The complete issue of ER(R)GO No. 33 (2/2016) - sounds/pauses/silences for download.

Title page and letter of contents of the issue.

Wojciech Kalaga
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
Faculty of Philology
University of Silesia in Katowice
Poland

Er(r)go...

failure of speech – please be silent, because silence is the treasure hold of sounds, their saturation, the accumulation of tones. And further: active silence, the energy of silence, poetic language as the music of silence, the landscape of sound, silence of the plants, performativity of silence. Penetrating the silence, we reach the world of sound and of whatever is not silence: intonarumori – rumorarmonio, ululatori, rombator, scoppiatori, sibilatori. Murmurs, humming, noises, knocking, grinding, howling, groans, laughs, human and animal sounds, drones, clatter, din, boom, crash, creaking, scraping, rubbing, wheeze, hiss, gasp, ping, pop, machine music, tonal cords of words, the harmony of murmurs, vibrations and resonances, unwanted sounds.  Reversing presence and absence – internal physiology, mute dramatization of the heart and the breath: noises, moaning, breathing in and breathing out, periodic cadence. Moans, grunts, billing, whizzing, blowing, quiet strikes of the upper and lower lips of the diva, quiet rubbing of the body of the instrument.

Silence turns to thunder. Industrial noise: machines whizz, howl, boom, crash, groan, hiss, whistle, toll, hammer, clatter, grate, grind, beat, whir, hiss. Music as the effect of silence – it is the silence that gives the sounds their strength, makes the darkness less still, when the tiniest noise becomes a wraith. A silent piano – the art of noise and 4’33”.  And several figures: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Cage, Jacques Lacan, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, Maria Pappenheim, Anna O., Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leris, Colette Peignot, Francesca Woodman, Bracha L. Ettinger, Tres, Dan Geva,  Noit Geva, Gillian Wearing. Muzak. The audiosphere of communism: the singing, mystical body of the collective, the trumpet in the hands of a young ZMP zealot, the buzzing of flies, the jabber of the enemy. In addition, the voice as an incestual object. The transcendence of the sounds of the surrounding, the ringing in the ears, tinnitus, the musical rollercoaster, the funeral march at the burial of the deaf, a second so full that it does not fit into half an hour, cord as discord, the soundness of our bodies, the hum of a gesture, the noise of  an object, electronic clatter and clamor, musical loops, drumming of fingers, recital of re-playing, The Banquets of Changing Moods, and, finally, embalming with sound.

Friendship as silence; silence that speaks in order to hide better, a muted, ashen sweater, nonverbal torrent of words, reading with the ear, listening to the difference, hearing oneself. One must go beyond the staff. Muteness and dissemblance. Silence as power and a form of shaping bodies, the muting of buildings, the sucking out of sounds.

Tacet. Silence does not exist. “In absolute silence, everyone will eventually hear something.” What do I hear?

Wojciech Kalaga

Silence does not always mean the absence of sounds; contrariwise, as in Heidegger, it is charged with sonority which, as in Hopkins, “erupts” with the symphony of sounds. Hopkins’s poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1875) was written after seven years of silence that preceded the poet’s entering the Society of Jesus. He destroyed all poems he had written before 1875 when he was requested by the rector of the college where he studied to write something about the wreck of the ship off the shores of the North Sea when "five Franciscan nuns drowned between midnight and morning of December 7th, 1875.” He responded to the challenge and in thirty-five stanza masterpiece which presented one of the biggest poetic elegies of Victorian England. All Hopkins’s poems are not only a polyphony of sounds articulated in Sprung Rhythm but also the moments of silence, as in The Windhover in which the description of Nature in the octet is divided from the sestet by the caesura of the rest or pause (fermata in music) or the pianissimo followed by meditation on Christ’s passion. The “grammar of creation” in poetry and music has its own rules; usually the invocation of the poem is a loud symphony of sound which progressively tends to fall silent in the final code of the poem or the musical piece. Silence is usually associated with the contemplation of Sacrum but also with the time of creation in the poet’s (composer’s) mind; each poem (or a musical work) is a kind of “spiritual exercise" (Loyola) which is practiced until the final diminuendo that reduces force and loudness of sound to the quietness of death.

The aim of the article is to present the most important elements of the technique and aesthetics of works by the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. Due to the economy of means used, his opera work belongs to the most radical these days, yet at the same time most original group of works which binds the ecology of sound, as well as the aesthetics of silence. The first part of the text describes the composer’s biography together with the basic terminological scope related with the poetics of music, that is, the azzerare strategy, invisible action or the inner space. The second part of the text presents the opera context along with the analysis of Lohengrin – the opera upon which the means of creative and executive expression – used also in other Sciarrino’s works – have been outlined.

