Radical Open Access Collective
Building Horizontal Alliances
# Call for Steering Committee Members – MediArXiv
The initial Steering Committee is excited to announce the forthcoming launch of MediArXiv, the nonprofit, open archive for media, film & communication studies. The open-access “preprint” server will soon accept submissions from scholars across our diverse fields. MediArXiv will join the growing movement started by the math/physics/computer science-oriented arXiv.org over 25 years ago, as one of the first full-fledged preprint servers conceived for humanities and social science scholars.
MediArxiv will accept working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published manuscripts. The service is open to articles, books, and book chapters. There is currently some limited support for other scholarly forms (like video essays), which we plan to expand and officially support in the future.
Our aim is to promote open scholarship across media, film and communication studies around the world. In addition to accepting and moderating submissions, we plan to advocate for policy changes at the major media, film, & communication studies professional societies around the world–to push for open-access friendly policies, in particular, for the journals that these associations sponsor.
MediArXiv will launch in early 2019 on the Open Science Framework, which already hosts a number of other discipline-specific open archives:
We are writing to solicit applications for additional Steering Committee membership, with an interest in, but not limited to, early career scholars and those who work in the Global South. We anticipate adding five- to six- additional members, who will help to establish and guide MediArXiv together with the existing members. In addition to governance, Steering Committee members commit to contribute to light moderation of submissions on a rotating basis.
Applications will be accepted through Friday, January 23, and successful applicants will be informed by January 30.
https://mediarxiv.com/steering-form/
More details about MediArXiv can be found at our information site:
Many thanks for considering MediArXiv service,
The MediArXiv Steering Committee
MediArXiv is a project initiated by Open Access in Media Studies:
https://oamediastudies.com/
As free, nonprofit, community-led digital archive, MediArXiv is fully committed to the Fair Open Access principles:
https://www.fairopenaccess.org/
Historians tend to define fascism in terms of its historical manifestations, sometimes warning not to (over)use it in contemporary contexts. Yet, in the past few years, the world has seen the rise to power of figures like Trump, Duterte, Orban, and Bolsonaro, the stunning impact of the Alt-Right movement, and the Cambridge Analytica-scandal. Unsurprisingly, the slumbering interest in contemporary fascisms amongst cultural theorists and net critics has risen once again.
In November 2017, Sara-Lot van Uum and I interviewed Geert Lovink on the topic of meme fascism for the Fascism issue of student-run magazine Simulacrum, seeking to formulate a conceptual bridge from ‘historical fascism’ to ‘contemporary fascism’. We wondered: can we use the notion of fascism to analyze Trumpism and the Alt-Right movement? Does ‘fascism’ refer specific mode of societal organization, to a psychoanalytical mechanism?
In the year between Simulacrum’s interview and today, contemporary fascism has grown to be one of INC’s focus themes. For example, the two most recent INC Longforms are Pim van den Berg’s Execute Order 66: How Prequel Memes Became Indebted to Fascist Dictatorship and Roberto Simanowski’s Brave New Screens: Soma, FOMO, and Friendly Fascism After 1984. Furthermore, INC is working on the publication of BILWET: Fascisme, an anthology of Adilkno’s critical theory of ‘contemporary fascism’ from the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Today, I find myself working on this Bilwet/Adilkno publication. Wondering about the contemporary relevance of these texts from the 1970’s and 1980’s, I was reminded of the interview I conducted last year and decided to translate it.
First Panel – Contemporary Fascism: Method and Definition
Sara-Lot and Sepp: There is a lot of talk about fascism today, more than, say, five or ten years ago. Yet, this interest in fascism after the 1940s is not unique. Already in the late 1970s and throughout the ‘80s, you have extensively theorized ‘contemporary fascism’. Which methods of fascism analysis and what definitions of fascism did you have at the time?
Geert: The dominant discourse in the 1970s was characterized by a somewhat vulgar Marxist economic and political understanding that the major force behind the rise of Hitler and Mussolini was capital. This understanding held that the economic crisis in the 1930s was an effect of capitalism, but that the discontent caused by it found its political articulation in the fascist movements. Thus, already in the 1960s and 1970s, fascism was analyzed in predominantly historical terms.
