Christopher Hasty at the 13th International Whitehead Conference 2023 in Munich
13th International Whitehead Conference 2023
Whitehead and the History of Philosophy Munich, Germany 26.-29. July 2023
Alfred North Whitehead developed his process philosophy with an explicit reliance on the value of the history of philosophy. While the trend of recent years has often suggested that different approaches to philosophical problems can be adequately categorized, using the dichotomy of purely systematic or purely historical interests, Whitehead offers an equally historically informed and systematically intended perspective.
For playlist for all the talks at the conference, click here.
Fifteen Ideas for Reading Poetry in a Whiteheadian Way
Notes after Listening to a Lecture on Whitehead and Poetry by Christopher Hasty
Christopher Hasty is renowned for his scholarship in music theory and analysis, covering a range from the 16th to the 20th centuries. He approaches these topics through the lens of process philosophy. His book, "Meter as Rhythm" (1997), received the Wallace Berry Award for Outstanding Music Theory Book of the Year from the Society for Music Theory.
Currently, Hasty's research delves into diverse areas such as process philosophy, poetic prosody, and ecological and post-cognitivist psychology.
In a lecture at the 13th International Whitehead Conference in 2023 offered above, Hasty focuses on poetry and employs a process or Whiteheadian approach to its reading. I listened to his lecture, impressed by its scholarship and intrigued by how it could help me (and others) better understand and read poetry - especially poetry influenced by modernists such as Ezra Pound. After listening several times, I made notes which are a combination of what he said and what I thought in response to what he said. I hope I am faithful to his ideas, but I apologize in advance if I distort them. I encourage you to listen for yourself.
Poems as Events Poems are events, not mere objects. In this sense, poetry and music are akin. Both are temporal by nature; their units are durations of varying lengths.
Momentary Configurations of Feeling Both poetry and music illustrate, communicate, and describe fleeting emotional states, both concrete and imaginative. This is especially true of modern and postmodern poetry that eschews a narrative style for what Ezra Pound called an "imagist" style or, later, a "vortice" style.
Flexible Durations The durations within poems—the time it takes for sounds and meanings to happen—are neither periodic nor predictable. They are rhythmic but not regimented. A duration can be a syllable, a word, a phrase, a punctuation mark, a pause, or a breath. It does not have a fixed identity but derives its meaning from the musical or poetic context and the experience of the listener and reader.
Beyond Countable Rhythm Rhythm is not reducible to counting. Rhythm possesses an organic flow, similar to that of a stream encountering rocks or following shifting slopes, with pattern through time. In poetry, this flow is not only in the poem itself but in reading of the poem, which is holistic and bodily.
Sensory Experience in ReadingReading poetry engages the senses. Even in silent reading, the words and phrases are heard and imaginatively articulated. Even as the mouth may not be moving, the poem is internally mouthed. Reading poems is a sonic, kinesthetic, and bodily activity.
Reading as a Verb Reading itself is an event, more an action than a static concept. While we can talk about poems as nouns, they are more fundamentally events that "happen" as they are read; and the reading is itself an event through which they happen. The poem and the reading are relational.
Unhurried Pace of Reading The act of reading a poem shouldn't be rushed. Slowing down allows new perspectives and experiences to emerge. If you imagine driving down a highway in third gear, shift to second gear. The poem must be read and listened to, without a pre-set idea of what, if anything, it is about. Don't worry about "aboutness."
Meaning in Rhythm In reading poetry, it’s important to attend not only to the so-called meanings, understood as conceptual frames within which a poem "means," but also to the rhythms. Often the meaning is in the rhythm, the meter, the movement, the musicality. Just as the meaning of music is in the rhythms of its flow, so the meaning of a poem can be in the meanings of its flow.
No Need for Closure A poem doesn't need to be pinned down by a fixed interpretation after it is read; it has a life beyond our reading. Thus poems can be read again and again, by individuals and by generations. New readings may elicit a different understandings.
Creating New Experiences and Perspectives The point of reading a poem is not simply to understand it. It is to think with it and allow your own thinking to move onward, through the reading. Readers create new experiences and viewpoints while reading poems: the many become one in the reading, and are increased by one on the act itself. Hasty calls it "thinking forward into new adventures."
