Schlagwort: Kritik

EX005 Reading Chapter 1: "Unlikely Publics" by Brandon LaBelle

In this episode I read chapter 1: “Unlikely publics: on the edge of appearance” from the book “Sonic Agency” by Brandon Labelle. The book deals with the fascinating question of sonic agency – of what kind of agency becomes possible by and through sound and the sonic. LaBelle further develops a typology of ‘unlikely publics’, i.e. social formations and their contexts and conditions that have particular need for sonic agency (the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak). The first chapter of the book seeks to give an introduction to the approach as well as the problems discussed. Unfortunately the language is unnecessarily complicating things; difficulties to follow the arguments cannot be attributed to the medium of reading out loud, but are already inherent in the written text. 

I originally read this text for the seminar “Writing culture – recording culture” I taught in the spring term of 2019 at the university of Bern.

Bibliography:
LaBelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

EX002 Reading "Introduction: Partial Truths" by James Clifford

In this episode I read James Clifford’s introduction from the famous essay collection Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography  edited by James Clifford. In itself the chapter might be one of the most important texts of the so called “writing culture debate”.

I originally read this text for the seminar “Writing culture – recording culture” I taught in spring of 2019 at the university of Bern.

(As a comment: I know, this is not very well read, yet it was my first attempt using this approach for working with seminar texts of my own seminars. In this context I find it worth documenting. Maybe I will add another attempt of reading this text at a later point in time. So far I find it refreshingly irritating and healthily humbling to hear this result. At least it reveals the aspect of reading out loud as interpretation as seen from the perspective of annoyance and imperfection.)

Bibliography:
Clifford, James. 1986. Introduction: Partial Truths. In: Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography ; a School of American Research Advanced Seminar, ed. by James Clifford, 1–26. Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.: Univ. of California Press.