Tenney’s Five-Year Struggle with a Theory of Harmony

If it seems as if it has been a while since I have continued my writing about From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, it is because I have been deeply occupied with four consecutive chapters (and one appendix), which collectively account for a five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a theory of harmony that would apply to contemporary music as effectively as it did to the traditions of the nineteenth and preceding centuries. The texts that occupied my attention for so long are the following:

• Chapter 10: Introduction to “Contributions toward a Quantitative Theory of Harmony” (1979)
• Chapter 11: The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates (1979)
• Chapter 12: John Cage and the Theory of Harmony (1983)
• Chapter 13: Reflections after Bridge (1984)
• Appendix 3: Excerpt from A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (1988)

As can be seen from the first of these titles, Tenney’s orientation throughout these chapters is primarily quantitative. His methods are grounded in mathematics, but it is a mathematical orientation that reflects his experiences in using computers to manipulate properties that are fundamentally numerical in nature. It is from that foundation that he believed that there can be “a quantitative theory of harmony.” So it is that we encounter this sentence in Chapter 10:

Unless the propositions, deductions, and predictions of the theory are formulated quantitatively, there is no way to verify the theory and thus no basis for comparison with other theoretical propositions.

This is a rather unfortunate attempt to apply the methods of formal logic to quantitative properties. Sadly, it leads to a misunderstanding of what formal logic can and cannot do. While those who work in formal logic will use terms such as “truth value” casually, Tenney seems to have overlooked that such logicians are not constrained by dictionary definitions of the noun “truth.” The “mission” of formal logic is never anything more than a means to establish whether a collection of propositions is consistent; and deductions involving the determination of truth values is the tool for seeking out an inconsistency. (It takes only one inconsistency for the whole collection to dissolve into uselessness.)

In pursuing that mission, whether or not a proposition is “formulated quantitatively” is not relevant. Identifying an inconsistency is a matter of symbol manipulation, the manipulations being the workings of deduction. As I have previously observed, had Tenney enjoyed the benefit of an intellectual community in which “computing” was more concerned with manipulating symbolic structures, rather than evaluating complex numerical forms, he would have realized that the role of numbers in a “theory of harmony” is only part of the story, a story that is more concerned with finding useful symbolic constructs to represent the nature of signals that must be processed when either making or listening to music.

As a result, even after Cage had radically broadened Tenney’s view to accept that a “harmonic structure” may involve any simultaneity of sounds, Tenney continues to be obsessed with the integers that represent the overtone series. This is understandable, but it also distracts from where the real questions reside. Consider, for example, some of the ways that Cage worked with a piano (both with and without “preparation”). Clearly, he understood that composition and performance needed to deal with simultaneities of sounds. However, Cage was willing to deal with a sequence of such simultaneities as if it were a progression no different from the progression of chords in a four-voice hymn setting. In Cage’s case, however, one could not reduce that progression to a sequence of Roman numerals or figured bass integers.

Tenney clearly appreciated this quality of Cage’s music; but, by the end of Chapter 12, one gets the impression that he had not quite figured out what, in his capacity of theorist, he should be doing about it. The good news is that he was aware that there are actually (at least) two different kinds of simultaneity. In one case, such as in those hymn settings, one is aware of both the individual notes and the chords that they form. In another case, such as one of Henry Cowell’s tone clusters, the individual notes “fuse” into a single “sonorous object,” whose “signal” is an integrated whole, rather than a superposition of recognizable parts.

The good news is that, by the time Tenney wraps up Chapter 12, he is beginning to appreciate that time-consciousness is more relevant to perception than “score reading,” associating correlations between auditory constructs and symbols on staff paper. Once again, however, I need to be fair to Tenney. He was writing at a time when few were focusing on issues of time-consciousness raised by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and even fewer were trying to relate their focus to the cognitive foundations behind listening to music. Those who read From Scratch today are better equipped to consider going down roads not taken by Tenney; and, if Tenney’s efforts did not lead very far, they may yet provoke a new generation of readers to seek out new paths.

James Tenney’s Formal Thoughts about Form

In “Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” written between 1969 and 1970 and the sixth essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, James Tenney returns to matters of phenomenology after accounting for his computer-based research activities that took place between 1961 and 1966. This is a relatively short essay that, more than anything else, reminded me of a caustic remark made by Arnold Schoenberg in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

The good news is that Tenney avoids making Leibowitz’ mistakes. He is fully aware that the prize on which he must keep his eyes is that of music (as opposed to, for example, music theory).

Mind you, he resorts to philosophy-speak to establish this point:

Actually, the “thing-in-itself” doesn’t even exist in music apart from our perception of it. All that may be said to “exist” are various partial manifestations or symbolic representations of it, and even these must be mediated by perception.

However, we are on a slippery slope here. There is, of course, the problem that “thing” is a notoriously vague weasel-word (Does “Ding an sich” sound classier just because that is what Immanuel Kant wrote?); but, even more problematic is that fact that it is a noun.

The wording of Tenney’s next sentence seems to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs:

So it is really the form of the musical experience that must be dealt with.

Nevertheless, as the essay proceeds, one finds that Tenney’s argument is linked to the fact that “experience” is also a noun, suggesting the premise that the attribute of form only applies to noun-based constructs. That slippery slope seems to be pulling us into a pit in which terms that we use comfortably, such as “perfect cadence” or “recapitulation” have more to do with “forms” perceived on score pages than with the experience of listening to the “music-in-itself,” an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest studies of perception dealt with the “processing” of visual stimuli. That processing involved how the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals registered by the retina (as William James put it) are ultimately registered by mind as configurations of objects. However, the operative phrase in that last sentence is “registered by mind.” Perception is in the mind of the perceiver, so to speak; and mind is always in the midst of processing, whether or not the stimulus is static.

