Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, everyone, thanks for great week. Hope you'll continue to chime in through the rest of the month, as well. Regarding, Salome's question, I'm wondering whether she would exclude participatory vibrancy as a critical condition of the auditory. This, for instance, is what I experienced a few weeks ago during the June 4 demonstrations in Hong Kong where the generation of disruptive noise constituted a critical act of Hong Kong resistance to mainland centralization. Or last night, as Renate and I enjoyed the Fete de la Musique in Paris, we reveled in the non-directional vibrancy of the multifarious sounds of the public sphere. Cheers, Tim Sent from my iPad On Jun 19, 2014, at 6:39 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sorry, just to add. I do not think that a post-idealist, post-humanist materialism means to deny human agency, perception and reflection in a passive vibration, but to understand the equivalent embededness, (being centered in the world while not being at its centre) as well as the ethical responsibility that comes with being capable of human agency. Because while the bird can listen to me as much as I can listen to it, in the end my position is different and if I pretend it is not I think I am in danger or naturophilia, if such a word exists, and that will not empower the bird. On Jun 19, 2014, at 11:21 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: Chris: I am sorry if I was not as clear as I would like to be. I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. There is a difference and it is vital.The notion of sonic materialism is important as a critical lever, but materialism is, for me at least, paradoxically a philosophy of the material at the same time as it is a philosophy of perception and reflection, and that paradox or coincidence, dissolves the dichotomy that you rightly say should not be evoked: it is not a matter of human/non-human, culture/ nature but the compounding of all of it and thus gives us an insight into the make-up, bias, balance of that comound. So I think, or hope at least, we are on the whole in agreement, if not in the details or in how we get there. I do not mean to build a straw man or woman and neither do I mean to point a finger at any body in particular, but the focus, as seen in these discussions, on the one hand towards technological clarify, and on the other hand the celebration of unspeakable states of the heard (mishearings and hallucinations) that need to be bracketed off if we want to make sense within critical language confuses me. It at once suggests that sound is a pre-critical inarticulable state that needs to be framed if we mean to hear anything valuable and talk about it, while at the very same time celebrating that inarticulable state. Neither position seems useful to me as it avoids considering the socio-political particularity of listening. hope that makes a bit more sense. On Jun 19, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Tim I am sure participatory vibrancy has a criticality, or at least has the potential for criticality in both the instances you mention, it depends however on your interpretation of the auditory and of criticality as to whether we agree on what that might be. Criticality or rather the articulation and valuation of criticality is for me a matter of interpretation and thus of human agency and political choice making. In other words a matter of contingency and context. I am sure the marches in the third reich had a participatory vibrancy too, and yet it clearly meant something so very different. Sound, listening and revelling are difficult things, I think, and not per se positive. :-) best salomé On Jun 22, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Timm750 timm...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, everyone, thanks for great week. Hope you'll continue to chime in through the rest of the month, as well. Regarding, Salome's question, I'm wondering whether she would exclude participatory vibrancy as a critical condition of the auditory. This, for instance, is what I experienced a few weeks ago during the June 4 demonstrations in Hong Kong where the generation of disruptive noise constituted a critical act of Hong Kong resistance to mainland centralization. Or last night, as Renate and I enjoyed the Fete de la Musique in Paris, we reveled in the non-directional vibrancy of the multifarious sounds of the public sphere. Cheers, Tim Sent from my iPad On Jun 19, 2014, at 6:39 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sorry, just to add. I do not think that a post-idealist, post-humanist materialism means to deny human agency, perception and reflection in a passive vibration, but to understand the equivalent embededness, (being centered in the world while not being at its centre) as well as the ethical responsibility that comes with being capable of human agency. Because while the bird can listen to me as much as I can listen to it, in the end my position is different and if I pretend it is not I think I am in danger or naturophilia, if such a word exists, and that will not empower the bird. On Jun 19, 2014, at 11:21 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: Chris: I am sorry if I was not as clear as I would like to be. I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. There is a difference and it is vital.The notion of sonic materialism is important as a critical lever, but materialism is, for me at least, paradoxically a philosophy of the