okay so welcome to this first seminar called on sound on sound I'm been looking very very much forward to to to this lecture series where I will be doing the first seminar of today and the last seminar in yeah after eight weeks the first seminar here is kind of an introduction well present the course and what we'll go through so I'll start out introducing myself my name is a Jakob Eriksson I am living in
Berlin originally from Denmark and my background is in musicology which I studied at the University of Copenhagen. I had some studies in philosophy at the York University in Toronto and then I did and a master's degree in sound studies at the berlin university of the arts i did my master thesis on the concept of repetition as a sonic notion through the through readings of son kirkagor um frederick nietzsche and deleus who are not specifically philosophers of sound, but in their concepts of repetition, which
they all have, they have sonic notions. So that was what I was working on there. And since I graduated from sound studies, I've been lecturing pretty extensively at the Humboldt University in Berlin at University of Copenhagen in Musicology and also at the Rhythmical Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. Also I've been lecturing a lot at the Berlin University of the Arts where I'm part of the faculty at the Department of Sound Studies and Esonic Arts. At the moment I am doing my PhD also at Sound-Sonic and Sonic Arts at Berlin University of the
Arts and my research topic is on what I call the post-human attitude in Sonic Arts. So I'm trying to um addressing how topics from post-human theory are being expressed through sound art and experimental music and i'm doing that by analyzing a exemplary case studies of artistic practice Other than that, I'm also doing sound art myself. I'm doing sound installations, I do performances, and I mostly use the computer program MaxMSP in order to do sound manipulation and sound
synthesis. Other than that, I am part of a research colloquium here in Berlin called Sonic Thinking. And that is what we're trying to do there is to think through or with sound and not so much about sound. And that is pretty much what we are also going to do in this course. So let me read the course description just so we're on the same side. I'm sure you all read it but just in order to have it fresh in mind. So I
wrote, sound, the vibrational force that enters your ears encapsulates our bodies, shakes our worlds. Unsound, the vibrational force that exceeds our ears, goes beyond our bodies, inhabit the world. The interdisciplinary research field of sound studies has in the last decades established a flourishing mesh of sound theories and listening practices. In Unsound Undead from Ebenomik, that's this book, the research group Audent presents essays challenging the prevailing notion of what sound can be and how the world can be thought sonically. By addressing sound through its
potentials as vibrational continuum on the limit and beyond human hearing unsound and undead disentangles sound from its anthropocentric notions revealing a world of sound out of sound through inquiries in philosophy cultural theory and sonic arts this course asks what can inaudible sound do? What are the consequences of vibrational theories? How do these perspectives alter the way we understand audible sound? During the seminar sessions these questions will be addressed in collaboration with six theoretical researchers and sound artists who all have engaged with sound
beyond sound each through their theoretical and artistic practices, approach and methodologies. Additionally, the seminar will touch upon and address concepts such as sonic materialism, politics of vibration, and posthuman listening. So now I will briefly introduce the guest lectures, which we will meet throughout throughout the next six sessions. The first one is Leslie Garcia, who is part of the group
Interspecific, and that is an artistic research group who are exploring the modern human or other-than-human world through installations focusing on sound. And specifically the interspecies communication. Next up we have Steve Goodman, who is also under the name of Code9. He is a label manager of the record label Hyperdub. He's a producer and DJ. He is author of Sonic Warfare, which is this book, book which has been very influential in sound studies and musicology and cultural studies
on sound then he is also editor of unsound undead and he has been telling me that he will be doing a presentation from his book from from a concept he kind of coined in the book sonic Warfare but really didn't develop. So that will be on audio virology, kind of a response also to COVID. So I'm really looking forward to that one, like a new take on Sonic Warfare. Next up, we have Laurence Abu Hamdan, which many of you might be familiar with. He's a sound artist, doing what he calls
sonic forensics and that is kind of a political investigation on how sound is used as a tool in conflict areas and conflict situations um he has been doing exhibitions worldwide in various established art spaces and museums and he also holds a phd from goldsmiths in london Then we have Eleni Iconiadu. She is author of the book The Rhythmic Event, also editor of Unsound Undead and part of the Audient Unit together with Steve Goodman. And she
is lecturing at the Royal College of Arts in London. Then we have Toby Hayes, also part of the audit audit unit, also co-editor of Unsound Undead. So we have all three editors on the roster, which is great. Then he is a reader in digital media and head of the research school of digital arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is doing cross-disciplinary research focusing on the ways that frequencies are utilized by governments and industry to influence and manipulate and torture.
Last but not least, we have Christoph Cox, who was co-editing a very influential book on audio culture, which I really encountered when I read or studied musicology and it kind of changed the way I did study musicology. So I'm really happy that he's on the lineup as well. He recently released or published his monograph, Sonic Flux. Then he is author of numerous articles on sonic thinking and sonic ontology,
which has been very influential on sound studies, scholarship and debates. He is co-author of Realism, Materialism, Art and then he's a professor of philosophy at the Hampshire College in the US of A. Before we go any further, I would love to hear if you have any questions or comments so far. you can raise the digital hand or just jump in I also just check the chat okay that's a question from Vincent your master thesis sound interesting can I read it anywhere
It's first, firstly, it's in German. So I don't know if you read German. I can send it to you if you want that. That's about it so far. Any other questions? other questions no good we are quite a lot of participants normally we would do like kind of round of introduction I've been considering this because with potentially 47 students now I can see we are 33 in the participant list I was
thinking that we could do something else than everyone presenting which can be like it would take up all the time for today so instead of that I have made a spreadsheet which I post in the chat now and please everyone go to that one and fill out like your research interest short biography where you are located and also you could write in your your interest in in the course and if you have a website or any social media that you want to share with each other you
can also post a link to that one So while you are doing that, I want to play some music. And that is a piece of music that is also found in Unsound Undead by Jenna Sutela. It's called Nemia Setti. So let's see, I'll just... Oh, there's a question. Do you think you have a link to your master thesis about repetition? I don't have a link. I can send it to you in an email.
So, now I hope I share sound. Alright, I think most of you have done your introduction. introduction. You can of course edit it and add to it throughout the seminar today or afterwards. My idea is that I'll compile it into a PDF that I'll send to all of you and Then you can read each other's introductions.
Okay. Next up, we have to do some organizational stuff. Most of you might be familiar with the structure of the new center. That in order to participate in the course, you have to do some coursework. It's like you have to do a term paper in the end. There are some additional coursework throughout the seminar that should also be stated by the organizers. And some of this coursework is presentations and responses. And we should try to spread out all of your presentations
and responses to the six lectures from the guest lectures. So for that, I also prepared a spreadsheet, which I post in the chat now. And I don't know if we should just go anarchistic on it and you can type in where you want to be presenter or responder. Maybe we try to do that in the beginning.
And then we see if it kind of works out by itself. Also, if you have any questions to that, feel free to ask. I have a question or Yes, please. Perhaps I wonder if we could have some written information about the six six meetings we will have so we can see where we feel in a wonder yeah sure
no but maybe after an information on them I haven't prepared any written information on them yeah I was just wondering after or yeah yeah yeah I can I can try to do that. So the thing is, each of the lectures will provide some texts, and you will then do your take on it, either as a presenter or a responder. So. And I'm very sure that all of them will be very interesting.
