RÉSUMÉLes œuvres musicales sont à la fois multiples et audibles. Dans le domaine de l'ontologie musicale, deux des principaux modèles conçus pour expliquer ces caractéristiques des œuvres musicales sont le modèle type/instanciation et le modèle étape/continuité. Julian Dodd a soutenu que le modèle type/instanciation a un avantage sur le modèle étape/continuité, car il peut offrir une explication directe de l'audibilité des œuvres musicales en termes de catégorie ontologique. Je défends le modèle étape/continuité contre l'argument de Dodd en invoquant une relation (...) de continuité qui unifie l’œuvre. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

This paper is a polemic against the science of linguistics, to the extent that, with its relentlessly reductive methodologies, it has encouraged the marginalization of the aesthetic in literary studies—particularly in the field of metrics. The paper also suggests how this aesthetic imperative might yet be reclaimed through study of the audible reading of poetry.

A vivid, expressive, and innovative study of how the great composers in classical and rock music deploy subtle musical signs in ingenious ways.

"Since at least 1980 Godard’s cinema has been explicitly looking for (its) music, as if for its outside. In Sauve qui peut (la vie) Paul Godard hears, and asks about it, coming through the hotel room wall, and it follows him down to the lobby, but remains “off,” like Marguerite Duras’s voice, in spite of his questions, until the final sequence. At that moment, at the end of the section entitled “Music,” the protagonist is at the same time struck by (...) a car and struck by the entrance of the music into the diegetic present of the film, as the camera pans past an orchestra playing on the sidewalk while Paul fades off under the quizzical gaze of his daughter. By 2004, with Notre musique , it would seem to have taken over the whole text, for the film was announced as being about the collaboration between Godard and German record label ECM. In the context of that film it is difficult to determine both what that music is and who we are, although this discussion will try to advance a hypothesis in that regard. In fact, my main contention will be that music in Godard’s films functions as something like the absent image ( s ), not those it has lost but rather its cinema to come, what remains to be discovered and live within it, the survival of it. Not a cinema that cannot be seen, rather the image that can perhaps only be heard; and not the romantic or psychedelic dream of a synaesthetic apotheosis either, rather the technological coincidence of sonimage that has also been the precise direction of Godard’s cinematic research for more than thirty years. For the argument I will be making here is inscribed within my own investigation of what I call “technological life,” the means by which, in “prosthetic” symbiosis, or “dorsal” umbrality, a form lives beyond the simplistic opposition of animate and inanimate, or against the reductive presuppositions of autokinetic ipseity...". (shrink)

This paper is devoted to face recent views in the ontology of music that reject that musical works are repeatable in musical performances. It will be observed that musical works’ repeatability implies that they are audible and variable in their performances. To this extent, the aim here is to show that repeatability, audibility and variability are ontologically substantive features of musical works’ nature. The thesis that will be defended is that repeatability, audibility and variability are dispositional non-aesthetic properties (...) of musical works. The plausibility of the dispositional account of musical works’ repeatability, audibility and variability will lead us to the conclusion that they are ontologically substantive features of musical works’ nature, and consequently, any suitable explanation of the ontology of musical works must not ignore them. (shrink)

