Bernhard Waldenfels
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Master Class 16-20 July 2012
Phenomenology of the Senses and the Arts My first lecture deals with the phenomenon of attention which pervades our whole experience. The double event of being struck by and taking notice is symptomatic of a radical form of experience able to generate something new beyond all repetitions ad habits. The innovations of art are directly concerned. After this overture the three following lectures will explore special relations between experience and art: first the relation between seeing and pictures, then the interplay between hearing and sounds, especially the sound of the voice, and at last the intertwinement of moving and dancing as a paradigm of kin-aesthesis. In each area both, experience and art, are mediated by special techniques, political practises and cultural symbols which can only partly taken in account.
I.
Perception and Attention My experience is what I attend to (William James) – Ideas come when they will, not when I will (Friedrich Nietzsche) – Very many humans, perhaps most of them, must first know that there is something before finding it (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg).
1. Attention as an originary fact 2. Tastes of becoming attentive 3. Being struck by and taking notice of 4. Temporal displacement 5. Attention as selection 6. Creative responding 7. Beyond sense and rule 8. Incorporated attention 9. Polarised and blocked attention 10. Directed attention 11. Techniques and practices 12. Attention in the arts 13. Attention and respect Résumé and Comment: Attention is not a by-product, but a basic phenomenon. It is not initiated by objective stimuli, intentional acts or common rules, it rather wakes up whenever something strikes us (auffallen) stirring up our attention (aufmerken). So it is never completely available. It is subjected to a certain time-lag; the event of being struck by comes too early, our act of noticing comes too late. Attention is highly selective in organising fields of experience. It arises spontaneously in terms of wondering, frightening, disturbance, chock or violation; it becomes disciplined by practises, techniques and media, based on neurological processes; is gets socialised by means of governing. Its selectivity has effects on the daily economics and politics of attention. The fight against the dulling effects of normalisation is supported by a freely flouting sort of attention practised by meditation, by psychoanalysis and last, but not least by the arts. At last we owe attention to others. Turning into respect (Achtung) attention shows the basic features of an ethos of the senses.
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II.
Seeing in pictures Nothing is more difficult to know than what we really see (Maurice MerleauPonty) – I do not exactly know what I see. It is too complex, so one must try to copy the visible in order to account for what one is seeing (Alberto Giacometti) – Fiction does not consist in making visible the invisible, but rather in showing how invisible the invisibility of the visible is (Michel Foucault)
1. Aisthesis and aesthetics 2. Rehabilitation of the sensible: figures – colours – lines – kinaesthesis – visual fields – fictions 3. The status of images and pictures: pictures as media – iconic/pictorial difference – things and pictures 4. Pictorial dimensions: mirror: making similar – trace: making present – gaze: doubling seeing into seeing and seen 5. The power of pictures: being touched through pictures – pathos and eidos – modes of pathos 6. Creativity as responsivity Résumé and Comment: General presuppositions. The art of painting or sculpturing resembles our body in being visible and making visible at once. Like our sight has its blind spot the act of painting has a blind spot too (see the mottos from Merleau-Ponty, Giacometti, and Foucault). Aesthetics and aesthesis prove to be closely connected, being both submitted to a “Logos of the aesthetic world” (Husserl). – There is no seeing and making visible without certain orders of the visible. Consequently, aesthetics cannot be separated from cultural and historical conditions which determine what can be seen and what not, and what seems worth being seen and represented. – As to the role of art in life and history it makes a great difference whether the orders of the visible are pre-established or arise in and by experience itself. Art is not exempt from the crisis of modern rationality and subjectivity, on the contrary, it can be considered as a seismograph of high finesse. We will confront a series of special issues. First, phenomenology reconsiders the material and the forms of painting drawing upon the results of the gestalt theory. – The status of images and pictures is based on seeing in pictures and seeing pictures as pictures, passing from the imagery of things (Bildlichkeit) trough picture things (Bilddinge) to artistic pictures (Kunstbilder). – There are three dimensions of the picture: ___________________________________________________________________________ Form of image original/copy telepicture picture of alignment (Urbild/Abbild) (Fernbild) (Fluchtbild) ___________________________________________________________________________ Process assimilation re-presentation doubling of seeing (Verähnlichung) (Vergegenwärtigung) (Verdoppelung des Sehens) ___________________________________________________________________________ Prototype mirror trace gaze (Spiegel) (Spur) (Blick) ___________________________________________________________________________ Formula x looks like y x reminds us of y x invites us to y ___________________________________________________________________________
3 – The shape or form (Bildgestalt, Eidos) is born out of a pathos which produces certain effects (Bildwirkung). We are affected or stimulated by seeing through pictures; pictures function as a sort of medium per quod. They exert a certain religious, social or political power. – The process of making visible is especially determined by the contrast of material and form, by tensions between work and happening, by the weight of language-like functions like representation, expression and appeal or by the intertwinement of painting and writing which pertains to the normality of Eastern writings. Pictures never function without any reference, but they are permanently playing with it and working on it. Our ‘seeing seeing’ which is creative exceeds the ’seen seeing’ which is more or less repetitive (see Merleau-Ponty’s distinction of speaking speech and spoken speech: parole parlante, parole parlée). – Creativity of art is a central issue, especially for modern art. In opposition to any pure creationism I propose a contextual kind of creation which passes through processes of a “coherent deformation” (Merleau-Ponty) and responds to certain provocations and challenges of our experience.