Oh, there are some questions here. Yeah, so Luca asked, sorry, what exactly is the difference between presenting and responding? And James kindly answers, presenters talk about the text and then responders comment on the presenter's presentation. But essentially the responder can give their own thoughts about the text as well.
from enda are we to sign up for one presentation and one response and one response or just one of either as far as I understood you have to assign for one of them this is my first course at the new center so if anyone who is more familiar with the structure can correct me on that one then it would be highly appreciate it. And of course, because we are so many, we can have several presenters
and responders. So there's another question from Guillaume. Are we having weekly readings and making a presentation on them, or are we presenting something of our own interesting that relates to the seminar? OK, good question. So for every seminar, the guest lecturers will provide some readings. So for example, for next Sunday, next time we meet, Leslie Garcia has sent me some texts that I'll send to you after the seminar today. And you have to present or respond on those texts.
I'll let that work in the background. Let's go to today's readings. I don't know if you have read the text. So because there are no presenters or responders today, I think, also because it's a seminar form, I really hope that we can have a good discussion. So I hope you have prepared maybe some questions, some doubts, and then we can kind of discuss the text together. I will do an introduction to them. And then let's see where it takes us, hopefully,
into a better understanding of it. I chose these three texts in order to provide an introduction also to the seminar and to the topic of sound studies. What is sound studies? There's a question here before we get into that. So, sorry again, can you resend here the Google Doc? Oh. Okay, someone answered that. Good. Okay, so I sent you three texts. One from Jonathan Stern called Sonic Imagination,
which is the introductory chapter from the Sound Studies Reader. Then I the third chapter of Timms' book, The Sonic Episteme. And then finally, the introductory chapter from Unsound Undead. Yes. So the reason I chose Jonathan Stern's text is to provide an overview of what sound studies is. And that doesn't mean that his definition is the best definition or is going into all aspects
of sound studies, but it's pretty broad and he points out a lot of valid points of what sound studies can be and how we can do it. The other text from the Sonic Episteme by Robin James, I chose that as kind of an example of how sound studies can be done. And that text is also referring back to the Jonathan Stern text. So we stay in the kind of vocabulary that he is providing us. And then Robin James is doing a critical reading on sound studies concepts.
And then last, there's an introduction to Unsound Undead. So that kind of gives an overview of what that book project was about. Okay. So let's start with Jonathan Stern text. What is he providing us? So he starts out talking about what is sound studies. And his first point to Pacha is the study of sound of everyday life. And that doesn't mean that it's a static field of study.
It is in the opposite. It's really providing aspects on different points of history. His first example is with mobile phones that suddenly all were carrying a mobile phone. And the everyday sonic environment was very much influenced by ringtones, which then again disappeared because no one uses ringtones anymore, because we have vibrations on our phones. So that is kind of an aspect on sounds that suddenly appear and then disappears again. And he also provides other examples throughout history where sonic aspects and notions
are appearing and disappearing and what takes are on them. So sound studies, what is that? He says that sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sound practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them re-describes what sound does in the human world and what humans do in the sonic world. Okay so that's at least a point of departure for us to understand what sound studies is. like very very broadly and also a bit human-centered.
Further on he says that okay it doesn't just to human relationships to sound but also to animal relationships of sound or even sonic concepts that we cannot grasp through our human perception of sound which is normally like described as the frequency spectrum of 20 hertz to 20 000 hertz which is what ideally our ear can perceive that doesn't then um account for what our body as like a bodily ear can perceive because we can go below or be beyond that which might not be audio audible through the
ear but it can affect us bodily and physically okay then he goes on and introduce the the concept of a sound thinking or to think sonically and I think that is kind of the concept that is the most important in the introduction because it provides us with a vocabulary of how to address theories and phenomena sonically And he kind of using, he's introducing some examples of how vocabulary is used in a sonic way.
There's the W.E.B. Du Bois quote where he's using the word echoing as a way of, like we use the word reflecting which is we can say that's a visual way of thinking so echoing could be one word resonating which we will also encounter with a robin james um is another way of thinking sonically um and all of this um he is kind of of of building up to uh what he calls the auditory listening
and i'll just find that it's on page nine if you have the text in front of you so what is this a the audio visual listening is he called this so so what is that um a lot of sound studies scholarship um starts out claiming that the world until now has been conceived visually, but there's so much that we neglect through this visual perspective that we can find in sound. Some of them kind of say that actually we should conceive the sound, conceive the world through sound as a more or a better way of consuming
and understanding it. And they kind of create this dualism between the visual on the one side and the sonic on the other side. And on page nine, he is then listing some examples of how hearing or sound is contradictory or oppositional to the visual. So I'll just read them out. Hearing is spherical. Vision is directional. Hearing immerses its subject. Vision offers a perspective. Sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object.
Hearing is concerned with interiors. Vision is concerned with surfaces. Hearing involves physical contact with the outside world. Vision requires distance from it. Hearing places you inside an event. Seeing gives you a perspective on that event. Hearing tends towards objectivity. Vision tends towards objectivity. Hearing brings us into the living world. Sight moves us toward atrophy and death. Hearing is about affect. Vision is about intellect. Hearing is primarily temporal sense.
Vision is primarily spatial sense. Hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, while vision removes us from it. OK. So what happens here is, of course, an ideal way of understanding the world, kind of beyond hearing, but using hearing or auditory metaphors in order to get a new perspective of how to encounter the world. And what is suggested by this approach is that with sound we can situate ourselves and understand the world from within,
which is opposite of the positivistic way of distancing yourself from the world and look at it from afar with this god eye perspective which has been very much criticized through philosophy or late philosophy because it has again and again and again been documented that we can always think different. So instead of saying now I have the new truth
about the world, then saying okay I situate myself here in the middle of it and then take from it what what what comes to me what what is a what what I am perceiving it as and by that making your position clear that it is a position okay so at the same time he's also a critic criticizing this because of course it's a dualism that needs to be criticized and it has to be combined or maybe we have to go beyond that as well but it's very good to have in mind that that is an argumentation
that is used throughout sound studies in order to maybe to to a on studies to to be some kind of importance of course sounds are important but it's not a in and any hierarchy above philosophy or whatever it has to connect. Okay, so this connection is also very important because as he argues that sound studies is a hybrid field in itself as it is with other studies where you have cultural studies or animal studies or gender studies or there are a lot of fields of studies
it's different than the kind of classical disciplines of let's say philosophy anthropology sociology musicology and and so on so what does this studies mean that means that it is inherent interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary taking an aspect which we can find in all these other disciplines and focusing on sound in in this instance or gender or visuals or whatever the studies represent.
So in that way, we can do sound studies, which is anthropology. We can do sound studies as philosophy. We can do sound studies as musicology and so on. So what can this approach do that is kind of meant to be a breeding ground for connecting all these studies and doing something not just like between them, but doing something new, like trying to go beyond them. And I think that is a tendency that we very much experience these years, that we have new humanities. For example, we have digital humanities,
we have medical humanities. Like we have a lot of these post disciplinary fields of study, which doesn't necessarily ascribe to the traditions of what we have encountered in Western academia so far. Yes. So, so far, do you have any questions or comments to that? No. Oh, there's one there.
