Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Suspicious to the Core (eight)


tobaccoey dreams, fiery thoughts : the right to learn, the right to the remix

“That’s my choice—I’m glad! I should have done the same if I had had the first lot.”
Plato, The Republic

passion, darkness, and -- theater

Seekers learn. Learners seek. Partly, the privilege is manifested as and in the capacity to immerse oneself in the very act, to be synchronized with the adventure, and continuously energized by it. Partly, it is integrated into the playfulness inherent in such endeavors; abundance of its challenging, yet rewarding, tasks; quirkiness of its content, the ways it is delivered, and the nexus between the two; persistent invocation of its nature, of its authentic character.

Each instance within the trajectory called learning is a reminder to revisit the dark theater from Sherman Alexie’s story “Fearful Symmetry” from the book War Dances (2010). It is a story about the guy who embarks on a journey during which his resilience, adjustability, adaptability, stamina, and resourcefulness are tested.  He was going to be hired as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Sherwin Polatkin was to adapt an account of a former smoke jumper who captured the event in which sixteen adventurers parachuted in the Sirois Canyon to “fight a small wildfire” (162) that soon, unpredictably evolved into raids of raging flames, scorching adversaries threatening to obliterate the scenery. Calamity lurking from each wild movement of the destructive cohorts. The only survivor from the whole team, Wayne Ford, set a fire to escape the fire. It was weird. And yet, he was the only one who did not try to outrun the nature ablaze. The only one who did not run:

Did you know that you can escape a fire by setting another fire at your feet? You might seem to be building a funeral pyre, but you’re creating a circle of safety. In order to save your endangered ass, all you have to do is burn down the grass surrounding you, lie facedown in the ash, and pray that the bigger fire will pass over you like a flock of blind and burning angels. (162-163)

The event chronicled by Harris Tolkin decades in the aftermath of the event is entitled Fearful Symmetry: The True Story of the Sirois Canyon Fire. Sherwin was to devise a cinematic version of it. Only, he would have to de-tragedize it, so to speak:”The hero can’t die” (171 italics original). As a means of ensuring and, hopefully, enhancing box office success, he was advised to possibly include ”a scene where the hero fucks his girl in the ash after a fire” (169). And it was also suggested to him to “[g]et rid of the William Blake shit (171 italics original).  

We don’t buy it. That’s when his “odyssey” across the seas of crossword puzzles begins. After those unlikely ordeals and trials, he settles in the territory he knows, but from which he was temporarily distracted due to challenging circumstances, tribulations, and inner oscillations spurred by and invigorating deceitful uncertainty, and elusive self-confidence.

Before them, as if his whole life could be encapsulated within, sublimated into, a single experience: a visit to a movie theater with a girl. Unexpectedly, Karen, who was not exactly an epicenter of his romantic world, turns the dark room and viewing of The Breakfast Club into an immensely intense, passionately emotional sensation that grips his whole adolescent being. She touches his hands. She plays with his fingers. His palms. He had had a sexual experience. He had sex with three girls before. The contact with Karen was very different from those:”It was simple—and nearly innocent—but it still felt like sex” (161). As their hands touch, in the midst of an ordinary, potentially quite prosaic viewing, the initial semi-indifference of the movie theater experience is being transformed into one of the most powerful, most vibrant, and most memorable moments.

From then on, it is deeply engrained in his mind map. It turns out that everything that follows is a search of the possibility to generate “courage to step into a dark theater, hold hands with a beautiful woman, and fall back in love with [his] innocence” (181). He is entertaining the idea on the plane, on his way back from a crossword puzzle contest. He is soon to land in San Francisco. On his way back home, he devises a metaphor as powerful as the passion that fuels the realm of letters itself is. And his place within it, as well.

