Kodwo Eshun: Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture
In the wake of Mark Fisher’s death, I’ve found Kodwo’s recent work on interpretive communities incredibly compelling. Not least as a means to understand what it is about Mark’s work – his way of working – that draws me (and so many others) into these “wars of interpretation whose aim is to intervene in culture.” I’ll soon write more snippets on Eshun’s interpretive communities, but for now I wanted to share his list of “aesthetico-political positions” from the memorial lecture.
Those of us who are unable to reconcile ourselves to our existence. Those of us whose dissatisfaction and disaffection, whose discontent and whose anger and whose despair overwhelms them and exceeds them. And who finds themselves seeking means and methods for nominating themselves, for electing themselves, to become parts of movements and scenes that exist somewhere between seminars and subcultures, study groups and HangOuts. Reading groups drawn together by the impulse to fashion a vocabulary. By a target. By a yearning. By an imperative to consent not to be a single being…
The cybergoths, that move through the calendrical systems of templexity.
The cyber-feminists, that situate themselves in the time-streams of patriarchy.
The afro-futurists, that hack the systems of chronopower and chronography.
The speculative realists, that dismantle the barriers to the great outside
The hauntologists, that diagnose the slow cancellation of the future in order to dismantle its enforced depression.
The eliminitivists, that dismantle the coordinates for experience.
The accelerationists, that aspire to decode flows.
The left accelerationists, that seek to build the stack whose platform logics generate our entrenchment.
The right accelerationists, that summon the basilisk.
The unconditional accelerationists, that seek to decouple themselves from the left and from the right.
The students of black study, who argue that “being black is a thing that you can only do with others.” I don’t know that it’s possible to be black by oneself. Insofar as being black, or black being, is a necessarily irreducibly social thing that is general, and that is ongoing.
The AltWoke, that write; “Our amorality is not a bankruptcy of ethics, so much as it is an emotional discipline in response to global existential threats. A learnt stoicism and pragmaticism is crucial to #altwoke.”
The mundane afro-futurists, that claim; “We. are. not. aliens.”
The neo-reactionists, engaged in promoting highly advanced drastic regression.
The xenofeminists, that announce that “xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X and a mobile map. This X does not mark destination – it is the insertion of a topological keyframe for the formation of a new logic.”
The black feminist poeticists, that know that “studying blackness announces the end of the world as we know it.”
The prometheans, that “consider revolution not as a passionate attachment to some flash of negation, but is a process of undoing the abstract social forms that constrain and humiliate human capacities, along with political agencies that enforce those constraints and those humiliations.”
The forensic architects, that “invert the direction of the forensic gaze.” That “seeks to designate a field of action in which individuals and independent organisations can confront abuses of power by states and corporations in situations that have a bearing upon political struggle, violent conflict and climate change.”
The inhumanists, that argue that “the universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand.” That inhumanism is a vector of revision that relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposedly self-evident characteristics, while preserving certain invariances.
The afro-futurists 2.0, that assert the social physics of blackness.
The afro-pessimists, that assert that “the slave cause is the cause of another world in and on the ruins of this one, in the end of its ends.”
The black quantum futurists, that “work on the temporal dynamics of retro-currencies. Of backwards-happenings – an event whose influence or effect is not discrete and time-bound but extends in all possible directions and encompasses all possible time-modes.
The black accelerationists, that argue that “binding blackness and accelerationism to one another proposes that accelerationism always already exists in the territory of blackness, whether it knows it or not – and conversely, that blackness is always already accelerationist.”
The gulf-futurists, that emerge from “the isolation of individuals via technology and wealth and reactionary Islam. The corrosive elements of consumerism on the soul and industry on the earth, the erasure of history from our memories and our surroundings, and finally our dizzying collective arrival in a future that no one was ready for.”
The sinofuturists, that argue that “sinofuturism is an invisible movement – a spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products – a billion individuals.”
Each of these neologisms are actually forms of life. Each of them is the names of, and for, aesthetico-political positions that operate by disagreements and differentiations – that make claims that must be argued. Each of these is not so much a term as a war of, and over, interpretation. A stance that aims to intervene in cultural politics, that fashions itself to articulate a discontent – to focus despair and depression into theories that live. Theories to live by. Theories that are embodied. Theories that live in us and through us. And with us. And on us.
