"Everything in the world is exactly the Same."
"The ἐνέργεια which Aristoltle thinks as the fundamental character of presencing, of ἐόν, the ἰδέα which Plato thinks as the fundamental character of presencing, the Λόγος which Heraclitus thinks as the fundamental character of presencing, the Μοῖρα which Parmenides thinks as the fundamental character of presencing, the Χρεών which Anaximander thinks is essential in presencing - all these name the Same. In the concealed richness of the Same the unity of the unifying One, the Ἒν, is thought by each thinker in his own way."
These quotes are from two thinkers from different continents seperated by two generations, both world wars, the Atlantic Ocean and common conception. I don't know why, but no one has yet thought through the Same vein of thought these two titans of truth thrived in and thrive in, respectively.
The first quote was originally laid down in speech; as all teachers have done throughout the ages. As a saying then, the onus is upon us as listeners to hear what is said. But, do we hear properly? Do we even know what proper hearing is? Heidegger said proper hearing is paying thoughtful attention to simple things catching what is essential.
Unlike the time of Heraclitus - which is to say past times - the present remains for a time in popular memory until it is forgotten. Therefore the context of the first quote, having appeared a few days prior on Late Night with Seth Meyers, is still fresh. The quote is a response by the polymath musician/designer/citizen-of-the-world Kanye West to a question that went as follows: "What's the difference between how you approach fashion and how you approach music?" The response was given with unexpected stern seriousness and focus. It didn't seem to answer the question and was casually laughed off. Thus it's initial classification as a response must be revoked according to mass consensus (democratic opinion?) and so it becomes an orphan clause: a fragment.
For many ancient thinkers too what is left of their sayings more often than not take the form of fragments.* As fragments they necessitate closer listening to what they say. Upon closer listening to what Heraclitus says in his famous fragment concerning Λόγος Heidegger hears this: ὁμολογεῐν σοφόν ἐστιν Ἓν Πάντα, "the fateful comes to pass insofar as One All." What is to be thought here is Ἓν Πάντα': One: All, All: One. Likewise we must consider what Kanye himself says in his fragment. "Everything is the Same." Is this not even more proper for what is thought here, and it's nature as a fragment?
There is something dangerously simple about this saying. Dangerous in the sense that it may lead others to believe the speaker is seeking to re-present a universal formula and/or make him seem crazy; which he is not. Rather, this Heraclitean saying conceals this thinker's first steps which initiated all of the following steps in the fateful course of his thinking.
"Everything is the Same" lets things stand together which usually are not thought of belonging together - which is to say things that are separated from one another - such as the sun and moon, light and dark, sobriety and intoxication, evil and the good, Heidegger and Kanye. But how can such opposites, separated by that seemingly insurmountable distance between presence and absence, come to stand together? The answer: through the Sameness that pervades or runs through All.
As everyone today seems all too ready to admit - whether prompted or not - Kanye is no teacher, let us accept this. Instead let us see him then as a thinker. As such he only gives us to think. That is his gift to us. As the Giver, he has no need for whatever bounds we try to keep him within, for he has transcended them already. We, on the other hand, are not only behind him, but we still have no idea how to be thankful to him and by association to all thinkers past, present and soon to be.
Reference:
ἐνέργεια - energia
ἐόν - eόn
ἰδέα - idea
Λόγος - Lόgos
Μοῖρα - Moera
Χρεών - Chreôn
Ἒν - En
* This does not mean to imply that their remaining as fragments is due to the fact that the context surrounding them was completely superfluous as well, not by a long shot.
2014년 3월 1일 토요일
2014년 2월 2일 일요일
The Good Life
What is the function of a city? More precisely put, what should the human function of a city be?
This is a question that I presume will have a vast array of possible answers that are predicated in no small measure upon each persons respective position in life. Moreover, for most people the city is something that has long since transcended the limits of individual conception, leaving a mere sliver for them to inhabit let alone conceive of. This conception - or rather misconception - allows individuals in turn to view the city simply as a sort of rudimentary means towards fulfilling singular needs. For example, Manager Kim has a home in Mok-dong¹ in order to secure educational opportunities for his children. (full stop). Any other advantage(s) secured by happening to reside in a specific space is simply the happy result of pure coincidence. To this mind at least, such binary 'choice making' - because to consider this sort of behavior as something even approaching thinking would merely indicate how much one is not thinking to begin with - is a direct refutation to (of?) life itself. Like, why are you even living, guy?