Thanks a million. OK, that's a good question. OK, so let's go to the next text, the one of Robin James. I'll just find, did I put my notes on that one? Yes. Okay, so,
why did I include the text or the chapter three from the Sonic Episteme from Robin James with the title Vibration and Diffraction Acoustic Resonance as a Materialist Ontology. Well, I think this is an example of critical sonic thinking in sound studies. So she is working on a concept of philosophy outside of the fringe of sound studies. and then introducing them into sound studies. So I'm focusing mostly on the first part of the chapter.
It's quite dense, it's quite long. So what I wanted to get from it, there's this critical reading of vibrational ontology. So So, she's taking three scholars, three philosophers, as an example of how to think sonically. The first one is Elizabeth Gross. The other one is Jane Bennett. And the third one is Karen Berard. and she kind of treat them both individually but mostly as like one having the same
perspective on on the vibration as a physical understand a physical understanding of the world so on page 90 she's saying that vibration is the elementary structure of matter as a factual claim about reality. That is kind of her condensed understanding of those three scholars' work. And that is to say that understanding physical matter as something that is vibrating. We can go down on a molecular level and see that, okay, all molecules are vibrating.
And in that sense, the whole world is vibrating. And then we can have a vibrating understanding of the world, a vibrating ontology. so her critique of that is that instead of providing a new perspective that allows for situatedness like reading uh harroway we can we can understand the world through like it has to be understand situated in instead of all encompassing because this would just be a a new objectivity. And Robin James is criticizing this new objectivity,
a new physical way of thinking, of being just a new kind of Western thought that is trying to objectively describing how everything is on all levels. And that is her problem with that, which is known as a new materialism. But before going really into that critique, she's also providing more vocabulary for thinking with sound. So thinking with resonance, thinking with consonants, dissonance, and harmony.
So this is what she also calls the resonant methodology. And that is where she says that moving from a juridical rationality to a calculative rationality, that is kind of a neoliberalist ideology. So everything can be calculated through its vibrations, through its resonances, consonances, dissonances, and harmony. So an idealistic way of understanding the world. She provides some alternatives after that in the end.
But I think we have some ground here for opening up for discussions. So I hope you have a lot of questions that we can engage with now. There's one comment saying peak Western animism. well maybe uh matina you want to elaborate on that hey hi um hi everyone yeah it was a bit of a fleeting comment on the text um referred obviously not to robin james but um to a critique of new materialism which um i gave that definition to
which is maybe a bit unfair um but it's kind of how I see the way that they try and interpolate and kind of use sound and vibration to the right advantage in a way that seems a bit superficial and ill thought and I think um the part of the essay when she was speaking about the audio visual lithony was particularly stringent in exposing how that's kind of like a fallacy of this binary between the ocular and the auditory and like this ideal form of understanding this auditory which yeah seems a bit superficial and misses out on a lot of more of a more complex
understanding and unpacking of sound by the otherwise and a lot of other people, you know, hence the critique of non-inclusivity into the history of feminism, non-inclusivity into the discourse of post-colonialism. So yeah, I really liked the text, kind of keen to know what everyone else thought. I thought the bit about talking about the exercise that she was doing about Christina Sharpe's The Wake was also really interesting and the exploration of sound and across black radical thought kind of made me think of maybe Fred Moten's recollections
of the Ornthester scream. I don't know if people are familiar with that. Yeah, so there is, God, the title escapes me, I'll link it up to everyone, but Frederick Jameson, Frederick Douglass, kind of description of his life and his family life through slavery includes a lot of instances of exploration through sound, and there is this particular moment, yes, thank you, Sebastian, it's in the break, where Merton uses this
piece of Douglas, which is the recounting of Orne Tessa's scream as she gets beaten, And so how the sound would travel as an expression of pain, resistance, lack of words, lack of different, maybe different visual register to break out of that situation. anyways it's it's really interesting and I think there is a part of Robin James reflection that made me think of that and that I think people may be interested in reading a bit more about
but yeah keen to know what everyone else made of James text because I thought it was really interesting and also quite dense and a lot to unpack and I yeah Maybe Sebastian, you want to further it? Oh no, I just, yeah, that was a great reference, I thought, in regards to Fred Moten, but I was also quite fascinated by James' text. And there was another text by her that I once read that talked about this phenomenon of the drop in EDM music and how this is somehow symptomatic of our burnout culture. I thought
that her comparison was perhaps a bit too hyperbolic and exaggerated. It was quite an outrageous comparison, but maybe that's what made it even more entertaining perhaps. But But what was not super clear to me in the text was how exactly does James see this transition from, let's say, the sovereign regime to the neoliberal regime of risk management and pure calculation and statistical values. How does she see this transition in the new materialist ontology that she's speaking about?
Because what I got from the text, I also have to say that I didn't finish it, so maybe this is revealed in the end, but she's somehow implying that this ideology is somehow pertinent to new materialist ontologies in a way that is somehow concealed or not feasible, and then she somehow connects it to sound. But this was not super clear to me. But I also, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't finish the text. So maybe, yeah. Sure. Within this. Did anyone get the connection between this vibrational ontology and the neoliberalism, which she argues that is inherent in it? I think maybe I was kind of perhaps did.
I was kind of thinking in the sense of like how representation within neoliberalism tries to quantify things and like force them into a numerical system of ontologies. whilst yeah there's like if something's oscillating then it defies that so there's that tension there between things which can't necessarily which defy that sort of mode of measurement so yeah and to me I'm thinking in academia in terms of when universities sort of impose these research coefficients on to like the value of research and all these things like that are inherently like not quantifiable. It's like that's like the sort of
Yeah, the neoliberal quantification impulse at its worst. Yeah. Yeah, sure. I think that was what I got from it like this like an ideal of that you can kind of calculate and rely upon like this new kind of chance calculation that the world is open but according to this set of numeral ideologies. I had also a brief question about this text. I was interested in the selection of references too that she uses to exemplify this argument and it made me wonder whether these three theorists
and then also pop cultural references she uses are really sonic in the same way that she characterizes new materialisms as being because they seem almost to be a sort of sonic form of witnessing maybe or they're more concerned. They almost turn a sort of, I mean using this audio, you know, the audio visual litany, they seem to sort of make into sound forms of representing whether that's a kind of witness of historical grief or it's like a persistence of something that almost has an archival basis. And I was kind of curious about those choices because it seems like there are other sources, even if you want to confine yourself to like a Black
studies source, that deal with orality as a way of pushing past forms of enclosure. I mean, of course, deconstruction is an example, and I think that idea of orality there also has a sort of of draws in some way from African tradition. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily reason to reject the critique, which I also found extremely compelling, but it made me sort of pause at the way James was making that argument. So you mean how she chose the, what do they call it,
Grass, Bennett, and Barad? I'm sorry. I meant rather the selection, in fact, of the Christina sharp text and the three examples that she realized on later? Well of course I cannot answer for her, but surely there's a perspective there that might be missing. So does her argument, does it hold water?
Like, can you compare these vibrational ontologies to those black ontologies that she's providing, black vibrational modes of thinking and being that she's providing us with? So if that's not the way to go, how do we open it up then?
Why is it that the vibrational ontologies are what you call politics of exception? When they try to provide something new that is kind of encapsulating more and understanding the world better or different than how we have done it before, how does that then make this politics of exception?
Can you hear me? Yes. Well, basically, I think the problem with the book is that she makes a really, really big claim because if resonance and stochasticism are inherently problematic, then you basically need to rewrite all of modern physics and all of modern life, basically. So she has to make like this really, really big claim about resonance and soukesties in general, make a very small claim on sound studies. I think that's a very bad kind of structure of argumentation.
