[-empyre-] Ending March’s Discussion

[Junting Huang]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all

I want to thank all of you for reading, writing, and thinking about the topics 
of the month. Unfortunately, we have to end the discussion here on March 31. 

I appreciate all the quotes, questions, anecdotes, and fragments you have 
shared with us. I have been planing to respond to many of them, but as more 
posts come in, like Christof, I don’t know where to start. 

However, as Julien says, all the posts will stay in the archive, and hopefully 
some of the threads will be continued in one way or another.

Thanks again!

Junting

Junting Huang
Department of Comparative Literature
240 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853



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Re: [-empyre-] body noise as (non)sense

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--"That is, to generate a whole lot of language/*description around the locus
of the noise that resists being fixed*? Perhaps this is where Christof's
proposal of noise as a hyphenating agent might productively come in?"

I agree with you, Caitlin, I think Christof is struggling with the same
thing.

Murat


On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Caitlin Woolsey 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> In his writings, Henri Chopin correlates the particular modernity of the
> period after World War II with an operative assumption of plurality. He
> sets this plurality (semantic, sonic, visual) against expression (artistic
> or otherwise) as meaning. His work, I think, is not so much against
> language as such as it is resistant to conceptions of meaning per se. You
> can listen to a number of his sound works, which he called “audio-poèmes,”
> on Ubuweb: https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/chopin_
> henri/Chopin-Henri_Vibrespace.mp3
>
> In "Vibrespace" from 1963, the artist constructs a sonic atmosphere that
> engulfs the listener with rhythmic electronic pulses, rising bubbles, soft
> clicks and hisses. The bodily trace remains: we hear the huff of the
> artist’s intake of breath, and can identify the wet clack of his lips. Yet
> machinic-sounding elements and natural evocations of wind and water are
> juxtaposed with the vocalic remnants. In this particular audio-poem, the
> listener experiences a sense of containment. Is it as if we have been
> transported into a subterranean or underwater space, dark and enclosed, and
> the auditory trajectory of this piece reflects back to us the interplay
> between organic noises, the constructed soundspace in which we find
> ourselves (like a submarine), and the protestations of our own senses that
> may not find this kind of “poem” particularly pleasurable.
>
> What is the poetics or “sense” of a work like "Vibrespace," which is
> composed of the voice—but a voice that does not ostensibly speak as voice?
> What about the sonic envelope it creates, which is evocative even as it is
> impossible to fully locate? Chopin pursued what he called “mobile
> signs”—positioned against the concrete (albeit metaphorical) stance “in the
> beginning was the Word.” And yet I wonder: is a sound poem like Vibrespace
> in fact closer to the biblical formulation, in which expression—the Word,
> meaning—is made flesh, instantiated in the materiality of the human body.
> Might its “nonsense” voice—scrambled and layered and distended through the
> artist’s interventions and the tape recorder; and also constructed through
> recording non-vocal bodily vibrations—convey meanings insofar as it is
> created from and elicits a kind of embodied, haptic materiality?
>
> What about the impulse to interpret noise, to understand it in relation to
> human experience/analysis/effects (as Murat identified)?
>
> And how do we talk about noise and sound work like "Vibrespace" that seems
> to both elude and invite the impulse to describe or analyze or locate? I
> grapple with this problem as someone who is trying to write about sound
> works. Is there any way to describe them that doesn't mediate, compromise,
> mislead? That is, to generate a whole lot of language/description around
> the locus of the noise that resists being fixed? Perhaps this is where
> Christof's proposal of noise as a hyphenating agent might productively come
> in?
>
>
>
>
> Caitlin Woolsey
> Yale University
> PhD candidate in History of Art
> www.caitlinwoolsey.com
>
>
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Re: [-empyre-] why if?

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Caitlin,

"A small point, following Murat and Julien’s exchange of a few days
ago, I wonder also about how noise might produce disorientation as a
positive effect.

This goes to the Situationist practice of dérive through the urban
landscape as a means of processing the sensory (visual, aural,
tactile) input of the city in such as a way as to disorient, as a
means to open up new ways of navigating through the world—..."

