21 research outputs found
Johanssonian Investigations
In the last decades, Ingvar Johansson has made a formidable contribution to the development of philosophy and particularly that of metaphysics. This volume consists of original papers written by 50 philosophers from all over the world to celebrate his 70th birthday. The papers cover traditional issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, applied ethics, applied metaphysics, the nature of human rights, the philosophy of economics and sports
Recommended from our members
âJazz Steelâ: An Ethnography of Race, Sound, and Technology in Spaces of Live Performance
This dissertation uses multi-sited ethnography to explore how the technological manipulation of sound in live jazz performance conditions the meanings, feelings, and politics of racial difference. Situated primarily in two multi-room jazz venues, Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) and the Montreux Jazz Festival, I analyze three years of participant observation with musicians, audio technicians, acousticians, and sound system designers. I
analyze four main categories of technology: (1) physical acoustics; (2) sound isolation, (3) sound reinforcement (amplification); and (4) digital measurement, prediction, and manipulation technologies. My overarching goal is to provide new ways to understand live performance with more attention to the technologies, architectural designs, and human labor crucial to any sonic event. I show not only how the built physical spaces and technologies I observed are inscribed with human judgments about music and sound, but how the spaces themselves exhibit their own agentive force in conditioning social behavior. I thus rethink live performance as a dynamic network of materials, technologies, and human and nonhuman practices and meanings.
My second intervention uses the figure of jazzâand, more specifically, the sound of jazzâto investigate how the intersection of technology and sound exposes new ways to think through questions of human difference. Focusing primarily on race, I show how ideals of scientific objectivity and âpure and cleanâ aesthetics challenge racial tropes of Black sound as ânoisyâ or disordered while complicating jazzâs political force as an agent of oppositional energy and Black cultural distinctiveness.
Chapter one, ââSome Rooms Make You Shoutâ: Physical Acoustics and the Sound of Jazz,â shows how the designers of JALCâs Rose Theater, a prestigious 1,300-seat concert hall, acoustically encoded musical and social values into the physical materials of the room and the building that surrounds it. Namely, I show how particular aspects of the hallâs physical acoustics reveal overlapping investments in western aesthetic values and Afro-diasporic priorities, including call and response, participatory interaction, and heterogenous timbral palettes.
Chapter two, ââSome Rooms Make You Whisperâ: The Art of Isolation and the Racial Politics of Quiet,â focuses on Rose Theaterâs acoustic isolation, accomplished through a rare and expensive âbox-in-boxâ construction that physically disconnects the hall from any vibratory connection with the outside world. This unique architecture fosters an uncannily quiet, sequestered aural environment that counters a range of histories of racist white listening that associate Blackness, Black bodies, and Black spaces with various forms of ânoisyâ sonic excess. The hallâs extraordinary quietness also reinforces a culture of attentive listening that enmeshes the sound of jazz with western ontologies of aesthetic musical autonomy.
Relatedly, chapter three, ââMake Yourselves Invisibleâ: Transparency, Fidelity, and the Illusion of Natural Sound,â demonstrates how ideals of fidelity and transparency are embedded within electroacoustic sound systems, and how my interlocutors design and operate such systems to foster a âpure and cleanâ aural environment. I show how my interlocutors aspire to an illusion of a ânatural,â technology-free sonic experience but deploy an array of technological systems to do it. My analysis challenges traditional notions of fidelityâand sonic mediation itselfâby revealing musical experience as a constellation of vibrant interactions between acoustic vibrations, amplified sound energy, and physical human bodies. Chapter four, âTuning the Room: On the âArtsâ and âSciencesâ of Sound and Space,â analyzes how my interlocutors design and calibrate sound systems using state-of-the-art digital equipment to foster what they call a neutral, âcolorlessâ sonic environment with âthe same sound everywhere.â
This process of âtuning the roomâ conjures novel ontologies of sound and space as objects of detached observation and technoscientific manipulation. In chapter five, âBlack Boxes, Pink Noise, and White Listening: Rationalizing Race, Gender and Jazz,â I demonstrate how the objectification of sound and space is entangled with raced and gendered epistemologies of scientific knowledge production. I further analyze these approaches to sound and space for their underlying entanglements with what Lipsitz calls a âwhite spatial imaginaryâ: an ostensibly neutral environment conducive to discriminatory systems of capital accumulation. These and other entanglements complicate the oppositional, counter-hegemonic potential of jazz and other forms of Black performance
Recommended from our members
Change and continuity in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has long been reflecting on how to prevent the âre-emergence of chemical weaponsâ as the verification of the destruction of declared stockpiles continues to approach completion. To deal with this shift in emphasis, a functional rebalancing of activities and resources will likely be required as the OPCW seeks to ensure that the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention remains relevant and effective in future operating environments.
Despite much expert attention, studies that explore and characterise the nature of change within the OPCW are scarce, resulting in gaps in our knowledge regarding the different actors involved, and how processes of change unfold. This stems from ontological and theoretic positions embedded within some mainstream approaches used to examine international organisations, which often treat secretariats as bureaucratic âblack boxesâ, characterising change as the product of state machinations. Moreover, change is often treated as episodic and exceptional, arising from deliberate and controlled efforts.