To put it another way; Mark Fisher was a midwife…
CFP: Tuning Speculation V: Vibratory (Ex)changes
Note: deadline extended to the 1st of August
17-19 November 2017, Toronto (Canada)
Organized by The Occulture
(David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert, Eldritch Priest and Rebekah Sheldon)
If the din of sonic and vibrational ontologies has catalyzed a salutary expansion of the vectors through which the world is (never) made sensible, it has also risked speaking, echoing, and amplifying the disquieting murmurs and groans of contemporary neoliberal biopolitics such that sounds of the latter are, paradoxically, inaudible as such. If this is the case, then what is the relationship between a vibro-capitalism that is heard in and as contemporary politics and a vibrocapitalist impulse that drives and ratifies the reality of those same elements? Put differently, on what does vibration exchange?
Maybe it’s time to forget the future, which was always a hallucinatory mnemotechnical destiny anyways; instead, the tuning is now and it brings with it questions that can only be (un)heard at scales that never quite sound. We therefore seek contributions from scholars, artists, writers, activists and comedians who take seriously the ethical, political, or phenomenal capacities —possibly impossible, and likely unlikely—that are opened, foreclosed, amplified, attenuated, dampened, resonated, remixed, or otherwise called forth at the nexus of vibration and exchange, however broadly conceived. While several approaches can catalyze our speculations, we propose to concentrate on sounding art—broadly understood—in order to leverage the fated semiotic parasitism, differential production, relational expression, and perceived multiplicity that informs such practices. We also welcome various reflections on sonodistractions, phonochaosmosis, ’patasonics, harmelodicprescience, audio pragmètics, chronoportation, h/Hypermusic, rhetorical modes of speculation and other invocations of impossible, imaginary, and/or unintelligible aural (dis)encounters.
Please send an abstract (maximum 250 words) to torn@asounder.org by 1 August 2017. In addition, given that we will be making multiple funding applications to support travel for all presenters, please include the following with your abstract: short bio (150 words), your affiliation, and a summary of academic degrees. Notification of acceptance will be given in early August.
Tuning Speculation V is generously supported by York University through the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and the Department of Humanities.
Will Schrimshaw – Infraesthetics
I found this talk Will Schrimshaw did at Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic Imaginary in 2013 – a conference that had a lot of talks by people whose work I am still getting acquainted with.
The term infraesthetics is proposed in order to describe a prominent and `reductive’ domain of work that takes a functional approach to sound and signals wherein the aesthetic is understood to be a kind of residual congealing or crystallisation, an unavoidable byproduct of more fundamental and primarily functional processes.
Infraesthetics is the way in which art dealing with the infrasonic boundary orients our thinking away from interiority (and immersion) toward exteriority. The aesthetic is treated as a necessary interface to the inaudible conditions of audition. In this talk, Schrimshaw’s concurrent aim is to implement infraesthetics as an ontology of sound based on movement – not the artwork’s pictoral qualities, as is the case in cymatic artworks. It’s an ontology of the vibrational aspects of sound art, removed from its visual appearance.
Infraesthetics is concerned with the concept of the noumenal.
Later, Schrimshaw talks about an aesthticist engagement with aesthetics based in Deleuze’s statement that »experimental practices are primarily concerned with ideas« and that »white noise is the idea of sound.« This is something that recently has become clearer to me – the need for a more experimental and alternative approach to my research.
Now I need to figure out how I am going to implement this in my own upcoming PhD-research. Both in terms of institutional and personal limitations.
The Future of Festivals
»So all of these festivals that the film looks at, they are more or less – in my mind – run by people who come out of the late 80s and early 90s. The European techno scene. And that idea of music as a seismograph of societal change – that’s really important. So the film tries to look at – or prompt – each different festival – the organisers, the artists involved – to try and rethink it and go ‘Where are we? Are we succeeding at this?«
—Nathan Budzinski, The Future of Festivals
Lately, I’ve been writing quite a few articles for Seismograf – a journal for contemporary music and sound art. I’ve just submitted a piece on SØS Gunver Ryberg’s newest album, AFTRYK, which should be out next week. I’ll do my best to translate the Danish articles and bring them for you here. But for now, I’d like to share this longform interview I did with former contributor to The Wire Nathan Budzinski, about his film 9 Futures: Sounds Fragmenting and the current state of experimental electronic music festivals.
It’s all about what festivals actually are – why they exist, who creates them and for what reason. There’s a good bit of Jacques Attali’s Noise in there and we talk about how capitalist society needs these breaks from the boredom of everyday life. How you go to festivals to escape into an alternative space of dreams, insobriety and sound.
In any case, you can read The Future of Festivals here.
