Work in progress: brief status report

Usually the work distracting me from this blog is just pen-on-paper writing in the notebook. But these days I have a specific project which I decided I could post some brief notes on.

I take my text from Aristides Quintilianus, a neoplatonic philosopher whose On Music in three books is one of the very few complete musicological treatises to have reached us from antiquity. In the passage in question (Book III sec. 8), Aristides has just gone over a litany of instances from history, politics, medicine, and other fields, in which mathematical proportions play a prominent role. Then he moves to the crux of the matter:

τὸ δὴ ταῦτα μὲν οὕτως ἐναργῶς δι´ ἀριθμῶν καὶ μεσοτήτων συνεστάναι, μουσικὴν δὲ μὴ ἂν ὑπονοεῖν παντελῶς ἀμαθοῦς καὶ ἀμούσου τὴν φύσιν ἐστίν.

"To have organized these things so palpably through numbers and means but not music, is to suspect nature of being wholly ignorant and unrefined." (tr. Thomas Mathiessen)

Mathiessen's translation is not without its problems, which is (let scholars and/or pedants please note) one of the points to be addressed. But the main issue here is more global by far. I can think of no more succinct summation of the difference between the ancients and the moderns than this, that in the modern world (pace Latour) we do indeed imagine things to be organized palpably through number and mean, but not through music. And we do, eo ipso, suspect (and far more than suspect) nature of being "ignorant and unrefined." (Dawkins' anti-Paleyan "Blind watchmaker" is in fact a fairly weak trope for this, for nature is, on Dawkins' assumptions, not merely blind, but plan-less, and indeed fundamentally incapable of either vision or plan, to make a watch or anything else.)

Aristides goes on to lay out further analogies between music and the cosmos as a whole, which culminate (in Book III sec. 26) in a parallelism between certain melodic modes (on the one hand) and (on the other) his Stoic-inflected distinction between the sublunary world, where chance (and by the same token, freedom) has a foothold, and the higher heavens where necessity reigns supreme. These exemplify, for Aristides, two sorts of time, and especially two sorts of future: a future that is in some wise "up to us," and one that is inflexible and inevitable. These Aristides calls (in Mathiessen's rendering) what may be and what will be, and respectively they concern what is, he says, either contingent in part or contingent in general.

These last terms caught my attention, for Meillassoux characterizes necessity in exactly the same way: what is necessary is, in the last instance (to appropriate a Laruellism), simply that something contingent be. So one can (somewhat surprisingly) read a Meillassouxian account of hyperchaos through the lens of the Ptolemaic cosmology, and vice-versa; but the hinge of this is the analogy between "two kinds of future" on the one hand, and Aristides' musical modes. Of course, all kinds of things get weirdly transformed in this set of inversions, especially the distinction between the sub- and super-lunary spheres and the supposed decisiveness of the "Gallilean event" which abolished, we are told, this partition.

It's important to recognize that in Aristides, the comparison of the musical figure to either of the two sorts of future is not metaphorical; rather, the relevant aural musical figure is of two sorts because there are two sorts of future.

One issue, then, is: On Meillassoux's terms, in the last instance, Contingency cannot be opposed to Necessity; "Contingency in general" simply is Necessity. In Aristides, the opposition is between the "What will be" and the "What may be," but this latter is also the realm of agential perogative; thus in an Aristidean key, the oppositional term turns out to be Freedom. But this opposition in turn is bound up with a wholly different casting of the mathematical and its relation to both necessity and contingency -- in which, finally, the mathematical is a species of music, rather than vice-versa. It then turns out to be quite telling that Meillassoux's account (in "Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition") of mathematics as grounded in the "meaningless sign" hinges on the possibility of "iteration" which Meillassoux expressly contrasts with Bergson's account of the musical tone, and in particular to the musical tone's accute sensitivity to temporal meaning.

Not sure how much room there will be to lay all this out and expand upon it in the final paper, but these are the initial terms.