The simple answer to why we are living, why we who have been afforded the accident of life at this particular juncture in this particular form with the sum total of human actions so far (i.e. history) serving as our latent potentiality + α is simply thus: to have our total life etherialize² into impact itself. What this abstract statement looks like is quite simple: an idea, usually in written form, that aims to better life or put simply, the pursuit of the good life³. It was in ancient Greece that this idea of the city as the container of this so called 'good life' found it's own voice, and as the fates would have it, it was none other than Aristotle who said, "People come to the city to live; they stay in order to live the good life." Of course ancient Greece is respected more for the fact that this ideal was allowed to form, conspicuously within Athens, but no less in Cos or Rhodes for example, as opposed to serving as a direct model because, err well, slavery.
Obviously the good life cannot be static; it must be something inherently dynamic and organic in the sense that it can only exist and can only be brought about through a continuous, free dialogue between citizens and the city itself. This dynamic presupposes a few things: Firstly, both the psychic and physical possibility of withdrawal and return and Secondly, a truly autonomous city. From the collapse of the medieval guild societies the ancient universitas⁴ for long was the means for withdrawing and returning to society. The layout of Oxford in super blocks, quite nearly another world within a world, not only allowed for physical freedom from the city at large but existed for the mind to focus on concerns completely other than the normal (for that particular period) day-to-day matters at hand. Today, are not the university and city itself just two cogs in the wheel of global capitalism? This is not to imply that the pursuit of capital ipso facto is inherently negative; this is merely a call to resuscitate the dialogue of what the good life can or should be, and towards that end the collective as well as individual questioning of our basic assumptions that must occur, for questioning is the piety of thought.
¹ 'Dong' or '洞' refers to a single administrative area whose amalgamation with other similarly demarcated areas make up one of the twenty-five larger municipal districts or 'gu(區)' of Seoul.
² Etherialization, according to Arnold Joseph Toynbee (A Study of History), is the counterpart of 'Materialization' wherein a (material) idea is refined closer into its essential aspect (e.g the church was the etherialized form of the ancient city that allowed the culture of a particular city to be transposed across long distances as well as through time, or the mp3 file as the ultimate etherialized form of music itself, etc.).
³ The 'good life' spoken of here is none other than that earthly place where everything that is good co-exists as the Same, in that everything benefits life, or what is known as eutopia which is derived from the Greek εὖ + τόπος (meaning literally the good place); differentiated from the purposefully abstract and ambiguous conception of utopia (οὐ + τόπος literally meaning 'no place') as that ideal which has no earthly counterpart.
⁴ Universitas being the collective name for all guilds, originally.
This is a question that I presume will have a vast array of possible answers that are predicated in no small measure upon each persons respective position in life. Moreover, for most people the city is something that has long since transcended the limits of individual conception, leaving a mere sliver for them to inhabit let alone conceive of. This conception - or rather misconception - allows individuals in turn to view the city simply as a sort of rudimentary means towards fulfilling singular needs. For example, Manager Kim has a home in Mok-dong¹ in order to secure educational opportunities for his children. (full stop). Any other advantage(s) secured by happening to reside in a specific space is simply the happy result of pure coincidence. To this mind at least, such binary 'choice making' - because to consider this sort of behavior as something even approaching thinking would merely indicate how much one is not thinking to begin with - is a direct refutation to (of?) life itself. Like, why are you even living, guy?
The simple answer to why we are living, why we who have been afforded the accident of life at this particular juncture in this particular form with the sum total of human actions so far (i.e. history) serving as our latent potentiality + α is simply thus: to have our total life etherialize² into impact itself. What this abstract statement looks like is quite simple: an idea, usually in written form, that aims to better life or put simply, the pursuit of the good life³. It was in ancient Greece that this idea of the city as the container of this so called 'good life' found it's own voice, and as the fates would have it, it was none other than Aristotle who said, "People come to the city to live; they stay in order to live the good life." Of course ancient Greece is respected more for the fact that this ideal was allowed to form, conspicuously within Athens, but no less in Cos or Rhodes for example, as opposed to serving as a direct model because, err well, slavery.
