Repetition John Rahn Repetition John Rahn Music DN-10 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 USA (In this version in ascii format, the capitalized word "REPETITION" stands for the French word "repetition" with acute accents on the "e"s.) Learning to be a musician always involves learning to repeat sounds, or more precisely, to repeat in a new sound some quality or complex of qualities heard in some previous sound. Paul Valİry, in his typically nineteenth-century poet's admiration for music, marvelled at and envied musical instruments, whose like does not exist for poetry -- each instrument a laboratory for producing at will carefully measured quantified doses of particular qualities. (Valİry 1961) The musical instrument is a paradigm of such quantified, repeatable doses: Des Esseintes's mouth organ, and his ªsyntax of smells.º (Huysmans 1959) Music, like empirical science, is grounded on the repeatable experience. All musical structure derives from repetition. Imagine a series of sounds none of whose perceived qualities repeats -- where qualities include relational qualities of any kind and any complexity, such as pitch-interval-from-previous-sound, or in-the-key-of-Bb, or of- hexachordal-area-{1 2 5 6 9 10}. Such a non-repeating series can have no structure, by definition; the series is "random," if as chimerical as the unicorn (since human perception always structures, and also because even the mathematical determination of randomicity is problematic). Moreover, if internal structure is perceived within a series, there is necessarily repetition of some sort in the series as perceived. On the other two hands, a series may contain repetition yet be either structured or "random" (as in any computer-generated random number series, where individual digits repeat here and there, and an overall algorithmic pattern repeats also, albeit a very long one); and if a series is unstructured, then it may or may not contain repetition. To summarize these remarks, let R stand for "is a series that contains some sort of repetition," and let S stand for "is a series that has internal structure." Then respectively (universally quantifying over x), ~R(x) --> ~S(x) and S(x) --> R(x) and R(x) --> S(x) OR ~S(x) and ~S(x) --> R(x) OR ~R(x). So while structure and repetition are not logically equivalent (in which case S would imply R and R would imply S), they are closely involved: if structure, then repetition, and if no repetition, no structure. The experience of the second or subsequent instance of any quality or relation precipitates a structure: recognition conditions cognition. How then is repetition associated with boredom? The goddess of repetition shows a triple aspect: there is repetition itself, which is lively; there is REPETITION, or rehearsal, which is only re-animated, a zombie or revenant; and there is slavery, which is dead. The differences among these three aspects have to do with telos, or final cause. Slavery lacks telos. One thing is enslaved to another when the second repeats the first without final cause; nothing is happening; they have no future, no exit: Sartre's hell, without possibility of transcendence. Boredom. REPETITION is repetition in the presence of a given global telos, a goal with respect to the thing repeated. There is already an idea or picture of the whole thing repeated, to which successive presentations are supposed ever more closely to approximate. The telos, however admirable, does not change or grow, and the thing repeated changes inessentially and perhaps only in small increments from presentation to presentation, yet the process of successive approximation imparts a certain wan glow of pseudo-life to the series and thus to its components, les revenants. In contrast, what I would like here to call "repetition" is repetition within a larger thing whose telos is not given (as in REPETITION), but is in the process of being formed. Such subglobal repetition is not REPETITION because the point is not to perfect (telew) the thing repeated, by accomplishing its telos, but to point beyond the thing repeated to the thing being formed. This is lively because it escapes the dead hand of some prefigured order; like life, it is a process of continual transcendence toward who knows what end. The focus is always forward, un-self-ish, opening away from the current entity in the direction of something larger and unconfined. Naturally this lively kind of repetition is what makes, say, Beethoven's Eroica out of repeated qualities and quality-complexes such as Eb- chord-ness and Cb-ness. Repetition is, as I hope to show, more than merely analytical in the sense of laying out all the relevant repeatable component elements of a piece, like a disassembled automobile engine; this would be trivial. The involvement of repetition as an action constituting time and life from the inside makes it equally constitutional for