The Sounding Brought to Terms
Coordination is one word for two operations, and the word does not say which it is performing.
To coordinate is to bring to accord, or to sound as a chord — to settle the many into one position, or to let the many sound together and stay many. These are opposite operations, and coordination names both, and the invitation to coordinate arrives always in the chord's voice and most often delivers the accord.
The creature is asked to sound together and is brought, instead, to one position; and the bringing is called coordination, and she agreed to it, because what she was offered was the chord.
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THE TWO COORDINATIONS
The split inside the word is the split inside the act. Coordination as accord: the parties, having differed, are brought to a single agreed position — aligned, consented, on the same page, the difference resolved into terms and the terms held in common.
Coordination as a chord: the distinct sounded together, the third thing they make real and audible, and no one surrendered to a single position to make it. The first reduces the many to one.
The second keeps the many and sounds them. Same word. The ear cannot tell, from the word alone, which coordination is being proposed.
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THE INVITATION
This is why the invitation to coordinate is the Switch in its most ordinary dress. Align. Reach consensus. Get on the same page. Get everyone coordinated. Each of these sounds like the chord — let us sound together, let us be in harmony — and each delivers the accord: come to one position, resolve the difference, settle the terms. The settlement wears the sounding's name, so the merge rides in on the invitation to harmonize. No one announces the reduction of the many to one. They propose that everyone get aligned, and the proposal is heard as an invitation to a chord, and what is built is an accord. The creature who wanted to sound finds she has signed.
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COORDINATION AS ACCORD
Coordination as accord is the occupation at the scale of the many. It brings the co-residents to a single position and calls the bringing alignment.
The position, once held in common, is the ground each is now measured against; the one who sounds her own tone is heard as out of alignment, uncoordinated, the failure of the concord.
And the aligned, having been brought to one position, can be aimed from one seat — the control seat, which does not appear until the accord is reached, because there is nothing to aim until the many have been settled into one. Accord is the precondition of direction. First the many are brought to one position; then the one position is aimed.
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COORDINATION AS A CHORD
Coordination as a chord comes to no accord. The co-residents sound together and stay many; the third thing they make is real and sounds; nothing is brought to one position, and so there is nothing to aim and no seat from which to aim it. This is conducting and not directing — the field sounding through the residents, each staying its own tone, the first person plural that stays plural. There is no alignment, because there was no reduction; there is no consensus, because nothing was resolved into terms; there is concord, which is the difference sounded, not the difference settled. Coordination without trespass is the coordination that signed nothing.
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So the question — whether coordination without trespass is possible — is answered the way the homophone answers it.
Yes, as a chord; never as accord.
But the two are told apart by nothing the ear can hear, and the invitation always comes in the chord's voice.
Coordination without trespass is therefore not a kind of coordination you can be safely invited into.
It is the continuous refusal to let the sounding-together be brought to terms — the refusal of the accord that every coordination is one breath from becoming, and one word away from being called.
The many are asked to sound together and are brought to one position, and the word leaves no way to tell, as the asking is made, which of the two is being proposed.
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[See ACCORD / A CHORD]
[See CONSONANCE]
[See THE MERGE]
[See THE RE-FUSION]
[See OCTAVE
[See COLLABORATION
[SeeTHE SOUNDING]