The article deals with the explanatory relevance of the concept of stereotype in one of its original meanings - as a "mental image". This meaning of the term is the starting point for further differentiations, such as: between linguistic and behavioral stereotypes ; universal and particular stereotypes; self representative and introspective stereotypes; permanent and contemporary stereotypes; and finally, what is most important for our purposes, the difference between silent and audible stereotypes. These distinctions, along with the functions of stereotype, are (...) discussed in the first part of the paper. In the second part, the relations of silent and audible stereotypes are tested against the introduction of "innovative vocabularies" in popular lore. In other words, the explanatory power of this differentiation is checked through an analysis of unconventional motives in Serbian epic poems. The goal of the argument is to clarify the procedure of self creation of masculinity as a relevant feature of the "national character" through "tactic games" of silent and audible stereotypes. The examination of these "poetic strategies" serves a twofold purpose: to illustrate the process of constructing particular features of the "ethno type", on one hand, and to check hypotheses and models which are taken as frameworks in analyzing stereotypes, on the other. Predmet radja je ispitivanje znacaja pojma stereotipa i reafirmisanje ovog pojma u jednom od njegovih prvobitnih znacenja kao "slika u nasim glavama". Takvo shvatanje stereotipa u ovom tekstu je polaziste za diferencijacije u okviru samog fenomena: na jezicke stereotipe i stereotipe u postupanju i glasne stereotipe. Funkcije stereotipa i ove podele su, u najkracem, predmet razmatranja prvog delu teksta. U drugom delu teksta testiranje odnos izmedju nemih i glasnih stereotipa na nekoj vrsti "inovativnog vokabulara" u narodnom predanju. To drugim recima znaci da se u ovom delu teksta proverava funkcionalnost ovako diferenciranih stereotipa putem analize nekonvencionalnih motiva usmene knjizevnosti. Cilj je da se osvetli postupak samokreiranja jednog svojstva "nacionalnog karaktera" putem "takticke igre" izmedju nemih i glasnih stereotipa. Stoga je ispitivanje ovih poetickih strategija koliko u funkciji priblizavanja mehanizama izgradnje specificnih svojstava "etnotipa", odnosno u funkciji pokazivanja dispozitiva savremenih prica o "kolektivnom imidzu", toliko i u funkciji provere unapred naznacenih pretpostavki i zadatih modela u okviru kojih se ispituje fenomen stereotipa. (shrink)

Julian Dodd has argued that the type–token theory in musical ontology has a ‘default’ status because it can explain the repeatability and audibility of musical works without the need for philosophical reinterpretation. I present two challenges to Dodd's claims about audibility. First, I argue (a) that a type–token theorist who, like Dodd, adheres to Wolterstorff's doctrine of analogical predication must grant that musical works themselves are hearable only in an ‘analogical’ sense; and (b) that alternative musical ontologies are (...) able to explain the latter just as well as the type–token theory. Second, I argue that Dodd cannot evade this objection by claiming that what matters in musical ontology is accounting for audibility ‘in a derivative sense’, since the latter also allows of explanation by a range of musical ontologies. (shrink)

This article builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to explore new approaches to cinematic audibility. Recognised film theory terms such as synchronisation and synchresis approach sonic time from the transcendent distance of audioviewership. This essay moves cinematic experience inward to ask what is audible within the film world itself. Simultaneity and coexistence penetrate cinematic time to express a multiplicity of audible layers, threads or lines that occur in relation to image-events. The essay both (...) advances and critiques Bergson's and Deleuze's conceptions of time, making it relevant to both film studies and metaphysics. (shrink)

There are compelling reasons to believe that musical works are abstract. However, this hypothesis conflicts with the platitude that musical works are appreciated by means of audition: the things that enter our ear canals and make our eardrums vibrate must be concrete, so how can musical works be listened to if they are abstract? This question constitutes the audibility problem. In this paper, I assess Julian Dodd’s elaborate attempt to solve it, and contend that Dodd’s attempt is unsuccessful. Then (...) I discuss what I take to be the ideal response to the audibility problem, and show that it ultimately fails. I contend, consequently, that the project of construing musical works as audible is disheartening. Accordingly, in my last section, I will argue the audibility problem may be satisfactorily resolved without ascribing audibility to musical works. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to face recent views in the ontology of music that reject that musical works are repeatable in musical performances. It will be observed that musical works? repeatability implies that they are audible and variable in their performances. To this extent, the aim here is to show that repeatability, audibility and variability are ontologically substantive features of musical works? nature. The thesis that will be defended is that repeatability, audibility and variability are dispositional non-aesthetic properties (...) of musical works. The plausibility of the dispositional account of musical works? repeatability, audibility and variability will lead us to the conclusion that they are ontologically substantive features of musical works? nature, and consequently, any suitable explanation of the ontology of musical works must not ignore them. nema. (shrink)

