Year 3 – Page 3

Weaving

Thoughts in relation to my second creative project, trying to step out of contexualisation through language and start la la ing.

Erudite from oxford dictionary: having or showing great knowledge or learning. Does the erudite spread knowledge without the need to bow down and listen again, to submit themselves to the other voices of the present? Such fascinating theories can only come from isolation of the self, theories like long strings weaved in a hermitage. Does the erudite then promote isolation? Werner Herzog called the 21st century the century of solitude, due to the transformations of technology and communication. I’m learning so much on the internet, I have my own wallpaper and sounds bleeping out, I am so liberated. But there’s a tickling desire to march deeper, as if I am uncomplete. The discipline of knowledge is to go inwards into the abstraction of ideas, as if to weave a knot and bring it back to the ground. A challenge. Is it successful? Or does abstraction spawn more abstraction, as we trundle along in the “century of solitude”…

On meeting: Edging towards to abyss of meaning between us, we made a courageous attempt of bridge building, and we were highly rewarded by our actions. The bridge was not fluffed by our erudite knowledge, since we lost that as we said hello. The bridge was mediocre and fumbled into reality with a deafening hum of trauma and fantasy, the merging of our psychic fields that carry our deep histories. To connect is to be vulnerable!

Then I return to my computer, typing and weaving. My fingers are spurred by the vibes of precarity. The vibes that may spur us on to become professionals. The academic discipline is to funnel stress inwards, into our woven theories, the way we’ve transformed our desires from connection to complication, towards an edging of discovery, soothing our cope and cramming the machine of progress with ideas. Is it is the severing, the gaping hole of meaning, the lost connection of our environment, that pushes us deeper into our weaving and searching? Meanwhile our machines may not be designed on our benefit, and our efforts may end up elsewhere. What if this practice of knowledge production is dangerous in itself, when it has lost the connection with the thick present?

I love music!

Invisible Forces

Notes on “The Invisible”, chapter three of “Sonic Agency” by Brandon LaBelle.

Research for Radio Project, title tbd … (beyond the face/rallyradio)

LaBelle discusses the complex dynamics of visibily, claiming that visibility is not a pure or objective position but a constant “negotation, a conflicting procedure.” In a constant mediation of our visibility we work out how to be seen and heard, or how to disappear, using our voice, gestures, media and objects that shape and modulate our position. Our dance with visibility forms an existential stress, where unknown forces affect our desires to be seen or unseen.

LaBelle proposes a turn towards to invisible to expand our agency. By focusing on the unseen, we may become receptive to the invisible forces that mediate our visibility, and we may discover forms of agency that utilises invisibility to our own advantage or that of others.

The ACOUSMATIC is the sonic invisible: the sound without a known source. The acousmatic realm forms an ethics for beyond the face, where we listen beyond the prejudice imposed through the visual realm. The acousmatic is a generative tool to undo the embedded or reactive impulses that support normalising structures.

LaBelle proposes a methodology of listening that foregos visibility to harness to potential of the invisible, that which may make clear the “psychis tensions of desire and meaning while providing a vehicle to elating to what lies beyond what we see… To oscillate as sounds do across multiple ways of knowing and sensing.”

Bla bla bla

LaBelle’s theories are technical in their use of language and terms, yet aim to unlearn the listening body to reopen to subjectivity.

Esotericism? The word “esoteric” is defined by oxforddictionaries.com as…
Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest

The words of liberation for a few.

A few egoists defining themselves outside the normal tongue.

Or some erudites in fascination with their worlds.

The technical theory needs a few magic words to add to this pot of unlearning.

Silly sound system

An invitation to take part in a workshop and research project tackling professionalism on campus.

Theory and Introduction

We will question our listening subjectivity that channels traumatic memories and fear into defensive professionalism, which reduces our receptivity to the other and reinforces stereotypes and inequalities.

“Professionalisation… is the surveillance technique for privatisation.” Anna Tsing

Professionalism aids the privatisation tactics of neoliberal education by atomising participants’ and their fields of desires into assessment criteria and individual career paths. In our atomisation it becomes more difficult to collectivise

Sillyness aims to massage open our listening subjectivity with feelings of joy and humour, to become receptive to the other and build connection between participants. We want to reorient our field of desires to focus beyond our individual pathways towards a collective, where political action and critical knowledge production are more attainable.

question: are people comfortable with this excercise being recorded?

Instructions

Gather in a circle, under the octaphonic ring of the performance lab.
Begin with breathing and body excercise: arms up, inhale, arms down exhale.
One volunteer will place themselves in the middle of the circle and close their eyes.
The other participants will begin to circle the volunteer, making sounds with their bodies. The sounds aim towards care and humour, rather than shock or fright.
The silly sound system continues until the volunteer laughs, or has enough.

(try not to laugh sound system)

Radio Project

Demo map of Radio Project

3 hour show once a week, with four 45 minute episodes.

The four shows circulate between 8 individuals or groups connected to the university.

