Reader published on the occassion of Doc’s Kingdom 2024 – Ways of Listening, curated by Stoffel Debuysere. Edited by Catarina Boieiro. Graphic design by Ana C. Bahia.
This reader was offered to participants. Please mail me if you want me to send a (digital) copy.
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Introduction
The present seems to increasingly impose itself as a moment in perpetual crisis, with one calamitous happening piling on another. A moment of impasse, when the sense of history appears to be frozen out of the future – as if we’re stuck in repeated viewings of tragedy and catastrophe, while the powers and principles that govern the world are unabashedly revealing themselves in technicolor. Our time feels as what we might call survival time, a time of struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, constantly adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on. In a time where any notion of future feels unnavigable, how do we maintain our sea legs? How can we develop a wandering absorptive awareness that assembles material that might help us to clarify our way? How can we move on with a sense that the world is not only intensely present but also full of possibility, beyond our dominant and domineering imaginaries? How shall we re-open mystery in our times?
At the beginning of Noise, his treatise on music as a herald for social change, political economist Jacques Attali proclaimed: “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing… Today, our sight has dimmed; it no longer sees our future, having constructed a present made of abstraction, nonsense, and silence. Now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics.”1
What if we, much against the grain, take Attali’s suggestion to heart? What if we start listening past the presumption of visuality as the primary conveyor of meaning, past the adoption of measure and metre as the ruling value mechanism for our lives? What if we were able to reframe the prevailing visibility and temporality of our world by developing a sonic sensibility, by attempting to approach what Chris Marker once called “a vision that defeats the eye”? Couldn’t this sensibility possibly help us to question the fixed and imperial coordinates of the real and augment our critical imaginations, allowing us to emerge from under the shadow of inevitability?
”Sound’s reality,” writes Salomé Voegelin, “is not bound up in the absolutes of rationality and neither is it a trivial fiction. It is the reality of the invisible and the ephemeral, a reality that defines the actuality of the world as process, as a ‘zone of passage’, that engages relational and contingent truths, which are the possibilities found among affects, sentiments, the unpredictable, the imperfect and the incomplete. Sound generates a possible reality that does not represent a singular actuality but renders the real a mobile and unseen complexity. It makes the how of the dominant appreciable and sounds the minor, the suppressed, the hidden and the ignored.”2
Ways of Listening sets out to study sound in all its ephemeral invisibility and mobile intensity, in search for forms of sonic knowledge – a knowledge of the sonically perceptible and the barely audible, of the invisible and what remains unheard, of the unsound and the resounding. Listening serves as the main mode of engagement throughout this seminar, inviting us to lend our ears and bodies to silence as well as noise, to speech as well as what is not said, in and out of the bounds of sense and nonsense. Listening as a way of thinking with and through sound, opening up to a sea of wandering, to drifting, to ambiguity and fragility – which is not the same as futility. A listening-out for the overlooked and invisibilised, for blindspots and oversights, illuminating the limits and contradictions of the dominant sensible and sensual orders. A listening to work and to the world in order to discuss their relationship on a continuum of actuality and possibility.
Our aim is not to replace vision as such with listening as such. The seminar’s more profound aim is to move from the present with all its taken-for-granted beliefs about vision and experience and to move toward different understandings of experience, grounded in what Voegelin has called the “invisible formlessness of sound”. By opening time and space for a deeper consideration of the human sensorium that is informed by the auditory, we hope to shed some new light on audio-visual relations, in particular related to sound in or as documentary. While ocularcentrism and representationalism are still hegemonic within the study of the audio-visual, a re-evaluation of the sonic has been well underway. How do sound and its reproduction allow and disturb the frame or boundary of the visual? How can the sonic mitigate and, perhaps, transform the violence of objectified visuality? But also, how can we diversify the deafening homogeneity and sterility of existing attitudes and discourses regarding sonicality and aurality, in relation to historicity and coloniality, subjectivity and identity, sensoriality and accessibility?
In other words, how can we cultivate what Dylan Robinson has called a “critical listening positionality” – which “seeks to prompt questions regarding how we might become better attuned to the particular filters of race, class, gender, and ability that actively select and frame the moment of contact between listening body and listened-to sound”?3
These and many other questions will surface and resonate throughout our five days of study. “Study” can be considered here as what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called “a mechanism of and for attunement,”4 implying an orientation toward the world with no predictable shape or rhythm, an openness and attentiveness towards otherness, a feeling-with rather than a feeling-about. A sense and practice not granted, attunement suggests an operation of resonance, found in the spaces it travels, occupies, and generates. Only possible by way of gaps and encounters, resonance “sets into motion and sustains all creative processes”, according to Trinh T. Minh-ha.5 With this seminar we hope to create a resonance space where there are no clear demarcations between listening and thinking, words and sound, sociality and discursivity, a space which not only enhances our sonic sensibility, but also our sonic relationality. A space in which we can anchor ourselves and one another in the act of listening, allowing for a resonant being together in a whirlwind of creative encounters.
Welcome to Doc’s Kingdom 2024!
1. Jacques Attali, Noise (Presses Universitaires de France, 1977, translated to English in 1985).
2. Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
3. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
4. Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, “From Cooperation to Black Operation”, Transversal Texts, April 2016.
5. See “An Acoustic Journey” further in this Reader.
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CONTENT
* Presentation – Marcia Mansur
* Ways of Listening – Stoffel Debuysere
Trinh T. Minh-ha
* An Acoustic Journey – Trinh T. Minh-ha
* Listening Like a Documentary – Pooja Rangan
* Tuning in to the Music of the World: Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha – Stoffel Debuysere
Trevor Mathison + Gary Stewart
* Untimely Meditations: Reflections on the Black Audio Film Collective – Kodwo Eshun
* Twilight City: Outline for an archaeopsychic geography of New London – Kodwo Eshun
* Conversation with Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison (Dubmorphology) – Michael McMillan
Ernst Karel
* Sonic Archive Fever: Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content – Stephanie Spray
* Expedition Content and the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, 1961 – Veronika Kusumaryati, Ernst Karel
* Conversation with Ernst Karel – Joshua Minsoo Kim
Susana de Sousa Dias
* (In)visible Evidence. The Representability of Torture – Susana de Sousa Dias
* Reconstructing the Repressed Visual Archive. Interview with Susana De Sousa Dias – Iván Villarmea Álvarez, Nieves Limón Serrano
Matilde Meireles
* On Vanishing Points – Matilde Meireles
* Multiple Perceptions of the Everyday Unfolded – Matilde Meireles
Alison O’Daniel
* Compensation and Transfiguration. Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves – Jordan Lord
* Experiencing Noise – Marina Peterson
* Alison O’Daniel on The Tuba Thieves – Natalia Keogan