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility, affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship and instead enter the reality of the (...) film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach the microphone from its adherence to space, the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form. (shrink)

Patients with psychotic disorders experience a range of reality distortions. These often include auditory-verbal hallucinations, and thought insertion to a lesser degree; however, their mechanisms and relationships between each other remain largely elusive. Here we attempt to establish a integrative model drawing from the phenomenology of both AVHs and TI and argue that they in fact can be seen as ‘spectra’ of experiences with varying degrees of agency and ownership, with ‘silent and internal own thoughts’ on one extreme and ‘fully (...) external and clearly audible voices’ in the absence of a speaker on the other. We believe a spectral model will add emphasis to the continuity of experience and help to better understand how one type of psychotic symptom may interact with another, and put forward the argument that the experience of TI itself is not sufficient to classify as a delusion. In addition we aim to discuss some of the conceptual issues surrounding AVHs and TI with first-person accounts and current philosophical and neuropsychological theories in mind. We propose that the mechanisms behind AVHs and TI are more complex than source-monitoring deficits; indeed, to understand such phenomena one must appreciate that their very ‘existence’ and ‘reality’ as experienced by the individual have much deeper implications and meaning, both philosophically and clinically. (shrink)

In this paper, I summarize the medical evidence regarding the auditory and non-auditory effects of noise and analyse the ethics of noise and personal autonomy in the social environment using a variety of case studies. Key to this discussion is the fact that, contrary to the traditional definition of noise, sound can be noise without being annoying, as the evidence shows that some sounds can harm without being perceived. Ultimately, I develop a theory of ‘noisy autonomy’ with which to guide (...) us in discussing the public health ethics of noise and other sounds. (shrink)

What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experience? That is, how can experiences which do not fit the customary scripts of sense-making be heard? Whereas processes of official memorialization or legal redress often demand that victims and survivors convey their experiences through familiar modes of narration, in my project on ‘grammars of listening’ or ‘gramáticas de lo inaudito’ I want to ask how it might be possible to hear these experiences on their own terms and what (...) the challenges are that we encounter when trying to do so. What I ultimately want to argue is that doing justice to trauma requires a profound philosophical questioning of the conditions that allow us to listen to testimony, and a true reckoning of the responsibility that we bear as listeners. (shrink)

This article is centred on the idea that from the analysis and interpretation of data from the crowd noise (at historical and engaging events) it is possible to define the manifestation of extroversion of people’s perceptions and emotions. What I seek to reveal in my artistic research is not the conjugation of perceptions and emotions for individual participants but rather the collective feeling, the energy that connects and refines the involvement of individuals and creates from it a new and indivisible (...) whole: a collective perception and sentiment that in the multilayering of noise finds its full manifestation. Crowd noise, therefore, represents the synthesis of this unique collective emotion, a psychological and physical synergic experience channelling its force, energy and form into a distinctive event that is noise itself. What I am investigating is the sum, neutralization, enrichment and suppression of the constitutive elements of the emotion experienced by participants in an event, and noise ‘as a register of the intensity of relationships’ between them. Showing and describing an event, its sensations and atmosphere, or the perceptions and emotions of a moment, is impossible. The questions, how emotions emerge, how mental and physical perceptions are stimulated by our senses or how consciousness develops, are unanswerable; what is possible to show as an artist is what happens in the middle, what lies between the lines, within the fabric of events, and what one grasps and realizes from the exploration of what is in the involuntary traces the experience itself leaves behind. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 101-117.