The best example of such ongoing processing may be found in the response to the stimuli of the Necker cube. This is a line drawing of a cube in which it is possible to interpret two different squares as the front face of the cube. The Wikipedia page for this optical illusion illustrates that ambiguity of interpretation as follows:

What is important is that the ambiguity is dynamic. Mind can flip back and forth between those two interpretations, even though the stimuli themselves never change.

When we shift from visual to auditory stimuli, the dynamic nature of perception is further confounded. We are no longer trying to reduce the process of vision to a “scene analysis” consisting of a configuration of static objects. Rather, the sensemaking that emerges over the course of listening involves ongoing dynamic interpretations of stimuli that are, themselves, dynamic. To push that theatrical metaphor, one is not only occupied with the “scene” but also with the “actions (physical and verbal) of the “actors performing” in that “scene.” Mind is no more occupied with trying interpret musical stimuli in terms of static marks on score pages than it is with trying to reconstruct the text of the script while experiencing the play being performed on the stage.

To be fair, the very nature of the noun “form” carries connotations of a static object. The significance of the Necker cube, however, is that, even when the stimuli are static, mind is never anything less than an ongoing dynamic process that terminates only with death. To be fair, when Tenney wrote this essay, there were not very many cognitive scientists dealing with the dynamics of brain that enable what we call “mind;” and, on the philosophical side of the coin, very little had been documented to go beyond Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness other than Martin Heidegger’s proposition that “being” was a verb-based phenomenon, rather than a noun-based one.

As we learn more about brain dynamics, we are less inclined to reduce listening to the noun-based foundations of scene analysis. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of listening to music remains elusive. Those actually making the music probably have some advantage, since they experience the in-the-moment nature of relating what they are doing to what they are hearing. However, when it comes to describing those experiences, they are probably no better at it than those of us trying to account for the “audience perspective” of those same experiences.

I often refer to this site as my “laboratory notebook” for my efforts to understand better just what such description entails. (I also frequently call going to concerts my “field work.”) Whether or not I have yet learned anything of significant value from the pages of that notebook remains to be seen!

Icon, Index, and Symbol

I would like to continue addressing my “radical hypothesis” that the mindset for both making and listening to music presumes a context grounded on symbolic forms, which need not necessarily directly involve the lexical primitives of any system of music notation.  This raises the somewhat perplexing question of just what those symbolic forms are, if they are not grounded in the notational systems that musicians already use.  One clue may be found in  those three stages proposed by Ernst Cassirer as a sort of gradus to the Parnassum of linguistic behavior.

In philosophy it often seems to be the case that good things come in threes.  Where Cassirer is concerned his three stages bear a striking resemblance to an earlier famous “trichotomy” developed by Charles Sanders Peirce in his pioneering work in semiotics.  Cassirer gives no sign of having been aware of semiotics as a discipline in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and he recognizes Peirce only for his pioneering work in symbolic logic.  Consider, however, what happens when we examine Cassirer’s three stages in the context of Peirce’s published work.

Drawing again on Alfred Schutz’ account of these stages, let us begin with the first of them:

It [language] is first mimic expression, imitation of the sensuous perception by sound, so characteristic of the language of the child and primitive man.

Compare this with the first of what Peirce calls “three kinds of representations” specified in his 1868 paper for the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “On a New List of Categories:”

Those whose relation to their objects is a mere community in some quality, and these representations may be termed Likenesses.

Peirce would later call these representations icons.

Next we turn to Cassirer’s second stage:

The second level is that of analogical expression.  Here the relationship between sound and designated content is not of a material nature, but that of an analogy of formal structure.

This is both similar and different to what Peirce had in mind for his second kind of representation:

Those whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed Indices or Signs.

Where the difference emerges is in what Peirce means by “correspondence;”  but, before considering that distinction, let us move to Cassirer’s third stage:

Only the third level is that of symbolic expression proper.

Peirce describes his third kind of representation as follows:

Those the ground of whose relation to their objects is an imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may be termed Symbols.

The operative adjective here is “imputed.”  It anticipates one of the critical properties of symbols that emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which is that there is no inherent relationship between the symbol as a signifying artifact and what it is that is represented by the symbol (i.e. the relationship is only “imputed” by those who use the symbol, thus sharing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to how we “impute” meaning to linguistic constructs).

It seems as if, working through his own devices, Cassirer developed a system that parallels Peirce’s icon-index-symbol progression with an alternative progression that we might call “icon-onomatopoeia-symbol.”  This makes sense if we think strictly about that process by which we bring order to all those signals that bombard our senses;  and it is our capacity to tease order out of that "blooming, buzzing confusion" of sensations described in Chapter XIII of William James' The Principles of Psychology that probably distinguishes our ability to listen from, as Igor Stravinsky put it, the capacity of ducks only to hear.  However, as Gerald Edelman observed in developing his model of consciousness, that capacity to make sense of “exteroceptive” signals received by our sensory system may be applied recursively to the “interoceptive” signals given off by the brain as part of its own sensemaking behavior.  The correspondence of indices is not necessarily one of analogy.  It may also represent a “pointer” to another object, such as an interoceptive signal.

What this seems to mean is that it is not sufficient to make sense of what we (like ducks) hear when music is played to us.  Thinking about music is not only bringing order to sensory signals but also recursively bringing order to our introspective examination of how we are responding to those signals.  In other words the thoughts associated with a listening experience involve not only identifying “objects of perceptual categorization” but also building a bridge between those objects and the vaster repertoire of the objects of our individual consciousness.  Music thus taps into our consciousness in ways that elude verbal behavior, even at its most expressive.

This may get at why the effort of writing about musical performances is so challenging.  At a level of perceptual categorization, it would seem to involve nothing more that accounting for the perceptual objects of our sensory order;  but that is not where the music is, so to speak.  The music is on the other side of that metaphorical bridge in the realm of individual consciousness.  This implies the corollary that the concept of “writing about music objectively” is inherently an oxymoron.  Music only exists within the recesses of our own being and our conscious awareness of those recesses;  and one way of reading Plato’s Theaetetus is to recognize that this criterion for the existence of music is also a criterion for the existence of knowledge itself.

