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.

Fear Mechanics

Back to anarchism. I was engaged in anarchist activism in Amsterdam back in 2019. It’s interesting to return to this way of thinking through the critique of our university…

Dominant culture offers a “pacification of fear” and a sense of order to chaos. By reducing our subjectivity and a sense of freedom with the world, structures of power are unquestioned by our intellectual and sensual capacties. Therefore we must sedate sensuality, and the longing waves of subconcious desires for freedom, to participate blindly with dominant culture. We depend on external definitions to cope. This is existential politics. A blissful ignorance of our own shadow that fuels production lines.

Ursula LeGuinn writes a similiar theory in her fantasy novels “Earthsea”, where wizards are chased by their own shadows, and some pursue immortality and imbalance the ecosystem. Earthsea as the manifesto for critical awakening.

Fear and agency. How responsible are we for our “fear of chaos”? Generational poverty is traumatic, along with slavery and other kinds of oppression. How do we understand the role of fear in structures of power in relation to inequality?

Atoms

Final notes on “Mushroom at the End of the World” by Anna Tsing and meanderings on atomisation ~ privatisation in university.

“The edges of alientation is the latent commons.” Latent commons are not exclusively human homelands. They are mutualistic entanglements. Neither can they redeem us, they are the ‘here and now’. “The ruin glares… but luckily there is still companionship. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons…” Tsing again returns to the basics of ecology, those principles of interdependence and entanglement, with new language. She teaches unlearning of the popular ecology’s utopianism by making it clear that we live in the ‘here and now’, that the ruin is present. With this perspective we can also begin to notice the vibrancy of entangled life in its complexity. Nature is not a far away painting, but ever present.

Capitalism as translation: lifeworlds ~ lively production (local, cultural) ~ total commodification (alienation , disembedded from local connections) + centralized profit ~ commodity (connected to new lifeworlds, memories)

A commodity is only fully alienated for a temporary amount of time as it passes between lifeworlds.

Alienation is being “disembedded from local connections.” Tsing continues to discuss scholarship and it’s commodification, meaning we can bring this conceptual framework of alienation to our university experience.

The collaborative work is privatised: atomised. Scholarship transforms to an invididual process of personal timelines, projects, assessment critera and specialisation. Collective knowledge production (the latent commons) continues, being a primary goal of academia, but it’s process becomes slower and unceremonious. Lifeworlds are seperated and mediated by bureaucratic communication and administration. Connection is sparse as individuals less and less relate to one another’s practices and specialisations. Course work is independently lead. Humans scuttle off after class to return to a piling tower of virtual labour. As lifeworlds (humans) lose connection due to bureaucratic excess, unionising and solidarity become more difficult. Solidarity requires listening and understanding, qualities that vapourise in the age of uploading (virtualisation). Therefore bureaucratic excess and virtualisation become a tool of university management to build power.

The new radical act is connection and intimacy. A radical act in our university could look like collaboration outside of the curriculum. Physical interactions and communication can provide understanding across fire lines. Connection is radical because it arrives us to intimacy, which soothes the nervous system and slows down production. Connection does not mean we will necessarily transform the accelerating privatisation of our universities, but it means we could subvert this space of alienation for our own needs and benefit. Power dissipates when it loses our attention.

hope and fun

demo album

6 tracks so far, this is my sound submission for the Contemporary Issues in Sound Art module. I have been writing these compositions over the last few months in alignment with my theoretical research.

The project ‘hope and fun’ is a development in my compositional style from my previous reflective ambient music towards a hyper kind of dance music. oops, everything is dance music! This music has an accelerated form that could encourage latching on to with movement.

This kind of hyper music I have been writing for the last two years for live performances, but I have never formed them into finished compositions. The music is full of earworms and frazzlement, and I avoided exploring it for a while. Writing this music was somehow isolating and difficult in the way the compositions consumed my mental states into the frying pan, but I was excited about what was coming out so I continued to write. It felt like an amplification of my own frazzled states, trying to hold onto the heart while going through stress and metamorphosis in the fast pace of London.

The holding of the ‘heart’ is a kind of longing. The heart could be a grouping of those evolutionary technologies of compassion, solidarity and awe that formed over millienium of collective, collaborative living. The longing is a part of our desire for those feelings of connection and love between humans and non-humans. It’s an idealism that is represented through ‘naivity’ of melody and la la la.

My third little album was called ‘The Longing Waves’ which I released in 2020. I wrote this on the liner notes: “What can be heard, what is left, is the longing waves, these ruminations, little rumbles under a solid plastic world. Sometimes they flower into a piece of art that renders heart, or a little smile; a ‘connection’. With enough ‘connection’, we can collectively realize this destructive truth: that we are looking in the same direction. The truth that will destroy our plastic nests, and to reveal a love nest underneath. Remove these shackles to a love nest! It’s here, to be embraced, expressed and to be danced with.” It sounds so naive! I feel the power of naivity and idealism. I also believe my viewpoint has changed through recent theoretical research, and destructive forces become sonified in my music.

