The Madison Twist

            On Tuesday just before Philosophy class Naama told me that Professor Gibbs had given her an extension on her essay because she’d had to work, so she still hadn’t yet handed it in.

            The professor announced that they would be giving us the exam questions in advance so we can work out what kind of essays we will write on April 26. He told us that on that day the information chips would be removed from our brains prior to the test. He added that if we cheat we will get high marks for our understanding of truth and untruth but we will fail in ethics.

            He continued talking about Levinas’s “Meaning and Sense” and made a list of categories:

1)      Differential

2)      Cultural (covers Heidegger and the whole 20^th Century) Language is derivative. There is no outside and no prior experience. Meaning is around networks and so series of words can capture it.

3)      Economic – need. Language names what is there, or words work on horizon. But reality is human needs that produce meanings such as “feed the hungry” or “welcome the refugees”.

4)      Ethics – face. Signifies before language and calls for language. Revolves on a desire that cannot be fulfilled.

When cultures meet they don’t always fight. Sometimes they study each other.

A word points to a thing or idea and then it is spoken to someone that is not a

cultural signifier and is not given. The other person signifies in a more radical way. To speak to someone is to recognize them. Face to face the other has the capacity to signify an epiphany or visitation.

Some would say that results are not important.

The other is anyone because everyone has a face. The face is not a catalogue of traits. It challenges categories. One looks back at a disclosure. The other can deny classifications. The face breaks from its own presence and speaks. The face talks back and challenges. Meaning comes from challenge. The face is absolved from context. How to describe the face when words can’t grasp it? A face fowls the intentionality to classify. What is at stake is calling consciousness into question. Something more in overflow. But it is not the consciousness of calling into question. Consciousness creates context to deal with this. The problem is to be aware. Face to face we are disarmed. The I loses self-confidence. It is expelled from rest and sent into exile. Fall into doubt about the project of knowing. We have a summons and it is not pleasant. Being called to speak is a call to a type of pacific relationship. This call from the other creates responsibility. You can fight but they want to refound you. To be put in question is how to overcome the ego. When a beggar asks you for money you are responsible. No one can replace me. When the other summons me I can’t use a stand-in. Morality comes first. There is an infinite responsibility and no limit to the summons. We are infinitely responsible to every summons. We are responsible to infinity, which we cannot reach because it is need’s endless desire. A person is finite but the face is beyond the person and it calls me infinitely. This is radical ethics. This is where language begins. The other is a critique of my self-mastery. It has an urgent temporality. The present is too late. This is why we talk. Humility does not negate the self. The urgency does not come from me but from the other. Ethics precede language and culture is presupposed by language. In ethical experience I find something more fundamental than the world and it unmakes my world. This meaning precedes cultural signs. Check presuppositions at the door.

Others think that all relations are lateral. Western morality is colonial. When we denounce it, it is in honour of the person. The goal of a non-judgmental society, grounded in ethics is an inching toward Platonism and maybe even metaphysics. The face breaks from form and left behind is the trace, whether it is disclosed or not. The trace does not point you backstage. A symbol can bring stuff into the world. The trace signifies what is never present. A face is abstract. If we try to represent transcendence it becomes imminence. If transcendence shows up it loses transcendence. A face is not a window. There is no symbol for something that comes from elsewhere. A face is not a mask. How can we capture the beyond without imminence? A trace is gone and cannot return. It is beyond memory and cannot be brought into consciousness because it calls consciousness into question.

The trace is in the third person as “he” in thirdness as illeity. Behind in thirdness there is no you and me. It is beyond language and ontology. When we meet a person his heness is gone. In absence begins responsibility. The other disappears at the rate of appearing. You can track traces but use stones rather than breadcrumbs. Only a being that transcends can leave a trace. When things bump other things there is no trace. We cannot find the cause of a trace. A trace does not lead to the past but to an absolute past that unites all of time. Language involves tracing back to a past that is never present. It is a pastness that cannot be remembered.

The notion of divinity is anti-incarnational theology. Disincarnation theology breaks the structure of Being in the body. God is not an icon. The deep past is present whenever we meet anyone. Back to something that secures otherness. God is in the trace. To go to god is to go to the other.

Goal of the challenge from word to thing cannot be reached. It is an infinite task.

After lecture I went home to sleep for an hour and a half and then headed back downtown.

While waiting for Short Story class to start I finished reading Levinas’s “Is Ontology Fundamental?” I guess the answer is no. Then I read part one of Daniel Clowes’s “Ghost World”. I’ve downloaded the movie, but I figured I’d read the comic first so I can be super critical and disappointed when I watch the film.

For the first hour of class we discussed Thomas King’s “A Seat in the Garden”, which uses his trickster technique, but in more of a modern setting and without Coyote this time. In the story, King appropriates the trope of appropriation.

The guy that owns the garden is Joe Hovaugh. Get it? Garden and Jehovah?

In the story, a big Indian shows up every day in Joe’s garden, and all he ever says is “If you build it, they will come!” which is appropriated from W. P. Kinsella’s novel, “Shoeless Joe”, which of course was adapted into the film, “Field of Dreams”. Kinsella’s first novel was “Dance Me Outside”, which took place entirely on a Native reserve with Native characters. Some accused him of cultural appropriation, which he thought was pretty ridiculous. I agree. It would be like saying that Shakespeare had no right to create the play “Othello” because he wasn’t Black or “Romeo and Juliet” because he wasn’t a thirteen-year-old girl.

So Joe’s garden is private property. He calls his friend, Red Matthews, whose name is appropriated from an actor who played bad guys in a lot of Hollywood westerns. Every time Red looks at the big Indian in the garden, he thinks he looks like a different film actor. The first one he mentions is Jeff Chandler, who was a Jewish actor that played the Apache leader, Cochise in the film, “Broken Arrow”. Red also tells Joe about a movie in which a house becomes haunted because it was built on top of an Indian burial ground and that they had to bring in a medicine man to get rid of the spirits. He was talking about the movie “Poltergeist” but he got it wrong, since it was a little psychic woman that came. Red also claimed that the Indian looked like Sal Mineo, which was weird, because an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was Cree, had a major crush on Sal Mineo when she was a teenager. She sent him a fan letter and got back a signed photograph. Mineo was murdered. Andrew Lesk told me that they say he’d picked up some rough trade, but that wouldn’t explain why he was stabbed in an alleyway by someone that didn’t even know who he was.

It turns out that the big Indian was just in Joe and Red’s imagination, since they were the only ones that saw him. There are three Indians that come to the garden every now and then to sort cans they’ve collected. Joe decides to ask them what to do with the Indian. They pretend they see him and go into the garden to talk with him, and then they tell Joe that he wants him to build a seat in the garden.

In the second hour we looked at Rohinton Mistry’s story “Exercisers”, about a young man caught between the restrictions of his culture in India, as enforced by his mother; and his more modern relationship with a young woman of a higher class than him. Also in between are these young men who meet every night in the playground after the children have gone home. The men take their shirts off and turn the playground equipment into an improvised gym. There’s something homoerotic about the way these men are described and the main character, Jehangir, keeps thinking that he’ll join them and also become an exerciser but he never does. Joining an all male group though might free him from his mother and his girlfriend, who he feels are in a tug of war to win control over him. He’s more of a watcher than a doer as far as anything in his life goes.

That night I watched the other instalment of the Garry Moore show that I’d downloaded. Once again, Carol Burnett was very impressive in a spoof on My Fair Lady, in which she plays an uncouth Brooklyn girl trying to get a job as a salesgirl at an upscale department store. Her pronunciations of words like “girdle” as Tony Randall was trying get her to lose her Brooklyn accent were hilarious. Another interesting part of the show was when Garry told the audience that he’d caught his dancers dancing instead of resting between rehearsals. The type of dancing they were doing was type of called line dance called the Madison Twist. Garry had his dancers come out and improvise as they followed behind their choreographer.  The musical guest was Patty Page, but her music represents that dead period just before white people started listening to rock and roll.