Month: November 2021

After reading “In The Blink Of An Ear: Towards A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art” by Seth Kim-Cohen I have passed the irreversible step of injected knowledge; my house is bigger now. The house metaphor visualises bricks as knowledge. I have placed bricks, removed others that were quite old, resisted losing those dear to me. Certain bricks are large and sit in my new house, engaging with the world through it’s windows. Like I invite an interior designer to my house, I invited a theorist into the framework of my mind. Passively we dance with said theorist, imagining a sense of control but if I read another book my house would look different… However! the building process shows my interaction as a reader: what bricks I choose to place and where I place them. Maybe the garden remains in forever childhood. Spirit bushes glow and remind peace during the exhausting building process.

Seth Kim-Cohen assaults the reader with different anecdotes as evidence for the primary idea of the book. I felt convinced by the end as my confirmation bias was changed in the first half of the book.

The book is an examination of the tendencies towards essentialism in sound arts, or “sound-in-itself” as Cohen writes. He says essentialism is “based on faith in a fundamental stratum of experience on some essential ontological state, a metaphysics.” Percieving sound-in-itself is the attempt to reset the cognitive machinery to an imaginery baseline state. Particularly in sound arts, theorists have had the tendency to perceive sound as directly reflecting the real, or being the real. However Cohen claims that our relationship with sound is based on meaning and context.

Cohen is rejecting the tendency towards sound-in-itself for an expanded situation. He rejects the works of Lopez and Kubitsch that insinuate a purity to sound as if the listener is getting closer to a reality past the corrupt framework of culture. As I am reading, I am wondering about the value of these debates. What material results does this theoretical debate have on the world? Does it only resonate within s certain field? For me, this is a question we should engage with when arting; the question of relevance and political implication. A side note: my ability to see the relevance is construed and of course if someone is willing to write a book they must believe in it’s value. I will explore a personal point that makes me feel relevance in anti-essentialism. Anti-essentialism is an anti-primitivist argument, since primitivism is a belief in a harmony of human life that existed pre-industrialisation. Pre-industrialisation is pre-oppression and the rest of violence is natural! Wiki definition:“Anarcho-primitivism is a political ideology that advocates a return to non-“civilized” ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification.”

I was interested in anarcho-primitivism and doing political work in Amsterdam. I am grateful to be pulled away from one ideology into a new one; my house feels bigger, or I feel better in my house. I felt the lack of converation around gender troubling in primitivist circles, given the transphobia of the prominent anarcho-primitivst group “Deep Green Resistance.” They see the Christian construct of two sex species as an essential truth. They see the gender as a topping, chocolate or stawberry sauce. It is social constuct and therefore false. It has failed to see sex as a social construct.

One prominent example of the transphobia comes from Derrick Jensen, one of the founding members of DGR, responding to a DGR member asking him to clarify their position on transgender people. Jensen wrote :

Dear All, I have no ego investment in the following. I liked what I said to Julia or whatever his name was who wanted to join DGR: You are not a woman. You are a man who believes he is a woman. Thank you, Derrick

Interesting! Transphobia clothed in a radical political stance, one that has failed to understand that sex itself, the man-woman binary, is an epistemoligcal falsehood, a socially constructed violent regime that built our socioeconomic structures of today. For DGR to ignore this means their perception of reality is limited: the DGR framework is narrow enough to conceal hate and mask it as truth. It wouldn’t be so awkward if they didn’t claim to speak the truth….

isms everywhere, anti-essentialism for example.

Is the house the intellect? Is that all that we are? Cohen presents language as the base of our being, which could be criticized as another form of essentialism. What is beyond the house? Cohen would say that the belief in a reality beyond text and our personhood is a false belief; that we cannot escape ourselves.

We cannot ignore an object’s intersection with other elements of the world or situation: it’s setting, production, perception, impermanence. The borders of the defined object are conceptual borders: when examined closely they are more transient, since positionality has no centre. Coneptual art is often an exploration of these borders, with artwork that has no central point. It is a hole to direct attention to what is beside or additional to the work.

An expanded situation is necessary in the perception of art and sound as a way to explore our idealogical presumptions. The necessity is proven with the mistakes of DGR. The situation can be boundlessly explored but requires work, since text is formed and applied, and ignorance needs to be proven wrong with hard earned proofs. There is no essential wisdom, only the discussion of knowledge – marching forwards – towards a truth but never making it. I feel like we don’t go forwards, because in the attempt to progress we create new issues. It feels more like, a shifting house, one without any truth at all, just a lot of signs pointing to the sky that we will never know.

Richard Phoenix is self-described as a music facilitator and primarily works with people with learning disabilities. He began his lecture by fleshing out some issues of language, for example, that ‘disabled person’ can be more appropriate than ‘person with a disability‘. ‘Disabled‘ insinuates that the person is disabled by the world around them – the design is not universal – real people have been forgotten in the design process. An architect had a certain image of a person… When we design or produce something, we manifest our image of a person as the user. When we are not in contact with disabled people, we forget these people as potential users of our designs.

We may be in a constant participatory design mode of the spaces we inhabit. Beyond the architect we must ask about the silence in the room: who is not here?