Are you familiar with Frank O'Hara's magnificent poem "Sleeping On the
Wing" where, walking on the Manhattan street, the speaker's mind wanders
from one thing to another, spun by multiple objects, the honking of the
car, the pigeon, the doors's slam, including the wind. The poem does very
close to, exactly what you are talking about. Here's just a bit of it:
"... 'Sleep!/ O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!'/ that one flies,
soaring above the shoreless city,/ veering upward from the pavement as a
pigeon/ does when a car honks or a door slams, the door/ of dreams, life
perpetuated in parti-colored loves/ and beautiful lies all in different
languages.

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and and you/ are over the Atlantic.
Where is Spain? where is/ who?..."

II.
"It seems like you are after something similar, Murat, when you
describe your poetry as reaching for the point in which language is
broken down so that meaning is rendered ambiguous—not erased, but
rather (as you wrote) to “shoot in multiple directions.”

The last part of this quotation is true for my poetry in the last fifteen
years or so: "shoot in multiple direction." Not a poetry of statements, but
of movement.  Language, meaning become pure motion, what I call in
*Eda *anthology, "a
poetry of motion." A lot of translations in *Eda: An Anthology of
Contemporary Turkish Poetry *and the poems *The Spiritual Life of
Replicants* and *Animals of Dawn* in their totalities embody this poetry.

Ciao,
Murat



On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 1:51 PM, Caitlin Woolsey 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> A small point, following Murat and Julien’s exchange of a few days
> ago, I wonder also about how noise might produce disorientation as a
> positive effect.
>
> This goes to the Situationist practice of dérive through the urban
> landscape as a means of processing the sensory (visual, aural,
> tactile) input of the city in such as a way as to disorient, as a
> means to open up new ways of navigating through the world—both
> literally as well as creatively and symbolically
> (https://goo.gl/images/sM7TmE). Or even détournement, appropriating
> image/text material and turning it back on itself--not to eliminate
> meaning, or to eliminate noise--but rather to produce a kind of visual
> or semantic feedback, which in turn would be more free, more complex,
> more heterogeneous (at least in theory).
>
> It seems like you are after something similar, Murat, when you
> describe your poetry as reaching for the point in which language is
> broken down so that meaning is rendered ambiguous—not erased, but
> rather (as you wrote) to “shoot in multiple directions.”
>
>
> caitlin
>
>
> Caitlin R. Woolsey
> Yale University
> PhD candidate in History of Art
> www.caitlinwoolsey.com
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 12:17 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat 
> wrote:
> > --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> > Julian,
> >
> > I am essentially a writer, a poet,, an essayist on art (photography and
> film), poetry and translation, and a translator from Turkish poetry. Though
> indirectly, my writing is very much involved on the effects of technology,
> particularly digital technology, on human consciousness. For instance my
> poem of 2012 The Spiritual Life of Replicants (referring to the replicants
> in the film Blade Runner) revolves around the question what finally
> separates, if anything, the human from the android, particularly if the
> android develops a consciousness of mortality, as it does in the film. Or
> in my next 2016 poem Animals of Dawn, I focus on Hamlet, on Hamlet's
> "delay" to execute his father's revenge expeditiously. The poem suggests
> that Hamlet exists in a different time space from other characters, the
> move from one zone to the other being extremely difficult. The ghost's
> ambiguous injunction to Hamlet to kill his uncle exists in one time zone.
> The poem ends with the question: "If Shakespeare had photoshopped the
> ghost's image, would it have appeared clearer?," which is the last line of
> the sixty-five page poem. Both The Spiritual Life and Animals of Dawn are
> published by Talisman House.
> >
> > My poetics is very much involved with the ideas of silence and space
> (particularly empty space). In my poetry often words are broken down,
> language deconstructed, meaning becoming ambiguous and blurred --in other
> words, moving toward a state of noise-- to arrive than 

Re: [-empyre-] Fragments of Noise, part 3

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Christof,

I want to join your exploration for a fluid, shifting noise where it never
calcifies, solidifies into an authoritarian solidness. It all depends I
think on the alertness of the mind looking at it and is able to shift leg
in mid motion. One specific passage you just quoted may be a way to suggest
how that may happen:

"Henri Chopin describes burning a bag in which he had placed all of his
poems as his first poetic act. I¹m interested in the double negative at
play in that statement; the poetics of an act versus the poems on the
page; enacting an erasure; the wordless gesture overpowering the wordful
pages."