Facing Up to the Audience

I have been reading Claire Messud's review of The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, trying as hard as possible not to brood over not having enough time for fiction, even in the form of short stories. Messud's account of one story particularly intrigued me. "Someone to Talk To" is about Aaron Shapiro, an ex-prodigy pianist whose career is on the rocks, playing at a Pan-American music festival "in an unnamed Latin American country." Between his host, Richard Penwad (a name lacking any sense of Latin American heritage) and a British radio journalist named Beale, he realizes that he is in a setting that has commoditized culture until it is little more than a prop to maintain a despotic status quo. (Those with a broader sense of history may recall the great Persepolis festival that took place at a time when it was finally becoming clear that the days of the Shah of Iran were numbered.) Messud then captures the essence of Eisenberg's story in a single sentence:

The horror of the present is not simply itself, but also its destruction of his [the pianist's] fantasy of the past: Penwad and Beale between them drive home that Shapiro's success was only ever an artifice, that all his audience every encountered was itself.

I wonder if Messud realized the universality of this conclusion and that it applies not only to those whose present has fallen far short of a more glorious past but also to those (such as, say, Messud herself) whose talents are recognized in that same present. For all my own commitment to pursuing Igor Stravinsky's mission in cultivating audiences that listen rather than merely hear, what are the reflections of even the most serious listener? Are they not, ultimately, reflections on self for which the listening experience has been but a catalyst?

These thoughts may have emerged from my current encounter with Friedrich Nietzsche's "Twilight of the Idols." However, where Nietzsche might have seen such reflections as vulgar self-indulgence, I would argue that there is a more positive perspective. The Ancient Greek aphorism γνωθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) still has currency. If, as Plato argues in his "Theaetetus," the very concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to that of being, then knowledge of self might be seen as prerequisite to knowledge of anything else. From this point of view, listening experiences would seed reflections leading to better knowledge of self. It would seem that, if there are objections to such a perspective, they would have to do with the premise that such a sense of self takes priority over both the music and the performers responsible for the listening experience. This would probably aggravate anyone who had made the enormous commitment required to become a capable, if not skilled, performer; but is there any logical reason why the performer should sit on a higher plane than any individual in the audience?

Reflection on self is not, in and of itself, necessarily vulgar. Listening is an act of discovery, and there is no reason why the listener's discoveries should align with those of either composers or performers. If there is vulgarity in the concert hall, it is to be found in those who go for no reason other than to participate in a spectacle of adulation, defining self by the act of applauding louder and longer than the others. This does not require listening, however. One merely needs to hear as Stravinsky's duck does, responding to certain cues to determine when the time for applause has come.

Rage Against the Consciousness Industry

Last night Rina Chandran filed a story for Reuters from their Mumbai desk that really gets you thinking about where we have arrived and just how the hell we got here. Here are her lead paragraphs:

When Infosys Technologies, India's second-largest IT firm, hired paramilitary troops to protect its sprawling headquarters in Bangalore, some observers might have thought they had gone overboard.

But since the Mumbai attacks last year, India's software exporters have bolstered security due to concerns that militants might target their headquarters as symbols of the country's economic success and to deter foreign investors.

Foremost among those seeking to hire well-armed paramilitary troops are companies in India's Silicon Valley, Bangalore, the nerve center of the nation's $60 billion outsourcing industry that runs services from software coding to managing computer networks and call centers.

"India's IT firms are the flag-bearers of the country's thriving knowledge economy. This makes them 'high economic-value' targets with a global identity," said Manoj Vohra, director of research at the Economist Intelligence Unit's India division.

Security guards are no surprise to me. I have dealt with them since I was a graduate student doing my research in an off-campus building that housed the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I have also recognized the need for security, since I was doing my doctoral research at the time of the bomb attack on an Army-supported research facility at the University of Wisconsin. However, I never found myself working in an environment that required the protection of "well-armed paramilitary troops," even when I was working on classified material. Is this an overreaction to the Mumbai bombings or a recognition of the way things now are; and, if the latter, just what are "the way things now are?"

Recently, a New York Review article brought my attention to Hans Magnus Enzensberger and his study of the bomb-throwing anarchists of the late nineteenth century. His two-part essay, "Dreamers of the Absolute," was included in Michael Roloff's anthology of Enzensberger's work, published under the title Politics and Crime. I thought about Enzensberger while reading Chandran's article but realized that this was not a story about politics. As I saw it, the focus of the story resided in the Vohra quote at the end of the above excerpt. It was a story about the new Weltanschauung of the "knowledge economy;" and that association triggered a memory of an item at the end of the table of contents of Politics and Crime entitled "The Consciousness Industry."

When you think of it, there is something awesomely arrogant in so much having been written about the knowledge economy when we know so little about knowledge (perhaps no more than Socrates ever did). Enzensberger's gift was his ability to focus on industry, rather than economy, and to recognize that industry could be more about manipulation than about production. This was the origin of his "consciousness industry" concept, which has been nicely summarized by Jeffrey Thomas Nealon and Caren Irr in their book, Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, as follows:

The basic premise of the consciousness industry approach is that gaining the consent of the dominated is essential to the ruling class. The coercive nature of capitalism alone cannot guarantee its hegemony; it requires ideological work to convince subordinate classes that the system is fair, just, and "natural." Formal democratic rights guaranteed to the subordinate classes also complicate matters of class rule. The ruling class must work to articulate its particular class interests to the general interests of the citizenry as a whole. Nevertheless, the capitalist class has a clear advantage in the struggle over definitions of what policies and programs are in the "public interest." It is more organized and unified than the working class. It has the networks and resources to maintain and reproduce its hegemony. In addition, the field of struggle—whether the state or the media—is structurally tilted against subversive forces. For example, a historical study of copyright law demonstrates how the legal system tends to privilege private property rights over the rights of creators and consumers of culture and information.

