Figures of/for Voice

Author(s):  
David Nowell Smith

The concept of “voice” has long been highly ambiguous, with the physiological-phonetic process of sound production entangled in a far more extensive cultural and metaphysical imaginary of voice. Neither purely sound nor purely signification, voice can name either a sonorous excess over signification or the point at which sounds start to signify. Neither purely of the body nor ever extricated from its body, it can figure multiple kinds of meaningful embodiment, the breakdown of meaning in brute materiality, or even a strangely disembodied emanation. Voice can be both intentional and involuntary, both singular and plural, both presence and absence, both the possession of a subject and something that possesses subjects or is uncontainable by the subject. Voices may signify immediacy and be experienced as immediate, and yet they are continually mediated—by text, by technology, by art. In literature, the status of voice is particularly fraught. Not only do literary works deploy this imaginary of voice, but voice is crucial to literature’s medium. If this is most evident in the case of works composed or transmitted orally, it also holds for written works that, while destined for silent reading, nevertheless construct a virtual soundworld destined for its reader’s inner ear, to be subvocalized rather than read aloud. Literary works have been crucial in the development and deployment of the cultural-metaphysical imaginary of voice, precisely because “voice” poses such a diverse set of questions and problems for literature. These problems change focus and force with the development of technologies of inscription and prosthesis, from printing to sound recording to automated speech.

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Roman Belyaletdinov

The transition from an irregular understanding of nature as a given to the regulatory concepts of human development is one of the central philosophical and socio-humanitarian issues in the development of not only biotechnologies, but also society as a whole. In the theory of philosophy of biomedicine, the discussion is structured as the positioning of various problematic approaches, modeled using the principles of bioethics and philosophical ethics, taking into account the actual experience of the application and social perception of biomedical technologies. The status of problematic approaches is determined not only by philosophical ethics, but also by the willingness of society to accept something new as its own future. At the same time, accepting the future is impossible without rooting the future in the past - the beliefs and expectations that legitimize the future. The correlation of such concepts as the authentic autonomy of J. Habermas and the expansion of utilitarianism into the problems of editing the human genome, the conflict associated with challenges requiring collective moral action, and the rigidity of traditional moral mechanisms lead to the search for such a sociobiological language that would be formed from competitively coexisting old, traditional, and new, bioengineering, concepts of human development. The idea of biocultural theory as a form of connection between culture and biological foundation is associated with the work of A. Buchanan and R. Powell, who propose a systemic definition of biocultural theory as a mutual biological and cultural transformation of a person. Biocultural theory is aimed at shaping such a philosophical horizon, where the body, not only carnal, such as organs, but also personal - the awareness of its own bioidentity, becomes open and understandable due to the expansion of the connection between biology and culture, but at the same time acquires problems that becomes the subject of philosophy and ethics, since now a person, comprehended as a body, receives a variability that is no longer associated exclusively with culture. The goal of the article is to show that editing a person is not so much a traditionally understood risk as a transformation of the understanding of the cultural and biological conditions for the formation of his bioidentity.


2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Owen Clark

In an essay entirely devoted to the subject of dance in Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics [Petit manuel d'inesthétique (Badiou 2005b)], we find the following contentious statement: “Dance is not an art, because it is the sign of the possibility of art as inscribed in the body” (69). At first glance, this statement seems strangely familiar to the reader versed in writing about dance, particularly philosophical writing. “Dance is not an art”: Badiou critiques Mallarmé as not realizing this as the true import of his ideas. It is familiar because it attests to a certain problem in aesthetic thinking, one that relates to the placement and position of dance and the works that comprise its history into what can be seen as certain evaluative hierarchies, particularly vis à vis the relation of dance to other art forms, and in particular, those involving speech and writing. Dance seems to suffer from a certain marginalization, subtraction, or exclusion, and its practice seems to occupy a place of the perennial exception, problem, or special case. The strangeness of the statement, on the other hand, relates to the widespread view outside of academic writing that the status of dance “as art” is actually completely unproblematic. What follows therefore is a critical commentary on this assertion of Badiou, placed both in the context of Badiou's writing, and in the wider one pertaining to the problem of exclusion just outlined.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Ridley

Making some minor changes to the syllabus of a peripheral GCE subject – Advanced Level (A-level) Dance – would hardly seem to be of much importance to anyone except dance students and their teachers. But the loss of dance notation is not as unimportant as it might appear: there are implications for the status of dance in the curriculum, for its ability to attract a range of students and for the development of the subject itself. Whilst being a popular social activity, in UK schools dance is constructed as a physical subject with an aesthetic gloss, languishing at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. Dance as a discipline is marginalised in academic discourse as an ephemeral, performance-focused subject, its power articulated through the body. Yet dance is more than just performance: to dismiss it as purely bodies in action is to ignore not only the language of its own structural conventions but also the language in which it might be recorded. Using the notion of docile bodies, the author considers the centrality of the body as instrument in defining the power of dance and how Foucault's mechanisms of power and knowledge are exemplified in current conceptions of dance in education.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Alexander M. Pivovarov

The author poses the problem of the status of sociology of the body as an independent sub-discipline, putting forward the hypothesis that today this moniker only unites the spectrum of those sociological directions that are engaged in the study of separate theoretical and applied issues related to corporeality. This review allows for securing the trend towards fragmenting sociology of the body as a field of study and strengthening its status as a rubric for research, rather than a full-fledged area of sociology. In order to clarify the subject of sociology of the body and its correlation with other disciplines which study embodiment, three classifications of theories used in body studies are analyzed — philosophical, anthropological and sociological. Unlike other researchers, the author of this article considers the opposition of structuralism and interpretativism to be the most appropriate for designating opposing research programs in the sociological classification of body theories.