Then, in the 1980s, after studying Political Science in Amsterdam, I went to Berlin and joined the writers’ collective Adilkno (Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge). One of the first things we did in this collective was an attempt to reinvent the method of fascism analysis. Opposing the dominant historical mode of analysis, we drew on the psychoanalytical tradition of Freudo-Marxism. The latter discourse has its roots in Wilhelm Reich’s Fascism and Mass Psychology (1933), the first attempt to integrate Marxism and psychoanalysis. Freudo-Marxism became popular in the mid-1970’s, because it offered a foundation for a broader discourse, from the feminist socialist movements, in which the relationship between sexes is of crucial import, to academic exercises such as Cultural Studies. This large and important shift was most clearly articulated by Klaus Theweleit in Männerphantasien (1977), which brought together, for the first time, all the elements needed for a new type of analysis and a new definition: fascism as the over-identification of masculine ideals and their societal articulations.
This focus on the collective psychological structures latently present in all of us led to a problematization of the division of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the dominant discourse of fascism. Speaking of fascism in these terms was no longer a matter of projection onto the other, but a moment of collective self-analysis. Leading questions in such self-reflection were: what was it in fascism that people felt related to them? Why were fascist movements so popular? In Adilkno, we aimed to ask exactly these types of questions in the 1970s. Also, drawing on Foucault, we added to the lines of fascism and anti-fascism a line of non-fascism. By thoroughly analyzing the roots of the problem, we tried to formulate something close to a Hegelian synthesis rather than an anti-position.
A good example of how we used this new method and definition in Adilkno is Sexism-Fascism: A Reconstruction of a Men’s Ideal, a book which Basjan van Stam wrote after studying at the Free University in Amsterdam. In this book, a series of character traits are described as typically fascist: militaristic, explosive, hierarchic, though, superior, disciplined, performance-oriented, protective, full of expansion drift, sexist. In short: an extremely dominant masculine ideal. The type of characteristics we observe in Trump today.
You might ask why chose to analyze fascism in terms of sexism rather than racism, antisemitism, or homophobia. Again, I think this is because we are talking about a self-oriented analysis. There is a major problem in analyzing fascism in terms of racism or antisemitism: one ends up analyzing the other instead of oneself. This type of analysis supposes that we should learn to tolerate one another. In Adilkno, we were not satisfied in saying: if just we had properly liked Jews, nothing bad had happened. We wanted something more self-critical, contemporary, and fundamental. For instance, in Sexism-Fascism, Basjan analyzed the contemporary fascism implied in a series of Tintin albums.
Second Panel – The Emergence of Digital Culture: From Self-Psychoanalysis to New Media Theory
Sara-Lot and Sepp: It is interesting how you were working with the notion of contemporary fascism in the 1970s, but it may be even more interesting is the gap of the 1980s and 1990s. Before making the leap from the late 1970s to today’s situation, shall we consider what happened in this gap? It was a period which saw the emergence of postmodern thought and a decline in the popularity of psychoanalysis. Moreover, it is in this period that digital media and culture emerged. Can you explain your own trajectory within this gap/shift in contemporary fascist analysis and elaborate how you have come to focus on discourses like meme theory?
Geert: There was a very clear shift in the 1980s and 1990s from classic Freudianism, the clinical picture, and the ideas of analysis and therapy, to a much broader cultural analysis – paving the way for theoreticians such as Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, and many others. I see this shift as a reorientation of the fundamental terminology in psychoanalysis. For me, this crisis in psychoanalysis and the subsequent postmodern reorientation resulted in a focus on new media theory.
I should note here that I did not enter new media as an outsider, but as an activist. We, digital activists, strongly believed that we could re-appropriate the top-down propaganda discourse of power by democratizing media. Actually, I still think that. Don’t misunderstand me: I see that we live in the era of Facebook and Google. Decentral digital activists have lost big time. Still, I keep believing that decentral networks can undermine all power relations (in Foucault’s sense) on the long run.
When I turned to media theory as means of activism, I found notion of the meme to be a central one. This is a notion derived from Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins theorized the meme as a condensation of culture in the shape of a symbol that moves of its own accord through (digital) networks. This concept, the existence of such symbols, implies that ideology is not constructed solely by the big institutions. The meme is the neoliberal antipode of the ideological state apparatus (in Althusser’s sense). In the meme, an ideology is summarized in the condensed shape of a crystal. The power of such a symbol is that it brings together elements of identity and desire that speak to a lot of people.
New media theory, then, started studying this meme-crystal, but it was certainly not the first approach to analyze the power of the compressed image. We can see earlier attempts in visual culture, iconography, and – here we come full-circle – psychoanalysis. Even though it was a good tool, the problem with psychoanalysis has always been that it unconsciously stuck to top-down logic. Psychoanalysis always studies how the individual was appelated by power. In meme culture, the functions are reversed. Here, the central user is the user/blogger, who autonomously and decentrally works with the elements of desire and identity.
