listening to repeating

my brand new NEC mobile phone

How do you write a history of a sense?

Recently, I’ve been reading sound-related materials, including patents, from the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th.  And I keep asking: What did it sound like then?  What was New York noise like in the 1920s?  What did it feel like to be lured into a store by a phonograph?

When I wrote only about literature, I didn’t tend to think about these kind of questions.  For one, I wasn’t very “feely.”   Finding something like affect or emotion in the novel was far too subjective of an enterprise.  It was too reader-oriented.  It would only enable the possibility of—egad—”identifying” with characters.  Yet more generally, sense perception never really occurred to me as  relevant to how I studied lit.  Or if it did, then it was just a theme or trope—a paper on “the eye in [enter modernist author's name here]‘s [enter title of literary impressionist novel here].”  Before New York noise and phonographs, my source material was visual.  On the page.  In hand.

That was then.

Read the rest of this entry →

For the English 207 course on technoculture studies, I’m working through how cultural studies (and, particularly, a mix of the Birmingham and Australian Schools of Cultural Studies) might serve as a foundation toward a political ecology of the senses.  This term, “political ecology of the senses,” is ultimately borrowed (tho not verbatim) from Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and his commentary on the politicization of art, the effects of technology on sense experience, and the shock effect of Dadaist art “happening” upon the spectator.

More specifically, Miriam Hansen references a political ecology of the senses in “Why Media Aesthetics?” (2003), where she writes:

[N]ew media such as video and the digital media have expanded the formal and material arsenal for imaginative practices and have opened up new modes of publicness that already enact a different, and potentially alternative, engagement with technology.

This antinomic situation eludes the perspective of strictly media theory, especially in its ontological and teleological bent (for example, Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Norbert Bolz), to say nothing of popular pundits’ techno-pessimism. It requires understanding the practices, both productive and receptive, of technology in increasingly overlapping yet fractured, unequal yet unpredictable public spheres. It urges us to resume Benjamin’s concern for the conditions of apperception, sensorial affect, and cognition, experience and memory—in short, for a political ecology of the senses (emphasis added).

For us—teachers, scholars, intellectuals—to engage on both sides of this antinomy, we need theory, and we need aesthetics. The current reinvention of the aesthetic in the humanities would do well to heed Benjamin’s lesson. The question of the fate of art in the age of technological reproducibility still maps a heuristic—and historical—horizon that no serious effort to refocus the study of literature and other traditional arts can afford to ignore.

For, oh, the last four years or so, I’ve been unpacking this very antinomy, imagining an approach—indeed, a critical method—where I can balance aesthetics and theory.  And it seems like a political ecology of the senses might be the vehicle toward that balance.

As a theoretical foundation, a mix of Birmingham and Australian Cultural Studies would enable, through models of articulation and radical contextualization, a type of critical awareness that attends to the politics of access, collaboration, and (hegemonic) everyday practices.  Then, as a subset of Cultural Studies, technoculture studies would situate this critical awareness in a negotiation between  technoinstrumentalism (e.g., technology is neutral and not value-laden) and technodeterminism (e.g., technology causes cultural change or domination). In so doing, it could synthesize technical skills, technoskepticism, and technoliteracy with a proficiency in critical thought.

With this foundation, it seems to me that a political ecology of the senses would look not only to questions of access, but also to questions of making.  Of who is producing.  Of creativity.  Of, to borrow from Hansen, radical engagements with technology.  And the responses to these questions would reply upon discourses not just of subject position or standpoint epistemology, but of, as Hansen points out, intersubjectivity, too. (I am admittedly unwilling to simply abandon the former for the latter.  Thing is, the question becomes how to recognize the lessons learned from standpoint epistemology in a move toward intersubjectivity.  That’s a tough one.)

This langauge might very well might mark a phenomenological turn in critical thought and media studies. If so, then that phenomenology needs a base.  It could not be, as Ioan Davies suggests in Cultural Studies and Beyond, “a phenomenology which is ultimately rootless” (69).  Davies goes on to add: “The problem remains . . . in knowing how to take the sensual and the meaningful together, and whether there is a way of teasing a radical, Marxist aesthetic out of the jungle of contemporary art creations and the reception of past art objects” (70).

