Why the Fence Must Fail

… as a carrier from the site of an “unheard” sound.

This is from ‘She Do the Ring* in Different Voices’ (1992) which is a review of the book Unsung Voices by Carolyn Abbate; found in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin (2009):

… New meaning is created when old works are asked new questions that arise out of new intellectual climates and concerns.

… meaning arises — is created — out of a relationship that is forged between subject and object; it is neither “subjective” nor “objective” to the exclusion of the other. Meanings unforeseen by the author (or by anybody else, in the author’s day, in our day, or at any time to come) are thus latent in any text.

… But there is an even larger point at stake, one that might be termed the poietic fallacy: the assumption, already encountered (and countered?), that the meaning of an artwork is wholly an invested meaning, defined and delimited by the process of its manufacture, there to be discovered.

Ultimately Abbate views all of these moves as attempts to quell the “numinous intruder,” to whom she had introduced us (through a parade of operatic characters) in chapter 3, the one who:

“comes in many guises — as despicable outsider, as revolutionary, as ironic voice, as a carrier from the site of an ‘unheard’ sound. Narrating voices within music, like these strangers who haunt the Romantic tradition, create their own dissonant moments, interrupting the spaces surrounding them.”

More than any other writer, as I say, Abbate shows why our postromantic critical and analytical tradition has erected such a fence around “the music itself” to keep that numinous intruder known as “the extramusical” at bay — and why the fence must fail.

[line break added] What we need is less refuge in the antiseptic safety of wholeness and more bold fission expeditions, thus to recapture empathy: “that ‘second hearing,'” Abbate calls it, “which reanimates … a sense for what is uncanny in music.”

My most recent post from Taruskin’s book is here.

-Julie

Within the Process of Use

… It is the activity itself — of regular, controlled movement — that generates the form …

This is from The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold (2000, 2022):

… Traditional models of social learning separate the intergenerational transmission of information specifying particular techniques from the application of this information in practice.

[line break added] First, a generative schema or program is established in the novice’s mind from his observations of the movements of already accomplished practitioners; secondly, the novice imitates these movements by running off exemplars of the technique in question from the schema. Now I do not deny that the learning of skills involves both observation and imitation.

[line break added] But the former is no more a matter of forming internal, mental representations of observed behavior than is the latter a matter of converting these representations into manifest practice. For the novice’s observation of accomplished practitioners is not detached from, but grounded in, his own active, perceptual engagement with his surroundings.

… in this process, each generation contributes to the next not by handing on a corpus of representations or information in the strict sense, but rather by introducing novices into contexts which afford selected opportunities for perception and action, and by providing the scaffolding that enables them to make use of these affordances. This is what James Gibson called an ‘education of attention.’

… It is the activity itself — of regular, controlled movement — that generates the form, not the design that precedes it. Making, in short, arises within the process of use rather than use disclosing what is, ideally if not materially, ready-made.

My most recent post from Ingold’s book is here.

-Julie

LUCA

… a 3-billion-year-old testimony …

This is from Physiology and Biochemistry of Extremophiles edited by Charles Gerday and Nicolas Glansdorff (2007):

… At this point we would like to emphasize that even if the LUCA [last universal common ancestor] had been a thermophile, it does not follow that it grew in the very same range of temperatures as the modern extreme and hyperthermophilic organisms which may appear related to it in certain phylogenies.

[line break added] Modern thermophiles are the result of more than 3 billion years of evolution, during which further adaptation has certainly occurred, and as already mentioned above, molecular adaptations to thermophily look rather elaborated in the only living organisms we can investigate.

… The notion of a complex LUCA was considerably enriched by the recent suggestion that viruses may have been active participants in the dynamics of this primeval population: the “three viruses-three domains” (3V3D) hypothesis, which assumes that each cellular domain originated with an RNA-DNA transition engineered by a different DNA virus in a LUCA population with RNA genomes, may explain phylogenetic observations on DNA replication proteins that had remained rather puzzling until now.