I have always had simple melodies running around in my head like earworms. When I started composing I tried to make them sound more cool but it didn’t work! Now I embrace my simple naive melodies and believe in their potential.

I have not wrote about my compositional process while writing this music, because it somehow interupts the process. I wanted to avoid contextualising this music, but now it is interesting to reflect and notice how my compositions related to my research. My questions about accelerationism and the idea to inject some kind of ethics into accelerated music were explored through my creative practice.

I will write some words on each composition.

the bridge ~ The title is inspired by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s concept of the bridge, “The bridge over the abyss of the absence of meaning can take many forms: falling in love, tenderness, collective creation, hallucination, and movement.” The composition goes through a change halfway through the track, where previous elements are deconstructed to form a joyful opening, a happy together frazzlement. The beginning is sort of pensive, so to me it feels like the opening of a question. Perhaps a friendship over a question, and I wrote it after meeting a new friend in Portugal with whom I shared resonant visions and awe. The composition incorporates melodies from old Irish music, and also percussive form from trap music. I was excited with this because I am interested in exploring my Irish heritage with reforming elements into contemporary music form. I was excited that I made a slappy beat with hearts floating around it!

side eye w bird ~ I write most of my compositions at my desk in my bedroom, which has a window above that faces the garden. In moments of intensity I would catch eye contact with a bird. I imagined we could share similiar angst for an environment that we both share. This track explores that ‘interspecies heart’ or something.

donkey drop ~ another track that explores longing within other species. Where I grew up in Ireland there was a donkey who had a field to themself. I always felt a strong longing from donkeys. I thought it would be fun to incorporate animal voices into the drop form that resembles USA dubstep, injecting a wholesome story into a popular form. Thinking of post-irony, holding our attraction and repulsion to ‘commercial’ or ‘pop’ music as a sort of post-hegelian dialectic. Making it funny and making a point.

another day grr’reidhlean ~ the most frazzled. Reidhlean is gaelic for a field for dancing and games. The rooster melody is another expression of earthly longing. To me this track represents a rising out of depressive states. Sometimes people think I am happy all of the time because my music sounds ‘joyful’! I imagine joyful aesthetics, like hope and fun, may not be ignorant towards regimes of power and violence, but could be a way to explore that darkness while holding an ideal. The claim for hope and fun is directly related to my experiences in London club scenes that lean towards aesthetics of nihilism and ‘darkness’. People want to be cool, but maybe we hide vulnerability! This track has little screams between the drops that could suggest another day of stress. Maybe this is a form of sonic vaccination with added hope vitamins.

dance without organs ~ referring to the Deleuzian concept of a body without organs; the potential of a body without organisational structures. Dancing has always been a great metaphor to me, in how subconcious desire could interact with a changing environment. A world in motion requires movement into it. A fluid jiggly self releases stress and offers connection. Sometimes I have very happy accelerated states where things rush into place. The sound design and music reflects this merging with and fluidity with an environment.

hey end 🙂 ~ I wrote this song a while ago. Another song about forcing joy. There is no escape, so let’s have fun! I was definitely reading about the end of the world when I wrote this. I thought, if the end of the world has already happened, if the cracks are glowing, then let us seize the opportunity. Collapse is a terrible opportunity. New ideas are possible when we become disullioned with violent paradigms. This song utilises acceleration to spread a message of naive longing, through the cracks, into the rushed body. I felt very inspired by my amazing friends who would create joy in difficult moments.

The music has expressed my desire to fit my style into more popular forms. When I built my acoustic sculpture for the exhibition, I felt a moment of disconnect with what was happening around me in music scenes and cultural production. The calling for slowness and ecological intimacy felt like it dissipated into thin air with no one there to hear it. I felt a desire to form my music into an accelerated form that coud reach more people. When I play this music live some people enjoyed and danced to it. People said it made them happy. In regards to my essay on sonic vaccination, I feel like this music parallels the parodoxes of our modes of liberation. I am involved in many harmful infastructures to try to make my messages about longing, hope, love, vulnerability. So many things are problematic! I couldn’t deny my longing to make this music. I hope to release it with a label this year, and that it may go on to inspire some kind of hope or heart or something.

A note on vulnerability, the sound design in many tracks sort of represents and frazzlement, things falling apart, being a bit clumsy! The melodies call out like a vulnerable heart. Being vulnerable towards something harsh. I want to express the idea that its ok to feel tension and stress in contemporary life and fall over sometimes! We don’t need to march around like bosses.

Immersive Arts

Ancient immersivity.