Intensifying and Problematizing Speech Poems surprise us by intensifying and complicating ordinary speech. While some poems may seek to communicate through vernacular speech, imitating spoken words, they almost always stretch and complicate them. They also problematize speech, showing its fluidity, ambiguity, complexity, and
Freedom of Syntax Syntax in poetry, especially free verse, isn't bound by rules. Unfamiliar syntactical choices (see Pound's are meant to challenge our regular ways of thinking. They remind us that grammar and syntax are human conventions, not absolutes dropped from heaven.
Within and Without Reading poetry involves both the internal and external worlds; the poem exists both within us and as an objective event open to various interpretations. It is important to think of it, and with it, in both ways: as something objective and available to others, and something internal to the reader's subjectivity.
Worlds Beyond Words Poetry transports us to realms beyond mere wording, both real and imagined. Poems are in words, but they are not reducible to words. They involve words turning inward, toward themselves, so that they can turn outward, beyond themselves.
Contemporary Scholarly Context Process approaches to poetry are gaining traction, partly due to the groundbreaking work of philosophers like Deleuze and Whitehead. Scholarly perspectives shape future generations of students. These new directions have been explored in visual arts; now they are being explored in musical and poetic arts.
These fifteen suggestions may or may not guide your listening to Hasty. Use them only as helpful. Again, please listen for yourself. But they are not the most important point of his lecture. Most crucially, Hasty emphasizes the primacy of lived human experience and its generation of modes of thought. In this regard, poetry and philosophy are deeply interconnected. Philosophy aligns itself with mathematics; poetry with rhythm; but both point beyond themselves to the world of direct experience from which our modes of thought emerge. Their function, at their best, is not simply to illuminate inherited modes but to evoke new modes. Hasty's lecture is not simply about modes of thought; it is an example of how a scholarly mode, fully informed by the past, moves into a promising future. In his reading and interpretation of Pound's The Return, you feel the mode.
Below I offer a few excerpts from the lecture, along with the quote from Whitehead which serves as its springboard.
Jay McDaniel
Whitehead on Philosophy and Poetry
"Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to meter, philosophy to mathematic pattern."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought
Whitehead and The Practice of Reading Poetry
Hasty's Introduction
"In my talk today I would like to propose an intersection of artistic performance and process philosophy in the practice of reading poetry. I will explain why I think process thought and poetry might be a useful pairing.
Poetry like music is an intricately articulated art of sounding. Both arts (poetry and music) compose with more or less clearly articulated and coordinated events or equivalently as I shall say durations or endurons relatively brief or long moments or spans where such quantitative difference is itself an essential factor in composition. Here an event or duration will be understood as an analytic abstraction from the complex emerging and enduring social work that is reading.
The fluid composition of events -- their successions, their overlappings, and subjunctions -- is what I shall call rhythm. Here rhythm will not imply a periodicity. Rather like the earlier rhythmus before Plato introduced into the concept of number; it names the particular way an event forms or takes shape.
Second process philosophy comes into the picture as a way of thinking about rhythm, and about things like event, succession, and duration. I believe that thinking about these things as a way of thinking about the workings of art could be valuable for artists and scholars of art see through new ways of understanding and teaching. For philosophy I would suggest that these two arts might provide Laboratories for experiment experimenting with categories that define process thought. Here I will concentrate on poetry but note that poetry's sister [music] is always involved."
Poetry's Eventfulness
"When poets speak of the music of poetry, they are not speaking metaphorically. Poetry has a music of its own. A music that is part of poetry's intense eventfulness; an eventfulness that is part of poetry's very meaning. Indeed poeisis means making, creating. Poetry's eventfulness crucially depends on its bodily, sonic and kinesthetic rhythm. Even when said and read internally. We can't but hear when we read internally. Silent reading is not reading silent. It is to this action of reading that I will turn, Reading as a verb."
- Christopher Hasty at the 13th International Whitehead Conference 2023, Munich, Germany 26.-29. July 2023
Reading Poetry as the Creating of New Experiences and Perspectives
"I will not entirely ignore the other reading: reading as a noun. Reading as something that can be discussed and written about. After all I'm here discussing something that I’ve written about. Nonetheless I shall concentrate on the verb, for I believe that it is primary.