We, too, need the passion that sustained Polotkin’s persistence in living up to the intensities of the magical moments of his and Karen’s dark theater experience. We, too, need it in order to go back to the dark theater and elucidate veering vagaries, lurking from disguises. Neither darkness nor blackness is what characterizes the dark theater. It is a symbolic device galvanizing the capacity to disambiguate hypocritical enchantment in the midst of babylonian noise and reconstitute energies regenerating the potential of the remix.


truths, worlds & scientists : re-vo-lu-tio-nize & know it

Neither darkness nor blackness is that what characterizes the works on which this book focuses. One of the ways to persevere in discerning and sustaining distinctions is to learn resistance against oppression, against coercion. In a word, learning resistance simultaneously fuels and is invigorated by critical thinking. One of the ways of deploying and demonstrating it through encounters with pieces reflecting that faculty is to look at the juxtaposition and parallels between and among them with regard to both the style and the message. Specifically, there is an undoubted sense of stylistic disparity—despite obvious reverberations—between Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream and Dennis Cooper’s Try.

The former is unmistakenly a piece of realist prose. Everything in it is in tune with the dynamics of the street, monstrosity of drug addiction, terror of degradation, discomfort of a dysfunctional family, unease of the collapse of the solidity of societal institutions, morality, and human relations. And that’s just how it should be perceived. The latter, however, in spite of the persuasiveness of horror genre and all the aspects of the underbelly and demimonde of what to a majority of denizens who inhabit this planet appears as the only form of the everyday, in spite of the intricacies and, indeed, at times puzzlement, of the opacity overshadowing destinies of the characters and bending their orbits, there is a streak that stands in stark contrast to the disastrous aspect  supposedly underscoring the overarching concept that unifies the whole novel.

Particularly, there is a cartoonish, so to speak, characteristic that contradicts the cruelty of the word depicted that enables dissolvement of those mindless forces. The cartoonish streak in question is that what inspires distrust of the philosophies some of the characters propagate. The cartoonish streak is that what ensures the basis for recuperation. Were it solely for the plot, solely for the content of the dialogues taken at face value, solely for superficialities of the manifestations of inner dynamic, the characters of Ziggy and Calhoun would be sensed merely in terms of their messed up syntax, stinky jeans, stained linen, dimlit rooms-as-an-epitome-of-dimlit universes, dispassionate responses, or inexplicable affinities. Were those components solely the focus, Ziggy’s magazine I Apologize would be suggestive merely of the noise in the communication channel, rather than the noise coming from the amplifiers channeling the signal of the mighty strings, resonating with the time steadily sustained with each and every strike of the drum stick on the surface of the snare drum, with the symphony of cymbals—rather than the glorious polyphony of his favorite band Hüsker Dü. Were those tangential elements under the disguise of the key ingredients constitutive of the substantiality of the message, the reading of this immensely inspiring novel would be divested of the joy of diving into the profound lyricism it so generously offers and presents.

Those features that typically characterize fiction writings and are mainly woven in the layer that belongs to the sonic aspects of prose--the tone--apparently are not exclusively pertinent to the genre in question. More precisely, there is a peculiar narrative device that can be found in nonfiction, as well. Surprisingly, it reveals the stylistic components as central to the statement of the work. From those versatile manifestations of that audio plane one learns.

In Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), where he considers a dynamic within the discipline called science, patterns of normal science are juxtaposed with the occurrences of revolutionary science. The former is characterized by cumulative mode of acquiring and storing knowledge aimed at and deployed in the service of solidifying and reconfirming the existing body of knowledge and the entrenched perception of phenomena and data alike. The latter demarcates the crux of the dynamic: the moments when new insights, that no longer support the previous theories and hypotheses, are obtained.

Such moments require and entail a rather holistic reconfiguration of both the information and access to it. Those moments are called paradigm shifts. That’s when normal science is rendered obsolete, inoperative, when the knowledge available is not sufficient to explain the world, and when the pattern known as scientific knowledge is questioned, rethought, and refigured. That’s when it (the particular pattern/paradigm, not the category) is replaced by an alternative vocabulary, new theories, hypotheses, perception, and approach to the subject matter. That’s when revolutionary science occurs.

However, one cannot but notice numerous instances of Kuhn’s debating the issues from which it could be inferred that radical paradigm shifts are quite unlikely. There is a sense that each seemingly radical shift of scientific vocabulary is an increment on the scale of revision of the existing ones, that the existing ones are to diverse degrees being redescribed. This puts the theorist, and philosophers especially, in a curious position. For one, s/he acknowledges versatility of what is taken to be objective knowledge, thereby ascribing the same revisibility to the fact that knowledge is human creation.

