Abstract

British democracy is in crisis. Lord Keen QC has just taken the extraordinary step of having to reassure the Justices that the Prime Minister will take all necessary steps to comply with any declaration the Supreme Court makes. Legal experts, political scientists, and the Twittersphere have been exercising themselves in debating the constitutional stakes of a juncture (and hubris) unprecedented in modern times. More broadly, in recent years scholars across a wide variety of disciplines—historians, political theorists, economists, sociologists, philosophers—have offered various analyses of the resurgence of right-wing populisms, the emergence of leaders brandishing authoritarian personalities, and the collapse in the hegemony of the liberal political-economic consensus. But there is another hypothesis that merits exploration, a diagnosis that music analysts are in a privileged position to test and explain—namely, that the crises of representation we are currently witnessing may be analysed as a generalized crisis of listening.

My admittedly provocative argument has two limbs. First, ever since Plato dismissed the people as a motley rabble in the same breath that he rejected certain rhythmic and melodic modes, music, sound, and listening have repeatedly been present at precisely those moments in the European political philosophical tradition when thinkers have sought to specify the limitations and especially the aporias of democracy. I suggest some explanations for the privileged status of this aural metaphorics and draw a number of conclusions from the historical vicissitudes of the concept of listening for understanding the contemporary situation in which there is paradoxically both a democratic deficit and a panacoustic excess of listening.

Second, the changes in social forms of listening are inseparable from and arguably even symptomatic of transformations in the conditions and practices of musical listening undergone as a result of digital mediations. The consumption of music through streaming services, together with the rise of digital personal assistants, affective listening technologies, and the judicial weaponization of forensic sound analysis, have combined to alter radically our attunement to our environment and to others around us. If our relation to this planet, and to the other human and non-human lives it supports, is a function of listening, who better than music analysts to clarify its intricacies, expose its risks, and advocate for its future possibilities?

Link

https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/event/oxford-seminar-in-music-theory-and-analysis-naomi-waltham-smith/2019-10-23/

In the field of media art, mailinglists such as nettime, -empyre-, SPECTRE and CRUMB have functioned as important para-institutional formations that have influentially played host to a diverse community of artists, critics, curators, activists and academics since the 1990s. These lists, we suggest, are of particular epistemological and methodological interest for the field of internet history due to their critical and experimental nature. This stems mainly from the cultivation of highly reflexive, at times ambivalent, stance towards the technical, social and aesthetic limits of such networking activity itself. In this sense, they present unique objects of study for exploring what difference computational methods might make for understanding mailinglist cultures over time; what we refer to in this article, drawing on Wolfgang Ernst, as counting and recounting the past. Our aim in this paper is, therefore, to both introduce these lists to the emerging field of internet history and scope out medium-specific methods that take the measure of concepts, discourses, cohorts, and events that have taken place through them over time.

Alexander I. Stingl joins CIM, alongside the IAS, as a WIRL-COFUND fellow for 2019-2021 (following two previous years in Paris with fellowships funded by the FMSH and the ISRF). Simultaneously he was made chair of the scientific advisory committee by the directors for the project "Juridifying the Anthropocence", Beatrice Parance (Paris 8) and Gilles Lhuilier (Ecole Normale Superieure Rennes); the project creates expertise for both the Development Bank and the High Court of Appellations of France. Alex will primarily, but not exclusively, conduct research on the so-called "Bioeconomy" (a transnational policy network and "post"-neoliberal discourse proposing to guide the transition from foissil-based to biotech-based economy and society). He will speak in the CIM Forum on Nov. 20 to give a more general introduction into this research topic, and, before that, on November 7 he will present a paper on "The Bioeconomy in International and Transnational Law" at the International Economic Law (IEL) Collective Inaugural Conference held here at Warwick. In January, his new book is due to be published with Routledge, titled Care Power Information, which addresses shortcomings of contemproary Global Northern Social Science resulting from the "colonial matrix of power" and makes an engaged plea for a different social scientific scholarship.