It is also highly problematic in the best sense of the word. the sense of raising questions and asking to take a thinking forward into new adventures of thinking. But not to let no one had the only said I will take a chance here and do some actual reading with you. I suggest this sort of empirical experimentation of testing or trying out reading carried out by an individual reader. This is quite different from the approaches of experimental psychology which aimed for pure objectivity and different two from classical phenomenology which aims for a sort of transcendental subjectivity.
Rather in the spirit of James's radical empiricism, I envision a method that moves back and forth between the inviolable subjectivity of actual occasions of reading and the objectification of those readings in a rhythm of thinking with and thinking about, inside and outside, working together to create new experiences and new perspectives.
This would be a process of learning both with and from something like Whitehead's image of education as an alternating takeoffs and landings. I mention education here to bring the topic of poetry down to earth for whatever else poetry is it is like all art forms a craft. Writing and reading takes skill and practice and their teachings involve what I should call craft discourses for example in music harmony and counterpart containing perspective and colors in the literature rhetoric and positive such discourses survive only if they continue to serve practice and they always draw our own briefly on reigning philosophical concepts.
- Christopher Hasty at the 13th International Whitehead Conference 2023, Munich, Germany 26.-29. July 2023
Exploring Momentary Configurations of Feeling
in nuanced and fluid rhythm
"In reaction to the prolix narrativity of 19th century English romantic poetry imagism [later termed vorticism] sought with great concision to explore momentary configurations of feeling, concrete or imagined, and to do this in nuanced and fluid rhythm.
Poetry's characteristic intensification and problematization of speech is here pushed to a new extreme. I'll let you take a couple of minutes to read the poem without my intervention except to urge you not to rush. Take your time and above all listen even as you read silently I will a bit later I'll read the poem out loud; and don't worry too much about the so-called meaning just enter into the world [of the poem.]."
- Christopher Hasty at the 13th International Whitehead Conference 2023, Munich, Germany 26.-29. July 2023
The Return
by Ezra Pound
In this book Christopher Hasty presents a striking new theory of musical duration. Drawing on insights from modern "process" philosophy, he advances a fully temporal perspective in which meter is released from its mechanistic connotations and recognized as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression.
Part one of the book reviews oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, determinacy and indeterminacy in the speculations of theorists from the eighteenth century to the present.
Part two reinterprets these contrasts to form a highly original account of meter that engages diverse musical repertories and aesthetic issues.
Christopher Hasty's work on meter, especially as presented in his book "Meter as Rhythm," offers a deep exploration of rhythmic processes and their interactions in Western music. Instead of viewing meter as merely a regular pulse or a fixed grid upon which rhythms are superimposed, Hasty proposes that meter itself is a dynamic, ever-emerging process of "projection" and "becoming." Here are some key ideas from his work:
Projection: Hasty argues that our experience of meter is not just about counting pulses or beats. Instead, it is a more complex process where we anticipate or "project" the next beat based on what we've heard so far. This means that meter is always in a state of becoming and can be reshaped or redefined by what happens next in the music.
Durational Identity: Hasty suggests that rhythmic durations don't have fixed identities but instead derive their meaning from their metrical context. For instance, a quarter note can be felt differently depending on its placement within the meter and the durations that surround it.
Transformation: Meter, in Hasty's view, is always susceptible to transformation. New events can modify our perception of the meter, leading to shifts in our experience of the pulse or the division of the beat. This idea challenges traditional models that see meter as fixed and unchanging.
Interactions of Various Layers: Hasty emphasizes the interplay between various rhythmic and metrical layers. This means that even in a piece of music with a clear pulse or meter, there are always other rhythmic processes at play, influencing and being influenced by the main metrical structure.
Experience Over Prescription: Hasty's approach is rooted in the phenomenology of rhythm, focusing on how listeners experience rhythm and meter rather than prescriptive rules or theoretical constructs.
In essence, "Meter as Rhythm" challenges many traditional views of rhythm and meter, offering a more fluid and dynamic understanding. It's a dense and intricate work, but it has been influential in music theory and analysis, inviting readers and listeners to re-think their understanding of musical time and rhythmic structures.