In other words, class warfare has moved from the conflict between those who produce goods and those who profit from the production of those goods (the primary focus of the investigations of Karl Marx) to a new conflict between a ruling class that controls the thinking of those they rule and those who resist having their thoughts controlled. If the IT firms of India are bearing any flags (as Vohra wishes to believe) they are the flags of a ruling class that can now "manufacture consent" (to borrow a phrase from Noam Chomsky).

However, what Chandran's report reveals is that the change in the objective of class warfare has been accompanied by a change in how that warfare is conducted. The bomb-throwing anarchists that Enzensberger were challenged by government-based institutions of enforcement, ranging from the municipal police to the national armed forces. What we see in India is a migration of defense and protection from the public sector to the private sector. This throws some new variables into the mathematical models of that "knowledge economy." The "supply and demand of knowledge" (whatever that may mean) now depends on the supply and demand of brute force to insure the security of "those who manage the knowledge" (again, whatever that may mean). Put another way, the geek kids in the playground now have the resources to hire their own bullies to protect them from other bullies, which means that, just as in every other era of history, it will all come down to which bullies are stronger. Is it time to hide under the bed yet?

The External Musical World in Knowledge and Practice

A blog post by Jesse Limbacher, submitted to the San Francisco Symphony Social Network with the provocative title "Why Music?," sent me back to review one of my own posts, entitled "Our Knowledge of the Musical World," only to discover that I had written it exactly one year ago. I had chosen my title as somewhat of an homage to Bertrand Russell's book, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method of Philosophy. However, such an homage may have been misplaced, since I am not sure it makes sense to think about music as strictly an "external world" set of phenomena; and I suspect that Limbacher's post piqued my attention, at least in part, because it was trying to take such an "external world" stance. This seems to be leading me down two paths, one concerned with the nature of the musical world and the other concerned with whether or not it makes sense to talk about having knowledge of it.

I would have to review Russell's book to confirm this, but I am pretty sure that he used the phrase "external world" to denote "external to self." This is a very Cartesian approach, which Daniel Dennett came to call the "Cartesian Theater" perspective. The Wikipedia entry for Cartesian Theater includes the following excerpt from Dennett's book, Consciousness Explained:

Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of "presentation" in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of. [...] Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But [...] the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us — laypeople and scientists alike — even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.

The theorists Dennett has in mind are those who view reality as constructed, rather than presented to the senses; and Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann made a strong case that such construction is a social process, rather than simply a product of stimuli "processed by an individual self." Since I have tried to make the case that the performance of music resides as much in the social world of engagement among performers as it does in the objective world of technique and the subjective world of interpretation, I support Dennett's rejection of Cartesian materialism and recognize that it may be more appropriate to talk about "constructed musical reality" than about the "musical world."

So, does it make sense to talk about our having "knowledge" of this "constructed musical reality?" I suppose the intuitive answer to this question would be, "Why not?" However, as Russell liked to observe, we should only use words when we know what they mean; and "knowledge" has been a difficult case that goes all the way back to Plato's "Theaetetus." About half a year ago, I summarized this particular dialog as follows:

It begins with the quest for a definition of knowledge. Each time Theaetetus proposes a definition, Socrates elegantly unravels it. Thus, in the final paragraphs of the dialogue Socrates as much as says that, while they did not achieve their goal, the journey towards that goal was still worth making.

For me the most interesting part of that journey involved the discovery that talking about knowledge led to deep exploration of three others equally challenging concepts: being, description, and memory. Think of these concepts in terms of three primary questions:

1. What is?
2. How do we account for what is when talking with others?
3. How do our past experiences with what is impact our present behavior?

I would not suggest that these questions are any easier than the question of defining knowledge. However, I would argue that such simple reductive formulations give us a better start down a path of inquiry than more abstract questions about the nature of knowledge. Besides, I have already spent a fair amount of time knocking my head over the question of description in music to recognize that I am not yet ready to ramp up to a higher level of abstraction; and I have not even scratched the surface when it comes to questions about being and memory! One thing I suspect, though, is that my inquiry will have less to do with Russell's deeply cherished scientific method and more to do with social theory!

Philosophical Investigations

A probably unintended consequence of Chris Hedges' "America the Illiterate" column for Truthdig, is that it has inspired a prodigious level of literacy among those who decided to comment on it. Thus, there are times when reading these comments feels like sitting in on a graduate seminar in philosophy, which is why early stages of the discussion have prompted some of my own posts to this blog. Since such reading interests me far more than Black Friday, I wanted to address a few points that seem to have settled into the discourse alongside the Thanksgiving turkey.

Consider the following well-ruminated passage in a comment from "Anarcissie," which could well have been the product of a satisfying meal:

I find the first sentences of the Tractatus profoundly mystical: “The World is all that is the case.” ("Die Welt ist alles, das is der Fall.") When we say that X “is the case” we mean that X is a correct statement. Assuming that the German means the same as the English, then W. is saying that the world (whatever that is) is made up of correct statements—a patent absurdity, it seems. Then he goes on to say the world is composed of facts. So one wonders what W. was up to there.

What I find particularly interesting about this reading it that it nice sets the context for Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself, wondering that he "was up to there!" It would probably even be safe to say that the wondering had begun before the Tractatus had been approved as his doctoral thesis. By the time we get to the speculations in Philosophical Investigations, that foundation of facts as the compositional elements of the world has dissolved into what may be called a radically counter-analytical practice of language games. At the risk of carrying Wittgenstein's ball farther than he might have dared, one might say that the world is that which emerges through our conversations. Ironically, there are seeds of this thinking in Plato's "Theaetetus," that wonderful account of the failure to define the concept of knowledge. We do not emerge from the other end of this dialogue with a definition; but we have discovered that knowledge is tightly coupled to several other equally elusive concepts, the most important being, memory, description, and being itself. One might say that the lesson of Philosophical Investigations is that both the "being of the world" and being-in-the-world are emergent properties of the descriptions we exchange in our language games.