material at the same time as it is a philosophy of perception and reflection, and that paradox or coincidence, dissolves the dichotomy that you rightly say should not be evoked: it is not a matter of human/non-human, culture/ nature but the compounding of all of it and thus gives us an insight into the make-up, bias, balance of that comound. So I think, or hope at least, we are on the whole in agreement, if not in the details or in how we get there. I do not mean to build a straw man or woman and neither do I mean to point a finger at any body in particular, but the focus, as seen in these discussions, on the one hand towards technological clarify, and on the other hand the celebration of unspeakable states of the heard (mishearings and hallucinations) that need to be bracketed off if we want to make sense within critical language confuses me. It at once suggests that sound is a pre-critical inarticulable state that needs to be framed if we mean to hear anything valuable and talk about it, while at the very same time celebrating that inarticulable state. Neither position seems useful to me as it avoids considering the socio-political particularity of listening. hope that makes a bit more sense. On Jun 19, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English http://canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/16/contents/international_art_english was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Seth, not sure I can agree with this : ) The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places and actually, the very sentence ///a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places/ is artspeak ; ) Unfortunately, like it or not, within the art-world IAE is a dominant vocabulary, it really has gone beyond a joke at this point. So: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english/ //Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English.'/ On 19 June 2014 15:27, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com mailto:s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Seth, not sure I can agree with this : ) The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places and actually, the very sentence a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places is artspeak ; ) Unfortunately, like it or not, within the art-world IAE is a dominant vocabulary, it really has gone beyond a joke at this point. So: Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English.' On 19 June 2014 15:27, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all, To my mind, a most basic condition of art is for something to be revealed, though what that/those thing/s are will never be singular. I don't believe there is something essential about what sound art/audio art/ music can reveal, but the conditions of expression and experience in sound and vibration, within the convergence of techné, politics, economics, culture, history, the immediate environment, etc, do offer something specific (though not necessarily unique). To segue a bit from yesterday's questions towards todays's, it's an interesting point Seth raises about the status of a sound 'work' or an art 'work' for that matter. I create work, and I do think of it as work, not because I can actually bracket it off from the rest of the world under my name, but because it is about labour, personal risk, instability, and yes, intention. I seek situations to be personally affected, and work to amplify/modify/express/transmit this onward. Perhaps especially because I work with transmission systems that are very prone to influence by all sorts of conditions, I am constantly made aware of the instability of the situation-- how little control I as an artist/maker have, how immediately I lose that illusion of control, how fragile the relationships between people and between people and things are, and how little I know or perceive of those relationships at any moment. But whether I'm working on a concert, a pirate radio broadcast, a site-specific installation, or an audio file on soundcloud, one thing I do consider is that every part is listening, including me; everyone is a listener, in the broadest sense of being effected by vibration and electric signals. In this way things and people are not so different. In this way, I hope and seek modest if cumulative revelations. Anna Friz radio * art * sound * research Wavefarm/free103point9.org transmission artist steering member, Skálar Centre for Sound Art and Experimental Music nicelittlestatic.com ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--I would tend to focus on the word inclusive in that previous quote, audience engagement is important, IAE doesn't help with this really. My gripe is not with with considered and qualified insider discourse, people need to build careers somehow, I guess, it's with artists who use IAE as a distraction; a situation where feigned profundity is coupled with art that's simply not up to the task. Not wishing to condemn thorough academic writing at all; although the Sokal affair does come to mind when a comparison between quantum physics and art is made. On 20 June 2014 04:11, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English http://canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/16/contents/international_art_english was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Seth, not sure I can agree with this : ) The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places and actually, the very sentence ***a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places* is artspeak ; ) Unfortunately, like it or not, within the art-world IAE is a dominant vocabulary, it really has gone beyond a joke at this point. So: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english * **Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English.'* ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--*...And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates...* sorry, I just can't help myself, but this kind of vague reductive assessment is itself an epistemological bubble. On 20 June 2014 14:03, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Semitransgenic In order to penetrate the epistemological bubble of Christoph's post, I suppose one would have to have read folks like Nietzsche and Deleuze and Foucault and Derrida and De Landa and Christoph himself. This would allow one to connect the shorthand of this discussion group post to the deep philosophical debates to which it refers. In the absence of such reading, researching, and thinking, the rather carefully considered and wholly precise language could easily be misconstrued as vague and reductive. By the same token, one would have trouble assessing the value of the no hitter that Clayton Kershaw, of the Dodgers, threw yesterday against the Rockies, if one did not know, for instance, that it was the first time in major league history that a pitcher struck out at least 15 without allowing a hit or a walk; or that following his teammate, Josh Beckett's, no hitter, this was the first time teammates have thrown complete-game no-hitters in the same season since Burt Hooton and Milt Pappas of the 1972 Chicago Cubs. It would also add to one's understanding of the event if one knew that Kershaw's performance computed the second highest Game Score in MLB (Major League Baseball) history. Then, I suppose, it would be helpful to know that Game Score, developed by baseball statistician, Bill James, follows this formula: start with 50 points; add 1 point for each out, 2 for each completed inning after the fourth and 1 for each strikeout; subtract 1 point for each walk, 2 for each hit, 2 for each unearned run and 4 for each earned run. Too bad art-speak is so unusually hermetic, catering only to the initiated elite. Ultimately, all this jargon just amounts to so much inside baseball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_baseball_(metaphor)). From the dugout Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 20, 2014, at 11:18 AM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ...And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates... sorry, I just can't help myself, but this kind of vague reductive assessment is itself an epistemological bubble. On 20 June 2014 14:03, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Over the past 8 or 9 years, Christoph and I have been back and forth from the eastern to western borders of this territory. And yet I feel there are stones still to be overturned. To wit: When Christoph writes, human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes [...] through which the entire world [...] operates, it is precisely the crucial importance of the variants that I want (need?) to account for. I don't take issue with the claim that all the universe is energy in various forms. As one of those forms, I am availed of a certain set of capacities, and a complementary set of incapacities. I have no choice but to do my best within this set of abilities and disabilities. On the one hand, I want desperately to understand and to value the modalities of other forms of energy. On the other hand, I feel that it's presumptuous to think I can truly accomplish this understanding and valuing. I'm left with what the philosophers call an aporia, what Joseph Heller called a Catch-22, what my Uncle Morty would call a pickle: damned if I privilege my forms of perceiving and knowing, damned if I don't. As a way out (or simply as cover), I'm sympathetic to Timothy Morton's distinction between anthropomorphism and anthropocentricism. What we call sound is, of course, a product of a particular filtering of the spectrum of wavelengths traversing the universe. This filtering is produced by the sized, shapes, and specific apparatus of our bodies. At the same time, it is produced by cultural, historical, categorical, and linguistic convention. Sound, therefore, is doubly anthropomorphized: by human anatomy and by human practices. There's no other way to carve sound out of the broader spectrum of universal vibration. To acknowledge this, however, is not, in Morton's view, to necessarily privilege the particular carving-out that sound is. In other words: anthropomorphism does not equal anthropocentricism. Why can't we accept our anthropomorphized and anthropomorphizing position without succumbing or surrendering to an anthropocentric privileging of the human (all too human)? All my best Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 20, 2014, at 9:03 AM, Christoph Cox wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates,
