REWRITING a PRESOCRATIC chorus / remixing verbal + visual lines
Joseph F. Keppler
E-Ratio, 2015, www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/pdfs/Presocratics_Keppler.pdf

An origin is a singular event. It can only happen once. There can only be one first; after that, there’s only a series of succeeding ordinals of potentially diminishing interest. Finding the initial appearance of something isn’t always easy, particular when it’s said to lie in a mythical time-before-time. Fortunately the origin of what we can recognize as Western natural science and metaphysics is situated in historical time and recorded more or less as it occurred, in treatises that have come down to us in fragments or as quotes and paraphrases in subsequent testimonia. These sources, witnesses to their own historicity, document the speculations and pronouncements of the so-called Presocratics, Hellenic philosophers active in southern Italy and Sicily, the Greek mainland, and what’s now western Turkey, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E.

The Presocratics brought speculation about nature and the nature of things out of the realm of myth and into the physical world. In Book I of the Metaphysics, Aristotle said that

In short, the Presocratics appealed to natural substances, processes, and forces rather than supernatural or mythical entities to explain the phenomenal world, and speculated about its metaphysical foundations. Some, notably the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes were material monists who looked to identify a first or primordial substance from which the various phenomena of the empirical world came to be via natural transformations. In doing so, they gave us a rudimentary physical cosmology. Others, such as the metaphysical monists of the Eleatic school, argued that beneath its appearance of mutability, all being was one and unchanging. The sui generis Heraclitus of Ephesus pronounced on cosmology and epistemology and, with his acerbic observations of human relations, set out a kind of early anthropology. By framing their speculations as they did, these philosophers in effect took Western thought out of eternal time and regrounded it in historical time.

In Rewriting a Presocratic Chorus / remixing verbal + visual lines Joseph Keppler returns to these origins. But this isn’t a recreation or reenactment; rather it’s a decidedly postmodern “remix” inspired by the speculations of the Presocratics.

Keppler’s remix consists of two hundred mostly brief, aphoristic statements accompanied by a series of drawings. (For present purposes I want to restrict my comments to the verbal lines alone.) The statements are presented as a series of numbered fragments, in the manner of most collections of the Presocratic material. The opening five statements, which in form and content are typical of the entire series, contain allusions to and variations on the concepts and concerns reported of the Presocratics:

Just a quick, first pass yields several recognizable references and resemblances: To Thales of Miletus’ reported prediction of an eclipse; to Empedocles of Acragas’ doctrine of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water being acted on by the forces of attraction (Love) and repulsion (Strife); to Heraclitus’ ruminations on truth and falsity and his pointed remarks on the ambivalence of human nature, as well as to his well-known claim that one cannot step into the same river twice. < /p>

Heraclitus’ pronouncement on the apparent non-identity of what we ordinarily think of as the same thing is exemplary of the kind of paradox that attracts Keppler and finds expression throughout his collection. For example, in fragment 135, with its allusion to Parmenides’ teaching on the unity of Being and the impossibility of non-Being:

The ontological “laws” Keppler sets out begin by moving in an orthodox direction—claiming a holistic inclusivity for Parmenidean Being and denying that non-Being can include anything--and then come to a sudden swerve in a reversal of sense or even a contradiction in which Being is claimed to contain the non-Being that Parmenides held was literally unthinkable. What this fragment has done is to point up a contradiction within ontological monism: that is, if Being is all-inclusive and cannot exclude anything, it must include its opposite as well.

In Keppler’s fragment 167, we get the paradox of motion within motionlessness:

Looking past the obvious contradiction that what rests doesn’t change and what changes doesn’t rest, we can intuit that movement, or by extension a dynamic vitality, is at work animating even an apparently resting body, and that a body undergoing change may still retain a self-sameness when considered at a deeper level. The larger question raised is one of the appearance of a thing versus the reality underlying it. That may be the sense behind Heraclitus’ statement “Changing, it rests,” which Keppler’s fragment references in reverse.

Heraclitus is the obvious inspiration for Keppler’s remix. Like the surviving fragments of Heraclitus’ book, which may have carried the title “On Nature” or “On Truth,” Keppler’s verbal lines frequently appear as maxims or general laws presented in short, economical statements. It’s a rhetorical strategy that rests on an appropriation of the Ephesian’s style of terse, often mystifying, aphorisms. (Heraclitus’ own corpus may itself have been self-consciously modeled on oracles and the wisdom sayings attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece, hence his nickname of “Heraclitus the Enigmatic.”) What this appropriation reveals, I believe, is the parodic nature of Keppler’s remix. I want to be clear that I’m using “parody” in a particular way—a way that excludes its ordinary implications of ridicule or mockery. The kind of parody I see here is a specifically postmodern parody.