And also I think she makes like some really kind of crazy logical leaps, like the leap from resonance to statistics to, oh, this is automatically oppressive because biopolitics also use statistics. Statistics are not really bad. So many things are bad. That's what I mean. She has to rely on making these really, really big claims to make a very specific claim about some studies. Yeah, and that's also kind of why I included the text, that it is a big claim that she's making. Can we follow it through when it's such a big claim in order to prove something in sound studies? Or is it actually just sound studies
that is kind of also proving that there's something inherently wrong with how we do academic work and scholarship? I mean, I'm just trying to like, unfortunately, I didn't only got halfway through the text as well, because I've been moving at my studio. But I'm kind of curious as to whether she is making the claim, you know, of disregarding vibration or whatever, or if she's just kind of like making a claim against new materialist ontologies, right? because I understood it to be more like she's making a counterclaim to a strong claim being
posed by the three theorists that she draws up, which is that this is the new sort of ontology and therefore any kind of representational one is more abundant, not worth pursuing. I mean, does this imply the claim therefore that we completely disregard you know like vibration as a kind of avenue I'm not sure if it goes that far but like I say I didn't actually finish the text so unfortunately I can't really say what's being said in the text in that regard. Yeah, main parts of the critique is in the first part of the text. Yeah, what I got from the text was not exactly this, and I'm not, I'm somewhat of a beginner
in this field, I think. But I don't think she says in any moment that the vibrational model of phonology is inherently wrong or inherently, for example, in the, in some of the end notes, she cites Steve Goodman's model of phonology, but she says he doesn't, he doesn't say it's a better way or the only way or it's somewhat, I don't remember exactly how she puts it, but she basically says he doesn't make us the same claim of superseding this other knowledge. Because I don't think at any moment she's saying, okay, we have to disregard modern science or anything, but she's more critiquing how this model of thinking basic, based on modern sciences
is also making a huge claim that we have to disregard philosophy or disregard any model of correlational thinking or anything. And I'm again not a specialist in these studies, but yeah, it just seems to be more of a, it's not that this ontology is necessarily wrong, but I don't know, maybe our access to this ontology can be pure or clean in the way that, okay, we can disregard our position in this world or the position of this theory in the world. So I think think that's what I'll say to Vincent's comment about it. It's not necessarily, I didn't read it that way at least. One thing she is not explicitly stating, but I kind of read in through, like between the lines, is this kind of new materialism and vibrational ontology is trying to do a flat hierarchy of thinking.
and by that dismissing like a power structures that are here that was what I kind of a like she could have been more explicit about that if that's what she is also meaning I'm not sure about that but there was one thought I had while reading the text as well I kind of see there's like some commonality perhaps between like this concept of sound relating to unsound and like philosophy as relating to like other types of thought, which are like arbitrarily not deemed philosophy, which like seems to be like the object of this like text kind of like in the sense that like, like categorically, there's no difference between like sound and unsound.
it's just like a spectral kind of like like according to like the the listener like what they are like sensitive to pick up on that like defines the category of sound as opposed to unsound while like like so someone else is like gatekeeping like the boundary of what philosophy with capital p is in relation to other types of thought which actually like like do you have as much value and like importance so like yeah did you sort of see that when in that in that relation between the text and and this like in a more broad sense like if i did that yeah yeah i don't know it was that to me feels like i i don't know maybe maybe it was my my reading of it rather than yeah no it's
a good question. Also addressed in Jonathan Stern's text, this kind of understanding sound as vibration. So is anything that vibrates, is that then sonic inherently? Or is it defined through a listening or a perception of hearing? If it's a squirrel or a human being or a whale, is it sound when it can be heard by someone who can perceive vibrations as sound or is planets vibrating is that also sound like provided by NASA for example like often you
you will see a post by NASA saying that this is the sound of planet Jupiter or the like. And then it's transposed into human hearing range. So that way of understanding sound, I think it's difficult to say that it's not sound, but it's also difficult to say that it's sound. is it the placebo or is the thing making the sound that is important in that or is it the relationship between them it's a valid question and it opens up for a lot of thinking and I think that's also what kind of
was one of the grounds of Unsound, Undead the book what is actually happening there? How can we challenge our understanding of sound? And what does that then do? It's part of the concept of audiovisual lithany also that sound is considered as somehow excluded from any kind of like you know, social, it doesn't have any kind of like a social component to it because it's some sort of a primordial force that exists almost
like some sort of, someone mentioned vitalism before, almost like a vitalist force that exists outside of any kind of like, yeah, social baggage or let's say, yeah, social hierarchy. It's almost like some sort of an esoteric kind of element. That's how I also Yeah, well, it's funny when we read the list that Jonathan Stern is providing us, then sound is mentioned, but mostly it's hearing versus vision. So that kind of implies that it's the perceiver that is introduced in the audiovisual litany. and not so much what often is called sound in itself.
So there's a division between the perceiver of auditory vibrations or sounds and then the sound in itself in this way of thinking. And of course, sound in itself is also an ideal concept of how to understand what sound is. So like a usual model you have when you explain what sound is, that is you have in the one end a medium that is vibrating and then it goes through air into the ear. So that is the hero, the listener or perceiver. and so you have that a dualism between a vibrating object that is producing some sound which then
travels through the air into the ear and that connection is what sound is Vincent you are allowed to talk as well I was just saying that Francois Jébonnet, who was at, I think, in Paris, and he also does a similar critique where he says, there is no sound in itself. Sound always comes kind of over determined with social meaning. And if we had just sound to himself, we couldn't even understand it because this kind of extra surplus meaning is inherent to what sound is because we can only perceive it.
Sure. So that is also what Jonathan Stern is arguing, that we are always positioned as listeners. So I am listening to a sound and you are listening to a sound and it might be what we can say is the same sound but we perceive it differently, though it's the same sound. I think, like, I just want to say something about this positionality of listening. I've been reading the last weeks this book called Hungry Listening by Dylan Robinson. And it's really interesting that he's like talking about this position of listening,
listening not only in a physical way, but also he's using like these two words called like because it's like from like indigenous sound studies. So it's like how you position as a conqueror and then how you position in these marginal positions, you know, as an indigenous or as a black, as a women or all these minorities that have problems in a political or social environment. So, I mean, I'm really interested in how it's not only all this like a physical realm of listening, but also this position of like that has to do with like a social class. And where are you like a position in a political way, not like only my physical capacity of
listening but also what is inherent to my race and where I was born and how I was like a form as a human or as a social being. Yeah sure. And maybe that's also the point of James that she is trying to claim the sound cannot just be vibration, it also has to be that kind of position. Yeah, what I liked about the second part of the text, the James text, in relation to that,
in relation to the unsound text, is that to me she seems to put unsound not exactly as this this completely unknown thing or completely outside an alien, but exactly that people live in this, in these regions of sound that the, the, the colonial culture, let's say, calls not sound, or that this isn't sound, or this isn't hearing, or this isn't, and this is actually not this other thing, but it's a very lived experience of actual people, but we tend to disregard it as outside of the, of what sound is and what sound, yeah, this ontology of some. Yeah.
