“We should not be satisfied with either biography or bibliography;
we must reach a secret point where the anecdote of life and the aphorism of thought
amount to one and the same thing” (The Logic of Sense 128).

— Deleuze (via Ulmer; citing Nietzsche’s method for invention).

 
Students’ independent reflective work this weekend intended to spark noticing “attunement” and discovering an “interface” like Pynchon’s in Lot 49. To these ends, provided them two strategies (from Heuretics and Teletheory) — and my examples — of Emblem (wideImage) and Signature Theory.
First time I’ve articulated each; worth noting here given how resonant and salient the “findings” are — catalytic in “fine tuning” the Stimmung of my thought.

• Emblem
• Signature

ghink

 
Cochlea: spiral-shaped part of ear; converts vibrations to neuro-sensory (audible) information;
i.e. literal interface between physical (”frequency”) and neurological sensory data.

 
 
 
Anecdote: (childhood memory)

In 4th grade, my class was assigned to paint something in art class to be considered for inclusion in the forthcoming playground, which our community (including my family) was building.
As I lacked fine art skills — unlike my younger brother Brian, the visual artist — I simply spent the period painting abstract shapes, deliberately not attempting to paint “a picture” like my classmates (following the instructions).
Not intending mine to be considered in the contest, I carelessly splattered some paint over it — which I found I quite liked, incidentally. A few more ’splatter” motions drew the attention of the teacher, who unexpectedly praised my work; (in retrospect, shapes of geometrical abstraction and methods of abstract expressionism!) I’d mainly used the colors that I consistently loved during pre-teen years: black, purple, and teal (as well as some complements of red, if I recall) — not any referential scheme.
 
The most prominent shape in the painting was an imperfect spiral, which I’d been constantly practicing in those days (before perfecting the circular pencil technique).

It looked something like this:

 
Two notable elements that frame this anecdote, prior and subsequently:

1) I most definitely was (and am) not skilled in visual arts, and never drew/draw
(except for tracing comic book characters in an attempt to match my brother’s skilled renderings! but that is a separate anecdote)
My brothers and I all grew up playing music, first through involuntary piano and vocal lessons for me, followed by saxophone and trumpet choices by me and Brian respectively (once we reached fourth grade) — then eventually our “real” instruments of choice (passion) by high school, guitar.
Andrew (youngest) is without exaggeration a musical prodigy, having begun playing piano at age four voluntarily (with a piano in the house, after all); he quickly superseded my skills at first piano and then saxophone(s) (but not guitar, a mandatory instrument for him in college!).
Indeed, Brian has become the visual artist (photography, painting, mixed-media) he has always been (after years of guitar/bass); Andrew has been / will always be a musician (composer and performer) — for them, there is little differentiation of their “life” and “career” (key lesson for all of us, as my parents have supported for 26 years and counting).
In this context, I consider myself not “involuntarily” but incidentally and notably situated in relation to them: artistic sensibility (way of understanding and expressing), yet in a scholarly context; thus, the priority of the aesthetic mode for my career and scholarly method, originating from the “life” dimension (passion for music).

2) The painting from class with the spiral and paint-splatter apparently was only a “draft,” which is unusual for art but not writing (as I’d later endure and then require dozens of composition students to practice).
Unfortunately at the time, I could not quite replicate the original composition for the playground, having a much different attitude toward the desired reproduction.
However, this was fortunate, as I have the framed original (”draft”), which hung in my room where I practiced saxophone and guitar in the subsequent years, until we tore my childhood home down.
Similarly, the playground was torn down last year, perhaps “fated” with its name on our barrier-island town: “Sandcastle Park,” (two blocks from the beach).
The spiral image ended up being just like the cochlea of the ear after all, only receiving vibrations (”hearing”) in the present tense — like the splatter-technique impulse, or live musical performances,
or the conversations between the “architects” (me and my dad) and the “engineers” (Brian and Andrew) of sandcastles during an ephemeral construction at the beach — where of course one might find a spiral-shaped seashell.
(This present time always belonging to Lêthê.)
 
Whereas the spiral once signaled the movement toward “immortality,” — selected for one of the playground’s (castle) towers in the context — there eventually became a point in time when the movement shifted, progressing toward destruction. Rather than linear narrative, we could say that both of these motions were always-already encompassed in the spiral shape.

