“What You Listen To” is a sonic storytellng performance borne out of doctoral research at the Centre of Research into Sound Arts Practice.
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty best describes perception from the point of view of a “perceiving subject” rather than of a fixed reality, as opposed to the idealist and empiricist position – he held the phenomenological position, which I connect to Kassabian’s ‘Distributed Subjectivity‘, of which she writes:
“Distributed subjectivity is, then, a nonindividual subjectivity, a field, but a field over which power is distributed unevenly and unpredictably, over which differences are not only possible but required, and across which information flows, leading to affective responses. The channels of distribution are held open by ubiquitous musics. Humans, institutions, machines, and molecules are all nodes in the network, nodes of different densities.”
(Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity.“)
Merleau-Ponty writes on phenomenology as I would about listening from an intersectional position: “We must conceive of perspectives and the point of view as our insertion in the world-as-an-individual, and we must no longer conceive of perception as a constitution of the real object, but rather as our inherence in things.” (from the chapter “Others and the human world.”
It is my theory and now practice that these things can only be grasped from the phenomenological position of experience, rather than theory, hence the performance. “You had to be there.”
Thanks to the School of Machines, Berlin for giving me the space to explore this.
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