Showing papers in "Substance in 2020"

Race, Class, and the Limits of the Analogical Imagination: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s African America

Abstract: Abstract:Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tireless opposition to neocapitalism throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s took “Africa” as the allegory and instantiation of political resistance tout court – a fact not surprising given the number of countries which began wresting back their sovereignty from European colonizers during these years. Yet there is another dimension of Africanness – bound up with the continent’s history yet simultaneously alien to it – that figures prominently in Pasolini’s aesthetics throughout the period: the African-American community and its particular cultural and counter-cultural expressions. By virtue of the United States’ fraught racial politics, sprawling ghettoes, and imperialist ambitions, the country figured prominently into Pasolini’s “third-world” imaginary in a variety of media and genres – representations relatively overlooked in his influential oeuvre, and which this article examines in detail.

Siren Enchantments, or, Reading Sound in Medieval Books

Abstract: Abstract:This paper reflects on the complexity of reading medieval voiced texts, where “reading with one’s ears” puts literary criticism on a convergence course with the history of the book. The medieval siren epitomizes this reading environment where text, sound, page, and the limits of the human, are all in play. Found in texts, images, and notated song, sirens both sing and enchant, bewitching by appearance and incantation. I follow their deceits and detours in the Queen Mary Psalter, the Bestiaire d’amour of Richard de Fournival, and an anonymous French lyric, RS 318.

Are Sounds Sound? For an Enthusiastic Study of Sound Studies

Abstract: Abstract:The ephemeral nature of sounds makes it difficult to think about sound as a foundation for our experience, for our being in a situation. This essay argues that sound needs to be explored and understood as crucial precisely because it exceeds the visual and its confining framework of point of view, enriching the manner in which we are anchored in the actuality of our situation in the world. Sound Studies points the way to understanding the fundamental nature of sound, and our essay pursues insights from the field to reflect on notions such as silence, ambient noise, voice, and recording in John Cage, Kant, Dumas’s Count of Monte-Cristo, and Dziga Vertov’s theory of cinematic sound.

The Sound of the Sublime: Notes on Burke as Time Goes By

Abstract: Abstract:Classical theories of the sublime—from Addison to Kant—privilege sight over the other senses, and disregard the temporality of the experience of the subject. Yet Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) also contains an alternative approach, namely an account of the sublime triggered by sounds, and crucially evolving in time. This article makes a case for Burke’s temporal grammar of sublime sonic patterns being relevant for analyzing past and contemporary objects, such as musical representations of war.

The Color of Noise

Abstract: Initially presented as a lecture in Hout Bay, South Africa, this article seeks to realize three aims. First, under the capacious heading of postcolonial sound studies, it attempts to think the articulation between racial difference and sound by probing the now common association of color and noise, for example, the “pink” noise routinely used as a sleep aid. Despite the existence of white and black noise, color is here attributed to signal characteristics in ways that also underscore the risks in reducing race to color. Second, responding to such risks, this article then seeks to examine a South African genealogy of the differentiation between sound and noise, a differentiation whose juridical (and thus political) instantiation draws essential and immediate attention to the figure of the neighbor, especially as the neighbor embodies a distinctly sonic nuisance. Race returns in this context as part of a spatial segregation that both “colors” noise, and draws attention to a prior sonicity, the “long scream” of those forced apart from others under Apartheid. This sonicity emerges as a problem for all thinking of noise that grasps it (whether phenomenological or juridically) as a form of nuisance. Third, in casting itself as an example of “investigative poetry,” this article broaches a collective inquiry on the politics of noise (both heard and unheard) in South Africa, and invites the participation of researchers distributed over cacophonous archives who hear themselves hailed by the conceit that sound is a problem whose quality as a radiant permeation requires the indiscipline of the critical humanities for its study.

Ironic Immunity: Proust’s Sustainable Extinction

Abstract: Abstract:This article argues for the importance of irony in Anthropocene discourse. It reads Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as portraying an “immunitary paradigm” that is grounds for human extinction, exemplified by modern “sustainability” strategies that seek to sustain private property and unequal distribution. In his novel, Proust depicts an “immune” class of hyper-privileged elites, and I suggest that, by reading the irony on which Proust bases their existence, we can rethink cultures founded on extractive appropriation. Irony is, then, the improper reading of other voices—those kept silent by a prospective extinction not written in their name.