This provides as an interesting perspective on a passage from a comment subsequently submitted by "Shenonymous:"

Physicist Paul Davies said something to the effect that It is an illusion to believe that time flows. “This is because, in fact, time does not flow at all.” Davies quotes J.J.C. Smart, an Australian philosopher, who once wrote: “Talk of the flow of time or the advance of consciousness is a dangerous metaphor that must be taken literally...Certainly we feel that time flows. This feeling arises out of metaphysical confusion…It is an illusion.” Agreeing with Smart, Davies adds:

“In other words, the ‘river’ of time is not really there. That may seem as
absurd as claiming that material objects are not really there, but Smart is
on firmer ground on this one…Since Einstein, physicists have generally
rejected the notion that events “happen” as opposed to merely exist in the four-dimensional spacetime continuum.

Shenonymous then reinforced this perspective with the following passage from Plato's "Timaeus:"

They are all parts of time, and the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to the eternal essence; for we say that he “was,” he “is,” he “will be,” but the truth is that “is” alone is properly attributed to him, and that “was” and “will be” only to be spoken of becoming in time, for they are motions, but that which is immovably the same cannot become older or younger by time, nor ever did or has become, or hereafter will be, older or younger, nor is subject at all to any of those states which affect moving and sensible things and of which generation is the cause. These are the forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according to a law of number. Moreover, when we say that what has become is become and what becomes is becoming, and that what will become is about to become and that the non-existent is non-existent-all these are inaccurate modes of expression.

When you think about it, however, this passage has an interesting reductio ad absurdum, which is that, for all intents and purposes, we should be able to manage very well in a language consisting entirely of noun phrases. (Alain Robbe-Grillet put this to the test in his novel Jealousy.) Nevertheless, the boots-on-the-ground reality is that most (not necessarily all) of the languages in which conversations are conducted have not only verbs but also a rather sophisticated verb grammar whose structure is radically different from the grammar of noun phrases. Whether or not, from an analytical perspective, the flow of time is an illusion, I still have to wonder why it is that the language games we play over time have cultivated such a sophisticated grammar!

So let me put aside all of those great minds cited in the comments of Truthdig and offer a few morsels of my own thoughts. Most of these philosophical engagements are grounded in the world as we find it (thanks to Wittgenstein) through sensory perception; and most discussions of sensory perception begin with vision. The thing about vision is that any "object of perception" can be frozen in an instant of time (as it is when we "document" it in a photograph). The problem is that our understanding of visual perception is a poor foundation for our study of auditory perception, simply because sound cannot be so "frozen." At any instant of time, there cannot be a sound; one cannot even describe a sound (by, say, Fourier analysis) without having a sample of it in a time interval. I thus have a lot of trouble dismissing the flow of time as "a dangerous metaphor," since, without that flow there would be no auditory signals! For further details I would refer curious readers to Husserl's Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness. He did not get all the hard details of physics quite right, but his finger was pointing in the right direction!

Description through Music

Before going over to Davies Symphony Hall last night for one of my San Francisco Symphony subscription concerts, I found myself reading "Just Remember This," Michael Greenberg's review of Sue Halpern's book, Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research, in my just-arrived New York Review. Greenberg's observation that "our memory is the fullest record we have of ourselves" reminded me of what I still feel is the most important lesson from Plato's "Theaetetus," which is that any understanding we may achieve of the nature of memory will, of necessity, be tightly coupled to the related concepts of description, being, and knowledge itself. I was thus pleasantly surprised to discover that, while the three compositions on last night's Symphony program may not have set out to penetrate the realm of knowledge, each offered its own approach to description, memory, and a sense of self, albeit in decidedly different ways.

The first of these was Joseph Haydn's incidental music for a German version of a French seventeenth-century comedy about absent mindedness by Jean-François Régnard. Given that Halpern's book is concerned primarily with efforts to treat Alzheimer's Disease, one might think that an association with such low humor would be politically incorrect, if not downright cruel; and certainly one will not find any clinical understanding of the mind in Régnard's text or Haydn's associated music. Nevertheless, when Haydn recast his work as his sixtieth, C major, symphony, he attached the name "Il Distratto," the Italian translation of Régnard's title; and this version makes for an interesting perspective on the vagaries of the easily distracted (attention deficit?) mind. Some themes are intrusively interrupted, while the second theme of the first movement seems to lose touch with its own orientation through a prolonged diminuendo. This may well have been perceived as yet another instance of Haydn injecting humor into his music; but, even if he was playing for laughs, Haydn seemed to have tapped into some of the key traits of the easily-distracted mind and captured their nature in his composition. Thus, what may have begun as low humor now carries a sense of poignancy in an age that knows more about the mind but is still humbled by how little it knows about mental disorders. Thus, when the finale of the symphony is preceded by an episode ostensibly compensating for the orchestra having gone out of tune, the humor of the strings struggling to pull themselves back into tune carries the bitter sadness that comes with the confrontation of a mental incapacity that we discover in another or perhaps in ourselves.

Haydn's symphony was followed by Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," a setting of a prose poem by James Agee, which the author later incorporated as the prologue to his novel A Death in the Family. When the text was first published, Agee offering the following introduction:

We are talking now of summer evening's in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

In other words this is description in the service of memory as a vehicle for the discovery of self, the most fundamental instance of being. Whether or not one would call that "knowledge" may be debated; but it certainly makes a good twentieth-century case for what the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico called "poetic wisdom." There is a tendency to treat such self-discovery through memory as self-indulgent sentimentality; and there are those, such as Joshua Kosman in his San Francisco Chronicle review, who hear Barber's score as matching Agee's sentimentality, teardrop for teardrop, as it were. However, this dismisses the sharp edge of Agee's introduction (not set by Barber), which as much as confesses that what is about to be offered as memory deliberately incorporates a layer of deceptive illusion. Barber's score does not so much seek out that illusion to inform the listener as much as it raises its figurative eyebrows when the text tends to drift into the too-good-to-be-true. In last night's performance this made for an interesting complementation of resources. Soprano Erin Wall sang the narration of Agee's text with all the sincerity of its surface appearances, while Michael Tilson Thomas gently but persuasively used the orchestral setting to let us know that there was more to this text than those surface appearances. The result was a convincing case that Barber was not only aware of Agee's poetic wisdom but capable of communicating it through his own musical resources.