III.
Hearing sounds and Listening to voices Voice is the sound of an animated being (Aristotle) – The most silent words bring the storm. Ideas coming on pigeon feet govern the world (Friedrich Nietzsche) – The grass is singing over the tumbled graves (T. S. Eliot)
1. What can be heard 2. Multiplicity of the voice 3. Emergence of the voice 4. Time-space of the voice 5. Strangeness of the voice 6. Embodiment of the voice 7. Sounds and sound technology 8. Symphonies and heterophony 9. Music within culture and between cultures 10. The audible and the inaudible Résumé and Comment: I try to show the special character of hearing which constitutes a whole world of sound. I refer alternately to the general sphere of sounds, to the voice as a crucial paradigm and to the impact of the musical art. Sounds are not something located within the world, but they are events creating a special space-time of hearing. So I distinguish between our intentional acts of hearing (Hörakt) and the event of something becoming audible (Hörereignis). Being a special kind of attending, the act of hearing responds to something affecting us and to somebody appealing to us. The embodiment of hearing leads to further distinctions. We are affected in different ways whether we are listening to voices, to noises, to simple sounds or to music, whether we are hearing our own voice, the other’s voice or an anonymous voice. Especially modern music tries to combine different modes of hearing by including new sound technologies, by testing the limits of the audible and by opening paths between different cultures. In various ways the voice emerges as a broken voice and as a special source of strangeness.
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IV.
Moving and Dancing Only the dancer knows how to march; the singer how to speak; the thinker how to smile (Paul Valéry)
1. Historical patterns 2. Self-movement 3. Being moved by others 4. Moving between 5. Place and time of moving 6. Natural and artificial movement 7. Bound and free movement 8. Effusive moving 9. Elements of dancing 10. Art of dancing and kinetic epochē 12. Bound and free dance Résumé and Comment: Whereas classical thinking takes the self-movement as the standard movement which characterises every cosmic being, modern Cartesian thinking sharply separates moving by oneself (autokinēsis) from being moved (heterokinēsis). Our mind does not dance, the dancer does not think. Phenomenological authors like Erwin Straus, Paul Valéry and Maurice Merleau-Ponty tried to overcome such a fragmentation without returning to the overall movement of a cosmic totality. Our revision goes step by step. Moving by oneself (sich bewegen) has to be understood in terms of the grammatical medium which is something between active and passive. What remains enigmatic is the self of this self-related movement. We presume that every sort of self-movement originates from a certain shaking or trouble; so it does not start by itself, but responds to alien impulses. – One’s own and the other’s movement constitute an intermediary movement interfering with each other, reinforcing and impeding each other. – Movements which are running neither chaotically nor according to program are based on certain rhythms, patterns and techniques which create a certain culture of movement. Concerning the peculiar phenomenon of dancing we find on the one side certain bounded movements such as glance, fluency, and train of thought, practical intercourse, emotion, social approach and distance, and we find on the other side a sort of free mobility detached from the aims and rules of our everyday world and from the duties connected with professional activities. – Positively spoken dancing can be characterised as an excess or exuberance of mobility which interrupts the normal course of things. Thus it comes near to festivals and religious rituals, and it produces an art of movement which competes with the arts of colour and sound. Dancers have their own way, they do not move in rank and file. – Dancing creates various figures and styles of movement such as positions, steps, dancing-with and dancingbefore. – To grasp dancing as such we need a special kind of epochē which suspends the course of normal movements and introduces counter-movements as invented by modern dance.
5 Literature General introduction into responsive phenomenology: Waldenfels, B., Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, transl. T. Stähler, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Special literature referring to singular lectures: To Lecture I: Waldenfels, B., Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004, chapter I, IV-V, IX-X. –, MS „Phenomenology of Attention“. To Lecture II: Waldenfels, B., Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, chapter 2-5. Husserl, E. Ideas I (Hua III), §§ 43, 99-101. Merleau-Ponty, M., The Prose of the World, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern, 1973, French 1969 (chapter “The Indirect Language”) To Lecture III: Waldenfels, B., Sinne und Künste, chapter 6-7. –, MS. “Emergence of the Voice”. To Lecture IV: Waldenfels, B., Sinne und Künste, chapter 8. Further literature: Alter. Revue Phénoménologique, No. 18/2010: « L’attention ». Arnheim, R., Visual Thinking, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Boehm, G. (Ed.), Was ist ein Bild? München: Fink, 1994, 4th ed. 2006. Breyer, T., Attentionalität und Intentionalität. Grundzüge einer phänomenologischkognitionswissenschaftlichen Theorie der Aufmerksamkeit, München: Fink, 2011. Brandstetter, G. and Wulf, Ch. (Eds.), Tanz als Anthropologie, München: Fink, 2007. Casey, E., The World at a Glance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. Jullien, F., La grande image n’a pas de forme, Paris: Du Seuil, 2003. Kolesch, D. and S. Krämer (Eds.), Stimme, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Leroi-Gourhan, A., Gesture and Speech, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1993, French 1964/65. Obert, M., Welt als Bild. Die theoretische Grundlegung der chinesischen Berg-WasserMalerei zwischen dem 5. und 12. Jahrhundert, Freiburg/München: Alber, 2007. Straus, E., The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963, German ²1956. Waldenfels, Sinnesschwellen, Frankfurt/M. : Suhrkamp, 1999.