Obviously the good life cannot be static; it must be something inherently dynamic and organic in the sense that it can only exist and can only be brought about through a continuous, free dialogue between citizens and the city itself. This dynamic presupposes a few things: Firstly, both the psychic and physical possibility of withdrawal and return and Secondly, a truly autonomous city. From the collapse of the medieval guild societies the ancient universitas⁴ for long was the means for withdrawing and returning to society. The layout of Oxford in super blocks, quite nearly another world within a world, not only allowed for physical freedom from the city at large but existed for the mind to focus on concerns completely other than the normal (for that particular period) day-to-day matters at hand. Today, are not the university and city itself just two cogs in the wheel of global capitalism? This is not to imply that the pursuit of capital ipso facto is inherently negative; this is merely a call to resuscitate the dialogue of what the good life can or should be, and towards that end the collective as well as individual questioning of our basic assumptions that must occur, for questioning is the piety of thought.
¹ 'Dong' or '洞' refers to a single administrative area whose amalgamation with other similarly demarcated areas make up one of the twenty-five larger municipal districts or 'gu(區)' of Seoul.
² Etherialization, according to Arnold Joseph Toynbee (A Study of History), is the counterpart of 'Materialization' wherein a (material) idea is refined closer into its essential aspect (e.g the church was the etherialized form of the ancient city that allowed the culture of a particular city to be transposed across long distances as well as through time, or the mp3 file as the ultimate etherialized form of music itself, etc.).
³ The 'good life' spoken of here is none other than that earthly place where everything that is good co-exists as the Same, in that everything benefits life, or what is known as eutopia which is derived from the Greek εὖ + τόπος (meaning literally the good place); differentiated from the purposefully abstract and ambiguous conception of utopia (οὐ + τόπος literally meaning 'no place') as that ideal which has no earthly counterpart.
⁴ Universitas being the collective name for all guilds, originally.
2010년 10월 3일 일요일
An Evolution in Musical Aesthetic
Performance. For far too long it has been neglected or accepted as a given following the innovations that had been wrought by some of the 60's and 70's leading innovators in the art of the musical performance. The Who, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Ozzy Osbourne etc... To compile a thorough list is a job for another time, but suffice it to say that since the mid-80's due perhaps to the standardization of sound and performances featured in music videos and rap music as a new genre, the musical performance itself has, at least to this writer, felt and appeared to be rather sterile and meant for reproduction over and over.
Rock music has had the luxury of the 'Jam' or the 'Freestyle' in Hip-hop; that is to say nominal musical ad-lib during a live performance to serve in a guise as a brand new gift to the crowd to provide a sense of innovative creation. This element, however, usually adds little to nothing to the overall musical aesthetic if it doesn't negate from the overall production as a contrived superfluity. Musical aesthetic is a term that refers to the visual aspects of a musical performance (i.e. wardrobe, style of performance, colors and their symbolic importance as they relate to lyrics and the tenor of each song/set, background visuals/movements, and most importantly source of sound) and their emotional contribution to the overall musical performance.
Kanye West as an impetus; an impetus of change and evolution in musical aestheticism. After viewing his recent performances on the MTV Music Video Awards and on the October 2nd episode of SNL it's apparent that the movement begun by the Philadelphia based live instrumental Hip-hop collective known as the Roots, picked up by Mr. West beginning with is 'Late Registration' that witnessed a live orchestra performance has culminated in the complete deconstruction of the musical performance. A deconstruction not only in regards to Hip-hop, but as Linkin Park is also intimating at with their own deconstructed theatrical performances of our contemporary musical zeitgeist if you will.
In the language of the culinary sciences, a food properly deconstructed will maintain the essence of whatever food that is being deconstructed (e.g. taste and flavor levels) but will present the cuisine in a totally different manner often utilizing subterfuge in an attempt to psychologically manipulate onlookers expectations and palate. The pinnacle achievement of a truly great deconstructed food is to elicit an even greater emotional response from the taster; a feat synonymous with the creation of an even higher level of refinement and overall product.
The recent performances of Mr. West's are the epitome and, at the least, most contemporary if not only example of live musical deconstruction. Specifically speaking on behalf of Hip-hop, aside from the previously enumerated examples and the hackneyed DJ, Hip-hop performance has been similar to Georgian Architecture in the sense it has tried to hide all production from view and has kept the focal point on the performers only. The Roots brought the instruments back along with Mr. West's Orchestral arrangement, but his recent performances featured perhaps the very electronic beat machine used to create the song being performed, something that hitherto has remained in the production studio hidden during actual performances, with a twist.