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Jun 20, 2014, at 7:23 PM, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: Why can't we accept our anthropomorphized and anthropomorphizing position without succumbing or surrendering to an anthropocentric privileging of the human (all too human)? I agree with the pickle most definitively, and to try to come out of it by pretending there is a equivalence and egalite because Nietzsche and Deleuze says so, kind of does not work for me. I have yet to see a monkey who is responsible for global warming for example, so there definitively is something terribly human about the current state of the world: human and non-human all together, up shit creek and no paddle in sight, but maybe we can hear one that we never dreamt of seeing. I am not so worried that we anthropomorphize in perception. I think as you say, Seth, what else can we do, we are human, it is rather how, with what awareness and ethical responsibility, we do the morphising that is important to me. Since the what else is more worrying as the options seem to focus on erasing the human (and with it his responsibility) by apparently becoming nature, non-human or whatever it is we want to be equivalent with without truly considering the power position we have leveraged ourselves into in philosophy, in art and in fact. There is a feminist argument here too in that I do not want man to become woman, I want woman to have her own voice not re-utter Nietzsche et all, to fit in at the margins. I think it is a bit late for pretending there is no bias to our carving visually or sonically! ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Over the past 8 or 9 years, Christoph and I have been back and forth from the eastern to western borders of this territory. And yet I feel there are stones still to be overturned. To wit: When Christoph writes, human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes [...] through which the entire world [...] operates, it is precisely the crucial importance of the variants that I want (need?) to account for. I don't take issue with the claim that all the universe is energy in various forms. As one of those forms, I am availed of a certain set of capacities, and a complementary set of incapacities. I have no choice but to do my best within this set of abilities and disabilities. On the one hand, I want desperately to understand and to value the modalities of other forms of energy. On the other hand, I feel that it's presumptuous to think I can truly accomplish this understanding and valuing. I'm left with what the philosophers call an aporia, what Joseph Heller called a Catch-22, what my Uncle Morty would call a pickle: damned if I privilege my forms of perceiving and knowing, damned if I don't. As a way out (or simply as cover), I'm sympathetic to Timothy Morton's distinction between anthropomorphism and anthropocentricism. What we call sound is, of course, a product of a particular filtering of the spectrum of wavelengths traversing the universe. This filtering is produced by the sized, shapes, and specific apparatus of our bodies. At the same time, it is produced by cultural, historical, categorical, and linguistic convention. Sound, therefore, is doubly anthropomorphized: by human anatomy and by human practices. There's no other way to carve sound out of the broader spectrum of universal vibration. To acknowledge this, however, is not, in Morton's view, to necessarily privilege the particular carving-out that sound is. In other words: anthropomorphism does not equal anthropocentricism. Why can't we accept our anthropomorphized and anthropomorphizing position without succumbing or surrendering to an anthropocentric privileging of the human (all too human)? All my best Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 20, 2014, at 9:03 AM, Christoph Cox wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates,
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Semitransgenic: If you disagree, then explain yourself and offer an alternative position, instead of taking cheap, short potshots at anyone whose thought and writing has any philosophical content. Your quick dismissal of such views is not conducive to genuine intellectual discussion. Present some content of your own, change the topic of discussion to something you prefer to discuss, or back off. On 6/20/14, 11:18 AM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- /...And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates.../ / / sorry, I just can't help myself, but this kind of vague reductive assessment is itself an epistemological bubble. On 20 June 2014 14:03, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu mailto:c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu mailto:c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I agree with much of what Seth says. As for much of what Salome says, a proper response would require a much bigger contribution than I'm able to make right now and a different forum than this one. Suffice it to say: (1) I accept a materialist monism not because so-and-so says so, but because /the //arguments//for that position are the most convincing/ (for reasons too many to number), (2) that this position absolutely acknowledges the uniqueness of the human (as a difference in degree, not of kind), (3) that it's a bizarre stretch to suggest that this materialist position absolves human beings of the responsibility for global warming (it's the exact reverse, I'd argue), (4) that feminism and materialism are absolutely compatible (see, e.g., Elizabeth Grosz, Luciana Parisi, Rosi Braidotti, perhaps even Karen Barad, etc. etc.) This forum seems to have fostered more misunderstanding than illumination. My too-quick comments have no doubt contributed to that. My apologies for that. Here's hoping for another occasion on/in which to explore all of this more fully, more sonically, and with more generosity and intellectual charity. On 6/20/14, 3:04 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Jun 20, 2014, at 7:23 