Museum of Endangered Sounds
Recently, this website has been doing the rounds on sound and archive-related circuits. The Museum of Endangered Sounds was created in »January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by [Brendan Chilcutt’s] favorite old technologies and electronics equipment.«
This blend of digital amnesia and our sonic past should be right up my alley, yet navigating the site I’m uncomfortably writhing in my chair. There is a playful and nostalgic element to this that I emphasise with. It’s fun going back to those – even at the time – terrible ICQ notifications or the operational noises of the ZX Spectrum computer. I can even enjoy the still very present sounds of my life, such as the turntable, film camera or cassette tape hiss. With fear of sounding like grumpy old man, I think there is something dangerous in this idosyncratic approach to preservation. This very narrowly curated selection of sounds does not a museum make.
Just as James Scott will tell you that we need not worry about the preservation of Super Mario, many of the sounds collected by Chilcutt are in no way in danger of being lost. The Nokia ringtones, the Tetris soundtrack, the vinyl turntable and the Windows 95 startup sounds are not “advocate-less items” – we’re set on major OS startup sounds.
And this is where The Museum of Endangered Sounds becomes trite or even harmful. It canonises our recent technological past in a mere 33 popular sounds. Since every inclusion to the archive is an exclusion of something else, projects like these instill a false sense of security that the past is “taken care of.” If you want to see endangered sounds look to Jason Scott and Archive.org’s work on netlabels and software emulation/collection, or Lori Emerson’s work on the Media Archaeology Lab.
Sound & Sensory Studies
The second meeting of the Colloquium for Sound & Sensory Studies kicks off on Thursday. This time, I will be presenting my PhD-research project proposal, while Stina Hasse and Rasmus Holmboe will lead a discussion and communal reading of “Veils,” the first chapter in Michel Serres’ The Five Senses. For my own presentation, I have asked the participants to read Will Schrimshaw’s “Non-cochlear Sound: On Affect and Exteriority.”
I think that the two themes of the colloquium will complement one another well, and definitely spark much discussion about the nature of sound. The critiques of the brilliant people at the Sound & Senses research group will surely give me a lot to re-consider.
Read more about the Sound & Senses research group here: http://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk/Forskning/projekternetvaerk/soundsenses/
The Spectrum of Artistic Possibility
»Gradients (i.e., a spectrum) of light have long been rendered accessible through comparison of musical pitch with color; such ideas survive today in various understandings of sound color, synesthesia, and how color and sound might physically or metaphorically correlate through frequency. One hundred and thirty years ago, an editorial appeal was made by the respected electrical engineering journal The Electrical World (1883), citing Sir Isaac Newton’s comparison of “the seven colors of the prismatic spectrum to the average tones of the diatonic scale” as one “correlation of forces” that could extend to an exploration between “light and electricity.” The telegraph and telephone had primed the possibility for “telephotoscopy—the vision of objects at a distance,” and perhaps the transmission of other senses, smell and touch, the editorial speculated, since electricity and nerves share a common energetic sensibility.«
(Kahn, Douglas 2013. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, Oakland: University of California Press, p. 11)
»Unlike the eye, the ear is not a dedicated electromagnetic apparatus. Although the inner ear eventually excites electrochemical impulses in nerves to the brain, its initial sensitivity is to the vibratory movements of acoustical energy. As elephants and dogs let us know, the human ear only gets excited by a certain range of the sound spectrum; flanked on either side are infrasonic and ultrasonic events. With enough energy, sounds beyond the normal human audible range can be felt or their effects heard—earthquakes come to mind—but most all simply escape notice.« (ibid. p. 13)
»Electromagnetism in the arts began to make its presence audible in the 1920s and 1930s with two classes of modern devices, the wireless (radio) and electronic music instruments, but attunements toward natural environments beyond the social traffic in communication or the local instrumentalism of the device were rare. Not until the 1960s, after the air had been primed with decades of radio broadcasting, with threatening atmospheres of gamma, broadcast television, global telemetry of satellites, and with the mobility of transistor radios, did electromagnetism begin to be conceived as nature, as artistic raw material in an environment of signals.« (ibid. p. 122)
»Alvin Lucier began to explore electromagnetism as artistic raw material, first as brainwaves and immediately thereafter as natural radio. He was not alone in feeling that electromagnetism per se was viable material for the arts. Experimental music, given its proximity to electronics and the palpable energetic transfer between sound and signal, was conducive to material being immaterial. This idea could also be found in the visual art of James Turrell, where light was understood electromagnetically, and in the conceptual art of Robert Barry, who observed that visual art occupied but a tiny patch (visible light) of the electromagnetic spectrum and that the rest of the spectrum was open to artistic possibility.« (ibid. p. 5)
Vibrational Affect
This is the second in a series of posts concerning the theories of what Jonathan Sterne would call ‘sound students.’ This is my humble attempt to grasp the (no-longer-so-)budding field of sound studies and develop a theory of sonic affect.
