Molecular spatial-awareness and the critical potential of listening

Activity: Talk or presentation typesConference presentation

Description

This paper discusses how ethico-political practices of facilitating multisensory
spaces can activate creative modes of resistance. I wish in this framework to
specifically focus on spatial-awareness where listening as a practice opens up for
an inherent mode of engagement. As proposed by Deleuze and Guattari,
schizoanalysis as a tool can accommodate emancipatory ideas and practices that
reformulate how we engage with others, society, and environments through an
activation of molecular dimensions in our relations across binaries (1972/2019).
Furthermore, it is through transversal engagement that the ethico-aesthetic and
its inherent ethico-political dimension becomes evident (Guattari 1992/2006), in
a relational practice connected to how we perceive and activate spatial relations.
I wish to consider listening as a way of paying micro-attention (Oliveros 1995),
which can reformulate our sense of awareness and move its emphasis on means
of political urgency in "zones of semiotic collapse" (Guattari 1979/2011, 144).
Listening thus activates a space of ephemerality, and as desiring-machines are a
potentiality outside of representation (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/2019), it too
opens up for a sensorial space always in motion. This is as much a physical
agential relation as an aural one, which at its core functions inbetween, and as a
critical spatial practice it facilitates a movement from the stratified to the
smooth. As emphasized by Deleuze and Guattari, it is not whether signs are
present but if these signs are signifiers and equipped with signifiance, as signs of
desire which are not in themselves signifying anything (Deleuze & Guattari
1980/1987; 1972/2019). They are there to be listened to and acted upon, and it
is in this singular immanent space of affective experience that we find such
potentials, to deterritorialize dogmatic thinking and power-structures written into
the spatial infrastructures around us
Period9 Jul 2023
Event titleDeleuze & Guattari Studies Camp and Conference: Space, Control, Resistance
Event typeConference
Conference number15
LocationBelgrade, SerbiaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Gilles Deleuze
  • Felix Guattari
  • Ethico-aesthetic
  • Ethico-political
  • Listening
  • Potential