the spirit of music. To understand how this may be, it is necessary first to interrogate repetition minutely as to its particulars. *** Subglobal repetition: live repetition: how does it work? Let us ask a schema of bare repetition, A = {a, then-a}. The schema A itself is outside time, but it is a schema of a temporal experience: first I experience a, then then-a, which is a again. The context changes: a is not then-a. (So what is it that is repeated?) A the global thing is the change of context. The change of context constitutes A and reflects back into each a. But if a is not then-a, what do we recognize as a/then-a? Is a then-a after all? Of course not -- worse, a is not even a-of-{a, then-a}, and then-a is not then-a-of-{a, then-a}. But abstract from context: a-of-{a, then-a} becomes a and then-a-of-{a, then-a} becomes then-a, abstractly. But is it possible to abstract from context? From this context? From any possible context? Not only is it possible, but inevitable, as abstraction-from-context is the only kind of abstraction there is. This is the operation that makes the notion of a thing. A thing as grasped is itself abstracted from any possible context. A thing endures for us, temporally, by virtue of abstraction from changes-of-context; a thing's boundaries, which hold it in existence for us as a cupped hand holds water, are constructed for it by us by means of an act of abstraction, drawing the thing out from its context (ab + trahere). Such an ontology encounters problems both practical (where to draw the boundaries, the practical problem of Sichselbstgleichheit (Koyrİ 1961a)) and theoretical (the cognitive chicken-and-egg problem -- how can one abstractly constitute or cognize a thing before knowing what it is, before being able to re-cognize it? -- and the problem of the world: how can that which is for me be also for others and in itself?). Such problems are well known; attempts at solving them form a large part of philosophy. In the meantime, the ontology sketched above will have to do to go on with. So the basis for cognizing a is there, and then-a is a with added context -- specific context -- context of {a, then-a}. When we re-cognize a in then-a, we cognize anew the added context that makes a then-a, a new context that is fused with and originally presented with the a of then-a. In fact the a of then-a is secondary, derived, an abstraction from the primordially presented cognition of then-a. So recognition is derived from cognition: cognition gives then-a, then abstraction gives a-from- then-a, which we recognize as a. (But remember that recognition conditions cognition.) How is the global thing A = {a, then-a} describable as the change of context? It is itself a context; but a change-of-context may be a context. The cognition of time lies in the then of then-a. Time as a thing is the then abstracted from all possible contexts-that-are- changes-of-context. (Since time is essentially implicated in changes- of-context, this makes time an unsatisfactory kind of thing.) But A = {a, then-a} is a particular context-that-is-a-change-of-context. It is not, say, {b, then-a}, nor is it {a, then-a, then-again-a}. How do we recognize A? The same way we recognize a. Play the record twice: {A, then-A}. But we have not been thinking of a as itself a temporal thing, while A embeds within its thinghood the then of time. To be a temporal thing is to refer to time essentially, as A does. A temporal thing can contain other temporal things, as when I drive to work I drive first to the freeway, then drive south to 50th Street, and so on: my-driving-to-work, a temporal thing that contains temporal subthings. After the foregoing remarks, the change of context that is A deserves re-inspection. We have been notating A as the set {a, then-a}, but describing it as a change of context. A set alone is itself a static thing. A change-of-context manages to remain dynamic, a change, even while being a thing. It is the neutrality of the notion of set that fits it for the foundational study of notions of order, as in the set-theoretical definition of tuple and number in the foundations of mathematics, or for the notation of change-of-context here. {a, then-a} = {then-a, a} = A, which is a temporal thing by virtue of the then. As is well known, any ordering can be interpreted in time or in other suitable dimensions. Thus {a, then-a} is equivalent to the ordered pair interpreted in time. This will justify all sorts of mathematical manipulations of temporal relations represented as relations of order. From the opposite perspective, the notion of order is a thing that is abstracted from different kinds of experiences: {a, then-a}, {spatial-thing, closer- spatial-thing}, {pitch, higher-pitch, even-higher-pitch}, and so on. It would be a mistake to question the notion of order about the nature of any of its experiential interpretations, just because it