EVENT DETAILS

CTE Mini-Seminar: Nina Power, "Voice, Noise, Silence, the City, Nature" April 9, 10, 11, 4-6pm; HG1010 (reception to follow first seminar)

Nina Power is a senior lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London, and the author of One Dimensional Woman (Zero Books, 2009), a dissection of popular culture and consumerist capitalism. Her research interests include modern French and German philosophy, Marxism and historical materialism, feminism, and protest. In addition to her scholarly works, she also contributes frequently to The Guardian newspaper and The Wire, a new music magazine.

Mini-Seminar Overview:

This mini-seminar will examine the relationship between human voices, artificial noise, the sounds of the city and the relationship between ‘secret’ sonics and nature.

It will ask: What is the relationship of modernity to sound, to noise and to silence? Are there today certain individuals and particular types of encounter and forms of communication that tap into a longer, deeper and occult way of understanding the possibilities of the sonic (whether human sounds and/or language, animal and natural sounds, mechanical sounds and sounds of the city) and the secrets of silence?

The mini-seminar will focus in the first place on the sounds of the city—the pre-recorded voices we encounter, the political impact of these voices of our understanding of ‘public’ space, and of the polis more generally. It will look at ideas of the voice as unique and ask what becomes of the voice in the age of AI, the robotic voice, the voices of Siri and other ‘Personal Assistants.’ It will examine Adriana Cavarero’s work on the human voice and ask what happens to the individual voice in the era of the homogeneity of the vocal.

We will, at the same time, consider the art of listening in the city via Pauline Oliveros’s method of ‘Deep Listening,’ before wondering how we can think more broadly about listening as a personal and political project—what and who are we listening to? Do we have a choice to listen? Can we hear or do we merely receive and resist sound? What happens when we step outside of the city and listen to the cicadas (we will turn to Plato's Phaedrus)?

To this end part of the mini-seminar will suggest that psychoanalysis, in particular in the emphasis it places on skilled listening and its reverence for silence, channels a long and often hidden history of using sound for magical and initiatory purposes that can be usefully compared to the 4th-century AD (or perhaps 100-150 AD) ‘Mithras’ Liturgy (from the Paris Codex), which invokes silence as the symbol of the ‘living, incorruptible god’ and which text explores, among other things the possibilities of ‘hissing’ and ‘popping’ sounds; sounds which Luigi Russolo would describe in 1913’s ‘The Art of Noise(s)’ as belonging to some of his six ‘families of noise.’

In the context of the long esoteric counter-tradition of thinking about noises, sounds, silence and the casting of spells, we will then explore modernity’s double-edged relation to the profanation and sacred nature of sound and non-sound. When John Cage states in a 1957 interview that there is ‘no such thing as an empty space or an empty time’ and Luigi Russolo notes that ‘[i]n the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion’ we are aware of a certain ironic modernist omertà with regard to a more ancient relation to the dyad sound-silence.

I will instead argue that to embrace ‘noise’ as an opening up of the possibility of an explosive, ecstatic and futurist relation to modernity, as Russolo proposes, is significantly counterbalanced by other aspects of sonic practices of the last century, particularly the psychoanalytic preservation of the secrets of sound and silence (that can themselves be mapped intriguingly onto certain Graeco-Roman rituals), but also by Russolo’s own profound interest in spirituality and the occult. 

Readings and links for the mini-seminar:  Power Readings

Work by Nina Power

https://ninapower.net/2017/12/07/once-you-start-listening-you-cant-stop-hearing-it/
https://ninapower.net/2017/12/07/soft-coercion-the-city-and-the-recorded-female-voice/

Works by Others

Pauline Oliveros: http://ciufo.org/classes/ae_sp14/reading/deep_listening_intro.pdf
Mithras Liturgy: https://hermetic.com/pgm/mithras-liturgy
The Art of Noise: http://www.artype.de/Sammlung/pdf/russolo_noise.pdf
“The Vocal Body,” extract from A Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Body, Adriana Cavarero (pdf to follow)
Plato Phaedrus: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html