Each show has full agency over their topic and theme. A connection to critical analysis of neoliberal education, whether that is through direct commentary, joy or sillyness, is encouraged. 🙂

Once a week, a group of radio editors gather to compile the episodes, recording introductions between each episode for a sense of continuity. They also prepare next weeks by making sure all episodes are in the production process or planned.

Occasionally an episode is recorded live on campus and people are invited as an audience.

A variety of shows could include: Interviews,discussions, curation of sound and music pieces from students and workers in the university, DJ mixes, show by outsourced staff.

e.g Friday, 5-8pm.

Timeline (since this is an amitious project, it may take some time to build up to a three hour show)

Find a working group of editors, curators and producers who want to be involved throughout the process. Perhaps we can reach out beyond the Sound Arts course.
Establish a name, and a platform to publish the radio show.
Begin with a deadline for the first show, perhaps it is two hours long, with three episodes, with two weeks of production time.
Plan the next episode based on the previous experience.

Goals

Each episode encourages collaboration in some way, to build connections, solidarity and collectivity on campus across different boundaries eg. student/worker/tutor/manager.
Most production occurs on campus to build a sense of power and ownership in the space.
Collaboration between students and workers, building connections through the university campus.
Amplifying voices silenced in the university.
Fun and enjoyable listening experience. 😛
Learning DIY radio practices, and non-hierachical political practices in the production process.

Molecularisation

When atoms come together they become a molecule.

Notes on two meetings in LCC, between students to discuss a potential for student actions on campus, that protest the commodification of our education.

So far we have gathered twice under an undefined consensus for student action. I organised the first meeting in response to student’s frustrations during the UCU strike at the beginning of this term, to imagine that we can gather with our frustrations, build solidarity and reclaim a sense of agency and power in the oppressive structures of our university.

I fascillitated both meetings in the way that I provoked questions, told people why I wanted to gather and asked different voices in the room to give their opinions and ideas. I took this role hoping that it can inspire a non-hierarchical organising and that it will move around the group in the future.

Most students are aware of the complexity of our current situation: the reason why tutors and cleaner’s working conditions are worsening is not because of an individual person or group necessarily, as the changes in our university system are entangled in larger changes in our society, goverments, economies and technologies. In the same thkning most students did not want to immediately act with anger in a disruptive protest. They also felt that for some students the campus may offer a sense of safety that they may not get elsewhere, and that we should be cautious to disrupt this safety. A common point that arose is that we need to gather more people to get a larger sense of how students would like to act collectively.

We discussed ideas of how to calmy express ourselves on the campus space and how to gather more people. During this process some students expressed a fear for being disciplined. Does this mean the techniques of surveillance coordinated by university management are affective in their psychological manipulation of our will and belief in our agency? Potential modes of discipline have varying effects on students since some students rely on a student visa to live in the UK.

Students were also feeling like they do not want to miss out on their education by focusing on politics. This is an interesting point. Can we promote the idea that a political approach to our time in university would be full of learning and expanding a sense of who we are? If our education has been “sold” by the enterprise of UAL, then isn’t poltical agency the only way to make use of our time in university?

I am unsure about the continuation of the meetings. The second meeting had three people. Many students are dealing with depression and cognitive stress: common psychopathologies of late capitalism. Many students are working multiple jobs, and these factors make political organising much more difficult. When we are made to rely more on digital technologies for communication, means being constantly absorbed into the excessive infosphere of the internet. Based on my observation of student experiences and what students brought up in the meeting, I feel that a student action should encourage sensuality, connection and a reclaiming of the university space. To use the campus for our own purposes (performance, discussions, activities outside of the curriculum) could give us a sense of self-ownership and control in our life, while learning the power of collectivity to continue elsewhere as we learn to live and resist through the intensities of our futures.

Thick Encounters

First notes on Brandon LaBelle’s “Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance.”

Beyond the self with courage: The individual space is a space held tightly together by an increasing unknowing of the other, and whose longing is dispersed along virtual lines of communication, where the other is translated onto our portals without the need to engage with their thick complexities and differences. With virtual technologies such as applications and social mass media, we have mediated communication to protect us from the contamination of the other, a process which reinforces the fear of the other and the safety of the self. This space of safety is the metabeing; a state of being uploaded and tied to a net of virtual symbols for one’s sense of comprehending reality. Metabeing surrounds itself with amplified sounds and repeating rhyhyms of owns own liberated taste and style. The self becomes an identity. The other we push away is not only other bodies, but the chaotic becoming of our own bodies and conciousness, the sea of triggers and anxieties. Perhaps a oto simple binary, but it seems that the nimistic religions made confrontational music, and the new age ambient soothes.

To exist through listening in the thickness of worldy relations descends us from the polished safety of the self. How can we pull ourselves back to the shared space with its discomforts and shifting particularies, to organise collectively? The virtual net is not enough to hold us, and it’s ruptures will increase.

LaBelle’s Sonic Agency calls for an amplification of the objections to neoliberal systems and privatisation. He calls for a listening to the invisible and unheard, that may provoke a new sense of the public space which reveals cracks of diversity within an oppressive regime.