And this is actually some, in regards to Vincent's comment of, of his last comment, this is something I'm currently interested in research. And I'm, again, I'm new, so I would be very interested to know about what you think about it, the sort of sound in themselves. And that brings me like to music basic, right? John Cage's thinking and everything. And it's very, it's caught my attention in the reference she makes the three authors, James Sites. It's very musical thinking, right? It's like resonance, consonance, dissonance, harmony,
chords and harmonics. And I was thinking exactly about that, how, at least from what I'm studying currently, there is this sort of musical thinking that is very abstract, very sounds in themselves, and there's only these vibrations and relations about that. But some studies maybe, or these other theories of sound or post-Cajun sound art, perhaps, I don't know, are interesting the opposite of that. there is this meaning of sound, of sound, significant sound of relational listening and everything. And I know I would be very interested to know what everyone thinks about it in relation to this text, because it's something that caught my attention, these readings. Yeah, so there's a lot of things in your comment there, like, for example,
sorry, that's good. That's good. Also, I think that I was thinking about what you was speaking and when i was reading the james text was this uh that that vibrational thought of vibrational ontology is nothing new like we just have to just we we have we can go uh all the way back to i think was a pythagoras who was a talking about the harmony of the spheres like a sonic understanding of the universe like everything is harmonious in that way because it is vibrating it is a musical in in in that way um and it's maybe just a new take on on on that
which has been represented through pythagoras and kepler and a kircher and there are many uh musical thinkings or understandings of of the universe in itself and that it has to be harmonious or it is harmonious in itself also when it's resonant um that is where it flows and ebbs into itself and each other um so that was the first thing i was thinking about The next thing I forgot because I was talking. Maybe it pops out in a minute. Other comments on that?
Hi, it's me. As we have said, sound is a kind of ansonic research is a position that we take. And, of course, it's a highly philosophical question in my point of view and as the text said, in the ways we perceive the world. So I was thinking that maybe that model of thought related to the vibrations and all these sonic terms and all this terminology maybe mostly describes this highly difficult world of effects that we live in.
So maybe along with this ontology that the texts are trying to describe, maybe this contribution might be seen as a comment on our current temporality. We've said about neoliberalism, we've said about biopolitics. Maybe there is also a parallel line of making an ontology of our current state in terms of this mess of political action, this entangled reality of many different epistemologies where the sonic can offer a lot of metaphors maybe. So maybe this is a good, not a very effective way of describing what's going on. Maybe because matter is under question, effects are under question, and maybe after the postmodern
condition, there's something else that yet we have no terms to describe it exactly. Some thinkers try to describe it. Many epistemologists are trying to do transdisciplinary approaches. so yes maybe after all of these contributions and the very nice comments I've heard I'm thinking of that maybe all these discussions are in a long way of producing comments on this contemporality which I don't know how we can describe it maybe Mark Fisher tried to describe it like a dispersed corporation of of a new kind of capitalism realism,
but there might be a lot of contributions into that. Maybe still we don't know what will be this temporal, the name of this temporality, but I'm, I'm thinking of that, like, and after all these comments, like, like we are moving towards that, toward describing also, let's say, a historical stage, a new historical stage through this ontology, something like that. I think that's a very good point. Also, I think that's the point of Robin James' book, like the sonic episteme, that is like how we understand the world through sound. And she is describing how sound scholars or sound students
are describing this world through sound as a new way of thinking. And on the same time, she is critiquing it and coming with alternatives to it. It's a very good point. Yeah, Catherine. I had one other thought after the comments on the idea that these sort of marginal sonic practices or theories are positional. And I kind of want to maybe question that a little more because I'm thinking of more ontological characterization, say, of Blackness as a form of social death, which is a more maybe Afro-pessimist account. And it makes me wonder why or whether we should restrict this critique of new materialisms in terms of their extraction of signal from noise rather than their, maybe their failure to understand silence or gaps in the sonic episteme.
Because, I mean, and it seems like both of these critiques could be valid and the positionality of sound, especially for marginal groups, is very valid. but there's sort of another maybe more ontological like substructure of this that kind of gets reprovincialized by this approach where the people who are doing work that picks up on historical traces in a sonic way can are this exception but in fact the sort of maybe more foundational critique of blackness as a category in its sonic form still evades this critique that James is offering. Any, any, um, takes on that?
How can we further it? How can we develop this maybe in a third way? I don't know. I just think, I think that's also like a more fundamental thing in the sense that like, for example, James is like, obviously like an anti-realist. Like she doesn't, I mean, she's a recordian, she doesn't, she's like a hardcore recordian show. She doesn't really think it makes any sense to talk about the world in itself with some of these other like vibrational ontologists or whatever you want to call them. I'm like, okay, we have to describe the world, how it really is even without any humans. There's a Christoph Cox paper where he went through prayer
where he responds to two people who really attacked him like, oh, you are doing all these bad things. I can maybe in the chat if I find it. But yeah, I think there's also maybe like a more fundamental philosophical difference between these positions in the sense that some people think that we can't talk about the world in itself and then describe it in terms of sound that our people think that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, sure. Good comment. She is also, by using the word episteme, she is in a Foucauldian tradition of thinking, which means that we are always in the world as thinkers and not we cannot okay so so truth is what we make
it and truth will change so they what we thought was true in the 16th century which is often what where we have to go goes back to was at that point true about the world and then it changed through renaissance and then and up to modernity or modernism and now we are maybe after modernism we are post-modern or or even post post-modern and that might provide another way of thinking i think and that is also what what what she is trying to do with it saying saying that okay uh new materialism is is um just a new way of
of doing the episteme um and in that way she's um criticizing the way of their they are arguing for a kind of objectivity and and by that excluding all the power relations power structures that we we have learned from Foucault so definitely definitely it's it's two schools of thoughts that are colliding there Yeah, so Vincent just posted an article by Christoph Cox, who we can maybe talk to him
about in the last of the guest lectures. I also included this text from Robin James, because it's criticizing a lot of this idealism, which is inherent in, for example, Cox's theory. And I think it's also all right to criticize the way James is narrowing it down to an idealism. Because when you read Bennett and Berard, I haven't been too much into it to cross, I must admit. But they are very reflected upon this positioning of themselves,
especially Akarnabarat being not fond of only having a physical world, but having this bridge between or combining what has been divided in nature and culture, that it does connect. so it would have been a bit beautiful i would say in in in james take on on on especially barad a that she is trying to get rid of this dualism between nature and culture and that nature and culture is one and the same it works together all the time as one and the same I don't know if anyone else.
