David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of
Matt Sakakeeny is Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University, and the author of
David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of
Matt Sakakeeny is Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University, and the author of
As the instrument of human perception, the body knows itself and the world. And yet the unmarked legal body in late capitalism is often reduced to an object that owns and consumes. Attention to sound, however, rehierarchizes the senses, reorienting the body such that new perceptions and new worlds materialize. The sound body is a body attuned to and transformed by the vibrations of its environment; as such the sound body resists the property principle. Furthermore, it is a vehicle of “sound knowledge”—a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening. Like Austin’s “locutionary acts,” listening acts enact; they are performative. Elaborating on the listening body of the Sufi and on Ibn al-‘Arabi’s concept of barzakh (the passage between multiple material ontologies), the entry demonstrates that self and world arise as co-immanent. And yet the body emerges in the paradox of being a part of, and yet distinct from, the “sound affects” of being.
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