Stephen Kennedy - Echostate - Sonic Theory @ University of Berlin, 2011

Stephen Kennedy's skype presentation to the Sonic Theory group at the University of Berlin. 


Echostate is a term related to Foucault’s category ‘statement’, and expands its scope by examining how statements get echoed and amplified across a range of media that exist in multiple simultaneous forms. Without challenging Foucault’s refusal to give examples of his concept, the paper will seek to demonstrate how it works as an acoustic refrain where disparate and uncertain forms coalesce to create an impact that once identified melt into air or undergo a quantum leap before reforming in a newer, or indeed an older, time and space, or spacetime. Hence certain phenomena can be described as having the characteristics of a statement without operating as exemplars. Beginning with the question of representation as a field of philosophical inquiry that impacts directly on the ways in which contemporary mediated environments are understood, sonority is presented here as embodying movement. This idea is pivotal if we are to progress beyond the Ontic to the Ontological as a process that is always in motion and is capable of accounting for the complexities present in the contemporary digital age.The paper will move from Plato to Jean Luc Nancy via Leibniz, Scopenhauer, Neitzsche, Adorno, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, McLuhan, Lyotard, Attali, and Pauline Oliveros to show how acoustic engagement can enhance critical thinking. Profile of Stephen Kennedy:
Dr Stephen Kennedy is an academic at the University of Greenwich, whose main research interests lie at the intersection of theory and practice in relation to the political economy of contemporary communications technology. He is currently in the process of producing a book on this topic entitled The Technology Agenda. He is also a practicing musician and DJ with a number of successful releases under the name of One Deck & Popular and is currently working on a major new research initiative Sonic Economies: A Politics of Decline in the Motor City that proposes the comparative study of musical phenomena in Coventry and Detroit from a geo-philosophical perspective.


Read & See More