… We consider that a colonization by space-traveling prokaryotes, even if it could have led to widespread colonization by their descendants, would not have produced anything fundamentally “more evolved,” because prokaryotes are evolutionary dead ends, a 3-billion-year-old testimony of what reductive evolution and intensive specialization can generate.

My most recent previous post from this book is here.

-Julie

And Flair

… This is “to regulate one’s actions and not merely to be well-regulated.”

This is from ‘Gilbert Ryle on Skill as Knowledge-How’ by Michael Kremer, found in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise edited by Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese (2021):

… Almost all human beings can digest food, but this involves no knowledge-how. Ryle accepts that, in order for someone to count as knowing how, it is necessary that “they tend to perform … well,” satisfying the “standards” or “criteria” which implicitly govern their activity.

[line break added] This is to be “well-regulated,” but is compatible with a lack of intelligence — the “regulation” might have an external source, as in the performance of a machine or a trained animal. Therefore, Ryle adds that the intelligent knower-how must not only “satisfy criteria” but “apply them.” This is “to regulate one’s actions and not merely to be well-regulated.”

… philosophy, like other higher intellectual disciplines, differs from such mental capacities as calculating or translating simple prose. The latter are more like mere competences: we learn them primarily by rote, and they depend on “knacks, drills and techniques.” In philosophizing, as in composing poetry, “the place of drills, wrinkles and prescribable techniques is much smaller,” because “to be successful is to advance beyond all beaten tracks.”

[line break added] Consequently, “the notion of a well-trained philosopher or poet has something ludicrous in it”; and yet, one can only learn to philosophize through “practice, stimulation, hard work and flair.” Therefore, “To teach a student to philosophize, one cannot do much save philosophize with him” …

My previous post from this book is here.

-Julie

Under the Skin

To the Story-Tellers
by Robinson Jeffers

Man, the illogical animal. The others go wrong by anachronistic
Instinct, for the world changes, or mistaken
Observation, but man, his loose moods disjoin; madness is under the skin
To the deep bone. He will be covetous
Beyond use or cause, and then suddenly spendthrift fling all possession
To all the spoilers. He will suffer in patience
Until his enemy has him by the throat helpless, and go mad with rage
When it least serves. Or he’ll murder his love
And feast his foe. Oh — an amazing animal, by education
And instinct: he often destroys himself
For no reason at all, and desperately crawls for life when it stinks.
And only man will deny known truth.
You story-tellers, novelist, poet and playwright, have a free field,
There are no fences, man will do anything.

-Julie

Its Breathing

… that shall make them either spiritual or material.

This is from ‘The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience’ found in William James: Writings 1902-1910 (1987):

…Our body itself is the palmary instance of the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes, again, I think of it as ‘mine,’ I sort it with the ‘me,’ and then certain local changes and determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings.

[line break added] Its breathing is my ‘thinking,’ its sensorial adjustments are my ‘attention,’ its kinesthetic alterations are my ‘efforts,’ its visceral perturbations are my ’emotions.’ The obstinate controversies that have arisen over such statements as these (which sound so paradoxical, and which can yet be made so seriously) prove how hard it is to decide by bare introspection what it is in experiences that shall make them either spiritual or material.

[line break added] It surely can be nothing intrinsic in the individual experiences. It is their way of behaving towards each other, their system of relations, their function; and all these things vary with the context in which we find it opportune to consider them.

My most recent post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

Bigger Than Life

… The game we are playing is the script as we have chosen to enact it.

This is from The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy by Bernard De Koven (2013):

… I think of games as social fictions, performances, like works of art, which exist only as long as they are continuously created.

[line break added] They are like plays or songs or dances, belonging to some special sphere of human activity which clearly lies outside the normal reality of day-to-day living. They are not intended to replace reality but to suspend consequences. They are not life. They are, if anything, bigger than life.

… Even though we are involved in a game, we are not always playing. Sometimes we’re negotiating, sometimes arguing, sometimes struggling — for real. Even though we are playing, we are not always involved in a game.

… Playing a game is a special condition of both play and games. The game we are playing is the script as we have chosen to enact it.

… When we are playing well, we are at our best. We are fully engaged, totally present, and yet at the same time, we are only playing.