So, enda. You think that James is I think I think earlier on, she basically says, um, I mean, at least that that she doesn't really dispute this kind of um intra agency that's posed by Barad but I think more um well I think I think again having not read the whole text and I'm very hesitant to like say too much for that reason but um you know uh you can posit this kind of like intra agency but then not really speaking about that in in in um like what that intra kind of constitutes in a sense. Maybe it lies a lot or I don't know. I mean, my real sort of like underlying thing here is I feel like she's not really like trying to have a
go at new materialism in the sense of like saying that like, no, no, it's totally an incorrect view. it's more like I think she's like negating the posturing of new materialism in a sense, which is a kind of implicit claim that truth can be gleaned from this kind of immediacy of being. And I think it goes back to the kind of the other text, the previous one, which sets up these kind of dichotomous relationships between the visual and the auditory, in which there's a kind of Michael Bewong- Underlying assumption in favor of of Sam that the kind of, you know, the second ambient or the kind of emerged the immersive model and the kind of closeness has, you know, there's a kind of there's a kind of
Michael Bewong- I don't know, maybe like a kind of assertion that this, this is kind of like this being with has absolute advantage, whereas actually I think it's worth asking like whether distance has lots and lots of useful virtues. And not only whether that distance has virtues, but also what kind of a context in which I think somebody was saying it earlier, you know, in what context is that distance to be communicated. I think this is a light in many ways, right? Like, yes, I mean, you have like the history of enlightenment, rationalism and all of the kind of baggage that comes with this, but this isn't, you know, this isn't making like a kind of formal claim from a kind of historical like contingency in a sense. And can we like, like step back from this in some sense and
think of some other way to kind of negotiate between competing representations rather than to simply say that, you know, this kind of non-representational vibrational mode of understanding has primacy, because I think this is like how it lends itself to the neoliberalism of like not, not positing some third, some other outside of the immediacy of the given, in which case you can't really start to like develop new political projects or something like this. You have just like constant open input model of sound which, you know, then it kind of like falls back on like subjective determinations rather than having a kind of like a positive project to kind of use as a critique of the sort of like, yeah, all the stuff that, yeah, again I forgot who said it,
but it was a really great point about how this kind of circumambiance of sound maybe is a good analogue for discussing how the conditions, the kind of phenomenal conditions of complexity are lived in the sort of contemporary moment. So yeah, I think, I don't know, I felt like that was kind of what she was doing in the first part that I read, which was suggesting that this kind of David Vogelpohl- Immediate like sweeping aside of of that representational third is is, you know, limited strategy. David Vogelpohl- Yeah, that was that's David Vogelpohl- Vincent, you just posted a response kind of to that.
Vincent? Ah, okay. I love you. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay. No, we're saying that Alexander Galloway, who also does kind of very strong critique of critique of this kind of new materialism, which is interesting because he comes from a kind of Deleuzean background. But I think like the Leuzen Quattori in like the 80s text, like thousand battles, I think they also re they're always also skewers. They already see this problem. It's like, if you just have like a really fat anthology, there's nothing really
good or bad. Like you have to pick and choose. So I think if you read like this kind of like I don't think you necessarily need a new perspective. I think if you would develop this kind of vibrational thing correctly, then you can already incorporate that critique in the theory, which I think Gross does, but I haven't read it so closely. What was the last sentence you said that kind of dropped out? No, I was just saying that I think Gross, Elizabeth Gross also does this, but I haven't read the book so closely. Thanks. I have a comment that relates to what Enda was saying. Just thinking perhaps of this
synesthesia involved with like a post human understanding of sound and perhaps that this maybe in the paper where it was discussing, I forget which of them it was, but the one that was discussing about how sound can be extrapolated from image using, yeah, so like once we have like you know the sufficient like computing power to to sort of do this then like at what point do other sort of sensory like the anthropocentric senses like differentiated from each other if we can if the information like can be readily converted between them then then it's almost like there's no a
priori distinction between like sound and vision anymore so is there like is Is there like a post human understanding where like, like everything sensible eventually converges. Yeah, good question. That was in the beginning of James text. So she was mentioning this say audio visual camera that can or vibrational camera that could through the camera lens. I recreate sound as objects are vibrating. I'm not sure if that's like, if that's merging sensors per se,
but it's underlining the fact that sound, that the objects also vibrate and that the vibration can be filmed. Like visually. But then again, this film is transformed into sound in order for us to hear. So it's not that we can see the video and then perceive it as sound. So, of course, it's just a technology. And then the question is, are we post-human just because of technology? I'm not really sure if that's the case, because then we have been post-tune always, since
we discovered how to make fire, which is also a position some have. You had another comment, James? Oh, I just thought something out, just kind of in that same vein. this method of spying where if there's a conversation happening in a room behind closed doors, but spy agencies or whoever can shine a laser onto a movable surface, like a cup of water or something, and then based on the light reflection of that off the laser, they can recreate the sound. Yeah, I think it's more or less the same technique because of the different disturbances in the wavelengths.
But surely it's giving a new perspective on technology. What can be considered as a listening device doesn't have to be a microphone that is in the air. It could be a laser pointing, it could be a camera. Yeah, and I think the whole digital technology can, I think, is always also this technological synesthesia, right? Like it's only data, so we can change from visual data to audio data at any moment. I think there's a lot of work that, artwork that explores this sort of transition and dialogue in this new possibilities of technology. Yeah, very much.
Just a moment. Yeah, and it's also what we are going to talk about next time. with Leslie Garcia and this kind of interspecies communication because what what she's doing a lot is like saying taking non human materials or beings like bacteria fungi and and translating that into sound and is that then communication or is that just like making something auditory? I'm very sure we'll talk a lot about that but she's like creating this kind of technological setup. So Enda's saying great
I'm gonna do a presentation on the octopus tweet. Sorry I'm just chatting share on the chat. Yeah sure. So There are new messages. Love the James sext. James, what the fuck?
No change. Ah, now I understand as well. Sorry. All good, let's keep this conversation going. Yeah, maybe we should try to incorporate the introductory chapter to Unsound Undead. It's a very short text. Did you all read it? Yeah, it's just a few pages. Oh, let's see here.
Thanks. So what are we about to experience with this book when we read it? What are they saying? And what kind of thinking are we getting introduced to? In its style, it's very different than James and Stern. So maybe I'm sure some of you would have some good point of view of this. But what kind of text is this we're engaging with? And what is it trying to do?
Because it's also pretty tense. Anyone? Okay, so like one of the core sentences I have underlined is this is unsound as a speculative probe. What is meant here? As unsound as a speculative
probe. Well, what they are doing in the book is to have these very fragmented chapters, like very short texts, very fragmented chapters, And the speculation in it, I think, is that they don't have to claim any truth. They have to provide some thoughts, some questions of what sound is and what sound can be. We experienced a Jenna Sutela's work earlier while you were typing in your short bios.
So, opening up for an understanding of what is Martian language, that was what it tried to do. What does that mean? Can there be language without a rational living being on Mars? Well, that doesn't matter because that was already provided in science fiction. So this kind of speculative probe on what is martial language and then trying to provide an answer to that through sound, through musical performance and through video.
That is, I think, a great example of one take on what this book is doing. So, we have ontology or martyrology and xenosonics as the kind of in-framing words. So martial ontology, there is very much this going beyond what Goodman introduced in Sonic Warfare, if some of you read that. Like how is sound used as a war machine?
How is it, and not just as a lethal weapon, but maybe something that can be not as bad as death, but trying to scare the hell out of you. And also beyond the weaponry of it. I'm sorry, I lost it a bit because of the discussion. I hope it's OK. maybe someone has some some comments
was everything clear in the text I have a question yes I'm I'm also very new into the, these, these, this field. But reading, I have this question, like, how, how the, the unsound would have agency would, would, as a ghost, yeah, would have agency as a ghost? It's a very open question, I mean, but I have this question in my mind, how exactly and how
you would proper have agency in the world. As a ghost. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you can you can like elaborate a bit more on what you mean with the with the ghost. Yeah, there was when it's written the second page. Mm-hmm. He's spoken about the ontology, the ontologist Fisher.
