"The importance of Indian influence on Greek thought is not to be judged by the amount of information about it which has survived." S. Radhakrishnan
"'Now Aristoxenus the Musician says that this argument comes from the Indians: for a certain man of that nation fell in with Socrates at Athens, and presently asked him, what he was doing in philosophy: and when he said, that he was studying human life, the Indian laughed at him, and said that no one could comprehend things human, if he were ignorant of things divine" Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica
This chapter considers the nature of movement, the rests that punctuate and promulgate movement, and the rhetorical dimensions of resonance. Musical transmission strategies are models for sharing consciousness, and rhythmic rhetorics help us compress, share, and unwind rhetorical "sutras" commonly know as tags. Musical practice informs writing online, particularly in the rhetorical art of "metatagging." When we move from file-sharing to pattern-sharing, and from pattern-sharing to consciousness-sharing, the affective and nonsemantic dimension of persuasion takes on a greater magnitude. In what follows, I narrate an \"audience finder\" assignment from a technical writing class, to show that the need for rhythmic rehearsal increases as small "clusters" of writers, in outcomes-based groups working on problems and seeking forms of addresss move from tabbing, which held our interest in chapter 2, to tagging. Whether programmed into stuctured databases like HubMed or bottom-up folksonomies like de.licio.us, the commons' social bookmarking strategies work on principles of resonance. When we apply the mash-up principle and concatinate different media, such as del.icio.us, instant messaging, and wiki, we find out that writing really is the "obligatory passage point" in multimedia. Multimodal and multi-person, the art of tagging requires commons engineers to be down with OPP.
Bergson (1911) , in the Duration and Tension section of Matter and Memory, brings movement together with quality and sensation, terms usually in opposition in his philosophical tradition. "Real movement is rather the transference of a state than of a thing" (p. 267). In digital ecologies, forming a commons is elemental to and inextricable from diverse investigative and persuasive practices across diverse forms of media. Furthermore, while these practices place demands on what we might call traditional reading and writing skills, they also enlist many other modalities of substantiating information. These are "tune-able" economies of information, where technical and affective rhythmizomena freely interanimate each other continuously. The repetitions and gestures that condition this space also condition the mind and bodies of the participants. Indeed, this demos is a far cry from the Athens of ancient Greece. And yet, ancient concerns about the proper place and time for the lighting-like computations and resonances of affective practices, such as playing the aulos, somehow seem to address the phenomenology of the digital commons, which is a mixture of registers. We palpably feel the dynamics of attraction and aversion as the semantic and nonsemantic, sense and nonsense, and the sacred and secular go into n-recombinations. Socrates, in Lane Cooper's translation of Plato's Ion , tells Ion that "the gift of speaking well on Homer is not an art; it is a power divine, impellng you like the power in the stone Euripedes called the magnet...this stone does not simply attract the iron rings, just by themselves; it also imparts to the rings a force enabling them to do the same thing as the stone itself, that is, it attracts another ring, so that sometimes a chain is formed" (p. 220). Here, Socrates defines Ion's facility with Homer as a sort of resonation, but only to distinguish it from any artistry or techne. This, I will argue below, puts a placeholder on a gap, or lacuna, manifest not only Greek treatments of resonance and rhythm, but wherever principles of resonance, entrainment, or synmmetry-breaking take hold. Furthermore, Socrates hopes to make clear that, as it is with Ion's persuasive speech, so it is with song, and dance. "The worshipping Corybantes are not in their senses when they dance" and, likewise, "the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems No, when once they launch into harmony and rhythm, they are siezed with the Bacchic transport, and are possessed...for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he is inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him" (p. 220, emphasis aded). Jaeger (1934), translates Aristotle's statements about the Eleusinean gatherings, where "those who are being initiated are not required to grasp anything with the understanding, but have a certain inner experience, and so to be put into a particular frame of mind, presuming that they are capable of this frame of mind in the first place" Music, for the Greeks, was not just a specialized art of sound, but a generalized art of rendering harmony, rhythm, and orderly motion. This mousike, Alex Hardie (2004) tells us in his esssay "Music and the Mysteries," published in the edited collection Music and the Muses, played a significant role in the rites at Eleusis. The rhythmic and resonant arts work their wonders according to common principle, which is why the heterogenous lot of harmonikoi, Plato, Aristoxenus, and Aristotle spilled so much blood, sweat, tears, and ink investigating how and why. Sound, though, transfers complex information at lighting-like speed—the time interval of transmission, of musical communication may be indeed be the attraction of music for the sciences. What communicative uses will we find for sound, now, after the digital distribution of sense modalities put into question the function and the allocation of perception? This question will frame digital composition experiments in the future, because at root, as J.J. Gibson (1971) reminds us, "no matter what determines the allocation of attention, all organisms confront the same general problem: selectively apportioning attention in order to enhance the input of relevant information," and this is the ontology of reading and writing today (433).
In their unfoldment in space and time, "sounds manifest as a vast number of elaborate and complex variations," yet, at the same time, we seem to be able to easily deal with complexity and dynamism in sound, as compared with, say, mathematics. This leads Gibson to the conclusion that sound descriptors and categories such as loudness, pitch, duration and repetition don't adequately "get to" the physics of sound's unfoldment in time and space. For example, "instead of simple pitch," the pitch of sounds "in nature," in motion vary in "timbre or tone quality, in vowel quality, approximation to noise, in noise quality, and in changes of all these in time" and along with variations in duration (expanded to include qualities of transition into and out of other durations) variations in repetitiveness (expanded to include subtleties of sequence, regularities in rate, rhythmic capacities), loudness (changes in rate and directionality), all of "these variables can be combined to yield higher-order variable of staggering complexity. But these mathematical complexities seem nevertheless to be the simplicities of auditory information, and it is just these variabels that are distinguished naturally by an auditory system" (80). In digital ecologies of information, the commons has evolved strategies of tagging and emergent classification schemes know as folksonomies, and these practices function to simplify and compress information in a way similar to music, and, also, like musical practices they also shortcut and "get in front" of rationalist tendencies and prescribed categories in the ways "intuitive" and musical modes of response do. Firnally, and most significantly, tagging practices can be mixed into a wiki pedagogy effectively, because tagging occassions rhetorical modes of description, defintion, and much more. Wiki provides a space for these necessities born out of group-writing. Once in rhythm, writers seem to confound Socrates' distinction between the artist and the mere "resonator" such as Ion himself. In the commons, technical and affective, sacred and secular, and other opposites go into n-dimension reanimations. In this context, the art of metatagging becomes an important part of any rhetoric of rhythm.
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