It is unclear how much the descriptions of Ludwig van Beethoven's F major symphony (Number 6, Opus 68, "Pastoral") are a reflection of his own memories, let alone his sense of self; but they definitely push the envelope of how music could be applied to description. What is most interesting about this symphony is the extent to which that description emerges through short motives that get repeated so many times that one might feel there is a connection to Philip Glass. However, those motives are cast in large-scale dynamic progressions, such as those I recently examined in the Opus 109 piano sonata, resulting in what I called in an earlier post "repetition without being repetitive." Thomas negotiated these dynamic progressions with a sure hand, to the point of often specifying the number of strings playing at any given time. Since he was working with a reduced string section, this made for striking sonorities quite unlike any I had heard in previous performances of this work. Social theory tells us that domination ultimately comes down to the power to manage resources. It would be harshly objective to reduce this performance to a matter of resource management; but it would still be fair to say that resource management added a "secret sauce" to the recipe that made this particular Beethoven listening experience such a memorable one. Through that memory we may discover that, as was the case with Barber's setting of Agee's text, there was more poetic wisdom in this symphony than might have been taken from its surface appearances.

Negotiating the World

Having taken Chris Hedges to task for an elitist perspective on human nature in his "America the Illiterate" column for Truthdig, I would now like to take my argument up a notch. I think that, beyond any problems with the ways in which he made and tried to justify his points, the key flaw in his approach was that he tried to peg everything on the single concept of literacy. If one seriously wants to make a case for the ills of our current culture, I believe one needs a broader perspective than such quantitative metrics as the grade level at which we can read.

My search for such a perspective was guided by a sentence that Truthdig reader "Shenonymous" submitted in one of her comments:

Ignorance and illiteracy reduces everybody to the lowest common denominator and unable to negotiate the world that has grown megamiles ahead.

I like this concept of negotiating the world and would even deem it more constructive (and pragmatic) than Heidegger's focus on "being in the world." At the end of the day, we negotiate the world in terms of how we perceive it; and what is often critically overlooked is that the act of perception is fundamentally an act of interpretation. We have to interpret all sorts of things, including the signals we acquire through our sense organs, the kinesthetic sensations of our own bodies, and, of course, all those signs that confront us, which form the basis for semiotic theory. If we want to invoke the noun "literacy," we should invoke it in terms of "reading the world," rather than just reading all the many sign-based artifacts (otherwise known as "texts") of semiotics.

I would thus put forth the modest proposal that, if we have failed as a culture, it is because our educational system has failed to cultivate an effective capacity for such interpretation. I would further argue that several factors figure in that failure. The most important is that not all interpretations arrive at unchanging (analytical, if you want Kant-speak) truths. Similarly, it is often the case that two individuals will not interpret the same inputs in the same way. This is why I like that word "negotiating." The only way to deal with conflicting interpretations is to negotiate over them; and the only way to negotiate effectively is through conversation. (Jürgen Habermas preferred the phrase "communicative action" as a way of distancing himself from both formal theories of argumentation, such as that of Stephen Toulmin, and John Austin's speech act theory.) We also need to cultivate the recognition that negotiation does not always end in agreement; sometimes the only agreement is recognizing that the proponents of opposing interpretations can agree to disagree.

There is nothing new in this modest proposal. Those who invoke critical thinking will probably recognize at least parts of the items I introduced. I avoid the phrase only because I have encountered too many situations in which it has been abused to invoke its very opposite, the uncritical embrace of some ideology. When a phrase like "critical thinking" suffers that kind of a vulnerability, we are better off to discard it and invoke new language.

The greater problem behind this modest proposal is that it is not supported with a cut-and-dried curriculum. My guess is that such a curriculum would defeat the very spirit behind the proposal itself. So it may be that a consequence of my proposal would be the undermining of existing educational institutions. As a product of those institutions, I am not sure I like that consequence. On the other hand I have long believed in Brian Eno's "oblique strategy" of taking an extreme position and then coming "part way back." At the very least I am hoping that, by putting such a proposal on the table, I can encourage the formulation of alternative proposals, one of which may be more effective!

Oliver Sacks and the Illusions of Scientific Method

I think I first became aware of Oliver Sacks when I read his essay "The Twins" (which would later be included in the collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales) in the February 28, 1985 issue of The New York Review. I found it absolutely riveting, in no small part because the style of writing was such a departure from the "scientific" (or, for that matter, "clinical") writing that I usually encountered in either the professional or popular press. However, it took at least a decade for me to cotton on to why his prose was as compelling as it was; and, having formed my hypotheses on this matter, I discovered, upon reviewing the Preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that they are confirmed by his own observations, but in a terminology different from my own. Since I have invoked my own terminology in several posts on this blog, I figured I would take the opportunity to discuss the extent to which I read Sacks' text as a confirmation of my own ideas.

The common theme that runs through my observations might be called an awakening (since Sacks used that for one of his titles) from a very long nightmare of positivism. The fact that I should have thought of positivism as a nightmare at all was probably a result of a rebellious spirit that emerged when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music, but I have social theorist Anthony Giddens to thank for helping me to take those unkempt rebellious thoughts and put them into a bit of order. Closely aligned with positivism is the "gospel" of scientific method; so, having been more than adequately prepared by my readings of Giddens, I was delighted to discover that the literary theorist Kenneth Burke had devoted much of his professional work to develop a theory of "dramatistic" thinking, which would serve as an opposition to "scientistic" thinking. Burke was enough of a Hegelian to recognize that this was an opposition that would not benefit from either side dominating over the other; but his own career was more than sufficiently filled with the study of "dramatism." So he left it for others to resolve the opposition through synthesis.

