Festival Focus #4: In conversation with Sean Cubitt
“What art can do is point towards a horizon where the sensory non-human exceeds our grasp and say - it went that way.”
Author: Chiara Pitrola
Within the framework of our festival theme Fragments, we invite writer and professor Sean Cubitt for a keynote lecture, also in anticipation of his latest book Truth, due out in June from MIT Press. He’s a Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. As a series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his current research is on aesthetic politics, eco-critique, media arts, and media technologies.
Dear Sean, we thank you for joining us (remotely) in the upcoming festival. In what ways does our festival theme “Fragments” speak to you and how do you relate it to your work?
I'm a media academic and writer focusing on eco-critique, media arts and technologies, and came in through literature. English-language modernist poetry is packed with concerns about fragmentation. That also seemed to be the case with modernist art from cubism and Dada to the postmodernism that occupied us so much in the 1980s. The fascination came from montage - in film, in art, in literature and in sound arts, including popular culture with the rise of turntablists and sampling. How can we (re)build wholes from fragments? How do cultures of connectivity turn the part-whole dynamic into commodities (the 'culture of distraction' that arose with broadcast TV and remains a characteristic in the social media era). The experience of fragmentation seems to be a characteristic of modernity, at least as far back as the Paris Arcades Benjamin wrote about. Granular synthesis is not just a technique: it is a description of what it is to be human in the 21st century. It may also be in the process of becoming the nature of what it is to be non-human.
Considering the environmental implications of digital technologies, specifically in the context of music streaming on multiple platforms, how could we approach this fragmented way of listening? How have these new developments changed our ways of listening and making sense of the sonic world around us? Does this influence the quality of our listening practices?
Hearing has been a selective practice for a long, long time. We teach our children to prioritise certain sounds - mother's voice for example - over the background ambience. What breaks down in modernity, and is accelerating now, is the hierarchy of sounds. You can hear it in deliberate aesthetic decisions - the Raincoats determined to mix 'lead' vocals down and to equalise the instruments in the band for example. This might be democratic, as it was for those 80s feminists. Or it might be a signal that in a time when commodification invades every dimension of life, every sound can be exchanged for any other, and the specificity of any sound is lost in universal exchangeability. On one side, this can be an aesthetic tool, making all-sound relevant to the making of sound art. On the other it may lead us to diminish the significance of natural sound - waves, wind, animal sounds – and to cease to care about sonic pollution in cities or at sea where it seems to do most damage. For many musicians, making music with simpler acoustic instruments has been a refusal of the greedy consumption of energy.
For others, finding new compression software to maintain depth without using so much bandwidth serves a similar purpose. Listening now means focusing in a disciplined, controlled way on the most important thing to you, now; ie creating our own hierarchies on the fly. Or it may mean making yourself open to the totality of sounds while you listen - the street noise AND the track you're playing. I dislike streams that tell me what to like, and distrust those that regulate a narrow geography or historical or cultural reach
Your upcoming book “Truth” states that you trace histories of separation, separation that creates struggle. Could you elaborate on who carries this struggle, are we all in it? Is the truth’s role to smooth divisions and fragmentation?
My guess is that even though in some sort of reality (scientific, ontological, affective ...) humans and nature are indistinguishable. We find ourselves in a historical reality where we feel alienated from the world. The experience is partly individuation - becoming an isolated human 'standing on your own two feet' as we teach children to do. Partly, that process also demands we pick an identity from a strictly limited set of options: male/female, homo/hetero; cultural specificity and so on. That alienates us not only from each other but from ourselves; repressing human 'nature' as instincts (which return from repression to haunt us in weird ways). It leaves us lacking something that we cannot name or discover, something we chase down all our creative actions, when we talk, dream, sing, fall in love... At the same time, we departed from nature leaving a gap that nature longs to refill. The abandoned ecology loves us at least as much as we love it. So "we all" may mean not just humans.
What is the truth of the sensory worlds (especially the non-human ones) excluded by the dominance of information systems? How can we get closer to non-verbal truths?
Truth is in general a category of language ('truth statements'). Film/video and photography have a related but different practice. Words seek to name but naming is always an act of reduction - if I say 'tree', I can't expect you to think of the same tree I'm thinking of. If I say something true like 'there is one tree outside my window' the number doesn't help: 'one' is a very curious number, and as Luce Irigaray says, there is always more-than-one or at-least-two. I would add that there is, in everything that exists a lack, a non-identity. Film comes close because it shows motion in time and the gap between the actual unique event in front of the lens and the flat, rectangular thing we look at.
Music is different again: sometimes a way of organising time, sometimes a way of shaping emotions, sonifications and samples of natural sound likewise - they capture something but at the same time abstract from it. What art can do is point towards a horizon where the sensory non-human exceeds our grasp and say - it went that way. Desire, which powers all art, sends us endlessly chasing the real that always escapes
Truth, a major theme in your book, is defined as the recovery of ancestral knowledge as a means to both restoring our connection to the natural world and also, returning to a greater understanding of our modern & human-made tools. How do you see this process unfolding in practice? How do you imagine our role as humans in it?
Marx had two wonderful ideas in his Fragment on machines in the Grundrisse - his theory of technology. One is the general intellect: a commons - like a language we all speak, we all add to, and which no-one owns. No-one owned the skills of knitting or weaving. But those ancestral skills were turned into technical processes which Marx called dead labour. From then on someone did own them: the factory owners. Technologies are black boxes where we lock up our ancestors.
Traditional cultures have ways of dialogue with ancestors whenever they use a technique or skill. We no longer know how to talk with our ancestors. And besides, they have been locked into their black boxes and forced to work for factory owners for a hundred years or more. Same goes for mathematics and logic: Gates didn't invent either of them, but he owns large tracts of them, charges rent to "use' them, and keeps them in servitude.
We have to be careful. After all this time, the ancestors may be mad. But that is all the more reason why we have to find ways to free them - with all the risks that implies.
How do you view our role as humans in the present? Are we bound to alienation or are there methods we can reiterate that can support us to reconnect with the truth?
Today we are so alienated from nature that we depend on technologies to connect us, from TV shows to scientific instruments. To regain our way beyond alienation, we need to make friends across the borders dividing us from ancestors and nature's agencies. We forced both to serve only profit (so much so we not only are killing the planet but destroying the evolutionary paths our ancestors might take if they were not slaves). As Tolstoy said, I would do anything to help my fellow beings - except get off their back. So far we cannot even allow strangers across national borders, though we know we forced them to migrate with climate change and colonialism. So we also need to get over the alienation that separates humans from humans. That too is risky, not to say terrifying. Arts, culture, creativity, these are the actions of a desire we have allowed to turn into hatred and oppression. May be we need to liberate our individual desires - not as the savage repressions they have become, but desires for co-location, collaboration, friendship and love - in order to liberate our creativity in conjunction with the creative but repressed forces of ancestors and nature.
Sean Cubitt has been invited to be part of FIBER Festival 2023 with the support of the International Visitors Programme from Nieuwe Instituut. He will be joining us during the festival symposium, happening on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 May at de Brakke Grond. More information: https://www.fiberfestival.nl/symposium