has been abstracted from them and has thus discarded the kind of information that differentiates {a, then-a} from, say, {pitch, higher-pitch}. Abstraction removes us from the scene of the experience itself in all its inherent obscurity, from the ineffability of quality and the obstinacy of things, and their resistance to "adİquation." (Merleau-Ponty 1964) Following this line of thought reveals that the temporal experience {a, then-a} is itself abstract in an essential way: a-for-Mary is not a-for- John. According to the ontology referred to above, the notion of Mary- for-herself is Mary's ongoing project of abstraction from the temporally open set of all x-for-Mary. Such a set always has a most recent member, and may have an earliest member (though determinacy fades in that direction), but never has a final member -- or perhaps just once, if one can be said to experience one's own death, as opposed to the events of one's dying. When Mary and John are sitting together listening to music, a temporal segment of Mary's set is concurrent with a segment of John's set. What is it that they both experience? Let m be some musical event for both Mary and John: m is a depersonalized, or rather interpersonalized, experience made possible by abstraction from m-for-Mary and m-for- John. Like A, M = {m, then-m} is temporally recursive in nature -- each interpersonal musical experience is temporal and may contain other interpersonal musical experiences. The abstraction of m involves the problem of intersubjectivity. How can John know m-for-Mary, or Mary know m-for-John, so that either person may abstract m? This is the domain of music theory: the construction of the interpersonal m. Mary and John negotiate some agreement about m. Language (natural or formal) is essential to this process, and m is spun into being out of language in the linguistic space between Mary and John. Any intersubjective entity is essentially linguistic, since only communication connects "subjects." Mary and John must then negotiate or assume from past negotiations each M in the music, or enough of them for each person to infer the others with some confidence. M is not M-for-Mary. What you and I are doing now, dear reader, is an attempt to negotiate (through the medium of text) a sense of change-of-context abstracted from change- of-context-for-you and change-of-context-for-me. How does that change of context feel? In an article called "What Lingers On (, When the Song Is Ended)," Benjamin Boretz opens a theory of reading-temporally out of a similar change of context in Plato's Theaetetus, a theory which then becomes, by change of context, a theory of music. (Boretz 1977) It is a theory of irony in that it deals with the projection of future contexts onto past events as a paradigm of constructive deceit. Deceit, like intention, is not possible without time. Deceit teaches us about meaning. The relation between the elements of {a, then-a} is not one of thin succession. I experience a, serene in its self-sufficiency, a context for itself. I experience then-a: in retrospect, a deceived me; I may never trust a again. Two is not one, two is the principle of division, the number of evil and deceit. Who knows where it all will end? The context has been destabilized, opened. Meaning has descended upon it in thick contours, like a Connecticut snowfall. The change-of-context from {a} to {a, then-a} is internal to {a, then-a}, and constitutes its meaning as a temporal being. I have said this (almost exactly) early on in this essay. The change of context adds "meaning" here. Just as deceit teaches us about meaning, death teaches us about time in music and in other temporal arts such as dance and, to a lesser extent, theater and literature. Mary's ongoing project of abstracting and constructing Mary-for-herself and the intelligible world-for-Mary from the open set of all obstinate x-for-Mary is terminated (let us say) by death. Yet the set of all x-for-Mary is essentially open. Mary skis over the unfolding terrain, interacting with the terrain so that the terrain-to- be is conditioned by Mary's actions as her actions are conditioned by the terrain. The quality of that particular sub-slope may be ineffable, but its relations to Mary and the rest of the terrain are the intelligible source of discourse. We admire the grace with which a good novel traces Mary's flight over the terrain, with its particular rhythm of swoops and reverses, its consistencies and inconsistencies of pattern, its varieties of speed, its subtle retards into near-slavery and death only to grasp an opening over to the right that accelerates her life in a new direction. Only repetition can make sense of this, as Mary recognizes a similarity of slope or pattern, recognizes that this most recent pattern fits together with other past patterns to make a larger pattern related itself to the most recent, now sub-pattern, by some (as it were) affine transformation. Repetition is transformation, too, and all transformation rests on the possibility of repetition, of repeatable qualities and patterns. The world is not a world, a life is not a life, if it makes no sense at all. Sense is dependent on repetition, without which nothing can be recognized. To fail to make sense of one's life, to give up on the project of the world-for-oneself, is to endure its repetitions as slavery. Without sense, there is no way to act, only the random jostlings of Brownian motion, given over to entropy, or against this background of bored slavery the petulant, momentary, unconnected and inefficacious -- because lacking hope of telos -- acte gratuit, or an act that is meaninglessly desperate, at once overdetermined and underdetermined, such as Mathieu's driving a knife through his hand in Sartre's novel entitled (ironically) The Age of Reason. (Sartre 1947) This process of continual repetition, continual change-of-context constituting meaning, creatively folding a life back over its traces as it unfolds, is a source of great satisfaction, aesthetically desperate and desperately aesthetic, for without this process, without hope of telos, there would be no life. Who among us is ready to die? To be ready to die would be not to be living. As long as one is living, one's life is unachieved, the final reconfiguration un-folded-back to give meaning to the whole, to make a whole. Therefore no one can die happy who is still really living, who is committed to the project of repetition, of making sense of changes-of-context. Death is not a change of context; it is the end of changes of context and the end of meaning. (If there is a life after death, there is no death, which would refigure the context of this discussion radically, and ironically.) A piece of music for Mary is the life Mary lives alongside of her life. Because music is temporal, Mary can experience it as she experiences (abstracts, constructs) her own life, as an ongoing project of the re- petition that is changes-of-context that is meaning. The depth and subtlety she asks of the music will be the depth and subtlety she has brought her own life to. If a piece of music cannot sustain her interpretation, perhaps because its terrain is perceivably limited --- closed -- and thus unlifelike, she will turn away. She will be attracted to pieces of music whose terrain leads her into ways of refolding, of replication (Deleuze 1988), that can teach her about her life. Aesthetic desperation is always looking for ways to go on. Music is both temporal and abstract enough to show her the delineaments of telos, the physiognomy of hope. Insofar as dance, theater, and literature depict character and mythos explicitly they evacuate the possibility of Mary's living her life in them. They expel Mary and make of her a spectator of other lives, without the possibility of the projective solidarity and interactive intersubjectivity that make the Other so fascinating in "real life." Yet even a puppet-show has its fascination, its slightly horrible fascination. This caricature of the Other, reduced to a symbol, to a fixed constellation, who never really acts as he is acted by the "actors," following the trenches carved out of the papier-mache terrain by the author who alone is really the actor, but behind the scene not on it --- is this the way the Other sees me? Is this the type of abstract person from person-for-Mary, person-for-John, person-for-Percy ... out of which (not whom) is constituted the social? Is this slavery society? Dance, theater, and literature all to some extent fall into the treason of representation. If "traduire c'est trahir," how much more must mere representation betray, especially if what is represented is life. The Islamic prohibition against representation is understandable. Representation is betrayed in its origins, as the mere re-presentation which in fact it cannot attain and to which it does not even dare aspire (the map is not the territory); but even if it did present a thing again, re-presentation would be boring. Representation is not even slavery, which would require that the enslaved be of the same kind as the enslaver. Representation is more like animal husbandry, the author herding her characters, playing Marie Antoinette. In contrast, re- petition is interrogatory; it asks again, and finds meaning from the thing as it is experienced. (Merleau-Ponty 1961) Surprise is always possible in repetition, as the answer may not be what one expects, and the things retain their autonomy. Several objections to this harsh portrayal of representational art may present themselves. Language itself involves representation, though it can be argued that language basically has more to do with metaphor, which is creative and respects things. Dance, theater, and literature also are metaphorical, not merely representational, and while