Showing papers in "parallax in 2017"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider how the revived interest in ontology within sonic theory connects to questions of race in sound art, and suggest that Cox's ontology is predi- cated upon a'modest' white aurality, a racialized perceptual standpoint that is both situated and universalizing.
Abstract: In this article, I consider how the revived interest in ontology within sonic theory connects to questions of race. Symptomatic of a broader ‘turn’ to ontology in critical thought, the (re)turn to ontology in sound studies is predicated on an ‘origin myth’ that disavows ‘old’ questions of culture, signi- fication, discourse and identity, and promotes ‘new’ questions of materiality, affectivity reality and being. This origin myth is re-articulated with the intro- duction of Christoph Cox’s materialist sonic philosophy, which hears the ‘richest’ sound art as giving voice to ‘the nature of the sonic’. Building on Nikki Sullivan’s notion of white optics, I suggest that Cox’s ontology is predi- cated upon a ‘modest’ white aurality – a racialized perceptual standpoint that is both situated and universalizing. Just as whiteness is not simply an individ- ual trait that is possessed, white aurality is not specific to or possessed by Cox; indeed, I suggest that in Cox’s work, white aurality is partly indebted to a particular engagement with John Cage: an engagement that amplifies an apparent distinction between the social and the ontological in Cage’s work, while muffling its political dimensions. The notion of white aurality is further exemplified through the comparison on two sound works: Lawrence English’s Airport Symphony (2007) which is heard to enact a move toward sonic generality; and Chino Amobi’s Airport Music for Black Folk (2016), which, apropos of Fred Moten’s notion of blackness as paraontological disruption, is heard as sounding the racialized violence of objecthood that often goes unheard by sonic philosophy’s white aurality.
53 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's "Situated Knowledges" can be brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as "sounding situated knowledges".
Abstract: This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's “Situated Knowledges” can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as “sounding situated knowledges.” Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the “nature of sound” with a Harawayan notion of the “natureculture of sound.” This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive “sonic naturalism” in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics (acoustic archaeology), which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production.
34 citations
TL;DR: This article explored a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies.
Abstract: This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), George Turner’s novel The Sea and Summer (1987), and Jan Zalasiewicz’s popular science book The Earth after Us (2008) all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change. These works can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene—an era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualization— to consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking. Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses. Climate fiction of the future-history variety—which mourns future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass in the first place—presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.
19 citations
TL;DR: Even as immunology has refined its representations of immunity’s biomolecular processes to the point where lay readers might mistake them for occult texts of an esoteric religion, it still offers no consistent explanations for autoimmune pathologies.
Abstract: What indeed does man know about himself? [...] Does not nature keep secret from him most things, even about his body, e.g. the convolutions of the intestines, the quick flow of the blood currents, ...
18 citations
TL;DR: Barad as mentioned in this paper affirmed the immanent vitality of matter and understood the agentive role of vibrant objects and other non-material objects in a new materialism, and argued that matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, remembers.
Abstract: Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, remembersKaren Barad, New Materialism.1Affirming ‘matter’s immanent vitality’ and understanding the agentive role that vibrant objects and other n...
17 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the development and evolution of Derrida's rhetoric of contamination from his increasing deployment of epidemiological tropes (contagion, virology) from the late 1980s to his shift to immunological tropes in a number of his later works in the 1990s and 2000s.
Abstract: Threaded through Derrida’s body of work is a rhetoric of contamination, one that is intimately bound to the question of metaphor—that is, to the question of language and communication in general. In his reading of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double in Writing and Difference (1967), Derrida notes that it is ‘metaphor that Artaud wants to destroy’. Metaphor, the manifestation of the schism between words and their referents, and an inescapable reminder of human alienation from the divine, is at the same time a force of contamination. Metaphor is a mark Derrida writes, quoting Artaud, of an ‘infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine’. The publication of Dissemination a few years later in 1972 saw Derrida concretising the links between contamination and metaphor. There is, as Derrida points out in Dissemination, a complex feedback loop between metaphor—the ultimate figure of figurality—and contamination: ‘metaphoricity is’, he says, ‘the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic’. In this paper, I map the development and evolution of Derrida’s rhetoric of contamination from his increasing deployment of epidemiological tropes (contagion, virology) from the late 1980s to his shift to immunological tropes in a number of his later works in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, I read Derrida’s ‘logic of autoimmunity’—a concept that has been considered emblematic of his ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ turn—as an extension of rather than a point of rupture from his rhetorical concerns, and one that is undergirded by the principle of contamination.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the author describes the moment to which he would often return to, posing it as a turning point, a kind of singular epiphany in his thought and work.