Postmodern parody as I understand it is a kind of emulation that consists in a recognition of precedent, which it realizes through the appropriation and refiguration of the sources it chooses to parody. This isn’t necessarily an ironic repurposing of what has come before—although irony is by no means excluded—but rather an acknowledgment of the continuing force of precedent, of the reality of culture as repetition, and of one’s own historicity within that repetition, which is to say one’s position of having come afterward into a field already opened up and to some extent mapped by past traversals. Postmodern historicity is the opposite of the mythical anti-history, which locates origins in a hypothetical time-before-time; it knows nothing of origins ex nihilo but rather exists at the point of convergence of multiple streams of influence and the accomplished work that memorializes them. As a result, it carries an awareness of being overdetermined and contingent, of its having come to be within a context that was always already there.

This awareness of one’s place within an already constituted world of meaning and practice is a manifestation of a relation the late Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, borrowing an obscure term from Heidegger’s later writings, described as Verwindung. Vattimo defined Verwindung as consisting of a “resigned acceptance” or “continuation” of what is given by way of a twisting or distortion of its original meaning. Vattimo contrasts Verwindung, which at least implicitly entails an acceptance of the legitimacy of the claims of tradition, to the concept of Überwindung, or the surpassing and overcoming of what is. I think of Verwindung as exemplifying the quintessential postmodern stance of recognizing both the inevitability of one’s historicity and the necessity of working with what’s already there, although I reject the idea that such a recognition must always entail a sense of resignation or of belatedness, whereby one assumes that all of one’s possible ideas and praxes have already been anticipated, if not actually accomplished. Rather, I believe the acceptance of one’s historicity without the accompanying feeling of resignation can on the contrary open up the possibility of a creative renewal of the worked material standing in back of the present moment.

Finding that possibility in the previously unexplored expressive potential secreted in the given is something the postmodern parody can do. In fact, with its continuation of its sources through creative distortion, postmodern parody is exemplary of the spirit of Verwindung. With its acknowledged acceptance of its own historicity, it potentially is open to establishing a creative dialogue with the given it appropriates and reconfigures. This dialogue is more complex than the simple ridicule of what we ordinarily think of as parody, but instead can consist of critique, both constructive or otherwise; of commentary and elaboration; and of contemporizing, that is, of bringing the parodied material forward into the present in order to reveal something of importance relative to contemporary concerns. Above all it represents a renewal of meaning by engaging with the nuances and creative contradictions latent in the source material, in which it discovers a proleptive relevance.

This is the view I see Keppler taking with his engagement of the Presocratics. His postmodern parody isn’t a symptom of a perceived exhaustion, both semantic and formal, of the discursive possibilities available to the present, but rather is the result of his finding continuing signs of life in what the Presocratics, in their various ways, attempted to signify. If his remix is a parody, it’s parody whose creative distortions of its sources constitutes a homage. To be sure, there’s humor in it, but it isn’t a sarcastic humor aiming to deflate its sources. Rather, it’s a wry humor of paradox and anachronism. It’s a humor that brings its models forward in order to highlight their own place within the history of thought, while at the same time showing that they retain continuing value. This shows in the serendipitous and affirming tone of many of his aphorisms. As he puts it in the brief prologue to his remix, “philosophy and History and art at the present moment seem to me alive with beautiful surprises.” The virtue of his postmodern parody is to find those surprises and to let us see them for ourselves. As Aristotle also said in Book 1 of the Metaphysics, philosophy begins with a sense of wonder. It’s exactly that original sense of wonder that informs and enlivens Keppler’s Presocratics remix.

References:

Aristotle, Metaphysics, tr. W. D. Ross, accessed at https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html

Joseph F. Keppler, Rewriting a Presocratic Chorus/Remixing Verbal + Visual Lines (New York: e-ratio, 2015). https://eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/pdfs/Presocratics_Keppler.pdf

A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia, edited and with an introduction by Patricia Curd, translations by Richard D. McKirahan, Jr. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1996).

Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, tr. David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford U Press, 1997). Vattimo’s definition of Verwindung appears on p. 53.