dance can retain the non-pre-interpreted temporality of music, dance-as- story, theater, and literature all gain the powers of language and narrative. Moreover, losing the temporal, art gains proportionately the contemplative. All the arts are to varying extents temporal (because they are experienced in life) and contemplative (because that experience can be remembered). The nontemporal plastic arts have another kind of relation to representation and to experience. But it is not my purpose here to explore, and certainly not to criticize, arts other than music. Mary wants to find art that can teach her about life. Mary can live herself in music with an immediacy that is lost if temporality appears under the sign of representation. But does Mary want to find art that can teach her about life? What about kitsch, entertainment, the mass media? Why is MTV so popular? Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1988) has suggested that "the masses," to which each of us belongs (this is not some term of alienation or condescension), have adopted the strategy of the appearance of passivity under the importunities of a media complex which has hypertrophied in an age of "information," transforming itself from communication to the hyper-reality of the simulacrum. The territory is the map, which has no other reference; the feigned is. Just as strategies of becoming, such as vigorous intellection and the actualization of self, and the whole project of philosophy, resist the demand that we be objects, and thus are a response to oppression and repression, so do strategies of being-object resist (in the middle voice) the demand for speech, for the maximization of production of meaning and participation in an increasingly rapidly changing social milieu of which the media are at once sign and simulacrum. The deceit practiced by the couch potato is its revenge. It is a vegetable by strategy. Each of us is a vegetable to some extent, no doubt, but being-vegetable can only be undertaken as a project of continually becoming- vegetable, which continually subverts vegetablehood at its very source. To become-vegetable as a strategy "sich aufhebt" (Koyrİ 1961a,b) against its will, as the instability of becoming-being-vegetable transmits itself to the vegetable strategy. If Baudrillard has decoded the silence of the masses, it is (for that reason) no longer silence and the strategy has failed. Yet becoming-vegetable as simulation of the vegetable is vegetable, as a psychosomatic pain is pain. The media, at once re-presenting and simulating the contemporary social and cultural scene, feigns an excess of life, while being structured so that any response in its terms is impossible. The strategy of becoming-being- object responds in life to this feigned excess. But representation is dead, and in this sense the media is no different from any other dead object presented to us. If the simulacrum is real, so is this terrace on which I sit writing. The response of life to that which is presented to it remains, obstinately and essentially, animal. To be aware of oneself-in-the-world is to realize life as anima, anemos, Sartre's great wind blowing from nowhere (even if we do not follow Sartre all the way), (Sartre 1957) the downhill ski run, that which asks again -- repetition. Life's absolute Other is death. This is the most difficult of all syntheses, an Entzweiung demanding the greatest Aufhebung (Koyrİ 1961a,b), the center of religion and art. The degree to which and the style in which it is faced up to vary from on the one hand religions, such as the naked stare of Tantric Kali-worship and the clothed Christian strategy, to (on the other hand) the soap opera in which Jeannine has cancer, the cop show, and the splatter flick. The Kali-worshipper (of a certain kind) attempts to realize death- in-life by such physical-spiritual tactics as fornication with corpses, the Christian (of a certain kind) by daily meditation on final things. Both have as a goal of their activities a sort of folding-back of death over life, a replication that will thicken the meaning of living and encompass a meaning for death. In contrast, the violence depicted in entertainment reveals a looking-towards-death that is either really an averted gaze -- the Amerindians bite the dust, the robber is blasted away as mere emblems of death -- or the sick fascination of the splatter flick, focussed on gut reactions, exteriorizing and trivializing death, and incapable of reflecting itself back into the conduct of life. Entertainment runs away from death. Entertainment is not in the business of producing meaning but of intercepting life on its way to re- petition, deflecting replication at each instant and by a sort of magic trick appropriating the mana from life's ever-freshly-throttled corpse. The representational cannot fully capture this life-and-death question which essentially