August 29, 1952, in Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock: a historic event takes place. The pianist David Tudor closes and opens the piano lid three times, without touching the keyboard itself, during the premiere performance of John Cage’s new composition. This piece, called 4′33″ has been written for a “silent piano.” It is a composition that is NOT to be played! Critics and the audience find he joke poor. Today, depending on the individual point of view, 4′33″ might be interpreted in hundreds of different ways.

In the absolute silence of the anechoic chamber John Cage supposedly heard the sounds of his body, and although this interpretation of what happened is questioned, one can draw from this experiment a not necessarily empirical lesson that for the subject the field of the hearable is constituted by a surplus which materialises in a hallucinatory sound. In Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung we encounter the opposite kind of surplus: a second of the scream so full that to exhaust it half an hour (the duration of the compositon) and all the intuitive resources of the composer are necessary. This scream is a formless permanent presence tearing the narration apart and materializing as its tears, which places it on the side of (non-empirical) silence. Therefore, because the field of the hearable is split for the subject, “on the side of silence” silence does not exist – it manifests itself as all kinds of sounds, even hallucinatory ones. We can reach the “absolute” silence only if we take the position of the paradoxical object which splits us – only through the surplus of constantly changing and at the same time formless sound, which paradoxically reaches a complex state of stasis. In the pure presence of the split, in which the difference between the subject (consciousness) and the object (sound) is overcome, the external rules of organisation (instinct, reason) are no longer biding, and the subject, who is a dissonance, becomes its own cause.

This article deals with silence in which one may see the main feature of friendship between Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot and the basis of literary friendship further developed by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. Since silence is analysed here as something that one can keep but also pass over, friendship somehow appears as the effect of overcommenting and can be interpreted as mythologem. The shape of the latter largely results from comments by Blanchot and other commentators who invoke him. In consequence, taken from Bataille, the notion of friendship loses its significance and comes to assume different meanings, including contradictory ones. Friendship between Bataille and Blanchot starts when a biographical fact turns to a literary fact and then comes back as a as form of thought. This article aims at revising the philological value of the latter in order to reveal what silence may hide.

In the picture entitled Self-portrait talking to Vince Francesca Woodman, an American photographer, endeavoured to capture her own voice. That which had been uttered became thereby unutterable, resulting in a sequence of doodles coming out of the artist’s mouth: the chain interrupted within the frame of the photograph in its attempt to reach the listener. This picture is both the space and the reason for the confrontation of two psychoanalytical views – Lacanian and Ettingerian – on the notion of the voice. While in Jacques Lacan’s thought the voice is introduced as objet petit a, inextricably bound to the Other and desire, Ettinger – author of the matrixial theory, practising psychoanalyst, artist, feminist, and member of the Second Generation after the Holocaust – defines this concept as link a, thus emphasising the connection inspired by the prenatal encounter, its fragility and intimacy. Collating these two viewpoints and the photographic art of Woodman lets one open the potentialities of the voice in the field of visual studies and consider the relationship between this notion and the senses. Such a juxtaposition challenges the boundaries of not only photography – the medium seemingly sentenced to silence – but also theory, for which the image can provide a platform of dialogue, as it relentlessly resists the reduction to solely one perspective

Treating silence as an effect created in a frame of work with manipulation of audience perception helps to overcome the dichotomized opposition of silence and sound. The way audience perception is manipulated helps to create a sphere of silence as in the series of Blackout performances by artist Tres, where all the devices in the building are gradually shut down. The point of departure of the panel comes from  treating this category as performative. This perspective become the foundation for reflection on the active role of audience in a work of art and further departure in power relations in sphere framed as silenced

This paper aims to show how the development of music and sound design formed an inseparable bond with such concepts as immersion, narrative formation, mood and even gameplay of video games. In the first part the diegetic and non-digetic elements will be analysed, as well as some special cases were the two intermingle, creating new forms: spatial representations and meta representations. The forms discussed there bear many similarities to the sound design theories of cinematography. Nevertheless, it is the aim of this paper to elucidate upon some significant differences and note that making straightforward parallels may lead to skewed perceptions of what video game sound actually is. The results of this analysis may shed a new light upon the largely unexplored aspect of interactive entertainment and emphasise the necessity for a new approach to the analysis of music and sound in video games.