I'll just have to find it. Yeah, and that's, that's, it's kind of a relation with a non-supernatural concept of the spectrum. Okay, let's just read out that paragraph. So in the early 21st century, the musical zeitgeist has been inflicted by the theme of ontology, a condition resonating with the impact of general structure, a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present and a non-supernatural concept of the of the spectrum
defined by fischer as that which acts without physically existing this ghostly virtual culture of the undead has already spawned a lasarian economy based on the digital river revivocation of dead young African-American musicians as laser-lit holograms. Here the future, not not just the past, can be found in the cracks of the present. From Elvis's 2007 holographic appearances on American Idol to Tupac's chimerical cameo at Coachella Festival in 2012,
popular culture has enlisted rotoscoping technology in the reanimation of a dead rap and rock stars okay so so the term a hauntology is here taken from mark fisher obviously because he's cited it derives from a shock derrida which has a kind of a different take on it but Mark Fischer takes it from and creates his own understanding of ontology. I think it is in his book The Ghost of My Life that he's kind of
developing and but it is sometimes since I've been working with that. So what is understood here as Hontology, of course, it's a word plate of the haunted and ontology, like a combination of that, especially in Deidah's understanding of it. So how I understand a fish has taken on ontology, that is that, okay, there's a different kind of temporality. like the past is always haunting us, is always present. And then this ghost, like let's try to understand that as that which is haunting us in the present
from the past. So, Shakur, Tupac Shakur re-emerging as the ghost or Elvis or at least examples that are listed here. creates a new way of thinking culture. I think that's kind of the point of it, that a directedness, a temporality that is not just going from the present into the future, but also is haunted by the past always. And not just the present haunted by the past, but the future is haunted by the past. if that makes any sense.
But I think I just want to add that I think it's also because he's responding to something very specific, which is he has this idea that after about 2000, at the end of the 90s, he thinks that there's a lack of cultural progress or musical progress. So basically what he thinks is the end of modernism and then people just recycle old things. So ontology is kind of this idea of what you said, the past haunting the future, but the past being the kind of old, the very idea of the future. So this kind of modernist past where people still thought about the future and there was cultural progress. So it's kind of the future that is now the past
haunting the future. So it's kind of very complicated. But yeah, basically I think the idea is that when we kind of live in a world where it was just like so much cultural cycling, like reboots, like people doing like 90s music or whatever, like all this old recycling that he's kind of looking for these kind of traces in the old that are still pointing to the future, this kind of, which I think is very similar to Ernst Bloch, the idea of sort of of unfulfilled futures, which are still there, but in the past, but we haven't fulfilled them yet. So in that sense, we are still kind of new and actual. Yeah, and I think it's kind of making a position
to what is like a retro thinking, like thinking of music, having ritual fashion, like looking from the present back to, let's say, 80s music, like with this kind of, what is it called, this genre? Okay, we'll come in a moment. But true that it's a new kind of a temporal thinking in that way that, okay, we are not going from the past to the present to the future anymore.
We are always in the present and that which is the future. That is what we are kind of trying to run away from. and that is always been haunted by the past. So in that way, the modernist thinking is going to the future all the time, like the future will always be better. And now we are haunted by that thinking because there is no future anymore. Like if we can be a bit bold and say that, the future is doomed by our past, what we have done to the world and so on. And I think there was a shift,
correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there was a shift somewhere around year 2000, maybe with World Trade Center. And there was a financial crisis in 2008. And of course, we are living now in a climate crisis. Like, where is the future anymore? like it's always trying to uh instead of thinking that okay we we are always getting better and better and better then we are haunted by whatever has been done always so it's a new understanding of the future i'm not sure if that was really clear yeah burial there's a comment on that
Sebastian, maybe you can elaborate on that. Oh, no, it's just someone that Mark Fisher, I guess, I guess, takes as somehow paradigmatic of this ontological, phonic genre of or maybe having some sort of interventions from the past that are haunting the present in a way that is not, yeah, in a way that is completely constitutive of music. It's not just some sort of an addition to it, but it's the very core of how this music presents itself.
Yeah. And also Vincent posted Retromania from Simon Reynolds, which is very much built on text on a ontology, like Mark Fisher's ontology, not Derrida's, which is, of course, very interesting. that is called retro mania, I would say that retro is another kind of connection to the past where ontology and Mac Fisher's sense is kind of the opposite in its epistemical thought. In relation to sound and to Zemabe's question, I think there's also a, I want to say more
fundamental level, but the idea of phonography also has a lot to do with it, right? Because this idea of hauntology has agency without presence or agency without life, right? And that's very connected to since the invention of phonography and Thomas Edison trying to record the voice of the bad and to save it for posterity and everything. That is very, that's a big part of this technology of this mode of culture, right? Of recording and saving these voices of the bad and these voices of past agencies and how this impacts us currently. And I have another question
about that builds on that from this text. There is also a basic question that is, is some sound meant to be heard? I think it's something that stood out to me. And I think that the answer is supposed to be no, but I don't know how clear that is to me. Because as I said before, there's okay, we have, we can sonify the sounds of Jupiter, right? And we can transpose the sounds of bats to human auditory range. But is that all that is unsound is only sonifying to be heard or is something more than that? I think something more but it's obviously less clear when it's not a common experience we have, perceptual experience we have. So that is something I was very interested
in the text. Is unsound something that needs to be heard? Yeah. Like I think that's kind of part of the thought provocation of that word. But also it's very it's very like practical. Like if you look in, let's see here. I don't know if it's clear. I'll just have to see if I can look at my camera. There. Like, this is from the Sonic Warfare. You see the auditory spectrum. And then on both sides, you have a unsound. It says that in words already there.
So in that way, it's kind of addressing that, which is outside of the spectral range of human hearing. But I think that's just the point of departure from this book project. That, OK, that might be sounds of bats and sounds of earthquakes and all that, but how can we speculate it further? like that's that's why i i really like that the one sound as a speculative probe so it might have started from sonic warfare uh that's that first place in sonic warfare
but it's like really like pushing through what what can this a concept mean what can it do and and speculative sounds of Martian voices or language. It's, well, you cannot say if it's heard or that we can hear it in any way, but we can speculate about it. And, you know, Sotila's work is trying to do that. And that is going beyond that which is unsound to something speculative. which can produce many other thoughts. And that's, I think, is the beauty of the book, that it's not clear, it's not proved by anything,
but it's like really trying to push through what can sound do as well. And not trying to argue against, like, of course, there are many different texts in the book, but it's not trying to specifically create a system of, this is on sound and we have all these realms that is building the building blocks and and it's consistent it's not consistent it's fragmented it's it can be anything and that's what what what the quality of it is I think and therefore also I asked about what how how is that that a a introduction structured like it's clearly also an artistic project
um and that leads us to the question what can what can art do like it can a instead of a having to a argue through a a critique of vibrational ontologies and so on art can do something else art has to be um it can be dubious it has it doesn't have to be clear and many of the texts are not that clear that maybe telling a short story or or or just elaborating on on an idea and and and and that's the cool thing about it like it's it's really trying to open up a sonic thinking as not in the way I think Jonathan Stern meant it in his text, but going beyond that.