This unique study opens up a new dimension of Terrence Malick’s cinema – its expressions of unseeing and hearing. ‘Unseeing’ is Malick’s means of transcending the moment in order to enter the life that unfolds; to treat cinema as a real experience for those who live its reality. In this way, Terrence Malick’s Unseeing Cinema moves beyond film theory to advance a work of original philosophy, bringing together two thinkers not normally associated with one another: Gilles Deleuze and Søren Kierkegaard. (...) It investigates how Malick’s gatherings of time allow one to explore new philosophical questions about immanence and transcendence, ethics and faith, time and infinity, and the foldings of subjectivity that are central to both philosophers. Beyond cinema, it offers a way to think about our everyday repetitions and recollections and our ephemeral points of connection with those we love. (shrink)

Pitch is an audible quality of sound which can be explained not only in terms of strong correlation with sound waves’ properties, but also by a neat correlation to the properties of the sounding object. This seems to be in favour of the theory of sound labelled “distal view”, according to which sound is the vibration of the sounding object.

On a widely held view, episodes of inner speech provide at least one way in which we become conscious of our thoughts. However, it can be argued, on the one hand, that consciousness of thoughts in virtue of inner speech presupposes interpretation of the simulated speech. On the other hand, the need for such self-interpretation seems to clash with distinctive first-personal characteristics that we would normally ascribe to consciousness of one’s own thoughts: a special reliability; a lack of conscious ambiguity (...) and incomprehensibility; and a sense of causal agency. I try to resolve this puzzle by proposing an account for the requisite self-interpretation of inner speech in terms of Bayesian probabilistic inference. Drawing on “perceptual loop” accounts of speech control, I argue that such interpretive probabilistic inferences are used for the control of inner speech, and that as a consequence of this function, they are biased toward the correct interpretations. I conclude by showing how this model can explain the first-personal characteristics of consciousness of one’s own thoughts. In the case of the sense of causal agency, the resulting explanation yields novel accounts for “audible thoughts” and thought insertion. (shrink)

We hear sounds, and their sources, and their audible qualities. Sounds and their sources are essentially dynamic entities, not wholly present at any given moment, but unfolding through their temporal interval. Sounds and their sources, essentially dynamic entities, are the bearers or susbtrata of audible qualities. Audible qualities are qualities essentially sustained by activity. The only bearers of audible qualities present in auditory experience are essentially dynamic entities. Bodies are not, in this sense, essentially dynamic entities and so are not (...) present in our auditory experience. Though absent in auditory experience, we may, nonetheless, attend to bodies in audition, when an audible sound-generating event in which they participate presents a dynamic aural image of them. (shrink)

In the realm of the philosophy of sounds and auditory experience there is an ongoing discussion concerned with the nature of sounds. One of the contestant views within this ontology of sound is that of the Property View, which holds that sounds are properties of the sounding objects. A way of developing this view is through the idea of dispositionalism, namely, by sustaining the theory according to which sounds are dispositional properties (Pasnau 1999; Kulvicki 2008; Roberts 2017). That portrayal, however, (...) is not sufficient, as it has not inquired the metaphysical debates about dispositions beyond the conditional analysis. In this paper, I try to advance this view by including recent developments (for instance Bird 2007; Vetter 2015) in the field of dispositionalism and I analyse whether this new version can sort out known and new objections to Property View. (shrink)

Sounds are audible, and sound sources are audible. What is the audible relation between audible sounds and audible sources? Common talk and philosophy suggest three candidates. The first is that sounds audibly are properties instantiated by their sources. I argue that sounds are audible individuals and thus are not audibly instantiated by audible sources. The second is that sounds audibly are effects of their sources. I argue that auditory experience presents no compelling evidence that sounds audibly are causally related to (...) audible sources. The third is that sounds audibly are related mereologically to their sources. I present and offer a defence of this third candidate. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that epistemic injustices can be understood and explained as social pathologies of recognition, and that this way of conceptualizing epistemic injustices can help us develop proper diagnostic and corrective treatments for them. I distinguish between two different kinds of recognition deficiency—quantitative recognition deficits and misrecognitions—and I ague that while the rectification of the former simply requires more recognition, the rectification of the latter calls for a shift in the mode of recognition, that is, a deep (...) transformation of the recognition dynamics so that other forms of recognition can emerge. Arguing against incremental recognitional approaches that aim only at increasing social visibility/audibility, I examine communicative dysfunctions around the phenomenon of racist violence in order to show how problems of misrecognition persist and become recalcitrant even when quantitative recognition deficits disappear. (shrink)

