consider the following from infinite jest

"...Joelle's limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glasses corner, hair of the flame she's eaten now trailing like legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the defaced veil and what's inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy driver [...] and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub's lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids' blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching." (240)

"And his younger and way more externally impressive brother Hal almost idealizes Mario, secretly. God-type issues aside, Mario is a (semi-) walking miracle, Hal believes. People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything that might be fair, they either curl up in their fire or else they rise. Withered saurian homodontic. Mario floats, for Hal." (316)

I admit that Infinite Jest has me completely rapt. But when you read the above, can you really believe that I would have any other reaction? Just read it. DFW writes about brotherly love and drug addiction with the same poignancy, elan, and breathtaking honesty; in doing so, he articulates the paradoxical complexity and sameness of life at the turn of the millennium. A failed sublation; the promise of transcendence forever out of reach.

questions posed, answers attempted.

I recently posed on our studio blog the following:

"....how do you interact with the ideal in your musical life? Is it an inspiration, or do you find it daunting knowing that you will work your entire life only for an approximation, travelling along a teleology with an impossible end-point."

Formulated on the heels of my most recent engagement with Hegel, these questions represent a reflection of my tumultuous relationship to The Notion. Most violently manifested in my abandonment of institutional musical study, this proverbial 'bad boyfriend' led to a springtime terror of entropic sameness. Things fell apart while my addiction to that claustrophobic and suffocating peril—the stage—remained.

I discontinued my relationship with performance for so many reasons; the most pertinent (for the present discussion) was that nagging and inevitable inadequacy to which any musician worth her salt falls prey. At the time I thought the choice would bring contentment: my desire for achievement thusly sated with a vision of the forthcoming sedation in domestic ether. But of course, this dumb and happy apparition revealed itself as nothing more than a mirage. To be alive is to be haunted by an ideal, inaccessible; inexpressible.

How then, do I proceed in my current position, my current reality? For me, teaching represents the intensity of performance mitigated through the mediating force of the student. The student functions as a kind of resistor, tempering the direct current between performer and audience; artistic intention is transmuted and transfigured via the potentiality of youth.

revisiting hegel: some preliminary thoughts

And....we're back. Siete pronti?

I can still remember my first time with Hegel. I jumped into the Phenomenology of Spirit with nothing more than blind ambition, the text itself, and a notebook of blank pages within which my naïve and superficial observations might be inscribed. It was a thrill. It was a puzzle. It was a trial. Foucault writes about spirals of pleasure, power, and knowledge and indeed, my journey with Hegel took the form of this Foucauldian corkscrew. Each paragraph represented a micro-bildungsroman, these cognitive sojourns from darkness to light culminated in—to employ a Renaissance euphemism—the intellectual equivalent of little deaths. From time to time I find myself returning to this ecstasy, extolling the virtues of Hegelian methods, proclaiming the dialectic as a proto-postmodern "truth"-dealer and the progenitor of plurality.

My most recent return to Hegel comes on the heels of finally, proverbially, hunkering down with Judith Butler, preparing to read her early work, Subjects of Desire. However, before delving into Butler’s transcendent rhetoric, I decided to shelve my pride and acquire a guide. Sara Salih’s analysis has been, thus far, illuminating, straightforward, and admittedly non-comprehensive. I anticipate a slightly less rocky road ahead—Gender Trouble and Subjects looming large on my intellectual horizon. In priming the reader for Subjects, Salih provides a particularly lucid explanation of Hegel’s sublation:

“Literally translated, [aufhebung] means ‘sublation’; again, any definition of this word will inevitably be reductive and simplistic, since the German verb aufheben contains three distinct meanings: 1) to raise, hold lift up; 2) to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel; and 3) to keep, save or preserve…Aufhebung therefore refers to the unifying or synthesizing of opposites into a form in which they are simultaneously cancelled and preserved.” [1]

Indeed, the notion of sublation is yet another expression of the dialectic: a process of interaction between the ostensibly oppositional resulting in unification and transcendence. After reading the aforequoted passage, I found myself explaining to a student that "Beethoven trios are like Hegel." His blank stare notwithstanding, my point was that in a chamber music setting, both the individual player's voice and sound are at once preserved, annulled, and transcended. Furthermore, as I internally interrogated my assertion, I concluded that it is not only this musical sublation, nor merely classical phrase structure that reflects the oft-referenced and over-simplified Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) [2], but also the very process of performance and pedagogy. Like Hegel’s dialectic, musico-pedagogical practices also proceed in asymptotic fashion: each new input spurring an outcome ever-closer, yet condemned to approximate, that which is infinite.

[1] Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. London: Routledge, 2002. (25)
[2] If Zizek says it, it must be so.

stamitz's sinfonia concertante as hegelian whole

The problem with reading philosophy, for me anyway, is that I begin to see Hegel/Kant/Baudrillard/Foucault/Russell in everything. Every painting becomes an exercise in Kantian aesthetics, an object imbued with the power to both transcend and foster transcendence. The world is merely a simulation saturated with proliferations of imagery and virtual stimuli. Stamitz Sinfonia Concertante is an illustration of Hegel's paradoxically bifurcated and unified I. Perhaps I just need to use something relatively simple (Stamitz) to understand something complex (Hegel).

In any event, here we go. Whether or not this will make it into the big paper remains to be seen. I have but twenty short minutes, and most of my time will be consumed by a discussion on the disciplined eighteenth century body and the means by which the twenty first century performer can resist this condition/tradition. Indeed, there may be precious little time for Hegel.