For this reason, we see an interesting relation between political views, ideological structures, and the emergence of memes. We can observe elements of propaganda in memes, but memes are never propaganda proper. Why? Because the primary subject of the meme is the very psychological constellation of the nerd, which means that memes are ever ironic. At the same time, exactly because of this self-referential quality, memes have the potential to mobilize discomfort, even when the individuals who create them have no clue by which political agendas these memes can later, in another constellation, be appropriated. This is dangerous. We cannot afford to be naïve about the danger of memes. There is a real possibility of political mobilization through memes. It is clear that old-fashioned populist politicians, such as Geert Wilders, do not appeal to younger generations at all. Memes, on the contrary, appeal very strongly to a broad, diffuse, and young public.
Third Panel – Meme-Fascism: Reading Escalated Innocence
Sara-Lot and Sepp: So, the activist potentials of decentralized networks brought to fore new media theory. However, the same decentralized networks resulted in the impossibility of psychoanalytical reading of the crowd in the digital age and thereby multiplied the task of new media theory: not only did it have to replace the activist function of psychoanalysis, but also the explanatory one. How do you see this task today? What can media theory say about meme-fascism, building on psychoanalysis after the failure of psychoanalysis?
Geert: If we were to attempt any sort of psychoanalytical or explanatory reading of meme culture, a directly political reading would be doomed to fail. Take, for example, cat images. These images contain a type of escalated innocence. The fact that millions of people spend millions of hours staring at innocent cats on their monitors implies a huge amount of poorly masked discomfort in everyday life. We could, of course, make some kind of quantitative analysis, we could map and visualize digital communication. But I think the real work starts only when we analyze compressed symbols and their separate parts using visual and psychoanalytical methods. The problem is that it is extremely hard to trace the narrative element necessary to turn this implication into substantial psychoanalytical theory. Digital communication is so fast, that the narrative element is immediately undermined and negated by the massive amounts of new information constantly pouring in.
For this reason, one could argue for a meme-analysis beyond psychoanalysis. However, this is exactly where Deleuzian strategy fails. Deleuzians are stuck exclaiming: ‘It’s a marvelous production! Ah! Production! Great! Wonderful!’ They can’t seem to proceed past this point.
So, however skeptical I am about the contemporary potential of psychoanalysis, I think that we somehow need the notion of contemporary fascism in explaining why memes are so popular, and why a very diffuse group of young men, nerds, is capable of making real political impact. Today’s Left, in being academically and politically correct, is incapable of communicating with these nerds.
Of course, we should give a lot of attention to the rise of the new Right. Yet, if you would ask me, looking at the specific examples of meme-fascism we see today, if meme culture is directly dangerous, I would say ‘no’. For instance, looking at the Alt-Right movement, we can clearly see a men’s ideal. But I think that this is a highly defensive and reactionary movement. If they do not rise to power now, they will soon cease to be visible forever. Moreover, I think that there are many possibilities of blowing up toxic meme culture from the inside, and to develop subversive strands of meme culture. We can create a language to create new majorities and to co-create new images that doappeal to people (this was already propagated in the 1930s within movements striving for a popular front). This is our challenge today. It is clear that artists and designers have a major task, but so do back-end developers, who determine the architecture of new technologies.
Speaking about these developers, I should emphasize that Google, Facebook, and other tech companies are extremely ambivalent in the matter we are discussing. On the one hand, they facilitate the phenomenon of meme-fascism, but, on the other hand, they are aligned to the global, liberal elites that do not identify with right-wing populist movements whatsoever. This means that Sillicon Valley should be put on the spot. So far, they have always said: ‘We only create the technical infrastructure, we shape the collective techno-subconscious, but we do not define what is articulated there.’ As the Cambridge Analytics scandal has shown, this position is untenable.
This brings us to the not-so-disciplined interdiscipline of media archeology. Because of its focus on materiality, media archeology is extremely important when looking at memes. It allows for the analysis of internal workings of the smartphone, to see how the interfaces of applications interact with the backends of chips and network structures. Why is it so easy to swipe? Which unconscious structures are called upon when we start ‘liking’? To the extent that it is materialistic, media archeology brings psychoanalysis back into the picture in a well-grounded manner.