To attribute an unchangeable character to a particular paradigm would mean setting it in stone, thereby enabling it to occupy a privileged position in culture and assume an unrivaled, uncontestable status. That, in turn, would entail an assumption of a demigodlike position of scientists—authors of(f)  inventions, owners of patents, of copyrights, royalties, principal researchers within projects funded by multifarious sources, the ones who both articulate and subscribe to the discovery. At the same time, to claim a discursive character of science would put emphasis on contingency that might be (as it has frequently been) misinterpreted as sheer arbitrariness, absence of structural solidity, unhinged relativistic anomie. It might be misconceived as a randomly articulated, purely subjective – matter.

Yet, Kuhn undoubtedly maintains the stance that heavily relies on the anchorage of scientific vocabulary (regardless of its being subject to redescription) in the objectivity of the world. His advocating objectivity features no affinity to determinism whatsoever, especially not at the expense of agency and individuality. So, rather than disruptions, discontinuity, and discrete nature of paradigm shifts, Kuhn’s theorizing inspires thoughts of continuity, process, constancy of revolution.

Kuhn seems to be reluctant to credit new angles of looking at certain scientific questions with the status of a revolutionary shift. Part of the reason he never explicates that hesitance might be understood in the context of the relationship between normal science (paradigm) and revolutionary science (paradigm shift). Specifically, the basis of the conundrum can be the problem of radical newness related to the notion of incommensurability. In other words, were those paradigms, indeed, utterly incommensurable, the shift would be out of the question altogether. They might be incongruous in the context of, with regard to, the object level (the questions they concern), but communication between them on the metalevel is intact. Hence, incommensurability is partial, conditional, specific, particular. So is newness. So is “revolution.”

Thomas Kuhn:” Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints. How can they even hope to talk together much less to be persuasive. Even a preliminary answer to that question demands further specification of the nature of difficulty” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 200).

To say that revolution is partial is to highlight the context within which Kuhn considers scientific vocabularies. His cautious approach to the notion of revolutionary/paradigm shifts is anchored in the understanding that new paradigms do not discredit scientific status/character of the one it questions and, potentially, modifies. Thus, the sense of certain kind of continuum of scientific vocabularies may imply that they do not necessarily propose completely different answers to the same questions. Paradoxically, it is not unreasonable either to presume that they might be addressing related issues and that they are constitutive of the same vocabulary called science.

The caution with which this should be handled results from the assumption inherent in such a precept. Particularly, the standpoint could be suggestive of there being diverse discursive descriptions of the world and that they are conjured up by humans called scientists. This may suggest ascribing to that knowledge merely subjective nature perceived as a radically mutually exclusive with objective knowledge. To say that absolutely objective knowledge is a philosophical impossibility by no means implies that the world can be molded by just any discursive description. Nor does it mean that any description is valid. Thomas Kuhn: “Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please” (150).

One needs hardly be reminded how extravagantly challenging Kuhn’s wording here is. The “different worlds” cannot be more symbolic in portraying disparity of views. Let’s consider a subtler version of the discussion in question: “To say that the members of different groups may have different perceptions when confronted with the same stimuli is not to imply that they may have just any perceptions at all” (195). The “different worlds” could be understood as different wording of “different groups. “ And yet, two vocabularies are quite what the phrase means. The contrast could be encapsulated by the observation Kuhn offers, thereby enhancing the critical edginess of the debate and accentuating both elusiveness and distinctiveness of the literal and the metaphorical, of the object level and the metalevel:”In the metaphorical no less than in the literal use of “seeing,” interpretation begins where perception ends” (198).