Indeed.

Given my scholarly investments in affect, technologies, embodiment, and sense experience, I am beginning to map a political ecology of the senses onto my research on sound technologies.  In the meantime, I’m also discovering that it’s a productive pedagogy, which could be imagined as a “CCCT model” for participatory learning, comprised of:

• Critical Awareness (e.g., proficiencies in assessing and articulating contexts),
• Creativity (e.g., knowledge of how to engage technology toward innovation and relationships that are not “business as usual”),
• Collaboration (e.g., destabilizing traditional, subject-centered forms of expertise in intersubjective, studio-based learning climates), and
• Technical Skills (e.g., the nuts and bolts of code).

Still plenty more to think through, so I’ll stop here for now.  I also want to send heaps of thanks to Angela Rounsaville for collaborating with me on outlining the CCCT model.

Over the course of the last few days, I’ve been reading up on various notions of overload—information overload, cognitive overload, and sensory overload, in particular—and their intersections with technology.  This search began, in part, because I just finished re-reading Shaping Things, which attends to the importance of cognitive load in technocultural practices.  Cognitive overload was also mentioned at the Born Digital talk I attended last nite, and the Digital Natives wiki has a section dedicated to digital information overload.

It’s all pretty overwhelming, really.

But the most engaging thing I came across is about sensory overload, and—surprise!—it’s on YouTube.  It’s a stunning video entitled, “Sensory Overload Simulation.” Not only does it perform a persuasive argument from sensory experience, as well as a critique of normative embodiment; it also uses digital storytelling to mobilize Transformers in a way that forces the audience to briefly inhabit several sense positions.  In fact, through “sensory simulation,” it actually alienates the audience, thereby demonstrating how distinct is empathy for someone’s thoughts, or even their memories, from empathy for someone’s lived experiences and perceptions. Or, a distinction between empathizing with information and what it means and empathizing with how that information is embodied and how it means.  Of course, parsing out these two is forever tricky.  Still, after watching this video, we have to (re)consider whether the latter’s even possible.

Looks like I’m back to the Turing test and questions about representation and cognitive systems again.  And tracking affect and qualitative/quantitative data, too. That said, I’ll stop here, with how WeirdGirlCyndi describes her video, followed by the video itself:

I am an autistic adult who is sick of so-called “experts” trying to explain what they think an autistic person is going through. They think they can “fix” autistic children by forcing them to act normal.

Watch this video and see how normal you think ANYBODY can act when they’re going through what I simulate for you all.

My site for English 207 (Introduction to Cultural Studies) is now up.  I’m sure I’ll be making more changes soon.  As always, I welcome feedback!

Here are my closing remarks from yesterday’s symposium for the Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities. Thanks to all who made it out.

Over the past eight weeks, as part of the seventh annual Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, I had the privilege of working with a group of faculty and undergraduates from across the disciplines, and the awesome variety of work presented today should give you, if nothing else, a taste of what that work looked like, how it came to be, and where it’s going. To sum up that work in my closing remarks would be neither sufficient nor fair enough to anyone in the room. Still, what I can do today is briefly address what I have learned from each of these students and faculty and articulate the ways in which that learning altered how I understand undergraduate research in the arts and humanities.

One thing I learned is that, in highly interdisciplinary contexts, both students and faculty can easily fall back on foundations—on what they are experts in. Obviously, we are most comfortable conversing about what we know, and this knowledge base often gives academics a feeling of control, a sense of place, and a steering wheel for knowledge-making. In this sense, expertise is framed around the individual, who is a person with a specialized set of skills and an authority on a particular subject. Yet what is striking to me about the very word “expert” is that, at least in the English language, it was a verb before it was a noun. While, starting in the 15^th century, “expert” was a verb meaning “to experience” or “to know by experience,” it was not until the 19^th century that it became a noun implying a person who is an authority or a specialist. That former definition—”expert” as an action—is now recognized as obsolete. However, from what I witnessed during the Institute, it is anything but. This summer, the most productive learning and novel creations occurred when “expert” shifted from a noun to a verb or from a person to an experience.