ABSTRACT
This article draws on insights from digital media theory and design methodology to contribute to sociological and anthropological understandings of money. It postulates the rise of a new money-form, or rather money-forms, referred to (in the plural) as experience money. The notion of experience money is developed through an analysis of Apple Pay, where I suggest that experience contains both economic and design qualities. Experience, that is, is both a way of thinking about and producing value, and a set of concrete design techniques for realizing such value. Each instance of experience money therefore embodies a distinctive ‘value proposition’ – an experience value, if you will – which forms the basis of differentiation and competition. While there is a vast literature dedicated to troubling and challenging the modern accounts of money and economy in terms of abstraction – from anthropology to economic sociology, social studies of finance or even behavioural economics – experience money poses new challenges for these empirically-nuanced theories of money. Experience money performatively incorporates and recodes the diversity and specificity of money and monetary practices as described by sociologists and anthropologists. It participates in the critique of (modern) money as abstraction, but it by no means does away with abstraction. The article concludes with a reflection on what money’s new relationship to abstraction entails for how we study economy.

CIM Assistant Professor Matt Spencer has been awarded a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship for his project ‘Scaling Trust: An Anthropology of Cyber Security’.

More information coming soon!

Monash Warwick Alliance Catalyst Fund – May 2019 Round

Professor Sarah Pink, Monash University, Emerging Technologies Research Lab (ETLab) and Professor Noortje Marres, University of Warwick, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), are bringing together the work of two world-leading research units in an innovative project that will produce novel interdisciplinary approaches in futures research, experimentation and impact.

Both groups have pioneered innovative research methodologies for anticipating technological, environmental and social futures. CIM champions an inventive approach to interdisciplinary research which configures new interfaces between fields by combining creative, computational and scientific methodologies. ETLab members pioneer new interdisciplinary methodologies, which combine social science with engineering, IT, design and creative practice to imagine and anticipate futures.

There will be a talk from Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society, Director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London, on Wednesday 20 November, 5–6:30pm. Room to be confirmed.

The title will be: “React: The Public Sphere at the Time of Reactive Media”

Watch this space for further details!

Nerea Calvillo’s project Yellow Dust has been selected to be part of the international exhibition project Eco-Visionaries, which in Matadero Madrid focuses in “Art for a planet in a state of emergency”. In the exhibition forty visionary artists and architects respond to the urgency of the environmental crisis threatening our planet, condemning the situation but first and foremost presenting proposals. Curated by Pedro Gadanho, Mariana Pestana and the Matadero Madrid team, Eco-Visionaries is structured into four themed sections: Disaster, Extinction, Co-existence and Adaptation.

Eco-Visionaries was originally organised by the MAAT (Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnología) in Lisbon (Portugal), Bildmuseet de Umeå (Sweden), House of Electronic Arts (HeK) in Basel (Switzerland) and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón.

The exhibition is open to the public until 6 October 2019.

http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/10103/eco-visionaries.html

A new paper from Dr Nathaniel Tkacz:

Link to paper

“What’s on your mind?”

These words, subtly greyed out in an input box on the user interface. Inviting users to write over them, replace them, respond. Pitched somewhere between an inquiring friend and a therapist, such is the gentle nudge fuelling content generation on the Facebook platform. What’s on your mind? Consider it a general declaration of the cognitive orientation of contemporary media. An underwhelming apotheosis when contrasted with the World Brains, augmented intellects or man–machine symbioses of days past...

CIM Academics Noortje Marres and Michael Castelle are at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science  (4S) in New Orleans this week.

On September 5, Professor Marres will speak at the Conference's Opening Plenary on Innovations. The other speakers are Maria Belen Albornoz (FLASCO-Ecuador), Lesley Green (University of Cape Town), Shobita Parthasarathy (University of Michigan). In the words of 4S President Kim Fortun (UC Irvine), the Innovations Plenary addresses the following:

To innovate is to move beyond, out of line, skirting predictable directions and outcomes. This is far from straightforward -- imaginatively, analytically and logistically. To innovate means being outside usual frames, working counter-culturally, against intuition and usual method. In many settings, innovation is a matter of great urgency: lives and prosperity depend on it. All too easily, however, innovation serves and even exacerbates entrenched hierarchies of privilege, creating something new but sustaining old structures (of wealth, authority, and so on). Innovation is subject -- even prone -- to capture -- becoming a carrier rather than critique of capital and empire. Innovation can also become an empty ideal, cover for business as usual. Innovation is pursued and promised in industry, government, education and NGOS -- and in scholarly fields like STS. Scholars need and promise to innovate; indeed, their charge is to create “new knowledge.” Their scholarly organizations -- like 4S -- promise to scaffold and help sustain this, though what this looks like in theory and practice often receives little attention.