 
 
Career Resonance

 
// Spiral in chaos theory

summary: dynamical systems are sensitive to changes in initial conditions (not deterministic); ordered systems include movement toward chaos, while chaotic systems include movement toward order. In other words, “undecidable” with binary logic, not “either/or.” Consider: is spiral moving “inward” or “outward”? Unknown, undecidable; both.
At SUNY Buffalo, my thesis supervisor was Joseph M. Conte — who uses chaos and complexity theory in his work with postmodern literature.

 
 
 
Spiral’s in/direct appearance or function
in (French) poststructuralist theory
(my primary area of research):

— Roland Barthes: “third meaning” of expression is neither denotation or connotation, but signifiance. The “third sense” is hearing. (Image-Music-Text)
 
 
— Hélène Cixous: task is to hear the unsaid, with attunement.
 
 
— Jacques Derrida:
“middle voice” is between active and passive, self-address. (i.e. speaking-hearing oneself)
Also, Différance is neither word nor concept, but active moving forces: undecidable, as différer means both “to differ” and “to defer.” Between speech and writing; becoming-space of time and becoming-time of space; new logic of impossibility.
 
 
— Gilles Deleuze:
Greek myth of Ariadne (from Nietzsche’s understanding); labyrinth is both spiral shaped and sonorous in Deleuze’s reading. For him, Ariadne’s song becomes one of affirmation of Life, as lover of Dionysus — rather than slave to ressentiment that results from judgment.
Thus, way of living that affirms Life.

 
“Signature Theory” example: ghink

(g)ary

 
ary:
Main Entry: “-ary”
Function: noun suffix
Etymology: Middle English –arie, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French –aire, –arie,
from Latin –arius, –aria, –arium, from –arius, adjective suffix

 

1 : thing belonging to or connected with; especially : place of <ovary>
2 : person belonging to, connected with, or engaged in <functionary>

 
French: –aire = “surface”

— also, River Aire in England (?)

 
Suffix –aire
1. –er; suffix used to form agent nouns.

e.g. legionnaire

 
* Latin: “ARIA” = expressive melody

noun
an air or melody in an opera, cantata, or oratorio, esp. for solo voice with instrumental accompaniment

 
— thus, expressive melody (solo) + connected with (orch/accomp.)

* voice/song as gesture (expressive quality of voice; unique)
 

“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

 
Introduced class final project proposal assignment with these quotes,
which catalyzed connection(s) of a compelling frequency: Stimmung.
(Composed a “theory supplement” for my students, on course blog.)

 
— In Derrida’s reading of Ulysses, the affect-tone of the yes (laughter) is affirmed by another’s signature (event); with this he proposes another mode of understanding, regarding the “vibration” (Deleuze?) of UL’s musical expression.
 
— GLU provides key references to the concept regarding both Plato and Heidegger, in Internet Invention; beyond “‘atmosphere’, ‘ambiance’, ‘mood’,” this serves as a means for “attunement” in the latter’s view.
 
Question I posed to class (and for myself):
We ask, “what is my Stimmung, and how is it expressed / felt?”
From this, the task lies in first identifying one’s attunement — “to which frequencies?” I queried.

The aforementioned quote from Nietzsche posed the challenge for my class experiment, to not only first intuit (and be affected by) someone else’s subjective experience — beyond, given impossibility of “first-hand” access, to express the affect of their/the event. The hypothesis is to employ the unconventional potential of Stimmung in the former case, in Heidegger’s formulation, and then to attempt expression in the form of Derrida’s affirmation-event (my signature affirms the other’s past {laughter?} at present time).
In both cases, there emerges the rich phenomenon of resonance — participant no longer “reader-writer” or “receiver-sender,” but a conduit of the earlier experience-event by means of our composing in middle voice.
 