2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (111) ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Ulrik Schmidt

MUSIC AND DESIGN. PHIL SPECTOR AND SOUNDSCAPES MEDIATIZATIONPhil Spector is often referred to as one of history’s first true music producers, and his famed ‘Wall of Sound’ has been the model for many future musical productions. However, Spector’s productions can also be seen as an early manifestation, among others, of a much more general change in the auditory popular culture around 1960 away from the conventional approach to musicalsound as something that depends primarily on a musical performance and secondarily its technical reproduction S towards a conception of music as a form of design. Hence, Spector’s productions make a favorable material for a more general investigation of the relationship between music and design. Despite the rather extensive literature on Spector and his music, and on sound recording and sound production in general, the different aspects of Spector’s design have not yet been the subject of a broader phenomenological and aesthetic investigation. “Music and Design” explores the key elements in Spector’s musical project through an analysis of his use of repetition, accumulation and synthetized sound in hit recordings such as He’s a Rebel (1962) and Be My Baby (1963). It is argued that Spector’s productions are basically characterized by a displacement of the auditory focus from external media conditions, to musical sound as simultaneously a more synthetic and mediatized as well as moremassive and ‘massified’ soundscape. This mediatization of the soundscape would later constitute a predominant aesthetic model not only in current music production, but in modern sound design in general.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülru Neci̇poğlu

The subjectivity of the gaze and its engagement with human experience had the capacity to incorporate the body, affect, sensation, and memory, thereby raising the status of the visual arts and architecture into potential sites of knowledge. This essay engages with the subject of the gaze and aesthetic experience by exploring the wonderment of the eye, the embodiment of vision through emotional states and desire, the disembodiment of the eye in introspective vision, and the cognitive capacity of sight to produce insight. Addressing these diverse yet interrelated themes, it considers the modalities of the gaze in new genres of Safavid and Ottoman texts on the arts and architecture, starting with their origin in medieval paradigms of visual perception and artistic creation. These more specialized sixteenth–seventeenth-century Persian and Turkish sources include treatises on the visual arts, album prefaces, biographies of architects, and biographical anthologies of calligraphers and painter-decorators. 



2018 ◽  
pp. 251-268
Author(s):  
Luiza Kempińska

Trace and Absence/Presence in the Art of Eva Kmentova Summary The topic of the paper is the sculpture of Eva Kmentova (1928-1980) from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Casts and impressions of the body, which make a significant part of the artist’s output, have been considered by critics and scholars as directly related to herself, and that allegedly close relationship has been taken for granted. The author proposes a different approach to Kmentova’s works. The related concept of presence has been based on Gianni Vattimo’s idea of the “week thought” and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In such a perspective, the traces implied by Kmentova’s body impressions refer not so much to the subject’s presence, but rather to its absence. This claim has been developed in the interpretations of some of the artist’s works, such as Human Egg (1968), Footprints (1969), Feet (1970), and Figure on the Grass or Myself (1971), in which the status of the trace and its tenuous relation to the categories of presence and absence of the artist in her own oeuvre have been examined.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Gianluca De Fazio ◽  

Beginning with the relation between the question of Nature and the status of philosophy, this essay interprets the theme of the mirror through the chiasm between multiplicity and thought. This relation is not substantial dualism’s relation of the subject with the object, but rather, following the image used by Merleau-Ponty, it is like the relation between two mirrors facing each other, thus suggesting that the “subject” herself is a multiplicity. From thence, drawing inspiration from this quote in Eye and Mind, “the Cartesian does not see himself in the mirror”, I formulate both the problem of the body and the question of intersubjectivity as a field of individuation for all possible forms of subjectivity. Following this theme, the essay retraces the use of the mirror in the Note on Machiavelli. Finally, given that the theme of subjectivity as a multiplicity is related to the theme of corporeality (granting the principle of reversibility characteristic of a Merleau-Pontian ontology), the essay ends with an analysis of the idea of the body-mirror (and not simply the “body in the mirror”) which, from an intersubjective point of view, becomes an expressive relation in which each body is mirror and expression of the whole universe, thus unlocking an existential monadology.


Author(s):  
C.D. Fermin ◽  
M. Igarashi

Otoconia are microscopic geometric structures that cover the sensory epithelia of the utricle and saccule (gravitational receptors) of mammals, and the lagena macula of birds. The importance of otoconia for maintanance of the body balance is evidenced by the abnormal behavior of species with genetic defects of otolith. Although a few reports have dealt with otoconia formation, some basic questions remain unanswered. The chick embryo is desirable for studying otoconial formation because its inner ear structures are easily accessible, and its gestational period is short (21 days of incubation).The results described here are part of an intensive study intended to examine the morphogenesis of the otoconia in the chick embryo (Gallus- domesticus) inner ear. We used chick embryos from the 4th day of incubation until hatching, and examined the specimens with light (LM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The embryos were decapitated, and fixed by immersion with 3% cold glutaraldehyde. The ears and their parts were dissected out under the microscope; no decalcification was used. For LM, the ears were embedded in JB-4 plastic, cut serially at 5 micra and stained with 0.2% toluidine blue and 0.1% basic fuchsin in 25% alcohol.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document