PM, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: Why can't we accept our anthropomorphized and anthropomorphizing position without succumbing or surrendering to an anthropocentric privileging of the human (all too human)? I agree with the pickle most definitively, and to try to come out of it by pretending there is a equivalence and egalite because Nietzsche and Deleuze says so, kind of does not work for me. I have yet to see a monkey who is responsible for global warming for example, so there definitively is something terribly human about the current state of the world: human and non-human all together, up shit creek and no paddle in sight, but maybe we can hear one that we never dreamt of seeing. I am not so worried that we anthropomorphize in perception. I think as you say, Seth, what else can we do, we are human, it is rather how, with what awareness and ethical responsibility, we do the morphising that is important to me. Since the what else is more worrying as the options seem to focus on erasing the human (and with it his responsibility) by apparently becoming nature, non-human or whatever it is we want to be equivalent with without truly considering the power position we have leveraged ourselves into in philosophy, in art and in fact. There is a feminist argument here too in that I do not want man to become woman, I want woman to have her own voice not re-utter Nietzsche et all, to fit in at the margins. I think it is a bit late for pretending there is no bias to our carving visually or sonically! ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--well Seth, valid point, my comment was inappropriate, and I apologise, entertaining myself at someone else's expense is not clever, or constructive, that said, although not entirely ignorant of those you mention, I'm certainly not a philosopher, and I personally don't find such material as enjoyable or inspiring now as it was for me in the past (there are reasons, but this is not the time of place), the disparaging comments stem from unwarranted frustration and impatience with the trajectory of the discussion. In actuality, I agree wholeheartedly with Christoph in what he stated concerning Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it but I thought we are here to discuss issues relating to sound/sonic/sensory culture etc. not get dragged down a philosophical rabbit-hole. Again, I apologise for my rude behaviour. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Jim thanks for inviting me to pose a question to this list. my question is rather short: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? and in many ways so self evident that it truly baffles me, and any suggestions, opinions, debates as to this relationship will be received with great interest. By way of expanding it I have no explanation but only a further question: Where does listening to sound art come from, what legacies does it carry, produce or try to rid itself of? thanks for all your ideas on this topic salomé On Jun 19, 2014, at 2:09 PM, Jim Drobnick j...@displaycult.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? 3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? 3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks for giving me the opportunity to participate in the discussion, Jim. I think Seth's post is bang on, and it actually unearths this strange tendency to treat sound and listening as extra-discursive somethings that are often propounded in numinous terms, if not directly, then in the deployment of rhetorical gestures that invoke ideas of ephemerality, ubiquity, and resonance. I'm not certain if this is expressive of a retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-economic hegemony, insofar as the isolation of sound fetishizes it (the something) and therefore turns it into, as Marx wrote, a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. In this sense, the recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is not a withdrawal but an expansion or intensification of the logic that drives late-capitalist economies. This is why I framed listening as a hallucination and agent for the powers of the false. Listening, like any other activity, is a technique, and techniques are ways of bringing forces into effect. Bringing something into effect, however, is a wholly pragmatic affair and will always entail matters of interest and power. (I think this was intimated in the conversation from earlier this week about curation and the issues of bleed. For instance, David Cecchetto's noting the bind of certain sound art exhibitions and his call for examples of shows that highlight or pressure the concept of aurality was explicitly calling attention to the relational and political work that any staging of (sound) art might do.) The idea that listening is a type of originary conniving strikes me then as a powerful place to start, because it immediately turns thought and experience of it into a form of creative complicity. Eldritch On 19-06-2014, at 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris: I am sorry if I was not as clear as I would like to be. I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. There is a difference and it is vital.The notion of sonic materialism is important as a critical lever, but materialism is, for me at least, paradoxically a philosophy of the material at the same time as it is a philosophy of perception and reflection, and that paradox or coincidence, dissolves the dichotomy that you rightly say should not be evoked: it is not a matter of human/non-human, culture/ nature but the compounding of all of it and thus gives us an insight into the make-up, bias, balance of that comound. So I think, or hope at least, we are on the whole in agreement, if not in the details or in how we get there. I do not mean to build a straw man or woman and neither do I mean to point a finger at any body in particular, but the focus, as seen in these discussions, on the one hand towards technological clarify, and on the other hand the celebration of unspeakable states of the heard (mishearings and hallucinations) that need to be bracketed off if we want to make sense within critical language confuses me. It at once suggests that sound is a pre-critical inarticulable state that needs to be framed if we mean to hear anything valuable and talk about it, while at the very same time celebrating that inarticulable state. Neither position seems useful to me as it avoids considering the socio-political particularity of listening. hope that makes a bit more sense. On Jun 19, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sorry, just to add. I do not think that a post-idealist, post-humanist materialism means to deny human agency, perception and reflection in a passive vibration, but to understand the equivalent embededness, (being centered in the world while not being at its centre) as well as the ethical responsibility that comes with being capable of human agency. Because while the bird can listen to me as much as I can listen to it, in the end my position is different and if I pretend it is not I think I am in danger or naturophilia, if such a word exists, and that will not empower the bird. On Jun 19, 2014, at 11:21 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: Chris: I am sorry if I was not as clear as I would like to be. I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. There is a difference and it is vital.The notion of sonic materialism is important as a critical lever, but materialism is, for me at least, paradoxically a philosophy of the material at the same time as it is a philosophy of perception and reflection, and that paradox or coincidence, dissolves the dichotomy that you rightly say should not be evoked: it is not a matter of human/non-human, culture/ nature but the compounding of all of it and thus gives us an insight into the make-up, bias, balance of that comound. So I think, or hope at least, we are on the whole in agreement, if not in the details or in how we get there. I do not mean to build a straw man or woman and neither do I mean to point a finger at any body in particular, but the focus, as seen in these discussions, on the one hand towards technological clarify, and on the other hand the celebration of unspeakable states of the heard (mishearings and hallucinations) that need to be bracketed off if we want to make sense within critical language confuses me. It at once suggests that sound is a pre-critical inarticulable state that needs to be framed if we mean to hear anything valuable and talk about it, while at the very same time celebrating that inarticulable state. Neither position seems useful to me as it avoids considering the socio-political particularity of listening. hope that makes a bit more sense. On Jun 19, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Seth, not sure I can agree with this : ) The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places and actually, the very sentence ***a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places* is artspeak ; ) Unfortunately, like it or not, within the art-world IAE is a dominant vocabulary, it really has gone beyond a joke at this point. So: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english * **Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English.'* On 19 June 2014 15:27, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes,
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for these questions. I am fascinated by how people listen to sound art, and find that others' listening experiences expand my understanding of sound art works. Each time I have engaged listeners in conversation about sound art, whether through handwritten, online, performed or oral forms, and whether immediately or over a longer time period, there are surprises. People listen in ways that continue to surprise me and that then lead to re-consideration of the sound art in question, as well as other areas of thinking. These encounters seem very precious and important. On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick j...@displaycult.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: *1) Jennifer Fisher*: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? *2) Eldritch Priest*: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? *3) Salomé Voegelin*: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- www.youtube.com/andrasound ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--I think it’s relevant to question and challenge oversimplified binary constructions that might assume easy polarities, pitting the physical against the cultural for example.I am drawn to Marcus Boon’s “politics of vibration” because of it evolving out of his focus on subcultures and identity and the empowering cultural/physical space it makes. Unfortunately I feel out of my league when it comes to the rigour and complexity of philosophical argument but look forward to reading more on this approach as it could relate its argument with respect to marginalized identities. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