One can either try to theorize about such a synthesis or jump in and try to achieve it. In my few brief exchanges with Sacks, the topic of Burke and his theory never arose. I would not be surprised to learn that Sacks is totally unfamiliar with the man and his writings. Nevertheless, were he still alive, I suspect that Burke would quickly see the dramatistic element in Sacks' writings and probably discuss it as pointedly and eloquently as he would any literary source. Sacks, himself, actually acknowledges this synthetic aspect of his work when he writes about

a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and dramatist [eureka!], am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness—animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

What, then, is the nature of Sacks' particular approach to dramatism? To some extent it is a synthetic approach to a matter of form, the idea (which, as Sacks observes, goes all the way back to Hippocrates) that a case history is as much a narrative as a scientific account. From a scientistic point of view, the most important element in the documentation of a case is description; but in a case history (by the very virtue of its name) that description is achieved through historiography. This then brings us to the most important element of Sacks' literary style, which is that his historiography is achieved through a subject-based narrative. A case history is ultimately the history of the individual enduring sickness, as Sacks puts it, "the experience of the person, as he faces, and struggles to survive, his disease." Thus, the case history, as Sacks has chosen to write it, probably comes as close to a synthesis of "scientism" and "dramatism" as we are likely to get.

Sacks then threw yet another radical declaration at me in his Preface:

The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.

This immediately reminded my of my favorite dialogue by Plato, "Theaetetus," which tries to define the concept of knowledge, fails, but still leaves us recognizing that knowledge is hard to define because it is so tightly coupled to the concepts of description, being, and memory. The path to knowledge is a path that leads through description, but only because it leads through fundamental questions of being. Indeed, if one wanted to be really dramatistic, one could accord the status of "personhood" (or, as Burke would probably put it better, agency) to the disease as well as the patient, which would mean that the case history embodies that concept of αγών fundamental to Greek drama. From this point of view, one might then view Gerald Edelman's pioneering research in how antibodies work as being based on further endowing those antibodies with agency, making for αγών between both patient and disease and disease and antibody. In the essays that I have read, Sacks never goes quite that far over the dramatistic line; but I know from his writings that he has a high opinion of Edelman's theories about consciousness. Since those theories are, in many ways, an extrapolation of his antibody theories, my guess is that Sacks would see the dramatistic element of Edelman's model were it called to his attention (unless he has already done so).

I have one final observation about Sacks methodology, and this one reflects on my recent citation of Daniel Mendelson. To a great extent Sacks believes that, if you want to understand how the body works, then you need to observe it in circumstances where it doesn't work. You learn little from the healthy state beyond some good hypotheses about normative conditions and behaviors; and that is not, as they say, "where the action is." Healthy bodies, like Mendelson's "good people" do not "make good subjects for operas" (or any other dramatic form). To go back to the Greeks, it is through the study of αγών that we get to the heart of what Sacks calls the patient's "essential being;" so, while it would be a flattering exaggeration to call Sacks' case histories Homeric, there is at least a modest spirit of the Homeric bards about them.

This all leads back to my personal "agonizing" (so to speak) over the sorry state of liberal education. We still seem obsessed with specializing as quickly as possible, in order to jump in and start doing "useful things." We thus see the study of anything as unscientistic as literature as a waste of time that will not equip us with additional instruments for our toolkit. Sacks provides us with specific examples that illustrate the fallacy of this reasoning. Given how long he has been writing these examples, one would think that our educational institutions would wake up and smell the coffee; but their reasoning along these lines remains deep in slumber. As Goya once told us, that kind of slumber produces monsters!

What has Become of America?

Last night Andrew Keen declared this to be "the great question of our age" on his Great Seduction blog. He seems to have committed himself to this position after reading Thomas Friedman's column for last Sunday's New York Times, which began with the following thesis (sic) paragraph:

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

Regular readers probably know by now that I believe that taking any position on the basis of Friedman's assertions is risky business. It is not just his inevitable self-confessed "totally unscientific polling" that bothers me. We all do this from time to time. What most impresses me about the guy is his uncanny talent for misinterpretation, whatever the source of his data may have been.

Regardless of the source of the inspiration, however, I can appreciate Keen wanting to pursue this "great question," particularly since he is not, himself, a native-born American. However, before jumping feet-first (as Friedman is wont to do) into a question of such magnitude, I would suggest that it is necessary to cultivate a bit of background knowledge; and, speaking of knowledge, if we really want to go back to basics, the best place to start may well be with Plato's "Theaetetus." Recall that this is the dialogue in which Socrates asks Theaetetus to define knowledge. Theaetetus tries four times; and each attempt is deftly reduced to a pile of empty words (not unlike most of Friedman's texts) by Socrates. So, by the time we get to the end of the dialogue, we are no closer to a definition of knowledge than when we began. However, Socrates reminds Theaetetus that the experience has not been a waste of time:

Then supposing you should ever henceforth try to conceive afresh, Theaetetus, if you succeed, your embryo thoughts will be the better as a consequence of today’s scrutiny, and if you remain barren, you will be gentler and more agreeable to your companions, having the good sense not to fancy you know what you do not know. For that, and no more, is all that my art can effect; nor have I any of that knowledge possessed by all the great and admirable men of our own day or of the past.

However, while we may not have concluded with a definition of knowledge, through Socrates' "art" we discover that defining the concept of knowledge is problematic because it is so tightly coupled to three other fundamental concepts:

1. memory
2. being
3. description

After my last reading of this dialogue, I even tried to diagram the nature of the coupling; and it is this coupling that justifies my approaching the question of what has become of America through Plato.

This takes me back to Keen and his approach to the question. That approach was triggered by a single sentence in Friedman's column: "We are not who we think we are." Here is how Keen reflected on this assertion and began to develop a methodology:

Oh dear: we are not who we think we are. So what, exactly, do Americans think that they are? What are the illusions that they hold in common? What deludes Americans?