Drawing on archival research at the Sussex-Harvard Information Bank and participant observation within the OPCW, this thesis investigates how our understanding of changing within the OPCW can be enhanced if we treat the Secretariat as a purposive actor involved in these processes. This enhanced understanding enables a deeper exploration of what change looks like and how it unfolds, providing insights that can support contemporary development.
The thesis uses culture theories to present a unique assessment of the Secretariat through the interaction between formal/official and informal/unofficial cultural manifestations. This gives the Secretariat character, opening the black box and allowing its role in changing to be considered. Then, inspired by the work of Andrew Pettigrew, an analytical framework based on a process metaphysics ontology is employed to examine processes of changing. Three longitudinal case studies are used to examine these processes in response to perceived challenges posed by chemical terrorism and non-state actors. This reveals how States Parties and the Secretariat co-create through long-run processes of change and continuity. Evidence for taking seriously the role of bureaucratic bodies in organisational development is presented, exploring how agency can be variously conceived of, and how changing often tends to be multiplicitious and not confined to a single category.
The thesis has theoretical implications. Approaches that arbitrarily ignore particular actors within (international) organisations should be treated with caution, and where possible inclusivity should be sought. Mainstream theories about change tend to be similarly exclusive, prioritising or prescribing a particular form or type of change. This thesis has demonstrated that a variety of forms of changing can co-exist, suggesting that expanding organisational change approaches might be fruitful. An important insight to emerge is that bureaucracies tend toward dysfunction rather than the ideal-type, and using cultural approaches can open up new spaces for examining relationships between structure and agency across different levels, and bring new dimensions to our understanding of secretariats.
Practical implications include demonstrating how the Secretariat has contributed to organisational capacity and capability to respond to perceived challenges around chemical terrorism and non-state actors. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the OPCW develops. The research argues that as the OPCW functionally rebalances, attention to organisational geographies and identities will need to be part of human resource strategies, as the cultural analysis reveals areas of tension. Finally, the Secretariat are co-creators of organisational changing, and although their inputs and impacts can be hidden, indirect, or informal, this research reveals they are productive. This suggests that more evidence-based research is needed to examine the role of secretarial components in organisational changing. During times of normative stress and functional uncertainty, this must be a priority
Spatial Formats under the Global Condition
Contributions to this volume summarize and discuss the theoretical foundations of the Collaborative Research Centre at Leipzig University which address the relationship between processes of (re-)spatialization on the one hand and the establishment and characteristics of spatial formats on the other hand
Progress on Model Checking Robot Behaviour
Abstract: We model systems that involve a learning robot which interacts with obstacles in a static environment. Our models are specified in Promela with a view to verifying them using SPI
Recommended from our members
Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media
Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psyâs âGangnam Styleâ music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulationââviral.â This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the webâs celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomenaâthe production, watching, listening to, circulation, or âsharingâ of such objectsâhas constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Smallâs influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term âviral musickingâ seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to.
The projectâs methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious âviralityâ comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of BeyoncĂ©âs 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0âs digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities.
âUnmute Thisâ articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty-first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality.
The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called âBus Uncleâ and âBed Intruderâ videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Blackâs âFridayâ video, while the fourth chapter analyzes âunmute thisâ video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of BeyoncĂ©âs self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede itâa claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertationâs epilogue
Books of Life: Post-DNA Life Science in 1960s American Fiction
Following the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953, concepts of genetic code and program emerged to redefine life. A range of complementary assumptionsâabout the cryptographic behavior of language, the transcriptional nature of creative writing, and the mechanistic constitution of the human organismâbuttressed this new, textual explanation for living beings. In this dissertation, I analyze how the 1960s novels of three writersâKen Keseyâs One Flew Over the Cuckooâs Nest, John Barthâs Giles Goat-Boy, and the detective novels of Chester Himesârespond to this epistemic shift within the life sciences. While the loudly-heralded âgenomic book of lifeâ written in the double helix appeared to co-opt the novelâs age-old endeavor to describe life, it also proved a compelling invitation to writers who could reconceive these molecular metaphors as compositional resources. Drawing on intellectual histories of the post-WWII life sciences to establish the heavily rhetorical character of this episode in biology, I demonstrate how Kesey, Barth, and Himes mobilized biological metaphors to dual purpose. By employing these new concepts to parody the anachronistic organic logics of literary criticism, they challenged received notions of literary form. Simultaneously, they harnessed the truth-value of scientific metaphors in a complex speculative impulse, which, by taking the new biologyâs claims literally, satirized the rhetorical bombast of scientific discourse while flaunting the periodâs nostalgic literary-critical investments in the âGreat American Novel.â Each text pursues post-DNA biological theory as theme and formal architecture, but ultimately arrives at a more fundamental reckoning with the poetics of literality that, at this historical juncture, worked to elide the distance between life and text. These analyses contribute to critical conversations around the Anthropocene, posthumanism, scale critique, biopolitics, and comparative methods for the interdisciplinary study of science and literature. They also promise to complicate dominant accounts of the postwar novel that have tended to minimize the contributions of 1960s writers, and to augment our understanding of the postwar novelâs debts to contemporaneous scientific discourse.Doctor of Philosoph