Listen Unknowingly

Notes on “Decolonizing Listening to Decolonize Memory” by Francis Sosta

“Decolonial memory as the ongoing project of unpacking the ways official historical records racialised, silenced and erased heritages and bodies.”

“The role of decolonial listening, the effort to listen beyond dominant and universal values to activate tractories that sound new alternatives.”

How can we promote a “disobedient relationality that questions normative academic logic?”

INTERSUBJECTIVITY:
from subject/object relation to => subject/subject relation

What practices raise intersubjectivity?

What mechanisms of research can we engage with in this project that does not reduce the other to an object? What tools (stories) can awaken a trust in our unknowing? Unknowing is to recognise the subjectivity of the other.

Cracks and Disturbances

More notes on “Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces”.

Crack capitalism theory by John Holloway. Contradicts the idea of total domination present in common discourse around capitalism. Encourages action because action is always present in our doing. Anti-capitalist radicalism is present in the most micro events of sipping tea with friends at home, or reading on a park bench. In this spectral view of change, action seems less daunting and more attainable. The weight of a world is lifted. Capital may have globalising tendencies but it’s constant cracking/excess reveals local cultures and diversity.

The Wretched of the Network Society is a healthy postcolonial critique of Technological determinism.

Postcolonialism: a critical analysis of colonial processes throughout histories and how they form our present structures of power and inequality. Engages in the complex transformations in societies both colonised and colonising. Discusses how colonial legacies lead to hybridity in identities and cultures.

Hybridization theory helps us move beyond the exlusionary and binary theories of colonialism; it recognises the blending of different cultural spaces, knowledge systems and social structures. In this thinking we must remember hybridity is entangled with domination; some populations/identities benefit in resources and power from the emerging “postcolonial” structures.

Postcolonial? could be a misleading term since colonisation and domination are ongoing processes.

In regards to technology and colonialism, this essay recognises the values embedded in modern technologies that perpetuate colonial strategies. Technological determinism theories such as that of McLuhan (the medium is the message) highlight the effect of new technological mediums in our society, such as print media or the radio, without discussing the values loaded in these technologies that perpetuate power dynamics. Many modern technologies have been developed in wealthy western countries, which give those populations more semiotic power (language capacities, identification with symbols) in the internet and popular media. at the same time, many of these technologies are produced in “post”colonized countries. Technological development perpetuates colonial power. However, the essay makes it clear that these values and power dynamics entangled in our technologies do not fully determine their capacities! Such as in “Crack capitalism” theory, humans constantly subvert the implied values and suggested routeways in which we engage with our technologies. Tech has the capacity to host radical information and activity, but their implied values should also be recognised and challenged.

Anarchist Learning Spaces

Notes on “Creating Transformative Anarchist Geographic Learning Spaces” by Farhang Rouhani

Neoliberalisation can be understood as the institutional erasure of place based identities. This kind of placelessness can be countered with a political pedagogy that encourages emplacement.

UAL functions as a neoliberal institution that interrupts the personal histories of a place through urban redevelopment. By encouraging the removal of Elephant and Castle’s old shopping centre to make way for a new university building, UAL participates in the destruction of local histories and also displaces its own students and workers by misaligning with place. It seems these managerial actions relate to the the “ivory tower syndrome” of higher education, where local knowledge is devalued in favour of empirical knowledge. If UAL was invested in local knowledge production, the managerial decisions would be different. More communication needs to happen between councils of authority and local communities in regards to urban planning. Also, the institutions that engage with gentrification on this scale need to be transformed by those who participate with the institution, such as students and workers. We must open lines of communication between us and community groups in Elephant and Castle to build a plan of action.

How can we subvert the mechanics of privatisation in UAL to regain our power? How can we use the facilities of our university as radical informal learning spaces for collective research?

Collective research – with community, local and institutional.
Across roles, students, teachers.
As an Expedition: an invitation to a diverse publics to participate in learning about under represented communities.
As an Institute: an active, collective site for the gathering of knowledge to be used to inform political action and policy.

3 steps for Anarchist pedagogy…

Humility in approaching education process
Anti-hierarchical, a mission to break down, challenge and discuss hierarchy wherever it appears
Expand what and who is worthy of learning and teaching, enlarging the set of educaitional needs

A belief in human capabilities <3

How do we integrate theory into practice of political organising, without imposing directions on to the other? How to practice anarchist pedagogy in a soft, listening approach while being actively anti-hierarchical?

Listening Pedagogies

Research question idea: Can anarchist-pedagogical theories inform listening practices to encourage anti-hierarchical and anti-professional communication, collaboration and connection within a university place?

Practice-based research will be carried out by a student/worker council, or some kind of workshops.

To do

Preliminary research in anarchist-pedagogical theories and political listening practices.
Create a listening practice in collaboration with other students in preparation for a student/worker council.
Organise student/worker council.
Request feedback in the form of recordings.
Analyse and form conclusions of research in the form of the audio-paper.