So, how can Adilkno’s conception of contemporary fascism inform this material analysis of today’s digital infrastructures? I would say that the most important issue is today’s cynicism or nihilism. With its political correctness, the Left does not address but simply denies the broadly present contemporary nihilism. There is nothing more dangerous than this denial! Nihilism is not exactly racism, or antisemitism, but it does provide a fertile ground for sentiments like that. We should go at length to ask ourselves: what is so appealing about this nihilism? When people see that there is no clear direction in their lives, that they are jobless or permanently work under precarious circumstances, the nihilist idealism of complete detachment is tempting. Moreover, since memes are a part of male-dominated nerd culture, meme-nihilism includes contemporary insecurities about what masculinity is today. Therefore, meme-nihilism incubates a new men’s ideal.
INC is happy to announce that in January we will publish a new title in the Theory on Demand series: Good Data – Edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann.
To celebrate this there will be a launch & drinks on 24 January 2019 – 17:00 @Spui25.
The editors Kate Devitt and Monique Mann, and DATACTIVE will discuss the book and open the discussion.
In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the collection and automated analysis of information by government and private actors. In response to the totalizing datafication of society, there has been a significant critique regarding ‘bad data’ practices. The book ‘Good Data’, that will be launched at this event, proposes a move from critique to imagining and articulating a more optimistic vision of the datafied future.
With the datafication of society and the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation, issues of data ethics and data justice are only to increase in importance. The book ‘Good Data’, edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt and Monique Mann, examines and proposes ‘good data’ practices, values and principles from an interdisciplinary, international perspective. From ideas of data sovereignty and justice, to manifestos for change and calls for activism, this edited collection opens a multifaceted conversation on the kinds of futures we want to see. The book presents concrete steps on how we can start realizing good data in practice, and move towards a fair and just digital economy and society.
Bio:
Angela Daly is a transnational and critical socio-legal scholar of the regulation of new technologies. She is currently based in the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and holds adjunct positions at Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Law (Australia) and the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology and Society (Netherlands).
Kate Devitt is a philosopher and cognitive scientist working as a social and ethical robotics researcher for the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group. She is an Adjunct Fellow in the Co-Innovation Group, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland. Her research includes: the ethics of data, barriers to the adoption of technologies, the trustworthiness of autonomous systems and philosophically designed tools for evidence-based, collective decision making.
Monique Mann is the Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Technology and Regulation at the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology. Dr Mann is advancing a program of socio- legal research on the intersecting topics of algorithmic justice, police technology, surveillance, and transnational online policing.
I developed the text I recite in this post as the theoretical framework for an article I’m working on about audio compression. As I was working on the article, I wondered about the role of gender and race in the research on audio compression. Specifically, I was reminded of the central role Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” played into research that led to the mp3. Karl-Heinz Brandenburg used the song to test the compression method he was developing for mp3s because it sounded “warm.” Sure, the track is very intimate and Vega’s voice is soft and vulnerable. But to what extent is its “warmth” the effect of a man’s perception of Vega addressing him as either/both an intimate partner or caregiver? Is its so-called warmth dependent upon the extent to which Vega’s voice performs idealized white hetero femininity, a role from which patriarchy definitely expects warmth (intimacy, care work) but can’t be bothered to hear anything beyond or other than that from (white) women?
“Suzanne Vega 13. Inselleuchten 02” by Wikimedia Commons user Olaf Tausch under GFDL license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
In other words, I’m wondering about what ways our compression practices are shaped by white supremacist, patriarchal listening ears. Before anyone even runs an audio signal through a compressor, how do patriarchal gender systems already themselves act as a kind of epistemological and sensory compression that separates out essential from inessential signal, such that we let women’s warm, caring voices through while also demanding they discipline themselves into compressing their anger and rage away?
The literature does address the role of sexism and ableism in the shaping of audio technologies, but this critique is most commonly framed in conventionally liberal terms that understand oppression as a matter of researcher bias that excludes and censors minority voices. For example, the literature addresses the way “cultural differences like gender, age, race, class, nationality, and language” are overlooked by researchers (Jonathan Sterne), offers cursory nods to the biases and preferences of white cis men scientists (Ryan Maguire), or claims that “the principles of efficiency and universality central to the history of signal processing also worked to censure atypical voices and minor modes of communication” (Mara Mills). Though such analyses are absolutely necessary components of sonic cyberfeminist practice, they are not sufficient.