Henri Chopin's "act" is a poem ("noise" in that positive sense) until the
moment it is enacted (in other words, before the surprise, until the "zero"
moment of its existence). Then, it becomes a "sound," a poetics of
performance. As suddenly, eliciting an intense moment of loss and an ebbing
away of language as time, the burnt poems become noise, lost, receding (in
memory) and radically undefinable.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 4:35 PM, Christof Migone  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Nice to see this flurry of activity. Difficult to know where to start,
> what thread to pick up. It¹s tempting to refer to this plethora as noise,
> but, aside from being too facile, there¹s a lingering fear that this would
> be read as dismissive rather than laudatory‹the latter is intended.
> Despite the fact that we have been articulating thoughtful and rigorous
> reversals and layerings of the term Œnoise¹ here, the negative attribute
> is abated, but not eradicated. Its hold is strong. Perhaps it¹s simply a
> corollary of its common usage‹the ease with which it can appear in untold
> contexts. And perhaps that surface-level currency speaks to the richness
> and slipperiness of the term. In other words, it¹s both spectacular and
> spectral (i.e. fore- and back- ground, as mentioned in part 2).
>
> ---
>
> Henri Chopin describes burning a bag in which he had placed all of his
> poems as his first poetic act. I¹m interested in the double negative at
> play in that statement; the poetics of an act versus the poems on the
> page; enacting an erasure; the wordless gesture overpowering the wordful
> pages.
>
> ---
>
> Caitlin: ³And how do we talk about noise and sound work like "Vibrespace"
> that seems to both elude and invite the impulse to describe or analyze or
> locate? I grapple with this problem as someone who is trying to write
> about sound works. Is there any way to describe them that doesn't mediate,
> compromise, mislead? That is, to generate a whole lot of
> language/description around the locus of the noise that resists being
> fixed?² Is this problematic particular to sound works, or all art works?
> Either way, any such activity, from ekphrasis to interpretation to
> translation will do all of these (Œmediate, compromise, mislead¹), if not
> more. By definition and by necessity. It seems to me that the opening
> (reversing the funneling that the act of description implies) lies in
> finding writing strategies that downplay the authorial voice, the
> historification impulse, the canonization drive, the declarative thrust.
> Expanding rather than reducing. Unfixing the notion that writing is fixed.
> By extension, one could posit that noise is ubiquitous, part and parcel of
> event, acts, gestures, objects, subjects, etc. It¹s the etcetera. It¹s the
> etcetera that resists and exceeds the Œit is¹ of this sentence.
>
> ---
>
> If noise as hyphenating agent is to be a productive notion it must be able
> to fold in on itself, an infinite konvolut. Perhaps akin to the ³sidelong
> glance² Wittgenstein mentions in sect. 274 of his Philosophical
> Investigations: ³Of course, saying that the word ³red² ³refers to² rather
> than ³signifies² something private does not help us in the least to grasp
> its function; but it is the more psychologically apt expression for a
> particular experience in doing philosophy. It is as if, when I uttered the
> word, I cast a sidelong glance at my own colour impression [in other
> translation, it reads: a sidelong glance at the private sensation], as it
> were, in order to say to myself: I know all right what I mean by the
> word.²
> The ability to retreat into a private language. To invoke it
> surreptitiously. Noise hyphen I, noise hyphen you, noise hyphen ad
> infinitum.
>
> ---
>
> Christof
>
>
>
>
>
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[-empyre-] NOISE as Consciousness, Consciousness as NOISE

[xname]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hello folk,

this thread has been lagging in my draft folder for a while and I drop 
it now, out of time, at the last minute, with my apologies for anarchism 
;)


So following the invitation to participate in this conversation, I had 
started reasoning about consciousness, the sound of our consciousness. 
What is it?


