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

Sat Jun 21 01:18:20 EST 2014

*"...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 <ccox at 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 <ccox at 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 <seth at 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, 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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