[-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening

Fri Jun 20 19:32:26 EST 2014

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 <ccox at hampshire.edu> wrote:

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> 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:
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>> 
>> 
>> 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 <seth at kim-cohen.com> wrote:
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>> 
>> 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:
>> 
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>> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 
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