If we take ownership of our thoughts, it is just ourselves. In this case 
we would be listening and talking at the same time.

Some see it as a paradox.

And what was inner sound, before the relatively recent definition of 
consciousness?

Noise? Interpersonal fragmentation? Scoriae of the Self?

If we accept that we are only listeners, who is emitting?
If we are both listening and talking, receiving and emitting, is the 
sound of our consciousness noise, signal, information, nonsense, 
something physical or a supernatural reaction?


Is inner noise just an echo of outer noise? Like a Bakhtinian language?

If so, how do we respond to the sound of our consciousness?

And what is the difference in potential between the real and the 
imagined sound?


Where subjectivity emerges beyond perception

[this story is to be continued...]

I haven't gone that far, just swapping notes,

thanks again to everyone who took part in this and those who organised 
it.



Yours,
xname


--
phantasmata and illusions

@oracle666
http://xname.cc
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[-empyre-] Fragments of Noise, part 3

[Christof Migone]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Nice to see this flurry of activity. Difficult to know where to start,
what thread to pick up. It¹s tempting to refer to this plethora as noise,
but, aside from being too facile, there¹s a lingering fear that this would
be read as dismissive rather than laudatory‹the latter is intended.
Despite the fact that we have been articulating thoughtful and rigorous
reversals and layerings of the term Œnoise¹ here, the negative attribute
is abated, but not eradicated. Its hold is strong. Perhaps it¹s simply a
corollary of its common usage‹the ease with which it can appear in untold
contexts. And perhaps that surface-level currency speaks to the richness
and slipperiness of the term. In other words, it¹s both spectacular and
spectral (i.e. fore- and back- ground, as mentioned in part 2).

---

Henri Chopin describes burning a bag in which he had placed all of his
poems as his first poetic act. I¹m interested in the double negative at
play in that statement; the poetics of an act versus the poems on the
page; enacting an erasure; the wordless gesture overpowering the wordful
pages.

---

Caitlin: ³And how do we talk about noise and sound work like "Vibrespace"
that seems to both elude and invite the impulse to describe or analyze or
locate? I grapple with this problem as someone who is trying to write
about sound works. Is there any way to describe them that doesn't mediate,
compromise, mislead? That is, to generate a whole lot of
language/description around the locus of the noise that resists being
fixed?² Is this problematic particular to sound works, or all art works?
Either way, any such activity, from ekphrasis to interpretation to
translation will do all of these (Œmediate, compromise, mislead¹), if not
more. By definition and by necessity. It seems to me that the opening
(reversing the funneling that the act of description implies) lies in
finding writing strategies that downplay the authorial voice, the
historification impulse, the canonization drive, the declarative thrust.
Expanding rather than reducing. Unfixing the notion that writing is fixed.
By extension, one could posit that noise is ubiquitous, part and parcel of
event, acts, gestures, objects, subjects, etc. It¹s the etcetera. It¹s the
etcetera that resists and exceeds the Œit is¹ of this sentence.

---

If noise as hyphenating agent is to be a productive notion it must be able
to fold in on itself, an infinite konvolut. Perhaps akin to the ³sidelong
glance² Wittgenstein mentions in sect. 274 of his Philosophical
Investigations: ³Of course, saying that the word ³red² ³refers to² rather
than ³signifies² something private does not help us in the least to grasp
its function; but it is the more psychologically apt expression for a
particular experience in doing philosophy. It is as if, when I uttered the
word, I cast a sidelong glance at my own colour impression [in other
translation, it reads: a sidelong glance at the private sensation], as it
were, in order to say to myself: I know all right what I mean by the
word.² 
The ability to retreat into a private language. To invoke it
surreptitiously. Noise hyphen I, noise hyphen you, noise hyphen ad
infinitum.

---

Christof





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