Capable of spurring relativistic accusations as it may be, the claim, in fact, clears the path to the clarification regarding both antirelativist purism and uncritical randomizing. That it is merely a demonstration of sensitivity to resilience, and yet, distance from unselectivity, sensitivity to critical thinking, and yet. distance from rigid discrimination Kuhn’s remark fortifies:

I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s. Though the temptation to describe the position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences. (207)

To generalize relativity would require drawing from the axiom that subverts its ever so versatile nature. Needless to say, it would spell out both its self-including and self-excluding, (self)denying and (self)affirming character. Simultaneously, to limit its scope, to negotiate articulating takes on it solely for the sake of ensuring “safe space” of theorizing that would enable its “immunity” can be a dangerous, dishonest, unscrupulously utilitarian, uncritical, theoretically not viable, and morally questionable maneuver. It’s not tasteful, either. Obviously, the dilemma implies the underscoring paradoxes generating the debate. Necessity/contingency, determinism/relativism are some of the polarities around which the conversation revolves. While they are per se frequently sensed as valid--despite numerous objections to dichotomies as such and albeit being even potentially theoretically untenable—it by no means invites mechanistic adjustments between theory and what it is supposed to fit in, let alone vice versa.

            That is precisely the reason why Kuhn might be reluctant to acknowledge and embrace in its entirety the postulate of/presumption about the continuum of scientific vocabulary. Simply put, it would signal an understanding of it as a succession of diverse takes on the constant called truth. Kuhn rightly has reasonable reservations regarding such a view. It is an admirably humble attitude towards the subject matter. Likewise, it is a manifestation of the awareness of both elusiveness and protectiveness of language, awareness of the limit and the greatness of the human.



fluctuating axioms, un-anchored tenets : limits to overregulated anomie

From another angle--from another group--a voice of a theorist resonates with Kuhn’s critique. Terry Eagleton’s book After Theory (2003) considers the trajectory that theoretical flows have delineated progressing from the clutches of the grand narratives toward a free wheeling discursive polyphony. The portion of the trajectory the book is mostly focused on spans the fluctuations characterizing discourse of the twentieth century and the very beginning of the twenty-first century. The period has brought to intellectual history the vernaculars widely known as modernism and postmodernism.

While distinct in some respects, the two may be approached in the key that addresses abandoning foundational, essentialist, universalist narratives. They both, in their own distinctive ways, tell a story about the ways we talk, think, create, live, and perceive the world, ourselves, and each other. Each in its distinctive manner demonstrates disagreement with a monolithic, homogenous expressive mode and, instead, offers a perspectivalist take on pluralist discourse and pluralist culture. Such a state of affairs may be perceived as ungrounded, uprooted, and unhinged. Some of its versions appear even as arbitrary, uncritically contingent, reductionist, and/or relativistic vocabularies. Many of the variants might sound way too unstructured. Some might even be untenable.

Those varied manifestations and perceptions of the increments on the modernist-postmodernist scale, those diversified approaches to the world within and without alike considered through modernist and postmodernist discourses can be understood through the prism of Eagleton’s theorizing, notably with regard to the observation about the quirky dialectic, oscillations between the polarities such as contingency-determinism, the conditioned-innate, discursive-biological, metaphorical-literal:“Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions” (57). Eagleton challenges this versatility raising a question about one of the most sensitive areas. His tone is unshakable, yet it is also comforting. Once he introduced the remark about limitless possibilities of discursively “founded” morality, Eagleton elucidates the counterpoint:”There is no need to be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be the flipside of the same misleading metaphor” (57).
Strangely, part of Eagleton’s discussion reflects an aspect of the conundrum Kuhn is depicting. Kuhn is a scientist-turned-historian. Eagleton is a theorist. Both realize the bliss of polyphonic playfulness. Both warn against ruthless misuse of such a benefit. Each of them demonstrates uncompromising refutation of the equation between unlimited potential of language and senseless belief in human omnipotence. Each of them draws a clear distinction between the world and what we say about it, each acknowledges points of intersection between these. While sustaining a balanced approach to such a weird dynamic, not for a second denying objectivity as such, these immensely provocative, yet incredibly vibrant, thinkers keep inspiring investment in resistance to mindless proliferation of discourses and worlds--orgies of hypostatization. Eagleton’s extraordinarily vivid and lyrically loaded trope is suggestive of the stabilizing component in the midst of deceitful, tumultuous wanderings: “We are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly being seized by panic on realizing that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. But in fact it is” (57). Theories like theirs invigorate critical thinking, re-establish the significance of critical distance, galvanize the edginess of critique, and reintegrate the sound basis for the preservation of playfulness: elusiveness, but also protectiveness--by virtue of poisenous poetics.