Abstract: Across John Cage’s writings there is one moment to which he would often return, posing it as a turning point, a kind of singular epiphany in his thought and work. This is his famous visit to an ane...
14 citations
TL;DR: The very same symptoms could point to decline and to strength.Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power as discussed by the authors, discusses the debate concerning the actuality of Deleuze and Guattari's political thought.
Abstract: The very same symptoms could point to decline and to strength.Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power.1With respect to the debate concerning the actuality of Deleuze and Guattari’s political thought, on...
13 citations
TL;DR: The evolution of human cognition has corresponded to the technological expansion of its state-space, increasing its degrees of freedom by tracking invariances and conjunctions in its relations with... as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The evolution of human cognition has corresponded to the technological expansion of its state-space, increasing its degrees of freedom by tracking invariances and conjunctions in its relations with...
12 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a consideration of disability representation offers an optic through which to address these questions and argue for the possibility of a productive critical mode that brings together approaches from both memory and disability studies to analyse posthumanist conceptions of culture, particularly in relation to the portrayal of war and conflict.
Abstract: What is the memory of the human in posthuman formations of cultural narrative? To what extent is such memory driven by a powerful anti-humanism or, conversely, a nostalgia for a human(ist) modes of being? This article will argue that a consideration of disability representation offers an optic through which to addresses these questions. It will focus on two terms – prosthesis and amnesia – that describe disability experiences but are also central concepts in memory studies. Exploring the interactions and tensions between these different manifestations, the article will argue for the possibility of a productive critical mode that brings together approaches from both memory and disability studies to analyse posthumanist conceptions of culture, particularly in relation to the portrayal of war and conflict. It will then move to focus on an analysis of three high-profile Hollywood films – Green Zone (2010), Source Code (20) and The Hurt Locker (2008) – that bring together depictions of conflict, technology and selfhood, and read them from within a disability optic that focuses on prostheses and amnesia. In Green Zone and Source Code, military power is rooted in technology and networked assemblages, but the human body itself is seen to be fragile and the films frequently return to core humanist conceptions of the individual in re-membering selfhood and resolving narrative issues. The article will suggest that The Hurt Locker, which also explores questions of power, technology and the human, enacts more complex notions of disability and memory, using them to potentially undermine humanist categories. It will end by noting that, while there are emerging creative and critical opportunities for interrogating humanism through the representation of memory and disability, mainstream cinema is caught between a fascination for technological potentials and the pull of classic human/individual-centred narratives.
9 citations
TL;DR: Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like a...
Abstract: Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like a...
TL;DR: There has been a lot of interest recently in what Roberto Esposito calls the possibility of thinking an "affirmative" biopolitics that runs counter to the dominant trend in biopolitical thought thus far as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: There’s a lot of interest recently in what Roberto Esposito calls the possibility of thinking an ‘affirmative’ biopolitics that runs counter to the dominant trend in biopolitical thought thus far (...
TL;DR: One key historical "site of memory" in which the Jamaican novelist, this article, wrote "The Us and the Them" was identified as a site of memory in the 1990s.
Abstract: Are we on the same page here? Because we too are also now struggling to move beyond the knee-jerk limits of the Us and the Them.1One key historical ‘site of memory’ in which the Jamaican novelist, ...
TL;DR: In this paper, Zirra describes the workings of a "vibrant memory object" in the form of a stone that cuts into the poet's hand, in Station Island.
Abstract: In her close reading of Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, Maria Zirra vividly shows the workings of a ‘vibrant memory object’ in the form of a stone that cuts into the poet’s hand. Her focus is on the poetry of Heaney and its evocation of an object, but many other examples can be adduced at a time when stories about objects have arguably become part of a cultural trend. Edmund De Waal’s bestselling family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) offers another case in point: it shows how a set of beautifully-crafted netsuke, whose presence in the writer’s pocket worked as a mnemonic gadfly, and triggered a convoluted search for the story of his family. It was arguably De Waal’s own capacity in turn to evoke these objects vividly for his reader that made his book such a success.
TL;DR: The notion of the Anthropocene has changed the ways we think about human life: human life is now also a geological force, a vulnerable species or only one part of ‘terraforming assemblages composed of humans.