“Untitled” by Flickr user Charlotte Cooper, CC-BY-2.0
We also need to consider the ways frequencies get parsed into the structural positions that masculinity and femininity occupy in Western patriarchal gender systems. Patriarchy doesn’t just influence researchers, their preferences, their choices, and their judgments. How is the break between essential and inessential signal mapped onto the gendered break between what Beauvoir calls “Absolute” and “Other,” masculine and feminine? Patriarchy is not just a relation among people; it is also a relation among sounds. I don’t think this is inconsistent with the positions I cited earlier in this paragraph; rather, I am pursuing the concerns that motivate those positions a bit more emphatically. And this is perhaps because our objects of analysis are slightly different: I’m a political philosopher interested in political structures that shape epistemologies and ontologies—such as the patriarchal gender system organized by masculine absolute/feminine other—whereas most of the scholars I cited earlier have a more STS- and media-studies-approach that is interested in material culture.
As a way to address these questions, I made a short critical karaoke-style sound piece where I read a shortened version of the text below over the original version of “Tom’s Diner” from Vega’s album Solitude Standing (which, for what it’s worth, I first owned on cassette, not digitally). I recorded my voice reciting a condensed version of the framework I develop for a sonic cyberfeminist theory of oppression over a copy of the original, a cappella version of “Tom’s Diner.” If I were in philosopher mode, I would theorize the full implications of this aesthetic choice, but I’m offering this as a sound art piece, the material and sensory dimensions of which provide y’all the opportunity to think through those implications yourselves.
[Text from audio]
Perceptual coding and perceptual technics create breaks in the audio spectrum in the same way that neoliberalism and biopolitics create breaks in the spectrum of humanity. Perceptual coding refers to “those forms of audio coding that use a mathematical model of human hearing to actively remove sound in the audible part of the spectrum under the assumption that it will not be heard” (loc 547). Neoliberalism and biopolitics use a mathematical model of human life to actively remove people from eligibility for moral and political personhood on the assumption that they will not be missed. They each use the same basic set of techniques: a normalized model of hearing, the market, or life defines the parameters of what should be included and what should be disposed of, in order to maximize the accumulation of private property/personhood.
These parameters are not objective but grounded in what Jennifer Lynne Stoever calls a “listening ear”: “a socially constructed ideological system producing but also regulating cultural ideas about sound” (13). Perceptual coding uses white supremacist, capitalist presumptions about the limits of humanity to mark a break in what counts as sound and what counts as noise…such as presumptions about feminine voices like Suzanne Vega’s.
Perceptual coding subjects audio frequencies to the same techniques of government and management that neoliberalism and biopolitics subject people to. For this reason, it can serve as a specifically sonic cyberfeminist theory of oppression.
It shows us not just how oppression works under neoliberalism and biopolitics, but also its motivations and effects. The point is to increase the efficient accumulation of personhood as property by white supremacist capitalist patriarchal institutions. Privilege is the receipt of social investment and the ability to build on it by access to circulation. Oppression is the denial of this investment and access to circulation. For example, mass incarceration takes people of color out of circulation and subjects them to carceral logics…because this is the way such populations are most profitable for neoliberal and biopolitical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
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Featured image: “Solo show: Order and Progress at Fabio Paris Art Gallery (Brescia, 15 January 2011)” by Flickr user Roͬͬ͠͠͡͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠sͬͬ͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠aͬͬ͠͠͠͠͠͠͠ Menkman, CC BY-NC 2.0
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Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism, published by Zer0 books last year, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. She blogs at its-her-factory.com and is a regular contributor to Cyborgology.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Christopher Chien
On Whiteness and Sound Studies–Gustavus Stadler
Unlearning Black Sound in Black Artistry: Examining the Quiet in Solange’s A Seat At the Table–Kimberly Williams
Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. The project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.
Silicon Plateau Volume 2 explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.
The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today — as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?
The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.
Download
Contributors
Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail.
Editors
Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton.
Publisher
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8.
Book and Cover design
Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton.
Copyediting
Aditya Pandya.
Supported by
Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
More information
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ISSN: 2202-2546
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For your end-of-the year reading pleasure, here are the Top Ten Posts of 2018 (according to views as of 12/4/18). Visit this brilliance today–and often!–and know more fire is coming in 2019!
