Article ID: CBB839291654

We Don’t Know That We Don’t Know What a Body Can Do … , or Spinoza and Some Social Lives of Sonic Material (2020)

unapi

This essay is about how artists, listeners and critics claim to hear life in a sound and how this suggestive, but hazily defined, provocation connects vast cultural circuits of production, technology and capital. I argue that claims to life in a sound also belie an anachronistic return to an early modern understanding of sound as particulate matter and suggest a technoscientific discourse in which sound and data are described in terms of one another. With a close engagement with microsounds – from Gilles Deleuze to computer music specialist Curtis Roads – this essay queries what sonic particulates are presumed to be when they are mapped onto Spinoza’s corpora simplicissima but processed through analogy synthesis or digital tools. In part, this essay tries to speak to a persistent separation of sonic materiality and auditory culture, in music and sound studies in which life in a sound cannot be thought apart from how life is subject to different kinds of extractions. With a return to Spinoza’s physics, this essay also retakes the often sloganized “no one knows what a body can do” to emphasize an ethical recomposition of the text in which to “know” must be as open-ended as “body” is typically emphasized to be.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB839291654/

Similar Citations

Book Enrico Giannetto; Giulia Giannini; (2009)
Da Archimede a Majorana: la fisica nel suo divenire (/isis/citation/CBB945473809/)

Book Miklós Vassányi; (2010)
Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German Philosophy (/isis/citation/CBB252978931/)

Book Fabio Bellissima; (2022)
La scala musicale: una storia tra matematica e filosofia (/isis/citation/CBB817825244/)

Book Antonino Drago; (2017)
Dalla storia della fisica alla scoperta dei fondamenti della scienza (/isis/citation/CBB248791186/)

Essay Review Alberto Cordero; (2016)
The Puzzles of Time, Then and Now (/isis/citation/CBB738676827/)

Article Alexandra Lippman; (2018)
Listening across borders: Migration, dedications, and voice in cumbia sonidera (/isis/citation/CBB255424262/)

Article Annekatrin Skeide; (January 2022)
Music to My Ears: A Material-semiotic Analysis of Fetal Heart Sounds in Midwifery Prenatal Care (/isis/citation/CBB433803030/)

Book Koetsier, Teun; Bergmans, Luc; (2005)
Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study (/isis/citation/CBB000500288/)

Article Gouk, Penelope; (2007)
In Search of Sound: Authenticity, Healing and Redemption in the Early Modern State (/isis/citation/CBB001035721/)

Thesis Nickard, Gary Laurence; (2006)
Phenomenal Surfaces and Noumenal Depths: Philosophy and Quantum Theory (/isis/citation/CBB001560887/)

Book Paolo Pecere; (2023)
La natura della mente. Da Cartesio alle scienze cognitive (/isis/citation/CBB751480142/)

Book Dogantan, Mine; (2008)
Recorded music: Philosophical and critical reflections (/isis/citation/CBB001181222/)

Book Kennedy , Stephen; (2018)
Future sounds: the temporality of noise (/isis/citation/CBB214824447/)

Article Fabio Bellissima; Maria Silvestrini; (2017)
The «Mathematical Possibilities» of the Music Concept of Mode from Ptolemy to Messiaen (/isis/citation/CBB413487512/)

Book Thor Magnusson; (2019)
Sonic writing: technologies of material, symbolic, and signal inscriptions (/isis/citation/CBB909967877/)

Article Siegert, Bernhard; (2013)
Mineral Sound or Missing Fundamental: Cultural History as Signal Analysis (/isis/citation/CBB001320385/)

Chapter Enrico Giannetto; (2009)
La Fisica di Spinoza fra Descartes e Newton e la sua influenza su Einstein (/isis/citation/CBB550074250/)

Article Harvey, Warren Zev; (2012)
Gersonides and Spinoza on Conatus (/isis/citation/CBB001211058/)

Authors & Contributors
Giannetto, Enrico
Bellissima, Fabio
Vassányi, Miklós
En-Chieh Chao
Magnusson, Thor
Kennedy , Stephen
Concepts
Philosophy
Music
Sound
Physics
Mathematics
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Time Periods
Early modern
Modern
Medieval
Renaissance
Ancient
21st century
Places
Europe
Germany
China
Singapore
North America
Japan
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment