Distracted Dasein?

1976

The hopes and frustrations of technology are revealed in the most advanced works of art. This implication of the Heideggerian standpoint contradicts the popular notion that art steers clear of science. These days, however, where art skirts the realm of industrial technique, it falls prey to the same commercial interests which rule there and which it may have hoped to slip by. Despite itself, the hapless work functions as a commodity to meet the demand for a holiday from commodities.

Horizon. Fenomenologičeskie issledovaniâ, 2022

The starting point of the following article are statements by various prominent musical performers of the 20th century who have testified to the life-experience of musical identification, i.e. the experience of unity and oneness with music. The purpose of the article is to explore the phenomenological implications of this experience on the basis of Martin Heidegger’s early phenomenological work. The article compares Heidegger’s early view of phenomenal givenness with that of Edmund Husserl. While Husserl sees phenomenal givenness as constituted by (transcendental) consciousness, Heidegger finds primary givenness in the resonance (Mitschwingen) between the I and its lifeworld. I argue that in Heidegger’s early phenomenology it is not the subject, but rather the relatio between I and world, which “constitutes” givenness. This viewpoint allows for the exploration of musical identification as a life-experience. Musical identification suspends the difference between subject and object. In musical identification, it is the relation between “I” and music, which is constitutive of both. Thus, music cannot be adequately grasped in phenomenological terms if it is regarded simply as an object, which is the premise of more traditional phenomenological approaches to music such as Roman Ingarden’s and Mikel Dufrenne’s. Ingarden and Dufrenne both position music at a distance from the subject, as something to be explored in its objective characteristics, without presupposing the constitutive relation between them. Contrary to them, Hans-Heinrich Eggebrecht, Günther Anders and Ilya Yonchev all recognize that the subject-object divide is insufficient for the exploration of musical experience. However, while Eggebrecht ultimately remains within the subject-object-dichotomy, Anders and Yonchev both develop the idea of musical Mitsein, or Being-with-music, which dispenses with the subject-object premise altogether and interprets musical life-experience as a mode of Being within which the sense of the I and musical sense coincide.

Ghosts of Transparency: Shadows Cast and Shadows Cast Out, 2019

The ear. Certainly, the hand and the ear. The distances and spaces, the fields they demarcate; this is the question at hand, at the heart of mediality. At the same time, the hand and the ear designate the figural limits of epochality, the emergence of time, no less than the time of emergence, all that is decisive in the kairos that sets into motion an era. And as perhaps we seem to be drifting away from the era of the writing hand, an era with only an ear for itself — or rather as this era seems to be drifting away from us — we, who ask on the meaning of this ‘ we ’, unavoidably also ask on the meaning of the ear. Self (auto) and ear (oto) are asked together.

Philosophy

Under Review

On the neglected relationship between silence, space, and death-disclosure in Heidegger. In this paper I argue that Heidegger's existential understanding of spatiality and silence (hearkening and the call of conscience being important) converge on spaces of death-disclosure - his insights serve to illuminate the characteristic behaviors of those who are in the presence of death.

Postdigital Humans, 2021

how the postdigital era has or might change listening practices. Locating the productive possibilities of the postdigital human in the ways it opens up definitions of humans, machines, and the relations between the two to struggle and contestation, this chapter extends these debates to the sonic register. It begins with a brief review of post-digital literature that emphasizes the old and the new characteristics of such an era, before turning to Marx’s conception of machinery to draw out how the machine has been seen as the objectification of human intelligence. Next it considers the aesthetic and political questions about postdigital human senses, examines key works in sound studies, and briefly revisits the history of the production and reception of music in the 20th century. This allows not only for situating the argument within the context of colonialism and anti-colonialism, but also for exploring the importance of noise in rebellions and the shifting definitions of noise that took place in response to such rebellions. In some ways, digital music production eliminates noise by turning analogue signals into ones and zeros. In other ways, however, it introduces noise into the most ‘human’ of all instruments: the voice. Here it becomes literally impossible to tell where the human ends and the digital begins.

Cosmos and History, 2019

Distraction is often held by the relevant literature to be an environmental factor, a nuissance at best, at worst a danger that must be suppressed and eradicated. Through our essay, we seek to outline an alternative approach to the aesthetics of distraction. We argue that deviant noise has an important role to play in philosophy, aesthetics and media studies, for it is more than mere distraction. Distracting, noisy entities, in actuality, bring to our attention the finitude of our existence, highlighting the everpresent immanence of death. We may even arrive at a kind of community with the Otherness of noise, cutting through networks of control and arriving at acceptance of impossibility. The deviant that distracts is actually an invitation for us to rethink our relation to the environment and, indeed, the at times rigid borderlines separating subjectivity from the ecology of its own finitude. Keywords chaos death distraction noise redundancy That which is uncached is usually considered unimportant. Multitudes of swarming, chaotic, uncached information are black holes that retain their subversive practices everywhere, intersecting networks, cutting them into moments of discontinuity. This circumstance, however, is liable to change. At a certain point, we read in one journal of computational theory, " continuous analysis of the auditory environment often becomes distracting rather than helpful. " [1] Analysis itself becomes a source of noise, spreading the practice of chaos throughout the system of networks. Chaos is everywhere, always primary and resonating. The powers that be perceive this, and seek to create shields that would restrict the ability of deviant operators to possess those with inborn affinities to chaotic praxis. Further on, the authors of a report detailing methods of combating distraction highlight the presence of " deviant sound " that vitiates attempts to focus attention:

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger's underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness (Indifferenz) of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness (Eigentlichkeit) and unownedness (Uneigentlichkeit) makes better overall sense of Heidegger's ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard existentialist interpretation of this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness (qua disownedness). Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between "authenticity" and "inauthenticity", I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger's underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary (critical) social theories.

When an artwork is not seen as holding meaning in its own right and independently of the thought or will of a subject, it is reduced to a representation, a sign tied to but distinct from a meaning. In the same moment, the work is reduced to presences and absences: What is in the image, what is left out? What are the objects that constitute the object-whole? How might we decipher the meaning that evidently lies hidden behind each represented object, just as one might break a code with a table of corresponding meanings? What is ignored in this framework for understanding is a place for the unsaid. In contrast, the spaces between objects, when seen as equally important as the objects themselves, take on the weight of presence, are meaningful emptiness. These, too, are determinative of the artwork as a whole. Heidegger’s discussion of language in “A Dialogue on Language,” as well as in his chapter on “The Way to Language,” where he explores certain concepts of the “unsaid,” provide a framework for understanding negative space as visual silence or stillness. This essay explores meaningful emptiness as a visual parallel to verbal silence and the implications of this parallel within the postmodern project of deconstructing of Western dichotomies.