It's such an illuminating question that I'd like to come up with my own equally illuminating answer. So, tomorrow, I'm flying to New York City to hook up with a film crew. And, on Wednesday afternoon, we'll go out onto the highly unrepresentative streets of Manhattan to discover the lie/truth about who those poor deluded Americans think they really are.

At this point I have to give Keen credit for recognizing that "America" is such a socially-constructed concept that the only way to address the question of what has become of America is through the question of what Americans have become. Furthermore, in the interest of data collection, one could narrow the domain at bit further by choosing to consider, for example, only those eligible to vote in the November election. Still, if Keen (or anyone else) wants to start talking methods, then the quest for useful background material will have to leap a couple of millennia forward; and, for my money, the best place to leap would be into the first three chapters of The Interpretation of Cultures, the collection of essays by Clifford Geertz. Geertz' approach to anthropology is refreshingly consistent with the thinking behind "Theaetetus" (and his attention to the concept of interpretation makes him, in many respects, an "anti-Friedman"). One might even say that his methods are oriented around those four tightly-coupled concepts:

1. Being: What is an American?
2. Memory: What do Americans remember about "American experiences" (their own and those of others)?
3. Description: How do they talk about what they remember and who they are?
4. Knowledge: What do Americans know?

Furthermore, we learn from Geertz that any pursuit of that last question comes not so much from what American say as it does from what they do. Thus, any data mined out of conversations on "the highly unrepresentative streets of Manhattan" is likely to be more deceptive than informative. Much of the interpretation of a culture involves a shift of focus from what people say to what they actually do, which then requires teasing out the motives behind what they are doing.

A final observation is that there really is no such thing as a "normative American" (given how diverse the population is). In other words the streets of Manhattan are as "highly unrepresentative" as a strip mine in Montana or the Googleplex in Mountain View. This leads me to seek further background material from, of all people, Henry Miller. Specifically, his Air-Conditioned Nightmare collection, along with its follow-up volume, Remember to Remember, addresses the question of what Americans are by seeking out some really interesting outliers. Thus, the interpretation of the American culture may be better informed through those outliers than it would be by more "representative samples," such as those collected by, for example, The Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University. I realize that such an approach flies in the face of the reasoning of political pollsters; but I also believe that those pollsters are responsible for getting the Democratic Party into its current conundrum, where it has still not settled on a Presidential candidate. Perhaps the most important thing about the four questions is that Americans do not describe themselves as "representative norms" and that, as a result, every American has some personal set of "outlier characteristics." This would expose the folly of Friedman's "totally unscientific polling," the conclusions that ensue from his flawed methodology, and, I am afraid, Keen's efforts to follow up with a similar approach.

Λόγος in the Enterprise

The more I read what JP Rangaswami has to say about Facebook and the enterprise, the more skeptical I get. Admittedly, today's skepticism was primed by a Reuters Life! story from Canberra, which was the first time I read of an attempt to put a cost figure of Facebook usage:

Internet security company SurfControl looked at the phenomenon, and found Australian workers who keep a close watch on their Facebook profile page were costing their employers up to A$5 billion ($4 billion) a year.

The article then elaborated the details of how SurfControl came up with this rather striking figure. In all fairness, however, I am not sure that the approach that SurfControl was taking to the measurement of worker productivity was any better than those invoked by JP, which I have previously critiqued; but it was still nice to see that someone is trying to assess the impact of Facebook in terms of a dollar figure, even if the dollar was an Australian one!
In his post today, JP invokes the wisdom of Max DePree, author of Leadership is an Art and Leadership Jazz. This is what JP learned about leadership from DePree:

• The first job of a leader is to articulate strategy and vision.
• The second and last is to say thank you.
• In between, a leader should be a servant and a debtor to the led.

This led to an extended riff on the use of Facebook to "capture the real-life interactions of a person in an organisation," which drifted pretty far from the points DePree had tried to make. Indeed, it all seemed to come down to using software as a facilitating and managing tool for handling masses of lists about the members of the enterprise, rather than having anything to do with engagements with and among those members.
I thus took great delight in a follow-up comment submitted by Stephen Lewis, which tried to get the discussion back on the topic of articulation in the context of such processes of engagement. This comment tapped into one of the more profound truths about the nature of knowledge, not just in the workplace but in everyday life. I tried to illustrate this truth in the following diagram, which I originally reproduced from one of my PowerPoint files for a post on my old Yahoo! 360° blog entries:
My work on that diagram grew out of Nonaka’s misconceived “definition” of “knowldge” as “justified true belief,” which he attributed to Plato's "Theaetetus." Reading this dialogue for myself, I discovered that Plato had Socrates dismiss this definition as entirely bogus, along with three other attempted definitions. However, while one gets to the end of Plato’s text without a definition of knowledge, one has learned that the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to at least three other equally fundamental concepts: memory, being, and description (which may be a poor translation of the Greek λόγος). I see that final concept of λόγος as the more general capacity that lies behind what Lewis wrote about articulation, and I further see it as another one of those skills that has fallen by the wayside in our current approaches to education.
Of course, in the context of my campaign for "equal time" for verbs, as well as nouns, I was particularly impressed with Lewis' process-based approach to such articulation. Given the pre-Socratic insight into all the flux in the world, the act of describing is more important than any resulting description, which, while more concrete is also more temporary. I have tried many times to raise this distinction on JP's own "turf;" and he has even taken some noble stabs at grasping the point I have tried to make. Unfortunately, as far as Facebook and the enterprise is concerned, he still does not seem to get it. Enterprise work is not about making a whole slew of structures (lists) about people more manageable; it is about making the processes of engagement more effective. If technology can facilitate those processes, so much the better; but the success of the enterprise will still come down to the day-to-day practices of all those who work there. I see Lewis' approach to articulation as a healthy contribution to those practices.