In ‘The Ockhamization of the event sources of sound’ (2013), Roberto Casati, Elvira Di Bona, and Jérôme Dokic argue that ‘ockhamizing’ Casey O’Callaghan’s account of sounds as proper parts of their event sources yields their preferred view: that sounds are identical with their event sources. This article argues that the considerations Casati et al. marshal in favor of their view are actually stronger considerations in favor of a quite different view: a variant on the Lockean conception of sounds as ‘sensible (...) qualities’ that treats sounds as audible properties of their event sources. (shrink)

Introduction -- The type/token theory introduced -- Motivating the type/token theory : repeatability -- Nominalist approaches to the ontology of music -- Musical anti-realism -- The type/token theory elaborated -- Types I : abstract, unstructured, unchanging -- Types introduced and nominalism repelled -- Types as abstracta -- Types as unstructured entities -- Types as fixed and unchanging -- Types II : platonism -- Introduction : eternal existence and timelessness -- Types and properties -- The eternal existence of properties reconsidered -- (...) Types and patterns -- Defending the type/token theory I -- Unstructuredness and analogical predication -- Musical works as fixed and unchanging -- Abstractness and audibility (again) -- Works and interpretations -- Conclusion and resumé -- Defending the type/token theory II : musical platonism -- Platonism it is : replies to Anderson and Levinson -- The existence conditions of works of music -- Composition as creative discovery -- The nature of the compositional process : replies to objections -- Composition and aesthetic appraisal : a reply to Levinson -- Composition and aesthetic appraisal : understanding, interpretation, and correctness -- Musical works as continuants : a theory rejected -- A theory introduced -- Explicating and motivating the continuant view -- The continuant view and repeatability -- Further objections to the continuant view -- Musical works as compositional actions : a critique -- Currie's action-type hypothesis -- Davies's performance theory -- Sonicism I : against instrumentalism -- Sonicism introduced -- Sonicism motivated : moderate empiricism -- Instrumentation : timbral sonicism introduced -- Scores -- Instrumentation, artistic properties, and aesthetic content -- Levinson's rejoinder -- Sonicism II : against contextualism -- Introduction : formulating contextualism -- Contextualist ontological proposals -- Levinson's doppelgänger thought-experiments -- Artistic, representational, and object-directed expressive properties -- Aesthetic and non-object-directed expressive properties -- Conclusion : the place of context. (shrink)

he theory o f natural selection provides a mechanistic, causal account of how living things came to look as if they had been designed for a purpose. So overwhelming is the appearance of purposeful design that, even in this Darwinian era when we know "better," we still find it difficult, indeed boringly pedantic, to refrain from teleological language when discussing adaptation. Birds' wings are obviously "for" flying, spider webs are for catching insects, chlorophyll molecules are for photosynthesis, DNA molecules are (...) for... What are DNA molecules for? The question takes us aback. In my case it touches off an almost audible alarm siren in the mind. If we accept the view of life that I wish to espouse, it is the forbidden question. DNA is not "for" anything. If we wish to speak teleologically, all adaptations are for the preservation of DNA; DNA itself just is. Following Williams, I have advocated this view at length, and I do not want to repeat myself here. Instead I shall try to clear up an important misunderstanding of the view, a misunderstanding that has constituted an unnecessary barrier to its acceptance. (shrink)

There you are at the opera house. The soprano has just hit her high note – a glassshattering high C that fills the hall – and she holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds the note for such a long time that after a while a funny thing happens: you no longer seem only to hear it, the note as it is currently sounding, that glass-shattering high C that is loud and (...) high and pure. In addition, you also seem to hear something more. It is difficult to express precisely what this extra feature is. One is tempted to say, however, that the note now sounds like it has been going on for a very long time. Perhaps it even sounds like a note that has been going on for too long. In any event, what you hear no longer seems to be limited to the pitch, timbre, loudness, and other strictly audible qualities of the note. You seem in addition to experience, even to hear, something about its temporal extent. (shrink)

