Notes on “Geopolitics & The Anthropocene: Five Propositions for Sound” by Anja Kaangieser, and discussion of a walking practice I will incorporate into my audio essay for “Sound Studies and Aural Cultures”.
Anja Kaangieser is an incredible geographer and sound artist, bringing creative methods to the investigation of space and politics.
How can we explore our ways of knowing and inhabiting the world? Kaangeiser proposes that sound is a provocation for geopolitical thinking and practices. Geopolitics discuss the intersection of politics and geography. I am interested specifically in the theories around place, territory and listening with. Listening can be a way of knowing and inhabiting space!
Kaangeiser quotes science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin: The “cold volcanic poetry of the rocks, each one a word spoken how long ago by the earth itself in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.” Le Guin personifies the experience of volcanic rock as a voice, a speaker, suggesting it can represent qualities of “space” like community, solitude… This way of receiving the world, by listening with matter over immense time scales, is a sensibility that enhances our ecological awareness. Jane Bennett has coins this as “vibrant materialism.” She writes in “Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things”, “The image of dead… matter feeds human conquest.” Awakening to the active forces of matter around us, human and nonhuman alike, such as the slow moment of rock, can perhaps change our view of that matter from “dead” and “resource” to having value and experience beyond our comprehension.
In a similar way Kaangeiser writes that we should be open to imperceptibility as a slower and more reflective form of activism, to understand and deal with “gradual and less visible processes”. Bifo says “Without passivity, without a negative capability… there isn’t any creative imagination.” Listening can bring us closer to imperceptibility. How can we listen to these subtle processes, and build a sensitivity to the silence, noise and complexity of inequalities around us?
Specifically I am interesting in group walking and listening practices where we can explore spaces with an intention of noticing subtle and imperceptible process. I imagine this approach of noticing imperceptibility is not to translate the subjectivity of sound into singular events and meanings, but allowing the imperceptibly to remain slightly in the unknown. Kaangeiser says that the ways sound is translated and interpreted needs skepticism. Translation is a way to institutionalise knowledge and can be violent in this process. This violence is described by Kaangieser as an asymmetry of ownership within our institutions of knowledge the limitations of translation. Listening practice can help us recognise this violence inherent to knowledge production. We can listen to the subtleties and unknown of what is happening around us without immediately objectifying that experience with our little knowledge factory. Little bodies converting sensory information into text. Big bodies with worlds of their own.
How can we encourage this way of listening through a guided walking practice? I imagine navigation can be a way to re-engage with imperceptibility: how, when we need to find our way, we start looking more around us. I have been practicing walking around the city without my smart phone, using hand drawn maps and engaging with information on bus stop signs and physical maps around London. I have come to feel that this method of navigation, by abstaining from digital map technologies, enhances our engagement with the space around us. This enhancement manifests through our listening too. I am imagining instructions to get people lost in a city, and listen for sounds that surprise them. This activity start with a discussion, or a paper text, that might stimulated an openness to imperceptibility and an intention to listening inequality, ecocide, colonialism or other understands of power.
I was walking with friends last Sunday around Canary Wharf. My friends curated this walk with accompanying speeches in different spots around the area, where we learned about the colonisation of time, the colonisation of the thames, and the replacement of labour with instrumentalisation. These heavy and abstract theories fuelled by anticapitalist critique, were softened by the fact of us being together, outside and exploring. I felt very inspired by this practice, as a way to digest theory and relate it to place, and specifically to recognise our ability to enjoy and inhabit these alienating spaces with our social skills (and loveeee). Without stepping outside with a group of people, Canary Wharf on paper would be missing these social elements of connection and friendship.
So the practice I am outlining will be done in groups so us sad anti-capitalists can uplift each other while holding on to critique and searching for alternatives. It will begin or be decorated with small texts, that stimulate critical ways of thinking. I am also thinking that participating or interacting with the space can be an empowering activity, along the lines of something like grafitti. Perhaps the participants will look for test around the city, and add their own ideas.