The aim of this article is to examine the role and meaning of soundscape in the communist
myth. Three main issues are pointed out: acts of collective singing and mass songs lyrics;
the tension between sounds of nature and industrial sounds; the dichotomy between noise
and silence. The soundscape presented in socialist realist creative writing is dominated by loud
sonic phenomena. Noisy sounds are recognised as a sign of creating the brand new society
and industrial world, while silence and muffled sounds are considered threatening to the new order

Translated by Justyna Stasiowska, Alexandra Hui's text analyses the emergence of sound objects with regard to the changes that musical culture of the 19th and 20th centuries have undergone and the impact that the invention of a phonograph has had on it. She introduces a new concept of reception, "threshold listening";  it is neither active nor passive act of listening, but rather it marks a psychological and physical response to the stimuli which does not necessarily entail their conscious reception.  

The text is an interpretation of three photography projects made by Terry Richardson, Melanie Manchot and Evergon Lunt. Actually the topic of analyze is a relation between the parent and adult child, who is at the same time an artist. All of the photographers asked their mothers to take part in their projects concerning nakedness. This transgression of cultural taboo seems to be an important sign and also identity question. The article is based on ideas of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur, who points relations between closeness and alienation. The artists construct, de-construct and re-construct the history of family, the rules of family life and also they query the role of individual human being in a society. The term “tactic”is used here in a Michel de Certeau way of understanding this word. It means that tactic is an individual form of using already existing institutions, traditions or practices in a more personal or communal sense. Artistic practices are ways of parasitizing on main-stream culture strategies or psychological/psychoanalytical mechanisms. Tactics are like games, however game is not just postmodern play but also an area of discussing problems of relations between objectivity, freedom and attitude toward mother as the other, very specific other- the other who has been already in a very specific symbiotic relation with her child.

Sound art is a term used to classify works which incorporate sound as the main artistic means of communication with the audience. If we look at the presence of sound in art from a historical viewpoint, our attention can be drawn by Cabaret Voltaire and the performances of Dadaist on its stage. Sound became also an element of performances, and constituted an integral part of many of them. However, it only accompanied the artworks and was not an independent object of art. The text focuses on materiality which is an integral part of Sergei Tcherepin’s sound artworks. In his artworks, a material object and sound constitute a specific unity.

Niniejszy tekst stanowi recenzję najnowszej książki dr Pauliny Sosnowskiej Arendt i Heidegger. Pedagogiczna obietnica filozofii, która to pozycja ukazała się w grudniu 2015 roku nakładem wydawnictwa TAiWPN Universitas. Jest to niezwykle interesujący tom komentujący intelektualne dorobki wybitnych filozofów XX wieku – Hannę Arendt oraz Martina Heideggera. Rzeczowo śledzi w nim autorka związki wierności i niewierności intelektualnej między nimi. To  rozprawa naukowa poddająca pod dyskusję oraz weryfikująca idee reprezentowane przez tych filozofów w kontekście myśli innych badaczy oraz dyscyplin naukowych, w tym przede wszystkim pedagogiki. Stanowi ona niezwykle interesującą syntezę próbującą na nowo zdefiniować związki pomiędzy tradycją filozoficzną i pedagogiczną.

Michał Snopek
Wydział Dziennikarstwa i Nauk Politycznych
Uniwersytet Warszawski

Zło i dobro jako elementy japońskiej kultury popularnej 

Recenzja pozycji: Barańska Dorota. Brak absolutu: pojęcia dobra i zła w japońskiej popkulturze. Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych UNIVERSITAS. Kraków 2014, 231 ss.

This critical note focuses on Art as Compassion: Bracha L. Ettinger, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock. The book is divided into six essays on numerous aspects of art and theory by Bracha L. Ettinger: an artist, psychoanalyst, member of the Second Generation after the Holocaust, and founder of matrixial theory.

Przedmiotem noty jest książka Michaela Naasa The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar poświęcona ostatniemu seminarium ojca dekonstrukcji. Rekonstruując dwie ostatnie lektury Derridy: Robinson Crusoe Daniela Defoe oraz seminarium Martina Heideggera z lat 1929-1930, Naas prowadzi czytelnika przez jego najpóźniejsze rozważania o suwerenie oraz świecie, a zarazem stale lokuje je w innych tekstach francuskiego filozofa, zacierając popularny podział na "wczesnego" i "późnego" Derridę.

Brief English summaries of feature articles of the issue.

Information concerning submission procedures and the stylesheet for prospective Authors.

The colophon of the issue.