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J. Martin Vest
In the early 1870s a talking machine, contrived by the aptly-named Joseph Faber appeared before audiences in the United States. Dubbed the “talking head” by its inventor, it did not merely record the spoken word and then reproduce it, but actually synthesized speech mechanically. It featured a fantastically complex pneumatic system in which air was pushed by a bellows through a replica of the human speech apparatus, which included a mouth cavity, tongue, palate, jaw and cheeks. To control the machine’s articulation, all of these components were hooked up to a keyboard with seventeen keys— sixteen for various phonemes and one to control the Euphonia’s artificial glottis. Interestingly, the machine’s handler had taken one more step in readying it for the stage, affixing to its front a mannequin. Its audiences in the 1870s found themselves in front of a machine disguised to look like a white European woman.[. . .Click here to read more!]
9).Mixtapes v. Playlists: Medium, Message, Materiality
Mike Glennon
The term mixtape most commonly refers to homemade cassette compilations of music created by individuals for their own listening pleasure or that of friends and loved ones. The practice which rose to widespread prominence in the 1980s often has deeply personal connotations and is frequently associated with attempts to woo a prospective partner (romantic or otherwise). As Dean Wareham, of the band Galaxie 500 states, in Thurston Moore’s Mix-Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, “it takes time and effort to put a mix tape together. The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient. It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. The message of the tape might be: I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you” (28).
Alongside this ‘private’ history of the mixtape there exists a more public manifestation of the form where artists, most prominently within hip-hop, have utilised the mixtape format to the extent that it becomes a genre, akin to but distinct from the LP. As Andrew “Fig” Figueroa has previously noted here in SO!, the mixtape has remained a constant component of Hip Hop culture, frequently constituting, “a rapper’s first attempt to show the world their skills and who they are, more often than not, performing original lyrics over sampled/borrowed instrumentals that complement their style and vision.” From the early mixtapes of DJs such as Grandmaster Flash in the late ’70s and early ’80s, to those of DJ Screw in the ’90s and contemporary artists such as Kendrick Lamar, the hip-hop mixtape has morphed across media, from cassette to CDR to digital, but has remained a platform via which the sound and message of artists are recorded, copied, distributed and disseminated independent of the networks and mechanics of the music and entertainment industries. In this context mixtapes offer, as Paul Hegarty states in his essay, The Hallucinatory Life of Tapes (2007), “a way around the culture industry, a re-appropriation of the means of production.” [. . .Click here for more!]
8).My Music and My Message is Powerful: It Shouldn’t be Florence Price or “Nothing”
Samantha Ege
Flashback to the second day of the recent Gender Diversity in Music Making Conference in Melbourne, Australia (6-8 July 2018). In a few hours, I will perform the first movement of the Sonata in E minor for piano by Florence Price(1887–1953). In the lead-up, I wonder whether Price’s music has ever been performed in Australia before, and feel honored to bring her voice to new audiences. I am immersed in the loop of my pre-performance mantra:
My music and message is powerful, my music and message is powerful.
Repeating this phrase helps me to center my purpose on amplifying the voice of a practitioner who, despite being the first African-American woman composer to achieve national and international success, faced discrimination throughout her life, and even posthumously in the recognition of her legacy.
In Price’s time, there were those in positions of privilege and power who listened to her music and gave her a platform. One such instance was Frederick Stock of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and his 1933 premier of her Symphony in E minor. But there were times when her musical scores were met with silence. For example, when she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra requesting that he hear her music, the letter remained unanswered. There was a notable intermittency in how Price was heard, which continues today. It seems most natural for mainstream platforms to amplify her voice in months dedicated to women and Black history; any other time of the year appears to require more justification. And so, as I am repeating this mantra—my music and message is powerful—I am attempting to de-centre my anxieties, and center my service to amplifying Price’s voice through an assured performance . [. . .Click here for more!]
7). “Most pleasant to the ear”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Itinerant Intellectual Soundscapes
Phillip Sinitiere
Upon completing a Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1895, and thereafter working as a professor, author, and activist for the duration of his career until his death in 1963, Du Bois spent several months each year on lecture trips across the United States. As biographers and Du Bois scholars such as Nahum Chandler, David Levering Lewis, and Shawn Leigh Alexander document, international excursions to Japan in the 1930s included public speeches. Du Bois also lectured in China during a global tour he took in the late 1950s.
