“The project is to learn to write with patterns that function
more like music than like concepts.” (91) — Ulmer, Heuretics
- Stimmung = “mood,” “atmosphere,” tone or “tuning”
- — of “chora(l) category” (Internet Invention p.101).
See below, including “Micro-Guest-Relay Lecture”….
- → key lesson: modality of method and (eventual) poetics of project
Karlheinz Stockhausen — Stimmung for Six Vocalists: (Relay?)
from Internet Invention:
- “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, p. 101).
Q. we ask: “what is my Stimmung ; and how expressed?”
- → task: identify my attunement — ask: “attuned to which frequencies?”
“Micro-Lecture”
(“theory supplement”; example in addition to Ulmer’s reference to Heidegger)
Jacques Derrida: Stimmung of Ulysses (1922)
- cf. Joyce’s mystory in Chp. 3 (pp. 83-4)
cf. Derrida in Chp 3 re: home (p.74)
cf. chora & Derrida in Ulmer’s Teletheory (pp.278-9)
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 the 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)
Q. we ask: “what Stimmung do I intuit, attuned, affirming an earlier event?
— what resonates in / with / through me?”