Premised on this shift, undergraduate research during the Institute attended not to effects or products, but to process and revision. Specifically, it emerged from collaborations among students—collaborations which did not assume agreement as a necessary ingredient, yet never failed to generate new and exciting lines of inquiry. It also emerged from an openness to and emphasis on change and flexibility. During the Institute, I saw students undo a day’s worth of their own labor, learn software that was new to them in a short span of time, rethink assumptions that subtended their previous work, drastically alter how they were imagining their projects, and, perhaps most importantly, take some serious risks, be they institutional, artistic, or even personal. That said, research was not only experiential; it was experimental. Last week, during their “In Process” exhibition, students turned the Jacob Lawrence Gallery into a laboratory for the arts and humanities, with many of them literally soliciting feedback from their audience, others presenting in a gallery space for the first time, and all of them realizing ways for others to inhabit and participate in their ideas. I could stand here and commend each of them for all of these things and validate their work; but I don’t have to. They already know they have succeeded, because they experienced success and know how to recognize it. As experts of a new sort, they developed competencies and proficiencies—and not just skills—that will allow them, in the very near future, to mobilize their experiences during the Institute for new conversations, here on campus and elsewhere.

For the kind of interdisciplinary, undergraduate research I have witnessed this summer, thanks both to the students and the faculty, is about listening, not just talking; it’s about unpacking what motivates a question, not simply posing one. And, of course, it does not do away with expertise; it displaces it and refigures it. These are the marks of creativity. And, this summer, I was fortunate enough to see and hear such creativity in action, and I learned so much from everyone involved. For this opportunity and on behalf of the students and faculty involved in the seventh annual Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, I would like to thank the Undergraduate Research Program, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Undergraduate Academic Affairs, the Office of Research, UW Educational Outreach, and the Mary Gates Endowment for Students. Because of support from programs and offices such as these at the University Washington, the expert in undergraduate research is well on the way to becoming a verb again.

The symposium for “Media and the Senses” is this Friday, August 15th, in Odegaard Library 220 (map). Here’s the schedule:

8:30-9:00: Refreshments

9:00-9:30: Welcome and Opening Remarks

Kathleen Woodward, Director, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Professor of English

Jennifer Harris, Associate Director, Undergraduate Research Program, Undergraduate Academic Affairs

Axel Roesler, Assistant Professor for Interaction Design, School of Art

Carrie Bodle, Visiting Lecturer, School of Art

9:30-10:25: Session I

Kendal Lund, English

William Damon, English and Law, Societies & Justice

Nishali Nanayakkara, Comparative History of Ideas

Andrew Franks, DXArts

Sohroosh Hashemi, Business Administration

10:25-10:40: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session I

10:40-10:50: Break

10:50-11:45: Session II

Julia Bruk, DXArts

Jennifer Mao, Photography and Psychology

Nichole Poinski, Comparative Literature

Christopher Stevenson, English and Creative Writing

Justin Vice, Comparative History of Ideas

11:45-12:00: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session II

12:00-1:15: Lunch

1:15-2:10: Session III

Gretchen Cook, Design Studies and Women Studies

Ari Kirby, Classics, Greek, Linguistics and English

Seungwha Lee, Art History and Communication

Regina Wandler, Community, Environment & Planning and Comparative History of Ideas

Sarah Wang, Informatics

2:10-2:25: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session III

2:25-2:35: Break

2:35-3:30: Session IV

Brittany Dennison, Philosophy and Creative Writing
Claire Fox, Comparative History of Ideas and Comparative Literature

Sol Hashemi, Photography

Jason Hirata, Photography and Comparative History of Ideas

Laura Paul, Comparative History of Ideas and DXArts

3:30-3:45: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session IV

3:45-4:00: Closing Remarks

Jentery Sayers, Teaching Associate and PhD Candidate, English

If you are in Seattle this Friday, then I hope to see you there.