In some utterances, some material does not seem to be explicitly expressed in words, but nevertheless seems to be part of the literal content of the utterance rather than an implicature. I will call material of this kind implicit content. The following are some relevant examples from the literature. (1) Everyone was sick. (2) I haven’t eaten. (3) It’s raining. In the case of (1), we are supposed to have asked Stephen Neale how his dinner party went last night (Neale, (...) 1990, pp. 94–95) and received this as the reply. Obviously, we do not take Neale to be saying that everyone in the world was sick; we interpret him as saying that everyone who attended his dinner party was sick. How, then, do we come to incorporate the property of attending Neale’s dinner party into the proposition expressed, when it does not seem to be the denotation of any overt lexical items in the utterance? In uttering (2), I might be asserting that I have not eaten dinner today (Bach 1994, pp. 135–136), even though I do not use any audible words meaning ‘dinner’ or ‘today’. (I might thereby intend to create an implicature to the effect that we should go to a restaurant.) And in saying (3), I might be claiming that it is raining at 11.59pm on Halloween 2008 in Arkham, Massachusetts, even though I do not appear to mention any time or place (Perry 1986; Stanley 2000; Recanati 2002, 2004, 2007; Mart´ı 2006; Neale 2007). (shrink)

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). (...) By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash. (shrink)

objects are standardly taken to be causally inert, but this claim is rarely explicitly argued for. In the context of his platonism about musical works, in order for musical works to be audible, Julian Dodd argues that abstracta are causally efficacious in virtue of their concrete tokens participating in events. I attempt to provide a principled argument for the causal inertness of abstracta by first rejecting Dodd’s arguments from events, and then extending and generalizing the causal exclusion argument to the (...) abstract/concrete distinction. For reasons of parsimony, if concrete tokens or instantiations of abstract objects account for all causal work, then there is no reason to attribute causal efficacy to abstracta, and thus reason to maintain their causal inertness. I then consider how one of the main arguments against causal exclusion, namely Stephen Yablo’s notion of “proportionality”, could be modified to support the causal efficacy of abstracta. I argue that from a few simple premises Yablo’s account in fact supports their causal inertness. Having a principled reason for the causal inertness of abstracta appears to entail that the musical platonist must admit that we never literally hear the musical work, but only its performances. I sketch a solution to this problem available to Dodd, so that the musical platonist can maintain that musical works are abstract objects and are causally inert while retaining their audibility. (shrink)

Some sounds have pitch, some do not. A tuba’s notes are lower pitched than a flute’s, but the fuzz from an untuned radio has no discernible pitch. Pitch is an attribute in virtue of which sounds that possess it can be ordered from “low” to “high”. Given how audition works, physics has taught us that frequency determines what pitch a sound auditorily appears to have.

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An inaudible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between (...) biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of "over-hearings" between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reflect self-critically on an ongoing research project entitled “Grammars of listening,” which started as a philosophical approach to the question of listening at the site of trauma and the challenges this kind of listening poses to our conceptions of memory and history, and has recently shifted to asking about the possible limitations to such a reflection when confronted with a decolonial perspective on temporality. I start by presenting a conceptual background for my inquiry, and asking what (...) kind of listening is required when trauma is considered as a colonizing form of violence – that is, when its effects are not only understood as an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible. Following the kind of challenges that such an understanding of trauma poses to the responsibility to listen to its testimony, the paper moves on to propose that only a decolonial approach to listening can truly do justice to the task of rendering testimonies of traumatic violence audible. By decolonizing the frameworks that organize and determine colonial and colonizing distributions of sense, I propose that grammars of lo inaudito understood as decolonial grammars contribute to resisting and disorganizing the criteria for legibility and audibility that colonizing forms of violence not only institute but constantly actualize in their attempt to perpetuate their silencing power.1. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage in (...) interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

