Event overview
Critical Environments is a series of lectures and events, which engages with the apprehension that we are living in end times through a wide variety of thematic and disciplinary perspectives.
Much aesthetic theory has concerned itself with the status and significance of the image. Resisting this "photology," my paper (a chapter from the forthcoming SOUNDS: THE AMBIENT HUMANITIES) will explore, by contrasting the sonic to the phonic, the attractions of tying aesthetic experience to sound, specifically the sound of "the gasp." Through readings of Derrida's SPECTRES OF MARX, McNally's LAST GASPS and Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, I will propose that the gasp vents us to what Spinoza called "admiratio" (wonder), a break that stirs the perception "photology" has long organised around the image (whether beautiful, sublime or craven). Photology, like the particulate matter generating the optical effect of a sunset, is thus read as an inaudible mode of sound pollution.
John Mowitt is Professor and Leadership Chair in the Critical Humanities at the University of Leeds. His most recent book titled ‘Radio: Essays in Bad Reception’, is from the University of California Press. It will be followed later this year by ‘Sounds: the Ambient Humanities’, from the same press. He is a Senior Editor of the journal Cultural Critique.
‘Critical environments’ names several senses. If the (Greek) krinein is to sift and kritikos is the ability to discern, then we are faced with the work of interpretation. Yet if we turn to the Latin criticare, then those environments are diagnosed as gravely ill. We know that what we call the ‘environment’ is indeed in a state of crisis – acidification renders the oceans increasingly inhospitable to life; deforestation threatens both local ecologies and global climate maintenance; the appetite for meat eats up land as well as nonhuman life. Many of us choose not to know this, or perhaps maintain the fetishistic logic of knowing that comes with simultaneous disavowal. Corporate interests ranging across agriculture, pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, and the super-saturation of all forms of media hamper the work of interpretation and the possibility of agency and intervention.
Series chairs: Lynn Turner & Wood Roberdeau
The event is free, no booking is required and all are welcome.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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22 Jan 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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