/


To articulate it all might be ambitious beyond good taste. To demand verbalizing it entirely precisely might be even less tasteful. It could even be ridiculously delusional. Or both. However, to understand it--if not completely--to communicate it, and to even deliver the message in a logical, rational, coherent, imaginatively invigorating, engaging, but also accurate manner might not be impossible. One thing is quite certain: the tone, imbuing the signature in the content, is if not the same, then closely related to the voice. The concept of voice is not likely to be separable from the notion of the subject, as Steven Connor observes in his essay “Choralities” (2015).[1] While he concerns audio manifestations of soundscape in its aural form, the thoughts he presents can be understood in the context of the voice as the tone of the narrative. The sonic imagery thus delineated can be perceived via the awareness of the notion of the subject: ”there is no disembodied voice. That is, there can be no voice that does not imply and require the possibility of somebody and more particularly some body to utter it” (1).

Connor succinctly and ever so subtly unpacks the specter of objectification haunting this benighted planet. He does so in a fascinating lateral manner. The tactic almost resembles the-fire-to-escape-the-big-fire strategy from Alexie’s story “Fearful Symmetry.” Namely, verging on being perceived as a claim about insubstantiality, almost hallucinatory character of voice, Connor, in fact, strips the voice of a mythical dimension. He de-subjectifies it. He focuses on the perception of it, thus repurposing the narrative, as suggested in his essay”“Acousmania” (2015).[2] Re-purposing in question concerns subjectivity as the pivotal component of the polemic--the focus and the source. To look at the phenomenon of sound more closely, Connor proposes an angle from which sound is rendered undetectable, unperceivable unless received in its relational form. The form in question is constitutive of content. Sound is that what one hears, as it were: “A sound is a relational entity, not any kind of thing in itself” (6).

Tracking the debate back to the vacillations between the metaphorical and the literal, one is prone to note the persistent centrality of the perception-awareness nexus in Connor’s critique. Not only does he divest sound of thing-in-itself, but also demystifies the stance by illuminating the crux and directing the discussion toward disentanglement of knots: “The set of relations that constitutes a soundscape is certainly a relation between auditory elements, but the relations themselves are not auditory” (6). To further clarify the point about de-subjectification of the inanimate and re-subjectification of the subject, he goes on to fortify the awareness of the subject matter:

Nor, let us hasten to add, are they necessarily visual, so this is not a question of the auditory being subsumed under or reduced to the dominative order of the eye, as audiomanes like to insists. For relations belong to the intelligible rather than the sensible, and are therefore as anoptic as they are anaural; we may see the relations between visual items, but we can no more ‘see’ the relations than we can ‘hear’ the relation between a major chord and a diminished seventh. (6)

            How does one then rejoice in the intricacies of the caprice of quirky chords if it is not possible--and not necessary, either--to simultaneously listen to the pretext, so to speak? Perhaps transposing the discussion into philosophical lingo could be instrumental in understanding the quandary--if not in its entirety, then, at least, the major part of it: ”because sound is all and always epistemology, and not ontology” (5). Through this prism, Connor reveals the key to the enigma of sound as relations, as perception. He does so by invoking the linguistic playfulness teaching one and, at the same time, confirming the capacity for and sensitivity to the power of language generated through a paradoxical dialogue between its elusiveness and protectiveness. Specifically, Connor evokes reverberations of and between the words intelligible, sensible, awareness, perception, understanding, perspective, point of view, sound, voice, the tone. He approaches the perplexity via the analysis of the act of listening--one of the most precious faculties cultivated by human beings: “Perhaps, it may be said, when one listens for the way in which things operate as sound, rather than simply listening through the sound to what they mean, one is doing something different – but it is really no more or less sonorous, or ‘intuitive’ than the action of listening for meaning” (4-5).