The diversity campaigns have yet to include people with learning disabilities.

Language can be exclusive. Richard Phoenix gave the word pedagogy as an example. We could often use the words teaching and learning instead and they are more widely understood. So why would we use the word pedagogy? Do we intend to exclude with our behaviour? The academic has an inner child that was misunderstood and hurt, a degree of seperation is necessary!

A part of my narrative for being queer goes something like this: I was rejected from the world, pushed to the peripheral; and I constantly seek an outsider position to maintain my understanding of myself. The attention and hate that I recieved as a child has been sculpted into a distrust and skepticism. The bitter air of rejection gives me access into queer community power stations where we convert the struggle into power, self awareness and body work.

Just like the academic can manifest their pain into an exclusive intellectualism, the queer can liberate themselves in spaces free from hate and those social inhibitions such as sobriety. Richard Phoenix makes a point in his manifesto “DIY As Priviledge” that the ability to be part of outsider spaces is a priviledge; that the ability to reject mainstream society is based on an ability to be independent. Beyond class, race, gender and sexuality, independence defined by leisure time, cultural capital and abilties is also affected by neurodivergent and disabled people. Some people can not be independent because of their needs. I guess, as we liberate ourselves, we could think of those left behind in the miserable pool of normativity, neither in nor out.

How can we help remove barriers? Be patient, and listen. The social model of disability is that the society, environment and culture creates barriers. A social barrier reflects the way we think: examination of the barrier includes self-reflection. “Using privilege to dismantle privilege, one of the best ways to use your voice is to amplify voices that aren’t being heard”. Be patient and listen, reflect, amplify. Put oneself into uncomfortable situations. As we come across difference we wonder, why now and not before? The unpeeling of the plastic layers is a slow unending process.

I’m thinking of the phrase: “Liberate us so we can liberate you.”

The bianzhong is an ancient Chinese instrument consisting of bronze bells to be played melodically. In 1978 a set of bells were unearthed in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng. They were made in 433BC. The bells were placed in the tomb to be unplayed, silent, hidden. This use of an acoustic instrument resonates with contemporary sound works. The symbolism of silence is frequent in ancient Chinese culture.

In 800AD there lived Han-Shan and Shih-Te, two hermits living in the T’ien-t’ai Mountains of Chekiang Province, in Eastern China. They were reclusive radicals indulging in the joys of living, with a mind of Taoism. Ascetic, zen, metaphysical exploration, immersed in nature… Hundreds of poems were found carved onto stones and trees and are associated with Han-Shan and Shih-Te. Even if they never existed they come to symbolise an aesthetic solitude that is fundamental to the poetry of zen. Interestingly Gary Snyder was one of the first to translate their poems into English, who is described as a a poet and an “environmental activist with anarchoprimitivist leanings.” And the two old anarchist mountain bums often wrote about sound and silence, and we see a long history of environmentalism in Sound Arts.

“Anarcho-primitivism is a political ideology that advocates a return to non-“civilized” ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification.”

The mountain poets were in love with the natural world. Here is one of Han Shan’s poems.

Thirty years in this world, I wandered ten thousand miles, By rivers, buried deep in grass, In borderlands, where red dust flies. Tasted drugs, still not Immortal, Read books, wrote histories. Now I’m back at Cold Mountain, Head in the stream, cleanse my ears.

There is a sense of purity, beyond knowledge or drugs or searching for_. Just the sound of the stream, “cleanse my ears”, washing the human condition of an impurity. The primacy of sound in Chinese poetry has had global influence. In Snyder’s book “Regarding The Wave” he connects englightenment to hearing, sound waves as a way in, inspired by the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Kuan Yin, who’s name translates to “regarding the sound waves.”

It appears that Taoism and Buddhism promote attention beyond the visual to include the sonic environment, and therefore sound in China has been listened to. Phonography is popular in China. It is a desciption of laws of the human speech, or sounds uttered by the organs of speech. Yao writes that Chinese phonography celebrate the domain of human affairs, the “non-utopian, the this-worldy, the social, the interpersonal, the personal, the bodily…” How wonderful! A celebration of the flawed humanity we engage from within, the noise that has spread, an admiration that doesn’t seem to match Western anarcho-primitivism, or Western phonography which apparently has embedded the conceptual dichotomy of man vs nature.

I’m curious about these relationships and a dysfunction: a poetry tradition acknowledging the beauty of natural sound, of nature and peace, hermitage, that has perhaps been interpreted in a Western audience as a utopia to return to, but current Chinese phonography is celebrating techno-urban human affairs. Snyder was friends with Keruoac and they tried their best to dissolve the ego to transcend to the top of the mountain. How the West struggles to interpret Eastern philosophy! Errors of translation?

How is Ancient China being interpreted, anywhere? It’s certainly mentioned throughout the article, Sound Art in China. David Toop doesn’t go back more than a few decades, and oat milk is everywhere now. Running forwards the West will grab anything. Running away?

I thought it was awful to only imagine China as something to compare/contrast to the “West”. But then I cannot approach it another way, there are barriers such as language and conditionment. I cannot get the West or China out of my head! I wonder does the technical process of applying nationhood to sound work?