--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