I've spent some time with the score, away from both my viola and my part and superficially, I can say that there is not much to the Sinfonia Concertante. It is largely pleasing, facile, balanced: representative of the quintessential early classical style. As such, it would be common practice to apply a so-called "dialectic" listening model.

However.

The Hegelian dialectic is commonly understood as that old "thesis; antithesis; synthesis." This, in fact, as your friend and mine Slavoj Zizek tells us, was applied later. In fact, Hegel was more concerned with the a cyclical process of understanding. Among other things, the Truth exists in the space between and interaction of being and actuality: a communion of the "negative" and the "positive." The cycle of being begating actuality, begating being, begating actuality was integral to Hegel's phenomenology. The dialectic is not so simply described as two disparate ideas finding common ground (I fell into this trap some months ago) but rather the truth that emerges from the fluctuations of being and actuality, and the combinations, the layering of ostensibly oppositional concepts.

If we could talk about Hegelian dialectic in simplistic terms, it would be easy to apply to classical form:
First theme = thesis
Second theme = antithesis
Recapitulation/Coda = Synthesis

we could just as easily apply  Aristotelian logic:
First theme = major premise
Second theme = minor premise
Recapitulation/Coda = Conclusion

But. It is not so easy. To apply these arbitrary systems is at best, a reductionist oversimplification rooted in archaic a priori epistemologies, and at worst, just plain wrong. I would argue that Hegel's dialectic applies more to the experience of music--the affect in the listener, the interactions of performers and their respective musical motives, and so on. At the heart of musical understanding is phenomenological inquiry. More than visual arts, music lends itself to experiential quantification.

In the case of the Sinfonia Concertante, I would argue that the dialectic operates on a few levels. The first--and yes, most obvious--is represented by the interaction of the solo voices: one voice poses, the other retorts, the two coalesce subsequently supported by an orchestral consensus. Simple. If I were to apply a Hegelian model, I might suggest that it is the communion of audience and performer, rather than the musical text itself that constitutes the meaning of the Sinfonia Concertante. This cyclical relationship of perception and musical production thus results in Hegel's negative: the space between essence (perception) and actuality (production).

wax, hegel, and the intrinsic disparity of existence

To punctuate my nearly month long silence, I thought I'd offer some notes from my most recent research projects. To be honest, the next few months will likely be filled with notes related to "baby's first conference appearance." Who wants to read about wax models, Stamitz, Foucault, epistemology and scientific illustration? That's right. You do.

So where to begin? Last night I found myself pouring over Sawday's The Body Emblazoned. Naturally, I went into the anatomy section for Galen and came out with Galen plus six other texts, Sawday among them. Although not necessarily his main point, Sawday's recurring references to that oft referenced duality of mind/body (a post yet to be written, Sawday brings up some very interesting points about temporality/phenomenology, leading me to consider the relationships between tonality, desire, and expectation) led me to revisit Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the disparity of being and actuality. When I first read the text weeks ago, I had the following to say about it:

The entire preface articulates a desire to reconcile disparate epistemologies. On the one hand we get some pretty intense critiques of eighteenth century categorization/compartmentalization/naming and the curiosity cabinet mentality (collect the extremes as a way of understanding the totality of the physical world - pg. 8 para 15). Also at one point, he eschews the "mundane" (5, para 8) and for me, this reference screamed "the body." Maybe that is oversimplifying it, but it just seemed like another dig at the eighteenth century. These critiques are then complemented by his advocacy of unified knowing, without superficial categories (and especially the act of naming) the infinite is implied in the ineffable. You also get this conflict of how to deal with process in the acquisition of knowledge, something that I read as another manifestation of this 18th/19th century conflict. Hegel espouses a kind of self-reflexivity necessary for successful scientific inquiry (and that this is a good thing), an assertion that to me, expresses this 18th/19th century conflict/synthesis. This awareness/refelction is a big deal for him (clearly), but I couldn't help but think of it in terms of the nineteenth century preoccupation with the mind (maybe an oversimplification).

Returning to it now in the context of the eighteenth century wax model, I have a few things to add to something previously dismissed as fin-de-siecle angst. [1]

In my mind, wax presents us with an ideal symbol of Hegel's thoughts on process, essence, and "being." Hegel returns again and again to an advocacy of the cyclical, the anti-teleological (this being the so oft referenced "dialectic"). To me wax would, ostensibly, represent a physical analogue to Hegelian philosophy. Its embodiment of process--its malleability, genesis, and connection to the natural world--in congress with its function and reception in eighteenth century Italy and beyond, articulates the crisis with which Hegel seems to be concerning himself. At once the medium evokes the warmth of human flesh while being bound to discourses surrounding death. Indeed, this is the paradox of anatomical study from Vesalius to Cowper to Hunter, Bidloo, etc etc.

To me, Hegel's negative--the disparity of being and actuality--offers a philosophical framework within which the anatomical wax model can be understood. Presented in a medium capable of evoking the nuances of human flesh while simultaneously trapped by its culturally constructed limitations, wax occupies--in its intrinsic duality--the space of that which simultaneously is and is not. The medium so accurately depicts its subject but it is this accuracy in and of itself that results in tropes of duplicity (and yes, femininity) that haunt practices of wax anatomists and sculptors.

Or something. Phenomenology is something I still have some troubles with, but my instincts tell me that in the case of wax artists in the eighteenth century, there is indeed a connection.

[1] Speaking of the fin-de-siecle, or rather that particular fin-de-siecle, there is a great article by one of my very favorite musicologists on the subject. If you have access, check it out here.