Abstract: The notion of the Anthropocene has changed the ways we think about human life: human life is now also a geological force, a vulnerable species or only one part of ‘terraforming assemblages composed...
TL;DR: In this paper, disability studies, queer studies, and critical race studies all attempt to usher in what Alexander Weheliye, drawing on Sylvia Wynter, refers to as ‘different genres of the human’.
Abstract: At base, disability studies, queer studies, and critical race studies all attempt to usher in what Alexander Weheliye, drawing on Sylvia Wynter, refers to as ‘different genres of the human’.1 Such ...
TL;DR: In immunology, allergy and autoimmunity are recognised as some of the most common types of immunopathology, involving errors in the protective and self-regulatory mechanisms associated with tolerance and immunity.
Abstract: In immunology, allergy and autoimmunity are recognised as some of the most common types of immunopathology. Both are conventionally viewed as deviations or aberrations of normal immune function, in...
TL;DR: A centipede was happy and quite happy until a toad in fun said, ‘Pray, which leg moves after which?’This raised her doubts to such a pitch,She fell exhausted in the ditchNot knowing how to run as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A centipede was happy – quite!Until a toad in funSaid, ‘Pray, which leg moves after which?’This raised her doubts to such a pitch,She fell exhausted in the ditchNot knowing how to run.Katherine Cra...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies by exploring future-history Cli-Fi and its use of anticipatory memory.
Abstract: In his essay ‘Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory’, Stef Craps proposes to ‘[think] through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies’ by exploring future-history Cli-Fi and its use of anticipatory memory. Focusing on three texts that feature a historian, archivist or geologist who looks back on the present from the perspective of a dystopian future marked by climate change, Craps’ is a surprisingly humanist discourse in the context of this volume on Memory after Humanism. For as he contends, in the face of the Anthropocene (which is indeed an anthropocentric term), memory studies is confronted with the challenge to scale up remembrance without discounting the human subject. In contrast to feminist theoretical physicist and philosopher of science Karen Barad, for instance, who argues that ‘there’s a sense in which even molecules and particles remember what has happened to them’, Craps maintains that ‘memory risks becoming a mere metaphor when conceived in strictly nonhuman terms, outside of human modes of experience and representation’. In this response, I want to challenge his fundamental assumption and tweak the discourse on memory to include the postand nonhuman. To do so, I will discuss climate change as cultural memory, explore its relation to the material turn in memory studies, and retrieve and rescale the concept of the memory environment in an effort to recalibrate memory after humanism.
TL;DR: The list of possible substitutions of a word can be found in this paper, where the list can never be closed, and only names can be cited only for reasons of economy.
Abstract: like all other words, acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a ‘context’ [...] the word has interest only within a certain context, where it replaces and lets itself be determined by such other words as ‘écriture’, ‘trace’, ‘différance’, ‘supplement’, ‘hymen’, ‘pharmakon’, ‘marge’, ‘entame’, ‘parergon’, etc. By definition, the list can never be closed, and I have cited only names, which is inadequate and done only for reasons of economy.
TL;DR: The concept of cosmic topologies of imitation (CTI) was introduced in this paper to better grasp the relatively new practices of social media marketing and provide the perfect medium for sharing while also spreading contagions that can potentially contaminate the medium itself.
Abstract: This article expands on an earlier concept of horror autotoxicus linked to digital contagions of spam and network Virality.1 It aims to present, as such, a broader conception of cosmic topologies of imitation (CTI) intended to better grasp the relatively new practices of social media marketing. Similar to digital autotoxicity, CTI provide the perfect medium for sharing while also spreading contagions that can potentially contaminate the medium itself. However, whereas digital contagions are perhaps limited to the toxicity of a technical layer of information viruses, the contagions of CTI are an all pervasive auto-toxicity which can infect human bodies and technologies increasingly in concert with each other. This is an exceptional autotoxicus that significantly blurs the immunological line of exemption between self and nonself, and potentially, the anthropomorphic distinction between individual self and collective others.
TL;DR: Charon as discussed by the authors is an interactive performance space, choreographed and articulated by contemporary media artist Sterling... suspended across a quadcopter, motion-capture system and data projection.
Abstract: Suspended across a quadcopter, motion-capture system and data projection, Charon (Figure 1) is an interactive performance space, choreographed and articulated by contemporary media artist Sterling ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss alternative schemas daring to go beyond the audiophile anthropocentric angle, and argue for the value of developing a sound theory that brings together speculative philosophy, science fiction, and experimental audio art.
Abstract: The past decade has seen the proliferation of scholarly work on audio culture by philosophers, sociologists, ethnographers, musicologists, anthropologists, and others. There is now a range of histories and ethnographies on listening and on the soundscape, and a proliferation of epistemological, methodological, and cultural investigations of the sonic. At the same time, as John Kieffer notes, sound art is fast becoming “the new kid on the cultural block” (2010).
Different writers have engineered different conceptual approaches for studying the sonic. These voices are symptomatic of a body of work that has developed as a way of reacting against the primacy of Cartesian reason, looking for ways of escaping the Western tendency to measure, calculate and represent everything. They offer strategies for defending and resurrecting the nullified senses, like hearing, which must no longer surrender to the tyranny of ocularcentrism. However, the belated recognition of sound as a valid academic object of study and art discipline, often risks fetishizing the sonic and repeating the same ideological separations between sound and image, body and mind. Moreover, refreshing as they may be, they are too often confined within a human-centred position and interested in predominantly addressing the phenomenal experience of sound.
This article wishes to discuss alternative schemas daring to go beyond the audiophile anthropocentric angle. It mainly draws on Kodwo Eshun’s unconventional method of ‘sonic fiction’ (1998), in order to argue for the value of developing a sound theory that brings together speculative philosophy, science fiction, and experimental audio art. Ultimately, it attempts to explore how such ‘a sonic intervention into thought’ (Goodman, 2010) can drag us away from the sociopolitical and historical organisation of sound and toward the vicinity of a more ‘unreal state’, where the boundaries between fiction and theory are provisional and utterly permeable.
TL;DR: Deletuze as mentioned in this paper argued that intellectuals abdicating their responsibility, but how are they supposed to express themselves in some all-purpose medium that’s an offence to all thinking?
Abstract: People talk about intellectuals abdicating their responsibility, but how are they supposed to express themselves in some all-purpose medium that’s an offence to all thinking?Gilles Deleuze, Negotia...
TL;DR: Theodor Adorno as mentioned in this paper read a text on German radio called Padagogik nach Auschwitz (later published as Erziehung Nach Auschwitz) which begins with a statement whose force has not diminish.
Abstract: On 18 April 1966, Theodor Adorno read a text on German radio called Padagogik nach Auschwitz (later published as Erziehung nach Auschwitz) which begins with a statement whose force has not diminish...
TL;DR: In this article, an early Philip K. Dick story published in 1953, an unnamed narrator pays a visit to his friend, the rather implausibly named Doctor Labyrinth, who, like most people w...
Abstract: In ‘The Preserving Machine’, an early Philip K. Dick story published in 1953, an unnamed narrator pays a visit to his friend, the rather implausibly named Doctor Labyrinth, who, ‘like most people w...
TL;DR: The writing of history has had a fraught relation to the writing of memory as discussed by the authors, and memory is unreliable, it can be manipulated, and sometimes, as with traumatic memory, it speaks a language that is diffic...
Abstract: The writing of history has had a fraught relation to the writing of memory. Memory is unreliable, it can be manipulated, and sometimes, as with traumatic memory, it speaks a language that is diffic...
TL;DR: In this paper, Snaza offers an important reflection on the forms of intersecting violence that characterize the contemporary world and makes a distinction between posthumanist education and the Banality of violence.
Abstract: In ‘Posthuman(ist) Education and the Banality of Violence’, Nathan Snaza offers an important reflection on the forms of intersecting violence that characterize the contemporary world and he makes t...
TL;DR: The ongoing explosion of pervasive digital technologies and ubiquitous computing is leading to radical changes in human experience as mentioned in this paper, and the pressure exerted on and by the acceleration of technical mediabeats is increasing.
Abstract: The ongoing explosion of pervasive digital technologies and ubiquitous computing is leading to radical changes in human experience. The pressure exerted on and by the acceleration of technical medi...
TL;DR: Sound is used in the service of music but it is not itself a musical medium as mentioned in this paper, nor is sound bounded by the musical domain (i.e. the artistic forms, structures, concepts, and cultural values, of music).
Abstract: Sound is used in the service of music but it is not itself a musical medium. Nor is sound bounded by the musical domain (i.e. the artistic forms, structures, concepts, and cultural values, of music...