A few weeks ago, Steve Goodman visited Copenhagen to talk about Sonic Warfare and his work as Kode9. His talk was largely based around the militarisation of sound – whether through LRADs, sonic booms over the Gaza Strip or the ‘ghost army‘ deployed by the US during WWII. Reading Sonic Warfare has showed me how an investigation that on the surface seems to deal with examples of sound as weaponry can move much further than that. Goodman tackles Deleuzo-Guattarian politics, Massumi’s theory of affect, Kodwo Eshun’s afrofuturism, Whitehead’s speculative materialism and more.
Steve Goodman
Augoyard & Torgue argue that the sonic effect is an open concept that constitutes a new paradigm of analysis. The ‘effect’ lies between cause and event. It is not an object in itself – sound does not physically change in the Doppler effect, as when an ambulance drives past. The only change happens in the relation between the observer and the emitting object. Thus, the object and subject emerge out of this relation – this ecology of vibrational effects. The sonic effect is what lies between physical sound and the subject’s ‘internal soundscape.’ However, instead of an ontology of vibrational effects, we should approach the (sonic) world through an ontology of vibrational affects that account for our mediatised, environmental and machinic coexistence. It is here that Augoyard & Torgue’s research is helpful to Goodman’s project, in that it positions the body and a transducer of vibration rather than a detached subject.
In the same sense, affect theory replaces the fluid nature of meaning for a more materialist approach. Steve Goodman writes; “If affect describes the ability of one entity to change another from a distance, then the mode of affection will be understood as vibrational.” (Goodman 2010: 83) This concept of change based on sonic vibrations presents novel modes of analysis of sonic arts that move away from the multiplicity of meanings deduced by methods lifted from the visual and textual arts. This vibrational force – or affective tone – then becomes a way to modulate not only mood, but materials and the socio-aesthetic realm.
To develop his ontology of vibrational force, Goodman refers to Whitehead’s speculative materialism as a way to describe how all things flow and no objects ever exist in themselves; objects are simply amalgamations of qualities (red, hard, sweet, crunchy). Therefore, according to Graham Harman, objects are useless fictions. This flow and malleability of objects is central to how Simondon and Whitehead both see living things and complex systems as striving for change. And perhaps this is what creativity is – change and novelty.
Sonic Materialism
This is the first in a series of posts concerning the theories of what Jonathan Sterne would call ‘sound students.’ This is my humble attempt to grasp the (no-longer-so-)budding field of sound studies and develop a theory of sonic affect.
The exposé for my PhD is slowly coming together. Having re-read Christoph Cox’s Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism this spring, I was inspired by his call for a new theory of the sonic. Since then, I’ve done my best to read myself into the field of sonic materialism, ecology of vibrational force, sonic affect and speculative realism. Many (if not all) of these overlap, and so it’s been a case of trying to figure out who agrees on which aspects, and how they differ.
Christoph Cox
In spite of sound art’s recent increase in prominence, Cox writes that little has been done to generate rich and compelling literature on the already under-theorised subject. Much academic writing has taken its outset in art history’s visual paradigms and musicology’s penchant for the textual, leaving out completely the nature of the sonic.
He calls for a theoretical framework that rejects essentialism’s position that the world consists of “[…] fixed conceptual or material essences to which images and signs would refer.” (Cox 2011, p. 146) Opposite essentialism’s fixity, Cox neither accepts cultural theory’s fluid relationship with meaning, which “[…] aims to account for and foster the contingency of meaning, the multiplicity of interpretation, and the possibility of change.” (Cox 2011, p. 146) However theoretically rich cultural studies may be; suggesting, as Jacques Derrida does, “there is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida, 1976) is a dangerous move according to Cox.
The freedom gained by relying on the contingency of meaning comes at the price of an ontological insularity that comes with textual or discursive theories. These theories “[…] implicitly support a separation between culture […] and nature […].” (Cox 2011, p. 147) In contemporary cultural studies, culture is the realm of meaning and significance whereas nature is inert and at the very most a socially constructed space. This anthropocentrism privileges human experience over the rest of nature – forgetting that human beings are themselves a part of it.
If “[…] the limits of discourse are the limits of meaning and being […]” (Seth Kim-Cohen in: Cox 2011, p. 148) then how do we write meaningfully about the sonic arts? Sound art frequently explores the very material texture or temporal flow of sound. How it is transmitted, and how these materials change the sound itself. Sound art and music is not more abstract than visual art, “[…] but rather more concrete, and that [it] require not a formalist analysis but a materialist one.” (Cox 2011, 149)