temporal, repetitional life poses for itself. The representational is both atemporal and second-hand. Music is the alternate ski slope, repetitional in that its very essence is the change- of-context which one questions for its meaning, replicates back upon itself, and, as the result of the minutest inflection, may recast globally in a change-of-world as dramatic as Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Art is often accused of deceit: the poem more pretty than life (or merely different from it), the sonata jingling nicely to its final tonic resolution. Music's problem is its finitude, in that its finitude is different from that of life. The end of a life is not part of the life, and certainly is not its telos; merely, "that's all." The end of a piece of music, while definitely part of that piece of music, is also not its telos - - it would be an absurd and trivial view of music that proposed a tonal piece's final tonic as its raison d'etre (and it is a petty view of Schenker's theories that would so misconstrue them). For both life and music, the telos emerges and changes during repetition and replication: it is always a telos of the whole-to-that-time, a telos always seeking a whole. The telos contains within itself at any moment not only the complex of refolded meanings of each of its changes-of-context (moments) and characteristics, but also the history of such complexes as they constituted themselves at every previous moment. This process is the "live repetition" we have been interrogating from the beginning, an active and continual questioning of each change-of--context as it increments and transfigures the temporal subworld of changes-of- context that is the larger context (the essay, the piece of music, the life). Music's essential deceit is its ability to encapsulate itself in such a temporal subworld, which Mary can live alongside her life and learn from, but which is bounded (however complex) and therefore is a thing. Mary's world, Mary's life, is not a thing. It is ultimately ungraspable because unbounded, always tending to a whole-to-that- time but never a whole. Yet the telos of repetition always seeks a whole. Repetition envies the whole: it places the idea of the whole in life, which naturally can never attain it. By living her life alongside her life in a piece of music, Mary can express a whole. She "has envie" for a whole which she can never live in life, but can in a piece of music. Death is teaching us about music's time, but deceit teaches us about meaning. Deceit always involves a change-of-context which is held suspended within itself until the deceit flowers, folds out in an outward change-of-context. Repetition asks this change-of-context for its meaning. Similarly, a piece of music always involves (folds within itself) the change-of-context unfolded when the piece is achieved and comes to its end. The music-that-was-alongside-life is now a whole thing in life. The repetition in music, which was essentially unbounded, finds its envied telos in life, but in a thing: the now bounded whole piece of music. What can we learn from this change- of-context? What does this irony have to say? By placing life and a thing in such an ironic relationship, music allows us momentarily to grasp the change-of-context between the two terms as a thing that is a change-of-context, which we can question for its meaning. The piece of music as a whole which had been our life alongside life, within which we questioned each change-of-context as we do in life, refolding meanings over each whole-to-that-time in the piece, is now a whole thing in the larger context of life. Our essential "envie" of the whole is folded back on itself by the deceit music practices about death. References Baudrillard, Jean. (1988) Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Boretz, Benjamin. (1977) What lingers On (, When the Song Is Ended). Perspectives of New Music, 16 (1), 102-109 Deleuze, Gilles. ( 1988) Le pli. Paris: ‰ditions de Minuit Huysmans, J. K. (1959) Against Nature. Translated by Robert Baldwick. London: Penguin Koyrİ, Alexander. (1961a) Hegel Õ Iİna. In ‰tudes d'histoire de la pensİe philosophique, pp. 147-190. Paris: Gallimard Koyrİ, Alexander. (1961b) Note sur la langue et la terminologie hİgİliennes. In ‰tudes d'histoire de la pensİe philosophique, pp. 191- 224. Paris: Gallimard Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964) Le visible et l'invisible. Paris: Gallimard Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1947) The Age of Reason. Translated by Eric Sutton. N.Y.: Knopf Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1957) The Transcendence of the Ego. Translated and annotated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. N.Y.: Noonday Press. Valİry, Paul. (1961) Poetry and Abstract Thought. In Paul Valİry, The Art of Poetry. Translated by Denise Folliot. N.Y.: Random House Alonissos, May 1990