Martin E. Rosenberg

Portals: Windows, doors, black holes, white holes and worm holes serve as nodes for transport between different systems of organization in the works and writings of Marcel Duchamp, and in Thomas Pynchon's novels _Gravity's Rainbow_ and _Vineland_. These portals enable pivoting between different forms of cognition, in the realm of the social and political with respect to subject positions with reference to chess, and in the realm of the individual with respect to subject formation and human creativity. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and on the cognitive science of Francisco Varela and Edwin Hutchins, a connection is made between an avant-garde modernist, and a post-modern novelist, in their attention to a war between top-down (control) and bottom-up (emergent) processes in society and self. This investigation becomes a way to rethink the terms modernism and postmodernism.

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze forges alliances among science, philosophy and the arts in order to propose a systems theory of culture-formation based on the distinction between differen(t)iation and differen(c)iation. The first term refers to spatial and temporal difference, as might be charted graphically on a geometric grid; the second term refers to the variations possible of an organism at any particular moment in its history, enabled, for example, by cell division and specialization in an embryo, or by spontaneous genetic mutation in a species. While Deleuze identifies the first with mathematics and the second with biology, a more precise rendering of the difference between these two versions of difference can be found in llya Prigogine' s distinction between the precise determinism typical of the time-reversible perspective in physics and the statistical accounts of complex systems typical of the time-irreversible perspective. Often associated with dynamics, the time-reversible perspective refers to the search for laws governing physical events which make sense whether looking forwards or backwards in time, like the movement of planets and comets in Newtonian mechanics, or the trajectories of subatomic particles in Richard Feynman's quantum electrodynamics. Often associated with thermodynamics, the time-irreversible perspective refers to attempts to account for more complex processes, as in nineteenth-century descriptions of entropy as an endgame, or more recent characterizations of entropy as the initial condition for self-organizing processes. Furthermore, this epistemological distinction has ideological weight, particularly if we consider how disciplines like physics may value one epistemological model more than another. Since history has its own ideological struggles, which in turn have their origin in conflicting epistemological stances, we may find Prigogine and Stengers' s account of time-reversibility and time-irreversibility as competing stances useful for representing conflicting interpretations of historical events. Deleuze and Prigogine quote each other on a number of occasions, which lends credence to Deleuze' s insistence that it is necessary to forge alliances among science, philosophy and the arts. Indeed, in a recent interview (with the author, May 3, 1994), Prigogine demonstrates familiarity with Deleuze's work, and notes that these two forms of difference, as well as the terms "repetition" and "difference," are coextensive with time-reversible and time-irreversible perspectives in the sciences. Prigogine and Deleuze developed their respective models of physical and cultural processes at approximately the same time, the mid- to late sixties. Further, Prigogine himself has often speculated on the cultural work of his own concepts. That philosophers have recourse to physics and physicists have recourse to philosophy (not to mention that Deleuze writes on literature, painting and cinema, and that Prigogine is an accomplished pianist) reinforces Deleuze's argument (here as well as in What Is Philosophy?, written with Felix Guattari) that science, philosophy and art should form alliances since all engage the problematic of chaos, only proceed differently toward it. Some have begun to call such an interdisciplinary pursuit epistemocritique.1 That Deleuze uses physical laws to describe the behavior of human subjects and of complex cultural systems raises questions about the epistemological and ideological implications of adopting tropes from physics to forge such alliances, given the relative power of scientific discourse in our epoch. While I will address these implications in my conclusion, here I want to argue that Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, with its sophisticated treatment of scientific and philosophical concepts, also deserves to be read as a form of epistE§mocritique. As an artistic construction, it draws on science and philosophy to foreground, especially in its depiction of the chaos of the postwar zone of Europe, the problematic threshold of historical consciousness as that consciousness acts to impose its own order on raw events.

This chapter examines jazz improvisation, using the concept of narrative in two ways. First, it addresses narrative as a problematic metaphor- “improvisation is story-telling.” Although jazz musicians must remain aware of the narrative frame or schema of the song form while improvising variations for their own “story,” they also must react instinctually in real time to the other musicians who are also creating variations. Thus, the improviser’s intention with respect to their own “story” may not be so simply defined. Secondly, it then addresses the problem with narrating how jazz improvisation happens, with respect to current neuroscience research. Improvisation requires the engagement of three coexisting forms of time cognition, and two distinct but competing forms of musical cognition: top-down "Projective Apprehension," while preparing for improvisation; and bottom-up "Proprio-Sentience," which enables unconscious interaction during performance. This model of improvisation becomes visible particularly in dysfunction, when jazz improvisers become "lost.”