How can we push the limits of what sound can do and what sonic thought can do? I'm just curious because in this introduction though, it seems quite often like, and I haven't read the book, so I think you know, qualified the claim of that, but it seems like there's like an underlying hermeneutics of this kind of speculation at the same time, which then sort of like reinscribes the representational form onto this kind of speculative claim about what sound can do. And this is some curious as to whether it is really thinking through sound or whether it's, you know, like, giving an interpretation to kind of sound in a sort of
like representational way. In which case, you know, we end up with kind of the same problem that we had previously with even with the New Materialist stuff where there's like a lot of implicit sort of biases or whatever that come into the kind of subjective determinations and you know like maybe that's fine you know I don't see that as necessarily being a problem but then the question becomes like how do we negotiate between those what sort of which then almost like implies a kind of systematicity or a need for something like more like uh like tractable or something I don't know um but yeah I just like I was thinking because you because of the stuff with Mark Fisher and this the sort of like ontology and stuff like the way in which this sort of implies a phase locked kind of
like it is making an ontological claim and it also makes a claim around like the kind of phase locked trajectory that we're on based on a kind of like the kind of ramifying consequences of like prior events and decisions. I'm wondering whether that ontology itself is kind of constructed by a kind of an assumed form of power or lack of power to be able to overcome the existing challenges in the sense of like Mark Fisher and people like Friedrich Jameson, who he's quite influenced by, always harking back to this kind of revival of popular modernism. Well, maybe is this structure of thinking as a way of overcoming that kind of problem that they've identified in terms of like, you know, the sort of ontological kind of
thesis or whatever. Is this not in a sense kind of like a conceited form of like subjective, you know, is this not the thing that needs to be overcome in a sense is sort of like the question. And I think it like goes into media, questions around media, like, you know, how do we, how do these sounds become distributed? And like, how do we, yeah, I don't know, like there's a lot of things I guess but yeah yeah yeah well I don't think that they necessarily want to like of course it's it's it is a collection of texts so there's no one direction they all trying to go
so i think that that a humanistic interpretation of some in some of the texts is very valid and some of them are trying to avoid that in the same time um so so it's yeah in that way it's not it's it's a it's a book written by several authors like many authors um and that way it's it's it's trying to do a lot of different things. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but it's like when I'm reading it, I read very fragmented and as an artwork
more than a theory book. And, well, I also come from the art university and there we understand partly art as theory. So a way of thinking, a way of gaining new knowledge, which is opposed to systematic philosophical thinking that what James might call philosophy with a capital F, with a capital P, sorry. and personally I think that's a really good way to approach philosophy and do new thinking but that's also just my world
also sorry can i take the please thanks i don't know if i can totally answer to end but i think i can contribute to some point to what you were asking about and i think there is this kind of discipline which is called media archaeology which is they have done a lot of references towards that kind of revival of media and nostalgia towards certain media devices or way of thinking about media but they insist
on they insist on this of the insistent their contribution in understanding this kind of ontology, like understanding this past presence going on in this time, which is not linear in the way media, but also we can say sound or the sonic event evolves. So they insist on that they suggest better. better. They suggest this non-linear way of considering media evolution or media presence. And I can relate it to the ontology conception, to the way it produces this entanglement of
temporalities. And in that way, I think it can be, this ontology conception has a constructive capacity towards arts and also towards the way we make history or on another other ontologies maybe so i don't know if i can answer to this subjectiveness thing but maybe this all of this kind of revivalism ontologies that go on in to the unsound but also to to the media spectrum. Maybe some of these issues have been addressed from the media archaeologists. I think it's a very nice way of making interpretations of ontology, a way of making
interpretations towards that direction. I don't know if that helped. Thank you very much. Like we are slowly approaching the end of today's session. I would really like to hear some of you who have not been saying so much for the last like five, seven minutes. five, seven minutes. Of course, it can be related to what Tiara said, but also other comments on what we've been going through today.
Well, it's also okay not to speak. I will not force anyone. Okay, so any, any, from, all of you any final comments on on today's session. Like if there anything that is unclear or we we could discuss a bit. I'm very open for that. Otherwise, we'll talk about the sessions that are coming. um maybe i i i thought i'd give someone i've spoken a lot so i was a bit reluctant to speak
up again but anyway like um maybe think i was just thinking in like an audio metaphorical terms of um this idea of like like um ontology and how um like this nostalgia functions as like a recursive signal and maybe like I was I just keep thinking of like audio is like a really like effective metaphor for it because like I mean like it's almost like there's an echo that keeps like like losing strength but like keeps recurring back and when you think about like fashion or culture of things that happen in cycles there's like you know like what they say like maybe like a 30-year cycle like so like you know the 90s like a lot of the tropes of the 60s were back into fashion and and so forth and then like what we're seeing is like this kind of like echo but that's
slowly like kind of losing losing like um losing like strength so it's like um like if we view recursion and this like nostalgic kind of pattern it's like you i think the audio metaphor maps onto it quite i don't know if that sounds like a really like obvious thing to say but anyway Well, maybe for to some, it might be obvious, but like that is also part of what we can understand as a sonic metaphors or sonic thinking. Maybe that wouldn't be that clear if we were not using the sonic metaphors in a way, not saying that they are better or worse than any other words or concepts.
but I think that's one of the key arguments as well from Jonathan Stern, that this kind of vocabulary is useful to think sonically like that, like it's echoing, it's reverbering, it's resonating. I think that's a very valid point to think like that, And I think it's also a good way to engage with sound studies text that's trying to not just read the words of resonating, for example, as a concept that is just the word as we understand it in our everyday life,
but trying to really engage with what does it mean that something is resonating or something is rhythmical. I know we talked a bit about Deloitte Gattari and they did that. They took the rhythmical event of rhythmicity and developed into a concept of thought. And what is rhythmical? like if you read a thousand plateaus in on on the refrain um they they are developing what what is what is this recurring sound is that a rhythmical um and is is the marching band the most rhythmical
thing you could imagine and they say no it's the opposite uh the marching band is the the least rhythmical. And now I'll not go into details with that, but that's another way of thinking what is rhythm, another way of understanding something through sound, something through a musical event. So, yeah, we can individually talk about that book later on if you want to do that. Now we have kind of come to the end of the session. I'll just check the presentations.
So next week, one subscribed, Aladdin as a presenter and Enda as a responder. Maybe you all would go back to the document. See, there are also some that are very crowded, especially Steve Goodman, Lawrence Abdelhamdan. I don't know if one or two would jump to one of the less crowded seminars. I would say that I will let that be open until,
yeah, I will just let it be open until tonight. Or yeah, for me tonight is, yeah, it's now. But yeah, tomorrow morning, my time Berlin, which is in, I don't know, 12 hours. I will close it down then. And then I hope that it's kind of sorted out. And then we could just go with that. I hope that this has been interesting, the introduction part, and that you have gotten something from it. And I hope that you are looking forward to the next sessions. If you have any final questions regarding the whole seminar or any comments on today, then please let me know now.
Yeah. I just had one for the presentations. Are you going to send out more text for us to present on for next time? Or are they already up somewhere? I just received the text from Leslie during our session, I saw. So we'll talk about it in a minute. Great. Then, oh, that's a question from Sharon. I signed up for this course quite late in the day and wasn't sent any of the readings. Who should I check with to make sure I have them for next week? I think there is a Google Drive folder, is that right? With the readings. And you will also get an email for every seminar.
So I'll make sure that everyone has all the readings also from today. Yeah. Good. All right, then, thank you for joining in. And I'm looking very much to the coming sessions. And we'll see each other on Sunday.