In his biographical writings, Lewis describes the “clipped tones” of Du Bois’s voice and the “clipped diction” in which he communicated, references to the accent acquired from his New England upbringing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Reporter Cedric Belfrage, editor of the National Guardian for which Du Bois wrote between the 1940s and 1960s, listened to the black scholar speak at numerous Guardian fundraisers. “On each occasion he said just what needed saying, without equivocation and with extraordinary eloquence,” Belfrage described. “The timbre of his public-address voice was as thrilling in its way as that of Robeson’s singing voice. He wrote and spoke like an Old Testament prophet.” George B. Murphy heard Du Bois speak when he was a high school student and later as a reporter in the 1950s; he recalled the “crisp, precise English of [Du Bois’s] finely modulated voice.” [. . .Click here for more]
6.) Beyond the Grave: The “Dies Irae” in Video Game Music
Karen Cook
For those familiar with modern media, there are a number of short musical phrases that immediately trigger a particular emotional response. Think, for example, of the two-note theme that denotes the shark in Jaws, and see if you become just a little more tense or nervous. So too with the stabbing shriek of the violins from Psycho, or even the whirling four-note theme from The Twilight Zone. In each of these cases, the musical theme is short, memorable, and unalterably linked to one specific feeling: fear.
The first few notes of the “Dies Irae” chant, perhaps as recognizable as any of the other themes I mentioned already, are often used to provoke that same emotion. [. . .Click here for more!]
5). Look Away and Listen: The Audiovisual Litany in Philosophy
Robin James
According to sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past, many philosophers practice an “audiovisual litany,” which is a conceptual gesture that favorably opposes sound and sonic phenomena to a supposedly occularcentric status quo. He states, “the audiovisual litany…idealizes hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority. It alternately denigrates and elevates vision: as a fallen sense, vision takes us out of the world. But it also bathes us in the clear light of reason” (15). In other words, Western culture is occularcentric, but the gaze is bad, so luckily sound and listening fix all that’s bad about it. It can seem like the audiovisual litany is everywhere these days: from Adriana Cavarero’s politics of vocal resonance, to Karen Barad’s diffraction, to, well, a ton of Deleuze-inspired scholarship from thinkers as diverse as Elizabeth Grosz and Steve Goodman, philosophers use some variation on the idea of acoustic resonance (as in, oscillatory patterns of variable pressure that interact via phase relationships) to mark their departure from European philosophy’s traditional models of abstraction, which are visual and verbal, and to overcome the skeptical melancholy that results from them. The field of philosophy seems to argue that we need to replace traditional models of philosophical abstraction, which are usually based on words or images, with sound-based models, but this argument reproduces hegemonic ideas about sight and sound. [. . .Click here to read more!]
4). becoming a sound artist: analytic and creative perspectives
Rajna Swaminathan
Recently, in a Harvard graduate seminar with visiting composer-scholar George Lewis, the eminent professor asked me pointedly if I considered myself a “sound artist.” Finding myself put on the spot in a room mostly populated with white male colleagues who were New Music composers, I paused and wondered whether I had the right to identify that way. Despite having exploded many conventions through my precarious membership in New York’s improvised/creative music scene, and through my shift from identifying as a “mrudangam artist” to calling myself an “improviser,” and even, begrudgingly, a “composer” — somehow “sound artist” seemed a bit far-fetched. As I sat in the seminar, buckling under the pressure of how my colleagues probably defined sound art, Prof. Lewis gently urged me to ask: How would it change things if I did call myself a sound artist? Rather than imposing the limitations of sound art as a genre, he was inviting me to reframe my existing aesthetic intentions, assumptions, and practices by focusing on sound.
Sound art and its offshoots have their own unspoken codes and politics of membership, which is partly what Prof. Lewis was trying to expose in that teaching moment. However, for now I’ll leave aside these pragmatic obstacles — while remaining keenly aware that the question of who gets to be a sound artist is not too distant from the question of who gets to be an artist, and what counts as art. For my own analytic and creative curiosity, I would like to strip sound art down to its fundamentals: an offering of resonance or vibration, in the context of a community that might find something familiar, of aesthetic value, or socially cohesive, in the gestures and sonorities presented. [. . .Click here for more!]
Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.
How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House? –DJ Irene
At the Arena Nightclub in Hollywood, California, the sounds of DJ Irene could be heard on any given Friday in the 1990s. Arena, a 4000-foot former ice factory, was a haven for club kids, ravers, rebels, kids from LA exurbs, youth of color, and drag queens throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The now-defunct nightclub was one of my hang outs when I was coming of age. Like other Latinx youth who came into their own at Arena, I remember fondly the fashion, the music, the drama, and the freedom. It was a home away from home. Many of us were underage, and this was one of the only clubs that would let us in.