This two-part essay inquires into the history of jazz from Be-Bop composing practices of the 1940’s, to the development of Free Jazz in the 1960’s, in terms of the concepts of “complexity” and “emergence” in physics and cognitive science. Thus, it continues my past attempts at cross-disciplinary investigations, which drift from the relationship between complex systems and art into the realm of philosophy, by addressing the transgressive and yet inevitably complicitous nature of avant-garde art and its posture towards dominant cultural formations. Much of my early work on the avant-garde demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari ground the concepts of nomadology and micro-political aesthetics to a great extent in the discourses of complex systems in physics and cognitive science, as those discourses have evolved throughout this century, but especially since the 1960’s. Since the late 1980’s, I have argued, along with Manuel Delanda, that many other concepts such as the refrain, multiplicities, territorialization and de-territorialization, difference and repetition—recently discussed by Deleuzean scholars with reference to music--also share these grounds. We need to justify this venture into the careful forging of alliances among scientific disciplines, the philosophy of science and contemporary aesthetic philosophy, in order to reflect on the following five main lines of inquiry (or what Deleuze and Guattari would call “lines of [conceptual] flight”) traversing the realms of science, philosophy and jazz aesthetics: How do assumptions about duration or time shape the very different creative processes in classical and jazz music? I refer specifically to the western tendency to spatialize time since the 17th Century when both calculus, and standard music notation with even temperament and bars and time signatures, emerged. How dependent are John Cage’s compositions, by foregrounding the interdependence of music and noise, upon a carefully considered deconstruction (in the Derridean sense) of the calculus of music notation dominant since those 17th Century innovations in contrapuntal composition. We will then notice how he adopts models of music notation that look uncannily similar to phase space diagrams of such complex irreversible processes as attractor states in thermodynamics. How did the Be-Bop composing practices of Charlie Parker and others engage directly in the calculated yet spontaneous deconstruction of spatialized time, in order for new, hybrid processes of musical expression to emerge? Reminiscent of Bergson’s stages of “creative evolution,” these processes, enable song structures, as the vehicles for improvisation, as well as the conceptual/linguistic musical content (harmony, melody and rhythm) of those songs, to evolve into increasingly subtle and abstract forms at breath-taking speed. How may we identify processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, and the iterative, emergent or self-organizing nature of the refrain (and of harmonic rhythm generally), as central to an understanding of the micro-political motivations of an aesthetic? We will also see how a shift from the model of calculus to the model of phase space in conceptualizing the nature of duration enables us to theorize, and visualize, the crucial role of systemic bifurcations: in both complex processes from physics (and cognitive science in Part Two), and in jazz. How one might define Ornette Coleman's theorization of “Free Jazz,” in terms of a distributed form of musical expression (called "Harmelodics"), as an evolutionary extension of the line of conceptual flight opened up by Be-Bop composing practices. Other artists also embraced the distributed nature of jazz performances, involving the maximum freedom in juxtaposing independent and sometimes contrasting melodic, harmonic and rhythmic materials, to reach for a full realization of performative freedom."

This response to Yasuo Deguchi’s manifesto “The WE-turn” seeks to unpack two issues. First, we need to finesse our understanding of the Self by reconsidering the relationship between Doer-Internalism and Doer-Externalism as requiring both hierarchical and meshed cognitive processes that are internally multiple as well as externally embedded. In doing so, we will confront, second, the limits of analytic approaches to defining a subject acting in the world, by shifting focus from what the WE is, to what the WE does; or better yet, how the WE happens. Deguchi’s accomplishment here is transformative: abandoning the single autonomous subject as the center of agency has been warranted for myriad reasons, but never has the logic for the case been made more elegantly on ontological and epistemological grounds, nor the implications for ethics more visible. Yet, asserting the WE-turn as a relational ontology by establishing its logical consistency does not provide an experientially grounded way to supplant the single autonomous subject, with its epistemological and ethical baggage. In other words, “saying it ain’t so” does not mean that the autonomous “I” will surrender of its own accord. “We” requires from the Doer more than an intentional stance. It requires a cognitive neurological transformation from ancient cultural conditioning, especially in the West.

This essay addresses whether the married artists and architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins might be considered Japanese philosophers by widening the definition of philosophy. Does the impressive number of leading philosophers who have engaged with their work qualify them as such? On closer look, when we look at what they actually do, we see that what they refer to as their “crisis ethics” delves into ontology as well as epistemology in ways both ancient and contemporary. I follow the lead of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in arguing that science, philosophy, and the arts must mutually inform each other in order to address questions that do not fit within the purview of a single discipline. I therefore wish to expand the disciplinary alliances between art and philosophy established by Raquel Bouso and Michelle Deville to include theoretical and empirical neuroscience, particularly the neuro-phenomenology of Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson. I also demonstrate how and why the philosophy of Dōgen, as well as the philosophical and artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century (exemplified by Marcel Duchamp), infuse their work.

ABSTRACT: This essay addresses how the complex processes that occur during jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss. It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift from focusing this analysis of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. By silence, I refer to the embodied, yet shared pure duration as felt synchrony within an individual performer, that extends to the members of an ensemble. Thus, I refer to both aesthetic and micro-political implications of embodied, yet also distributed musical cognition in real time. For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Here I expand my previous work establishing similarities in the behavior of bifurcating systems in physical and cognitive sciences to the unfolding of ambiguity in real time during improvisation with respect to polyphony, polytonality and polyrhythms in the history of jazz from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. We can therefore re-conceptualize jazz improvisation as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified in a sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” By examining silence from this anthropological perspective, we can conceive of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to top-down cognitive control immanent with social and digital networks. The ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation points towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously a micro-politics of neuro-resistance. In other words, I argue that freedom of thought requires freedom from thought as an initial condition. Yet, I emphasize the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. The valorization of silence by jazz musicians is not simply etiquette, an ethics of reciprocity for performers exchanging “riffs,” but an initial condition that jazz performers (and, I would argue, listeners) experience in their bodies, thus linking embodied cognition to a collective field of cultural production that emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems. The recent and remarkable research on music and the brain has demonstrated that it is now possible to describe jazz improvisation as possessing both embodied and distributed cognitive properties. The emergent neuronal ensemble behavior within the individual that is visible in jazz improvisors, discovered by the neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins led by Charles Limb, bears striking resemblance to the interactive behaviors of the jazz ensemble itself. Thus, it is by recourse to recent research by myself and others into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation specifically, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible.