Nancy

This week the lecture focused upon Listening which was a nice follow on from Silence. The writing style however was much denser. The thoughts in it were more confused and the reasoning unclear. I think this reflects the subject. The distinctions between something like listening and hearing are small and not easy to define. Nancy points out that language itself is failing him at some points. The way in which he struggles to convey with language what he is trying to express further enforces his meaning. The lack of clarity forces you to study it closer to find its meaning. This gives his idea that once written, language lacks the potency of the spoken word.

For me it would be interesting if his work to listen to his work. It quite possibly would have made more sense. Would it have been possible to do this well? Or would it no longer be philosophy? Nancy considers language in relation to the visual as well as audio. It is interesting to consider this in terms of typography. Designers spend a very long time adjusting the minute differences in types shape and style. It is much harder to find examples in audio. Poetry, particularly concrete poetry is a great example of the language and visuals combining to create meaning.

However this is not to say that the visual is more powerful than audio. The visual as Nancy points out is much more limiting. When you listen to something you can discern many more things from it than you can from one image. The timbre of someones voice can convey much more than their words written down. Music also can transport the listener to another world, the imagery imagined limitless. Where as the visual has a clear meaning and end. There are certain advantages to audio in books as well. The audio book for example uses introduction music to great effect. This snippet of music at the beginning conveys far more about the story than the front cover.

I disagree with some of Nancy's notions. He places too little emphasis on the power of imagery. He suggests that imagery can not provoke emotion but I would argue that it certainly can. I don't dispute that audio is very powerful in causing emotion however. A horror movie for example, when watched with no sound lacks fear and tension. But Nancy's view of the aural as an absolute I would continue to dispute. I think it is very difficult to separate these two senses.

Sontag

This weeks theme was Silence by Susan Sontag, the first female writer studied in the lecture series. She considers silence in relation to the artist. Artists often use silence to give their work more power, they become hermits or simply stop making work. This serves to highlight and contrast the work that they made before. Of course art cannot be truly silent as it is not Art if there is no audience being communicated with. There are some similarities to Deleuze here. The hermit lives on the outside of society like Deleuze's sorcerer. They both recognise that the outsider  has a great impact on the inner society. They show the limits of what we can do and they define our culture.

These outsiders use myths in order to survive, they place meaning onto things to give them value they otherwise would not have had. Its a form of mysticism again with strong links to Deleuzes sorcerers. This applicable immediately when we look at how we sell products. Giving something a Prada label immediately gives it a high price tag. High class brands often to use silence to sell their products. This is particularly evident in the way that designer clothes are visually merchandised. Expensive shops have emptier windows, they have fewer clothes on the rail and often they do not display the price. As you look at it you know if you need to ask how much it is you can't afford it.

The notion of giving things space to increase its value and impact can also be applied to typography.  Having one small piece of type in a page highlights the space round it as well as the text. The silence needs some noise to make it visible. Silence in terms of reading is a relatively new phenomenon. Books have been traditionally read out loud for hundreds of years and was a primarily social object. Last year I looked at how modern readers read silently creating a very private world and that in this others do not know what we are thinking. It is interesting that reading aloud for some can be a way of creating silence. It helps them to concentrate upon the meaning of the text. It blocks out exterior noises and stops interior thoughts from distracting them.

This is very quickly applied to academic practice as reading back an essay aloud has many benefits. It helps you find the places where the semantics of the work are not working. It also helps find the natural pauses where punctuation should be. Overall silence when considered more closely quickly becomes integral to the way we perceive and interact with the world.

Augue

This lecture focused on memory. Augue uses the metaphor of traveling through the metro in Paris to explain his theories. He uses it to argue that different places can become saturated with our experiences. In relation to my subject it could go some way to explaining why we keep books. In many ways they hold our memory, their tactility evokes an image of our past selves. There is a value in the old, in nostalgia. It is apparent even in the names of some of modern business' those with a family name encourage more trust in them.

Something interesting that we discussed in the seminar was that even when an artists work is in essence very repetitive we often still find it interesting. There is something to be said for the comfort of familiarity and safety in the knowledge of what something is. We would all prefer to be one of Augue's travelers than a tourist. I believe this relates to books that are re-read. We know what is going to happen, so when we read them we can take comfort in the knowledge that it will all come good in the end. This may well be something that is more applicable to a physical book as they have more permanence. they are not as slippery as a digital resource that may be deleted or corrupt in  the blink of an eye.

The way in which we read a text is also very similar to the way in which Augue's tourist reads the map. The tourist continually checking which stop he is at reflects the concentration needed for a new text. The layout of a text keeps everything a connected, the information is linked within the page. The layout system of grids also reinforces this order.

Augue points out that to remember everything would be monstrous, he gives the example of a diary of all the food consumed in a year. When all of the is listed together it truly becomes horrible. When I expanded on this thought I realised that its application to life can become very broad. As anything in excess is bad for us. Augue highlights the importance in forgetting and that repression is not necessarily a destructive force. Augue has introduced the notion that familiarity does not necessarily breed contempt. That there is a value in becoming the traveler and so being a manipulator of space and time.

Barthes

This lecture concentrated upon images, in particular photography. The reading came from Camera Lucida which having heard of before I can now relate to and understand much better. The reading itself was quite easy to digest. The sections of text were smaller and so more digestible than Deleuze’s work for example. This is something I should remember to apply to bodies of text such as my learning record in the future. Mostly as for own work, I think it is important that the reader can easily understand what I writing about.

In this reading we consider what is a photograph? It is not the image itself but the way in which we interpret it which is important. As with Heideggers notion of an object being boring, it is a combination of the physicality of the object and your experiences which create your experience of it. In terms of my own practice it is important to consider the implications of a certain image in a project. If you were choosing and image for a calendar of Big Ben for example you can disregard some photos immediately. However when you start getting down to your final selection it becomes more about gut instinct as to which you go for. This gut instinct process is something to build upon and recognise as it’s happening in order to use it in the future.

Along with realising that our interpretation is important,t the way in which we react to  photographs specifically is also important to consider. We immediately associate photography with fact, the subject of the photo was there in the frame at that time. This can create feelings of nostalgia, or sadness when we look at someone we know to be dead. This reaction is different to that of a painting of someone we know has died. This is because a painting can be created using only the imagination, they may have never met the subject, and so we do not emote with it as readily.

There is also an important distinction to be made between a photograph and a film. A moving image is much more impermanent, with a photo we know the subject is never going to move out of the frame. It is more permanent, much like a book in comparison to a blog. We can rely upon the book remaining the way it is, containing the same information in the same way. Whereas the blog feels less permanent, the author could delete it in a second or the connection could crash and your reading of it finish. Another ‘moving’ version of the traditional book is an audio book. It carries with it the impermanence of speech, its movement making it feel more fragile.

Perec

Of the readings so far this was the easiest to read, it wasn't bogged down by flowery language. It's structure with many subheadings made it much easier to digest as well. The lecture was on the categorisation of things, why do we do this and how. Early on Perec points out that a list should not list everything but by doing so it misses things out. He highlights the imperfection of categories yet their necessity in how we understand the world.

I was particularly interested that despite the arbitrary nature of categories such as the alphabet and despite us knowing this we then apply meaning to its order. For example a B movie or a C list celebrity, in reality the position of these numbers mean nothing yet they help us make sense of the world. For me categorisation enviably leads to a hierarchy. Wether this way of understanding the world is a positive one I am unsure, Apartheid, Nazi Germany in fact the whole notion of a government is based upon this. This process of forgetting that things don't make sense is known as naturalisation. In my own practice I should try to remember that thing don't have to be the way they are and to question the structure within I am working.