            Connor solidifies the point where the key aspects of his reasoning intersect: “I have begun to wonder whether subjects must be understood as those entities who know how to subject themselves” (3). Indeed. One should be reminded that the discussion Connor offers is constitutive of the discipline called sound studies. In philosophical jargon, it is the metalevel to the object level called sound. At the same time, sound studies is the object level of the metalevel called acoustemology. Explorations of /observations about sound put the subject on various levels of the investigation and conversation. Since much of what is pertinent to sound concerns the subject’s perception of it -- the knowing -- clearly, studying sound can only be conducted from the metalevel looking at sound as the object level. However, that metalevel always includes interrogation of those who observe, contemplate, and communicate, i.e., human beings who are, thus, simultaneously constitutive of the subject matter.

            Connor’s interpretation is sophisticated. It summons the awareness of a perpetual introspection, especially within the endeavors such as those linked to phenomenology, and yet, it refrains from self-referentially. It amply centers on the significance of the subject, and yet, it does not wallow in an inflated image of self. It shamelessly, yet humbly, positions itself in the world. It is an admirable homage to language: elusiveness, but also protectiveness--communicating the potential of the remix.


/

In the age that colors the world the shade of fabricated desire and dromospheric pollution enables reckless commoditization as a channel of oppressive mechanisms of control—a tunnel of noise. In the age that obscures via overexposing, where distraction is packaged in myriad false foci, the world’s angles from which blindness generates vision hide in the shadow of noise. In the age that threatens to transform the communication channel in an empire of a mindless monetized flux, unselective, uncritical perception of the world, oneself, and others perpetuates sensationalism as the controlling mechanism in the universe of hollowness.

The world that welcomes the ecstasy of bewilderment celebrates euphoric haze that devours critical distance. Critical thinking. Such a world believes that its modus operandi is its genuine character—battlefield of power. Such a world believes that viagra, bank account, and mortgage are linked by virtue of mysteriously woven digitized fantasies. In such a world, power has become the new l’art pour l’artism. Only, it’s neither. It’s a misnomer.

Some of the perplexities of this nature call for sharpening the edginess of critical thinking enabling, inspiring, generating, and invigorating the capacity to discern and sustain distinctions. One of them is the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. The legacy of the Enlightenment keeps the awareness of the world plagued by amnesia. The legacy of the Enlightenment keeps the awareness of the world that forgot the fervor of the investment in the age of reason. The era clad in a distorted image of the significance of the private sphere obliterates the distinction between the public and the private at the expense of transforming the latter into a cacophony void of a bilateral dialogue. The former, needless to say, is rendered self-referential to the point where individualism dissolves in the bacchanalia of disconnectedness. Both are dissolved in the murky entanglement of dictum of fiscal logic under the disguise of a crossbreed between sociopolitical structures and morality. Individuality is something else. It is constitutive of and is engendered through refacement.

 Cacophonic multivoicedness is a deviant version of polyphonic playfulness. Perspectivalism on steroids, hypostatization galore, proliferation of worlds, vocabularies, and senseless fantasy of human omnipotence reflect a misperceived potential of  pluralist discourse. In it, differences, instead of inspirational heterogeneity, establish the common denominator divesting them of -- distinctiveness. Such a proliferation of flawed diversification is, in fact, a means of further fragmentation, atomization, insularity, disconnectedness—by blandness. This paradox is the mode that both reveals and sustains a mutually dissolving relationship between cacophony and uniformity. Unity is something else. It is constitutive of and generated through refacement.

Both individuality and unity are pivotal to the remix. They are also key to refacement: subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring the hindrances to the patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on trust and love. The remix is both the source and the vehicle for the intersection between vibrant creative / critical responses, peaceful/peaceable resistance, and reverence. By virtue of such intersections, learning persists, and so does the fellowship: against noise, and in the service of the remix.






[1] A lecture given at Voices and Noises, Audiovisualities Lab of the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, 27th March 2015. http://stevenconnor.com/choralities.html
[2] A lecture given at Sound Studies: Art, Experience, Politics, CRASSH, Cambridge, 10th July 2015. http://stevenconnor.com/acousmania.html