I organised group listening workshops before a performance evening in Spanners, Brixton from my collective Roca. We thought by meeting outside in a park and then walking to the club together it would increase the intimacy potential of our event. This footage is from our 3D immersive surround sound system!

Seb, Asia, Teo, Jané, Weronika, Magda and myself

Last Summer we organised multiple outdoor events with a radio system to transmit and amplify live performances without needing a lot of equipment. For this event it was not possible to set up the radio system so I thought we could do some shared activities together. For this activity, one or more people are instructed to stand with their eyes closed. The rest of the group circle around them and make sounds.

At the beginning of the activity we were quite playful and wanted to surprise eachother. It was clear that the soundmaking position was as stimulating for the participants as the listener postion. I felt it was so are that I improvise with my voice, that I didn’t know what to expect when my body tried to make a new sound. People enjoyed playing together and making eachother laugh.

The participants had different reactions in the listener position. People quickly became overwhelmed when there were lots of soundmakers moving quickly around the space. It became clear that the soundmakers should intend a calm experience for the listener. When they slowed down and made quieter sounds, the listeners were able to focus more on the subtleties and the wider soundscape beyond, bringing a calm sensuality of space and motion. Most people enjoyed the quieter sounds more. If I organise this activity again I would like to add an instruction for quietness or subtley, perhaps as a place to arrive at or throughout the activity.

I noticed people would be curious to ask how it went for the listener and discuss the process together. When I was the listener, I felt a playful connection and warmth from the soundmakers. With the right intentions I imagine this practice to build intimacy between people, their environment and their own bodies. I am very interested to pursue research into group soundmaking and listening practices in my final year!

While I am engaged in terrible research about the end of humanity, doing activities like this make me feel hopeful about what simple practices can do for our sense of togetherness and environment. I am interested in how elaborate and abstract theory (end of the world) can inform simple accessible practices for constructive purposes (new worlds :D). The end of the world as we know it means we have an opportunity to imagine and connect in new ways.

This is my passionate belief in what immersivity can mean and a critique of the term’s usage in virtual reality development.

Frigid Happiness

Further notes on “The Soul At Work” by Bifo

In this chapter Bifo forms a great analysis of the affects of cognitive labour on our bodies, psyches and social relationships. Bifo loosely determines cognitive labour as paid employment and freelancing “creative” work that involves the processing and communicating of information. It seems that our general behaviours on digital media for communication and entertainment cause similar affects. The distinction between “pleasure” activities and “labour” activities is put into question.

Bifo describes how the competitive nature of cognitive labour isolates us from each other. We see other workers as competition and therefore we lose solidarity. Bifo claimes that due to automation of manual labour, it has become possible to reduce the entire production process to exchange of information. Virtual information is expanded towards infinity driven by the profit motives of the economic machine. Survival and competition becomes a semiotic production of symbols no longer based on sufficiency but infinitely expanding due to the infinite capacity of virtual information and the profit incentives of this production.

Bifo descibes the destructive nature of cognitive labour: “An infinite velocity of exposure to signs percieved as vital to the survival of the organism produces a perceptive, cognitive and psychic stress culminating in dangerous acceleration of all vital functions, such as breathing and heart beat, leading to collapse.”

Since cognitive workers are dependent on this labour for their own survival (duh :P) (or hm?), the signs they are exposed to are deemed crucial to this survival. What happens when the signs are changing too quickly to be able to comprehend their meaning, while chasing after them in belief of our dependence on them?

(What is our emotional dependence on social mass media?)

Bifo points out this is not an isolated individual experience. It is the formation of a collective panic, but it seems to create a feedback loop of self isolation. As we collectively panic our ability to care and support each other is weaker than the tendency to isolate and reach for the semi present connection we can recieve online.

Collective panic can lead to aggression and hate in small local bursts or in large, even national or international formations such as border policies, financial crashes and geopolitical conflicts. Bifo imagines this is not a problem that can be dealt with political persuasion or punishment by law, since it is not a political problem but cognitive stress based on the “infosphere’s excess.”

A question emerges: How can we manage and heal cognitive stress in an ever changing environment, when our own survival seems to depend on engaging with the “infosphere’s excess” to find work and make sense of what is going on?

Bifo proposes that a priviledged “virtual class” can isolate themselves from the physical destruction through virtual spaces. “The removal of corporeality is a guarantee of endless happiness, but naturally a frigid and false one, because it ignores, or rather removes, corporeality: not only that of others, but even one’s own, negating mental labour, sexuality and mental mortality.” By spending time in virtual spaces such as social media we can remove ourselves from the physicality of the pain of other bodies and also our own. Bifo proposes we need to analyse the virtual class in corporeal, historical and social terms to rematerialise virtual lifestyles.