(Exam intro. & conclusion, but a bit oblique — concl. was original Intro)

Exam 1
Area of Study — French Postructuralist Theory

Bibliographic essays on these primary texts:

• Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977)

• ——–. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)
• ——–. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. (Hill and Wang, 1979)

   

• Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. (1955) Trans. Ann Smock. (Nebraska UP,1989)
• ——–. The Writing of the Disaster. (1980). Trans. Ann Smock. (Nebraska UP, 1995)

   

• Cixous, Hélène. Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva (Minnesota UP, 1991)

   

• Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. (Chicago UP, 1982)
• ——–. Signéponge-Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. (Columbia UP, 1985)
• ——–. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. (Routledge, 1991)

   

• Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense (1969). Trans. Lester and Stivale. (Columbia UP, 1990)
• ——–. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text (1964/72). Trans. Richard Howard (Minnesota UP, 2000)
• ——–. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970). Trans. Robert Hurley (City Lights, 1988)
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975). Trans. Dana Polan. (Minnesota UP, 1986)
• ——–. What is Philosophy? (1991). Trans. Tomlinson and Burchell. (Columbia UP, 1996)
• Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical (1993). Trans. Smith and Greco. (Minnesota UP, 1997)

— that by which we gain access to the unfamiliar, by means of something familiar.
— e.g. city as “grid”: “interface between the sensible and the intelligible” (Ulmer, Heuretics 198)

//

Preterition:

• Calvinist doctrine
• (legal) indirect disinheritance (cf. Lot 49)
• rhetorical trope — Pynchon’s
  (cf. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster)

“preterition“

1. the act of passing over or omitting
 
2. (Law) Roman law the failure of a testator to name one of his children in his will, thus invalidating it
 
3. (Christian Religious Writings / Theology)
(in Calvinist theology) the doctrine that God passed over or left unpredestined those not elected to final salvation

//

“Paralipsis” —

also known as praeteritio, preterition, cataphasis, antiphrasis, or parasiopesis;
rhetorical figure of speech wherein the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be invoked.

• After teaching Crying of Lot 49 this week — introducing interface and resonance, recalling mode of indirection from Blanchot/Slaughterhouse—
  realized Pynchon used trope of preterition to organize the novel, which is not merely thematic — rather, from Family dimension of his “popcycle.”

• William Pynchon, 17th-century ancestor and Calvinist theologian. Published The Meritorious Price of our Redemption (1650)
  • cf. Gravity’s Rainbow: “William Slothrop” published On Preterition

   

• More significant implications than genealogical link and writing with entire popcycle (clearly not entirely Disciplinary dimension / Science as voluminous scholarship suggests) —
  preterition as poetics for writing (of) the disaster (Blanchot).
  Thus also, perhaps, for Lethe?
   

• Opposite of a conventional interface (literally) — and yet epistemologically, narrative strategies as interface (yet not material, never mediating) with oblivion / unknown….?
  (dramatized by TP in Trystero and Inverarity figures; review GR)

• Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Historicity, Narrative Interface (Scientific)

• Creative prompt, using some MyStorical elements in first attempt at assemblage:
  original narrative (structural role of Oedipa); historical reference(s) & figures (from novel); interface from one category: myth/belief; science/reason; students’ disciplinary knowledge, set within novel’s context (just as Pynchon was first an engineering major at Cornell).

• Instructing composition mode of Indirection:
  • Experience of Lethe as “secret” (Blanchot), concealed; never appears, unlike truth as “illuminated” or “unconcealed” (Aletheia).

  • “The philosophical genealogy of divination begins with Heraclitus declaring that the oracle at Delphi does not reveal or conceal, but intimates.” — Ulmer

Inventory of Historical Elements

• Contemporary (1960s, California) Setting
• European (18th-20th C) & U.S. (19th-20th C) Events
• Potential Interface functions
   

• Note for further research:
  • William Pynchon, Calvinist theologian — Preterition
  • “frequences” (“monaural” vs. “spectrum analysis”)
  • Narcissus and Echo (myths) — Lexia to Perplexia
  • Buchenwald
  • Cornell University (Engineering, then English major); Ithaca, NY
     
      — Dominick LaCapra’s History and Memory After Auschwitz(1998);
    Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1996)
    • — read? Writing History, Writing Trauma (2000); Rethinking Intellectual History (1993); outside scope, but compelled after appreciating History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (2004)

      — Ithaca (obviously Ulysses, always JJ); also, Brian’s shots of Taughannock area.

      — Pynchon took a course with Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell (according to Robert Daly)

      — “Humbert Humbert” (120) = main character/narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)
      — the (fictitious) character Clare Quilty is from my (real) hometown.

      —Berkeley (Univ. California at Berkeley) — connections?