November 11, 2022 | 1 Comment Cox & Crawley: As textual and discursive analyses presuppose a separation between nature and culture in the manner of Kant (Cox)—the aesthetic object separated from the knowing/judging subject: aesthetic sensibilities forged by means of a disembodiment which itself is a condition of emergence for the kind of thought processes valorized in this post-Enlightenment episteme (Crawley)—a materialistic theory of sound would, following “Nietzsche and Deleuze, [..] construe human symbolic life as a specific instance of the transformative process to be found throughout the natural world – from the chemical reactions of inorganic matter to the rarefied domain of textual interpretation” (148). This is what Crawley does in his chapter on “Shout.” From my notes: Crawley tends to the opportunities afforded in the practice of shouting, which—as the space of excess, of enfleshment as a social source of joy where the choreographic and the sonic collapse—invalidates categorical distinction—pure reason—as a condition of possibility of thought, and offers in its stead an integrated zone of thought and/as eros where “sacred possibility is found” (126).tbc…
just to the side, I heard a story (on NPR, maybe?) recently about people working with sound as touch — as airwaves move through the inner ear, they activate the sensory mechanisms/get them moving, which brain gives to us as sound. I love that sound is touch! Reply