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Tuesday, 20 December 2016



You could make the case that music is based on the interrelation of multiple temporalities, not rhythm and melody by themselves, say, but the dialogue between them, and even within each of these terms you could say there are multiple horizons defined by different-sized units: motifs, phrases, repetitions, variations and so on. You might extend this to a metaphor for the phenomenology of experience in which, say, the slower moving unity is functionally subject with respect to the faster one as object, or the other way around. In such a theorisation there is an elusive difference, be it the ontological difference, or a diffĂ©rance, but essentially unnameable, which is the prior of all the constitutive differences that make the greater world  - in this instance that between the act or event and the awareness of the act or event - and which shows up in various forms in various regions of experience and with various degrees of obviousness and opacity. Music presents a good case since despite a refined technical vocabulary, including that of the neuro-scientists, no-one can fully describe what is happening, but almost everyone can hear it. In fact it remains a complete mystery. Metaphors of this kind are however all fatally misleading, since in spite of all the many ways, through raised or lowered levels of consciousness, that you may become absorbed by the music, seemingly with little or no residue, it is not anything in the music itself, but what enable it to appear as such. In short the primal difference, however subtly thought, is still a kind of object, while the subject is the frame, or the ultimate frame of all frames. Of course this argument also works in contrapositive: if the frame could appear within itself then impossible objects would exist, objects whose nature was an irreducible reference to complete knowledge of the knower. But how do you know that such objects don't exist? How do you know that every single object isn't just that?

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