-Julie

Not Paraphrasable

… They live in the disjunctures, the mismatches and misalignments …

This is from ‘She Do the Ring in Different Voices’ (1992) which is a review of the book Unsung Voices by Carolyn Abbate; found in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays by Richard Taruskin (2009):

… It follows that a narrative is not simply a tale but a telling, requiring a teller (as well as a hearer). Who- or whatsoever is marked as a teller — be it animate or inanimate, be it actual or virtual (sung or “unsung”), be it singer, player, character, instrument, composer, or any of these in combination — is a “voice.” And this voice, transcending text and action and plot, is the ultimate musical doer, the Lord High Illocutioner.

… Abbate traces her concept of the “unsung” — the disembodied but still subjective and sensuous arbiter of musical meaning — to Barthes’s celebrated “grain of the voice.”

… Barthes … had introduced the notion of the grain by describing a “movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages” of a physically present (if for the moment hypothetical) singer — a Russian bass, as it happens — resulting in an impression not of the performer’s personality but of “the materiality of the body,” standing for everything in an art experience that is not paraphrasable.

… They live in the disjunctures, the mismatches and misalignments, the “structural dissonances” that we all learn to resolve and routinely discount but that scholars in other humanistic disciplines, unlearning their learning, have recently learned to prize as “hermeneutic windows.” “The narrative voice,” Abbate writes early on, “is marked by multiple disjunctions with the music surrounding it.”

… it is “a rare and peculiar act, a unique moment … within a surrounding music.” That is her principal thesis. She will celebrate, throughout, not the general (the “omnipresent”) but the particular (the “peculiar,” even the unique). This is criticism.

… Only thus can we hope to accomplish what to a critic should always be the primary objective: to catch at that which cannot be paraphrased.

My most recent post from Taruskin’s book is here.

-Julie

The Current

… every movement, like every line in a story, grows rhythmically out of the one before …

This is from The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold (2000, 2022):

… The more that objects are removed from the contexts of life-activity in which they are produced and used — the more they appear as static objects of disinterested contemplation (as in museums and galleries) — the more, too, the process disappears or is hidden behind the product, the finished object.

[line break added] Thus we are inclined to look for the meaning of the object in the idea it expresses rather than in the current of activity to which it properly and originally belongs. It is precisely this contemplative attitude that leads to the redesignation of the ordinary objects of the quotidian environment as items of ‘material culture’ whose significance lies not so much in their incorporation into a habitual pattern of use as in their symbolic function.

… First, the practitioner operates within a field of forces set up through his or her engagement with the material; secondly, the work does not merely involve the mechanical application of external force but calls for care, judgment and dexterity; and thirdly, the action has a narrative quality, in the sense that every movement, like every line in a story, grows rhythmically out of the one before and lays the groundwork for the next.

My most recent previous post from Ingold’s book is here.

-Julie

Saturated

…Live bacteria … have even been recovered from rock salt crystals that had been buried for 250 million years …

This is from Physiology and Biochemistry of Extremophiles edited by Charles Gerday and Nicolas Glansdorff (2007):

… When salt concentrations increase, the biological diversity decreases, and at concentrations about 150 to 200 g/liter, macroorganisms no longer survive. On the other hand, highly salt-tolerant and often even highly salt-requiring microorganisms can be found up to the highest salt concentrations: NaCl-saturated brines that contain salt concentrations of over 300 g/liter.

… Maybe the most surprising environment in which halophilic microorganisms have been found is the rock salt deposits found in many places worldwide. Live bacteria (endospore-forming organisms of the genus Bacillus) have even been recovered from rock salt crystals that had been buried for 250 million years, while viable Archaea of the family Halobacteriaceae or their 16S ribosomal RNA genes were recovered from ancient salt deposits as well.

[line break added] These microorganisms appear to survive within small liquid inclusions within the solid rock salt. Although the claim that these organisms indeed had survived within the crystals for millions of years is not uncontested, it is now well established that indeed halophilic Bacteria and Archaea can retain their viability for long times in such brine inclusions within salt crystals.

My most recent previous post from this book is here.

-Julie