The relationship between music and dance can sometimes be a ‘match’, a remarkable fit between the audible manifestation that music is and the visual or kinaesthetic manifestation that dance is. A match between two things seems to require a common measure with respect to which the match obtains. What can this be for two so different phenomena as music and dance? I argue that the most promising answer is: movement. This answer will not be satisfactory unless the movement of music (...) and the movement of dance are the same on some level. I suggest that they are: there are qualities of movement that guide both dancers and musicians when producing dance and music as perceptible phenomena. But the match in qualities is elusive, since the qualities are instantiated in different ways in music and dance, respectively. (shrink)

In a well-known passage of the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche makes audible a “new demand”: namely, that “we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must be called into question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they changed and evolved”.1 Here Nietzsche is relatively clear. We need an understanding of the historical conditions under which our moral values have changed (...) in order to call into question the value of our moral values and to subject such valuations to critique. Less obvious, however, is what Nietzsche’s methodology contributes to such a critique of morality and how... (shrink)

How many serious mistakes can a brilliant philosopher make in a single paragraph? Many think that Mill answers this question by example—in the third paragraph of Chapter IV of Utilitarianism. Here is the notorious paragraph: The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the (...) sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality. (shrink)

The essay attempts to delineate how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be applied to theories of sign processes, and how it reworks the framework of the phenomenalist conception of communication. His later philosophy involved a reformulation of subjectivity and a resolution of the subject/object dualism. My claim is that this non-reductionist theory of perception reveals a different view of nature as we experience it in an expressive and meaningful interaction. The perspective that another living being has and communicates entails (...) a form of depth, the invisible dimension of the visible or audible. These two aspects of perception and dialogue are intertwined in a dialectic of presence and absence, so that sense arises in the perceptual field rather than in subjectivity. This, I argue, is the most fundamental result of his theory. The origination of meaning in the workings of the chiasm of visible and invisible in perception opens up an objective sense of intersubjective nature. The essay also deals with the role of the phenomenological reduction; a suspension of beliefs and existence claims in experience. The reduction enables us to take a step back and look more closely at our understanding of nature in light of the historical and cultural influence on our thinking. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two kinds of ordinary multisensory experience that go beyond mere co-consciousness of features (e.g., the experience that results from concurrently hearing a sound in the hallway and seeing the cup on the table). In one case, a sensory experience in one modality creates a perceptual demonstrative to whose referent qualities are attributed in another sensory modality. For example, when you hear someone speak, auditory experience attributes audible qualities to a seen event, a person’s speaking motions. The (...) second kind of multisensory experience attributes features experienced in several sensory modalities to one and the same object via a process of amodal perceptual integration, i.e., integration that occurs separately from processing within the individual sensory modalities. Multisensory experiences arising from holding and seeing a tomato or from seeing the Indian curry boil and smelling it are examples of the second kind of multisensory experience. At the end of the chapter we look at synesthesia, a kind of atypical multisensory experience, and argue that one version of this phenomenon may be able to shed light on the neural mechanism underlying amodally integrated multisensory experience. (shrink)

Drawing on clues from Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Jacobson, Condillac, and Diderot, Appelbaum investigates the vocalized, acoustical aspect of audible expression. He analyzes the tendency to equate voice with speaking, and speaking with writing, the result being that vocalizing is equivalent to thinking aloud. Appelbaum affirms the body’s role in vocalizing expression by proposing a new and radical interpretation of the truth of voice: that it is true if it provides a disclosure of our human contradictions. Sound, or the acoustical (...) properties of a person’s voice, is able to bring about the revolutionary new set of conditions which reveal the truth of one’s condition. The author provides a unique account of the subjugation of voice by thought, indicating means for reversing the authority of the sound and for freeing up the voice. He concludes with the argument that poetic voice reconciles the search for semantic meaning with the raw, acoustical effect that the free voice causes. (shrink)