Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

The development of new media has a double effect on media that already exist. Old media register the impact of new media through the development of new artistic techniques, whilst new media clarify the technical logics and limits of the media they supersede. This essay uses Stewart Home’s contemporary novel, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, to examine the impact of widespread algorithmic language processing on literary experimentation. Home’s novel incorporates appropriated spam email into its body. By doing so, it not only registers the impact of this ubiquitous form of contemporary communication, it also invites, and problematises, code and software based analyses. This essay approaches Blood Rites as the terminal point for a network of globally distributed processes of spam generation. Whilst it uses tools from code and software studies to engage with this text, it also argues that Blood Rites - and the phenomenon of spam that it mobilises - exceeds the distinctions that code and software studies use to isolate their objects of analysis. Highlighting the distinction between code and language as the chief stumbling block to apprehending spam, this essay proposes an alternate conception of the code/language relation. It suggests that digitality is the operative logic of both code and language, and it uses this logic to understand spam at both micro and macro levels - and the effects of this media technical process on contemporary literary expression.

The concept of the digital subject proposes that online subjectivity is a mediated construct. This article extends this concept by arguing that online subjectivity is not a property of human users, but of digital subjects enacted in circulating data. It develops the digital subject by, first, using Phillip Agre’s concept of “grammars of action” to argue that computational architectures exclude humans from the position of the user; and, second, using Gilbert Simondon’s and Yuk Hui’s philosophies of technology to posit the digital subject as a determinate technical entity that, as per Hui’s reworking of Simondon, inhabits a “digital milieu”. Online, this digital subject inverts the human–technology relationship. It individuates by entering circulation, excluding us from individuating whilst individuating us in turn. This article expands upon this claim by analysing projects by Amalia Ulman and Zach Blas and their thematisation of visibility, identity and authenticity in online subjectivity.

Several journal issues and collections dedicated to Simondon’s work have been released in English in the last half-decade or more in anticipation of the perpetually imminent and perpetually delayed arrival of his major works in English translation (Boucher and Harrop, 2012; De Boever et al., 2012; Hayward and Geoghegan, 2012; Gracieuse and Tissandier, 2012). These collections have been accompanied by a few major monographs translated from the French and at least one guide to one of his major works written and released in English (Chabot, 2013; Combes, 2013; Scott, 2014). For us, each of these collections and works has proven to be, on the whole, interesting, provocative, useful – and above all, tantalizing, in the true sense of the word. But they have also been inadequate, because they have yet to fully articulate the suggestive potential of Simondon’s philosophy for media and communications studies.

What is at stake when the sonorous becomes a condition of possibility for a concept of community? Exploring the ex(ap)propriation of the sonic that takes places at the threshold between the refusal of presence in French deconstruction (Derrida, Nancy) and the refusal of biopolitics in recent Italian thought (Agamben, Negri, Virno), this essay proposes that, insofar as sound always-already goes beyond and outside itself, it provides a model for subtractive ontologies that resists both any notion of particular identity and criterion of communal belonging. The ontological-political potential of the sonic presupposes a division that inheres within aurality between the ear and the voice: between the resonant spacing that is Nancy's being-with and the sonorous residue of the capacity not to speak in Agamben. This leads to asking what form of politics can emerge if an unheard audibility is set alongside a sounding unsayability in the closest, yet irreparably disjunct, intimacy.

This article argues that Beethoven's Arietta Variations inscribe the activity of listening in their own melodic and harmonic processes. The argument proceeds from two observations: (1) that tonality anticipates the listening subject in the form of a " desire " to progress from dominant to tonic; (2) that the temporal representation produced by analysis is always minimally dislocated from the time of music's sonic unfolding. A notion of " the time it takes to listen " describes the time it takes for the ear to bring to its completion the analytical representation of time and thereby accounts for this gap. An analysis focusing on the role of the trill demonstrates how the Arietta Variations reflect this supplementary temporality in their own unfolding.

In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, Waltham-Smith suggests that this relation between belonging-as-membership and belonging-as-ownership manifests itself with particular clarity and rigor at the very heart of the Austro-German canon, in the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Music and Belonging provocatively brings recent European philosophy into contact with the renewed music-theoretical interest in Formenlehre, presenting close analyses to show how we might return to this much-discussed repertoire to mine it for fresh insights.

The book's theoretical landscape offers a radical update to Adornian-inspired scholarship, working through debates over relationality, community, and friendship between Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Badiou, and Malabou. Borrowing the deconstructive strategies of closely reading canonical texts to the point of their unraveling, the book teases out a new politics of listening from processes of repetition and liquidation, from harmonic suppressions and even from trills. What emerges is the enduring political significance of listening to this music in an era of heightened social exclusion under neoliberalism.

“The classics are back. Naomi Waltham-Smith lifts the critical analysis of style to the next level with the freshest and most radical reimagining of the classical masters we have seen in a long time. In prose of fire and fervor, Waltham-Smith puts Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the ring with Badiou, Agamben, and Nancy and raises the stakes in what it means for music to be human. A performance of dazzling intellectual virtuosity.”—Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool

“Do not enter these pages expecting to find the Viennese Classical Style of your peers. Brace yourself instead for a complete repurposing of every element of that style and of almost everything that has been said about it.  Nothing is lost on Naomi Waltham-Smith, and it is exhilarating to watch her wrest this music from its perceived foundations and urge it into the teeming vortex of her critical imaginary.”—Scott Burnham, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Haydn is known for his playful (mis)use of cadential formulas. Examining examples of this predilection and processes of cadential liquidation, this article develops a theory of the use of musical material. This entails a deconstruction of the Adornian dialectic between generic convention and particular expression and--following Derrida’s notion of exappropriation--between proper and improper, and propriety and impropriety.

This article proposes an alternative way to think about the process of expositional closure. The recent resurgence of Formenlehre has given rise to a dispute about the correlation between expositional closure and the sequence of local perfect authentic cadences in the second group. Noting that the two sides of the debate produce opposing representations of the temporality of listening, I draw upon philosophical and linguistic models of actualisation to theorise the way in which expositional closure is realised across the second group. To this end, I focus on the refrain cadences in the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor K. 491 which, as a means of deferring expositional closure, sit uneasily alongside other strategies of thematic loosening and cadential liquidation. The idea of the refrain leads me to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of repetition and from there, via the notion of temps impliqué, to Gustave Guillaume’s system of verb formation—both of which problematise the passage from potentiality to actuality, isolating a dimension of contingency as that which may or may not come to pass.

A quick review of the musicological literature and performer’s commentaries on Bach’s solo cello suites suggests that this repertoire can scarcely be thought of without reference to space, and, with the advent of recordings, the need to find a space for this music has become more acute. This study thus seeks to explore the ways in which listeners might experience recordings of Bach’s solo cello suites specifically in terms of space and to ask what kind of space this might be and what significance it might have. It aims not only to reflect upon how musical-analytical and performance-related questions shape a listener’s sense of space, but also to demonstrate how recording technology plays a significant role in doing so. In this sense, this study is more an attempt to develop a theory of how we listen to recordings of these works in space than it is an analysis of the spatial characteristics of Bach’s music. To explore the spatial possibilities of the experience of these recordings means drawing on a combination of sociological research into listening practices, musical-analytical findings and the responses of record reviewers, as well as numerous and detailed ‘close-listenings’ to the recordings themselves. Philosophical discourse also goes into the mix in an attempt to develop a theory of the transformative potential of such listening experiences.