At the beginning for "Runawayz" Mr. West seemingly punches in the ambient piano echos that loop over followed by the pre-selected bass-line and other complementing sounds. During the performance beautiful ballerinas pulsate and contort to the various tenors and pitches of the song re-creating what the electronic visualizations seen in Windows Media Player and more successfully in Apple Itunes. He also had fun with censorship and instead of either omitting the word in question or substituting an alternative word, he punched on stage a key with pre-record "'Hey!' in addition to adding new sound levels by superseding the DJ hitting with varying rapidity and frequency a few other pre-recorded sayings such as "Look at you!"
The red suit with gold accouterment, symbolizing the bleeding heart of musical royalty convulsing over an all white stage is powerful visual imagery serving to reinforce the base-emotion and raw essence that his new songs are implying. His movements on stage carry the same implications, contorting his body like the emotion he has experienced over the course of the past few years that twisted his psyche and soul. Mr. West has stripped all of the superfluities and ostentatious display for displays sake away from the performance, leaving only raw symbolic emotions and a deconstructed performance coalescing into a new pinnacle of musical aesthetic.
Rock music has had the luxury of the 'Jam' or the 'Freestyle' in Hip-hop; that is to say nominal musical ad-lib during a live performance to serve in a guise as a brand new gift to the crowd to provide a sense of innovative creation. This element, however, usually adds little to nothing to the overall musical aesthetic if it doesn't negate from the overall production as a contrived superfluity. Musical aesthetic is a term that refers to the visual aspects of a musical performance (i.e. wardrobe, style of performance, colors and their symbolic importance as they relate to lyrics and the tenor of each song/set, background visuals/movements, and most importantly source of sound) and their emotional contribution to the overall musical performance.
Kanye West as an impetus; an impetus of change and evolution in musical aestheticism. After viewing his recent performances on the MTV Music Video Awards and on the October 2nd episode of SNL it's apparent that the movement begun by the Philadelphia based live instrumental Hip-hop collective known as the Roots, picked up by Mr. West beginning with is 'Late Registration' that witnessed a live orchestra performance has culminated in the complete deconstruction of the musical performance. A deconstruction not only in regards to Hip-hop, but as Linkin Park is also intimating at with their own deconstructed theatrical performances of our contemporary musical zeitgeist if you will.
In the language of the culinary sciences, a food properly deconstructed will maintain the essence of whatever food that is being deconstructed (e.g. taste and flavor levels) but will present the cuisine in a totally different manner often utilizing subterfuge in an attempt to psychologically manipulate onlookers expectations and palate. The pinnacle achievement of a truly great deconstructed food is to elicit an even greater emotional response from the taster; a feat synonymous with the creation of an even higher level of refinement and overall product.
The recent performances of Mr. West's are the epitome and, at the least, most contemporary if not only example of live musical deconstruction. Specifically speaking on behalf of Hip-hop, aside from the previously enumerated examples and the hackneyed DJ, Hip-hop performance has been similar to Georgian Architecture in the sense it has tried to hide all production from view and has kept the focal point on the performers only. The Roots brought the instruments back along with Mr. West's Orchestral arrangement, but his recent performances featured perhaps the very electronic beat machine used to create the song being performed, something that hitherto has remained in the production studio hidden during actual performances, with a twist.
At the beginning for "Runawayz" Mr. West seemingly punches in the ambient piano echos that loop over followed by the pre-selected bass-line and other complementing sounds. During the performance beautiful ballerinas pulsate and contort to the various tenors and pitches of the song re-creating what the electronic visualizations seen in Windows Media Player and more successfully in Apple Itunes. He also had fun with censorship and instead of either omitting the word in question or substituting an alternative word, he punched on stage a key with pre-record "'Hey!' in addition to adding new sound levels by superseding the DJ hitting with varying rapidity and frequency a few other pre-recorded sayings such as "Look at you!"
The red suit with gold accouterment, symbolizing the bleeding heart of musical royalty convulsing over an all white stage is powerful visual imagery serving to reinforce the base-emotion and raw essence that his new songs are implying. His movements on stage carry the same implications, contorting his body like the emotion he has experienced over the course of the past few years that twisted his psyche and soul. Mr. West has stripped all of the superfluities and ostentatious display for displays sake away from the performance, leaving only raw symbolic emotions and a deconstructed performance coalescing into a new pinnacle of musical aesthetic.
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