“The project is to learn to write with patterns that function
more like music than like concepts.” (91)— Ulmer, Heuretics
“For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear. ”
— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Final Project: “Resonance Assemblage”
Informal Proposal — due Friday 27-Nov
— (contact me if you need to post on Saturday, as I am replying in queue)
suggested reading: “Mystory” excerpts by Ulmer (PDF)
Review Experiment, especially CATTt
(and notes from 09 & 23 Nov classes;
have you updated your “Analogy” category inventory?)
Final Project: “Resonance Assemblage”
Context: (parameters)
- 02 September 1945 – 10 September 2001
American Society
(temporal, geographic, social, political, economic “setting”)
“Genre”:
- Hybrid — “critical” and “creative.”
Writing with our entire “paradigm,” all three levels of discourse:
personal (autobiographical), cultural (literature, art, popular media), and disciplinary (scholarly, professional); see Ulmer on this combination.
Project Proposal
Informal and brief answers (1-2 sentences), to the extent you’ve developed and researched (both academically and personally) initial topic; including a sentence describing difficulty/uncertainty or posing a question is also useful (both for you and me).
Answer to best extent that you can at this time, with revision and/or supplement later; note that the more developed your ideas, the better feedback and guidance I can provide (I will not respond to proposals missing more than one answer, though).
1) What specific experience will you undertake the task of, and take responsibility for, expressing? What is the concrete historical context?
Describe the experience first in objective terms, with as many traits/categories as you can:
both A) Historical Situation, Event, Issue (actual, not invented)
and B) Identity
(entire “matrix”: race/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexuality, class, religion, age, etc.)
Note: while we are intuiting the lived experience, we’ll detach the affect from the specific identity (e.g. family member), so as not to make a personal anecdote (or “family history”) — but one slight degree removed. More about this focus later; you can cite a tentative affect (subjective dimension of lived experience), but likely will work on this subsequently.
2) “Explanation” or “account” of this experience from a conventional view? What is the dominant understanding?
(belief/morality or reason/disciplinary discourse — foreground your point of contrast)
Source of objective account? (list one, even if you’ll research more later.)
3) Personal resonance for you in the present?
(hint: testing whether this is your feeling/bias, or whether you are “attuned” to past experience of event.) Source and level of your familiarity? (i.e. extent of “expertise” or “curiosity”?)
note: not necessarily “easier” or “better” to undertake something extensively knowledgeable about; might actually be more challenging — what about an area of inquiry or “wondering,” within this same objective topic? see Q. 5)
Advantage and/or difficulty of this personal resonance for the project?
4) One cultural narrative or image that is prominent in your memory (any media)?
(Or, what is one narrative that comes to mind by association, from any discourse? Use intuitive and associative logic…)
5) One “forgotten” (or overlooked, neglected) aspect or element? (remember: Lêthê…)
Speculate a “blindspot” of historical discourse: what is conventionally forgotten or excluded about this experience?
(Or, what is “filtered” out by reason, and possibly by reductive binary logic?)
Why is it important to actively “recall” (resonate) and inscribe this into writing and into present/future memory? (”socio-historical significance,” humanities perspective)
In what specific way, “impossible” to express? (Literally speaking.)
As for project, what practical obstacles do you foresee at present?
6) One lesson (abstract) and one technqiue (specific) from one of our relay novels, that you will implement? (”Analogy” in CATTt)
If able, list the key poetics that seem promising for the project, so far.
Reviewing our novels, how many narratives seem to be an adequate/effective number to include in the assemblage? (i.e. estimate minimum and maximum)
7 ) A potential interface? and A potential figure (expressive)?
(from any level of discourse: personal, cultural, disciplinary — perhaps “discovered” through this week’s “mining” exercise; if not, need more reflexive contemplation…)
Part II — “Tuning”
(post when you have a chance; can be added separately / subsequently to proposal)
Cite one sentence/expression/phrase from any of our novels this term that resonates with you, at present (without “overthinking” or explaining). Might post the phrasing as you remember it (possibly fortuitous…); although, only takes a second to confirm: Google Books.
Next, from memory, state one of your favorite lines from a song, however “nonsensical” or incomprehensible out of context — in fact, all the better for being “nonsensical” or “non-rational.”
(Don’t explain why you like it, though!)
- Afterward (only/even if after posting this), examine how the line and the song overall is expressive — most likely, by the mood that it conveys (not the simple sentiment or denotation meaning — what is the connotation (second) or “third meaning” (feeling/affect)?)
Following from Pynchon’s reference to Karlheinz Stockhausen (p. 34)…
“ Stimmung” = “mood,” “atmosphere,” tone or “tuning.”
→ key lesson, modality, poetics of project
Theory Supplement (insight for project)
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo:
- “For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear.
Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie together beyond the possibility of any frequent or rare experience — that it is the first language for a new series of experiences.
In that case, simply nothing will be heard, but there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there.”
Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and proposing a new mode of understanding,
Derrida hears “a dominant affect, a Stimmung or a pathos, a tone” (Acts of Literature 291).
“Now if laughter is a fundamental or abyssal tonality in Ulysses,
if the analysis of this laughter is not exhausted by any of the available forms of knowledge….
then laughter bursts out in the event of signature itself.
And there is no signature without yes.” (295)
“The yes of memory, with its recapitulating control and reactive repetition, immediately doubles the light, dancing yes of affirmation, the open affirmation of the gift.
Reciprocally, two responses or two responsibilities refer to each other without having any relationship between them.
The two sign yet prevent the signature from gathering itself together. They can only call up another yes, another signature.” (308)
- “I hear this vibration as the very music of Ulysses.” (308)
“Only another event can sign, can countersign to bring it about that an event has already happened.
This event, that we naively call the first event, can only affirm itself in the confirmation of the other: a completely other event.” (309)
two other views of Stimmung, from Ulmer:
“In his history of the term ‘Stimmung’, Leo Spitzer noted the importance of [Plato's] Timaeus in figuring the world soul as musical: the importance of music in classical education through the middle ages was based on the idea of morality as a tuning of the individual soul to this world harmony (Spitzer, 34).
Heidegger returned to this tradition as part of his return to the Greeks,
designating Stimmung as one of the existentials grounding one’s being in the world. It names the ground of feeling that les us know where we are ‘at’, how we are doing, how things are with us.
Translated as ‘atmosphere’, ‘ambiance’, ‘mood’, the attunement of modern man is ‘dread’, according to Heidegger.”
(Ulmer, Internet Invention, 101).
Q. what is your Stimmung, and how expressed?
–> task: identify your attunement — to which frequencies?
[...] class final project proposal assignment with these quotes, which catalyzed connection(s) of a compelling frequency: Stimmung. (Composed a [...]