Arena was a cacophony of sounds that were part of the multi-sensorial experience of going to the club. There would be deep house or hip-hop music blasting from the cars in the parking lot, and then, once inside: the stomping of feet, the sirens, the whistles, the Arena clap—when dancers would clap fast and in unison—and of course the remixes and the shout outs and laughter of DJ Irene, particularly her trademark call and response: “How Many Motherfucking Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?,” immortalized now on CDs and You-Tube videos.
Irene M. Gutierrez, famously known as DJ Irene, is one of the most successful queer Latina DJs and she was a staple at Arena. Growing up in Montebello, a city in the southeast region of LA county, Irene overcame a difficult childhood, homelessness, and addiction to break through a male-dominated industry and become an award-winning, internationally-known DJ. A single mother who started her career at Circus and then Arena, Irene was named as one of the “twenty greatest gay DJs of all time” by THUMP in 2014, along with Chicago house music godfather, Frankie Knuckles. Since her Arena days, DJ Irene has performed all over the world and has returned to school and received a master’s degree. In addition to continuing to DJ festivals and clubs, she is currently a music instructor at various colleges in Los Angeles. Speaking to her relevance, Nightclub&Bar music industry website reports, “her DJ and life dramas played out publicly on the dance floor and through her performing. This only made people love her more and helped her to see how she could give back by leading a positive life through music.” [. . .Click here for more!]
2). Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Last December, a renowned sound scholar unexpectedly trolled one of my Facebook posts. In this post I shared a link to my recently published article “Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art (2017)”, an original piece rereading of sound art history. With an undocumented charge, the scholar attacked me personally and made a public accusation that I have misinterpreted his work in a few citations. I have followed this much-admired scholar’s work, but I never met him personally. As I closely read and investigated the concerned citations, I found that the three minor occasions when I have cited his work neither aimed at misrepresenting his work (there was little chance), nor were they part of the primary argument and discourse I was developing.
What made him react so abruptly? I have enjoyed reading his work during my research and my way of dealing with him has been respectful, but why couldn’t he respect me in return? Why couldn’t he engage with me in a scholarly manner within the context of a conversation rather than making a thoughtless comment in public aiming to hurt my reputation?
Consider the social positioning. This scholar is a well-established white male senior academic, while I am a young and relatively unknown researcher with a non-white, non-European background, entering an arena of sound studies which is yet closely guarded by the Western, predominantly white, male academics. This social divide cannot be ignored in finding reasons for his outburst. I immediately sensed condescension and entitlement in his behavior. [. . .Click here for more!]
1). Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music
Carlo Patrão
Only overhead the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant
Percy Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820
ROOT: Sounds from the Invisible Plant
Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the times we still fail to notice them. The botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler call it “plant blindness, an extremely prevalent condition characterized by the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s immediate environment. Mathew Hall, author of Plants as Persons, argues that our neglect towards plant life is partly influenced by the drive in Western thought towards separation, exclusion, and hierarchy. Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism–in particular toward large mammals with forward facing eyes–has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Plants are as threatened as mammals according to Kew’s global assessment of the status of plant life known to science. Curriculum reforms to increase plant representation and engaging students in active learning and contact with local flora are some of the suggested measures to counter our plant blindness.
Participatory art including plants might help dissipate plants’ invisibility. Some authors argue that meaningful experiences involving a multiplicity of senses can potentially engage emotional responses and concern towards plants life. In this article, I map out a brief history of the different musical and sound art practices that incorporate plants and discuss the ethics of plant life as a performative participant. [. . .Click here for more!]
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Featured Image: “SO! stamp” by j. Stoever
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Blog-o-versary Podcast EPISODE 62: ¡¡¡¡RESIST!!!!
Writing from Below is now accepting papers for an open-themed issue, volume four, number one. We welcome papers and creative works that engage with Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies from across all disciplines, and from academics at all stages of their careers.
All submissions will be peer reviewed, including creative works with accompanying ERA statements (see creative submission and ERA statement examples in our “Art(i)culations of Violence” special issue). Text based submissions should be between 3,000 and 7,000 words and should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. If you’re submitting artwork, sound or video files, or have queries about any complex or unusual submissions, please email amelia.walker@unisa.edu.au and CC q.eades@latrobe.edu.au.
The deadline for submissions is 30th January 2019.
Please note: all submissions are handled using an online process. To proceed, set up an author account and follow the simple steps.
Writing from Below is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, supported by La Trobe University.