The Rhythm of Life as an Opening to Sensation in Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts (1949)

Abstract: Abstract:This paper seeks to understand the pulse in the body and its “Open” receptiveness to the image/world as an opening to sensation in cinema. Georges Franju’s film Le Sang des bêtes (1949) provides a model for the abolition of a spectator who stands apart from the world as a unified subjectivity; the spectator is engaged in an opening to sensation. The sensorial opening in Le Sang des bêtes is derived from the shock of repeated blows, the repetition and “displacement” of body parts into segments, and the micro-movements of the nervous response that travel through the animals in the slaughterhouse.

Gaia Politics, Critique, and the "Planetary Imaginary"

Abstract: Abstract:In this article, I examine Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers’s recent writings on Gaia, the mythological goddess repurposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis as geobiological trope. I assess their claims that Gaia facilitates non-modern thinking (Latour) or short-circuits the anthropocentrism of Anthropocene vocabularies (Stengers), and represents an alternative to critique, which, they argue, confines us to the problematic legacies of modernity. Situating their work alongside contemporary “postcritical” thinkers, I challenge their accounts of critique, arguing that a future-oriented model of critique is compatible with their aims and can be used to inform a more reflective understanding of Gaia.

Soundscape and Power

Abstract: Abstract:In Balcony in the Forest, Julien Gracq composes a soundscape as a series of spatial events and material affects. He snatches it from “the smoke and the suburbs of Charleville” and “the jerry-built cabins of raw brick and concrete” to better situate it in a technological lineage that passes through all the operations of metallurgy. If the soundscape is fundamentally connected to war, it is not only because the explosive lead and broken iron punctuate its lived or imagined duration, but also because the methods of describing the soundscape and the military means of its destruction have metallurgy in common.

‘Pour cet état si particulier’: Disinterest and the Impersonal Resonance of Aesthetic Experience

Abstract: Abstract:Beginning with a consideration of the positive, affective dimension of disinterest, this article uses a passage of Proust’s Recherche to argue for a fundamental connection between weather and the aesthetic. By employing Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, Gernot Böhme’s discussion of a “new aesthetics” that can account for atmosphere, and Hannah Freed-Thall’s recent Spoiled Distinctions, this article examines the interconnection of habit, disinterest, and chance in the context of aesthetic experience. In doing so, a response to the tradition of Western aesthetics emerges, a response that indicates a further movement away from the object and toward impersonal, non-subjective (but also non-objective) aesthetic experience, as underscored by the theme of weather and its relationship with sound in Proust’s text — both the sound from outdoors and the “new sound” that arises within the narrator.

Adrift: Havarie, an Acousmatic Film by Philip Scheffner

Abstract: Abstract:My aim in this essay is to offer a reading of the documentary Havarie (2016), a film by Philip Scheffner that is essentially based on complex and unusual relationship and disassociation between image and sound, a film made of stories and visions of migration, powerlessness and wanderings. In slowing down and extending video footage of a small dinghy in the Mediterranean shot by a tourist from the deck of a cruise ship, the film provides viewers with a singular visual and ethical experience that is intensified by the presence of a rich sound environment, including that of recorded voices. In the film, pure listening to off-camera sounds and voices is coupled with pure visuality on the screen. Voices enable viewers to navigate the film, as though swimming upstream, by imagining the community of people addressed by the image. Guiding by Michel Chion’s theory of “acousmêtre” and Paul Zumthor’s discussion of vocal performance, this essay explores the interplay between sound and image in the film in terms of “phantomachy,” “hypersociability,” and “epiphamêtre.”

Why Are We All Too Familiar With Headphones Attached to a Wall? (Or, a Brief History of Sound-Art Curating)

Abstract: Abstract:From the 1960s through the 1980s, an ever-expanding exploration of sound occurred within the visual arts field, helping give birth to Sound Art (and its exhibition) as a unique genre. The sum of Sound Art shows has grown exponentially over time, reaching into major Western art institutions and beyond. Lending such space and resources to this category, and in such a focused manner, has invited possibilities for curators to develop more substantial investigations into a diverse range of rapidly emerging sonic practices. This essay focuses on the influence curators have had on the production, positioning and reception of Sound Art.