I would like to hypothesize a manifesto of action to be derived from Bifo’s critique. We can aim to reduce our time in digital space, which has the capacity to produce an excess of information towards infinity and therefore leads to cognitive stress. We can aim to reduce our time in specific online platforms that use manipulative algorithms to entangle our attention and emotions into more cognitive labour. While the medium of a virtual space is problematic, certain platforms can be more stressful than others in the way our survival and social ranking is semiotized through likes, followers and instant messaging. These platforms encourage a competitive nature and lead to as much isolation as their proposed connective capactities. We can integrate embodiement practices into our lifestyles to reduce cognitive stress. If a person does not feel safe to engage with their body there are forms of therapy available to help heal towards embodiment. Of course humans have been practicing “embodiment” in different ways since recorded histories and the term is overly simplified. If we look within but particularly beyond western medical sciences we can find incredible resources for healing cognitive stress.

Another way we could collectively deal with cognitive stress could be to increase our disembodiement. Imagine transhumanist biotechnologies that reduce the tension between the human and the machine, junk media that destimulates our imagination and desire, and hyperstimulating experiences that work as a vaccine for cognitive overload. I imagine these already exist in many forms, whether it is hardcore club experiences as vaccination, netflix as sedation or developments in immersive reality technologies that reduce our sensorial seperation between the real and the virtual. I think that these behaviours can be seen coping mechanisms for our current worlds. They can help each of us in different ways, but we may have confused these states of “frigid happiness” as something to strive for rather than a temporary release from suffering.

Not everyone has access to frigid happiness. Neither has all manual labour been automated. Bifo has made a sturdy critique by fixating on a certain part of the labour force, but what does it mean about other humans who are outside of the “virtual class”? I am confused by his projections of a collective psychosocial collapse from cognitive labour when many human bodies are still carrying out manual labour all around the world, without which the virtual class could not survive. Why is Bifo fixating on this class of humans when they represent a small minority? He writes “I’ll focus on the most innovative and specific forms (of labour), since they represent the trend that is transforming the whole of production.” I guess Bifo discusses what he can relate to, which reveals the limitations of his point of view and future predictions.

I am also carrying out my research on cognitive labour as a form of cognitive labour, disembodied from the mass of infastructure and other bodies that makes it possible for me to type, read, compose on my DAW, eat food and generally survive day to day.

Active Positioning

An exploration on forming a definition for the heart/humanity, and notes on “The Soul At Work” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.

If the heart is impure, contaminated by otherness, then what could it possibly signify? What means a story of connectedness when alienation is constant? It seems the story of the heart is ripe with problems, bordering religious. It needs to be made flexible!

But is some idea of essence, of humanity, necessary in order to prove the wrongness of exploitation? Humanity is in evolution and therefore remains undefined in it’s present moment. The recent steps we make are unsettled and barely noticeable while our technological development makes it seem our evolution is accelerating. When “humanity” is totally subjective, then a total submission to machine intelligence becomes possible. Is this evolution of humanity or something else?

Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher from Berlin wrote this in 1964: “The liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of (hu)man.” I am fascinated by the idea of a fetter of liberation: I feel this is an essential point we need to make towards our techno-optimistic cultures. To fetter, to chain, to restrain…

Bifo connects this to our economic model: “The economy, like a general semiotic cage, forbids the development of the potential still existing in the material and intellectual structure of technology.” The incredible infastructrucal development of our technologies loses any potential of radical social liberation due to the economic model they depend on. While capital “diminishes labour time in the necessary form” it tends “to increase it in the superflous form.” Only through superflous labour activity can we value an excess of production.

So through semiotization, a capitalist realism perhaps, our technological development can only function under a specific system of value making, where it loses possibility of total social liberation. Partial social liberation is essential to foster an emotional dependence with new technology. This emotional dependence will supply the new value making system with endless energy (superflous activity). The heart is entangled with the machine. I don’t believe we will be satiated through further development, but it seems like an inevitable cycle of longing and curiousity. Perhaps the only hope is restriction of possibility due to the collapse of material infastructures and semiotic production that leaves a gap for new thinking and new constructions. I imagine this collapse is already occuring so we don’t need to accelerate destruction but start imagining and building our healthier societies together.

To make the heart spectral… if the heart is an active position towards our encounters, then it does not represent a lost human essence but rather an idea of our potential. An active position depends on what is around us, a way of being that evolves with the surroundings, not lost but unwritten, capable of being wrote collectively, and wrote again.

Knowledge production: Human knowledge is not revealing/excavating truth, it is instead a feedback between our active comprehension that reacts and acts into our encounters, being formed by and forming with our environment. “TRUTH” is transformed as it is discovered, meaning that knowledge is produced. Let’s imagine a vulnerable encounter, a proclomation to love! Imagining might transform what becomes possible.