- Title
- Sonic geographies of shifting bodies
- Creator
- Boyd, Candice; Duffy, Michelle
- Date
- 2012
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/64064
- Identifier
- vital:5963
- Identifier
- ISSN:2009-3578
- Abstract
- In this article we take up some of the challenges presented by non-representational theory (Anderson & Harrison 2010; Boyd, forthcoming); in particular, that offered by Nigel Thriftʼs leitmotif of movement – ʻof living as a succession of luminous or mundane instants … of movement as a desire for a presence which escapes a consciousness-centred core of self-referenceʼ (2008, p7). In response, we offer two alternate styles of rhythmanalysis based on an experimental work that explores the sonic geographies of shifting bodies. In doing so, we consider the habits of bodies in order to think on the intimate relationship between body, habit, subjectivity, and what it may give rise to in terms of ʻa politics of what happensʼ (Thrift 2008, p2). Our starting point is that of the body and habits. Habits comprise rhythmic sequences – pulse, heartbeat, breath, talking, gesturing, walking, eating, digesting and a myriad of other sequences that keep us going and keep us moving even at these imperceptible levels. Yet such rhythmic states are not merely structuring space-time into repeated and monotonous acts. As music theorist Christopher Hasty points out, “rhythm focuses our attention, not on time as a substrate or medium of events, but on the events themselves in their particularity, creativity and spontaneity” (1997, p7). Regular repetition in this sense is more than a rigid and constricted pattern or proportion of time. The ways in which we experience repetitive rhythms, i.e., that we feel these as soundwaves with our whole body, leads us to try and make sense of this experience in terms of a pulse. This is significant to an embodied geography of place; our bodily and cognitive response serve to interpellate the human body into place, a rhythmic attunement that helps in ʻforging body-space relationshipsʼ (Duffy et al 2011, p 17). Using rhythmanalysis as a tool, we contemplate the way in which bodies, habits and rhythms constitute the ʻsocialʼ, and how even the most banal of bodily movements speak to our sense of being in the world and the bodyʼs capacity to act. In many ways the principles and methods of rhythmanalysis we draw on in our work resonate with theories of non-representational geography. Proponents of non-representational theory advance a cause and desire for a form of social analysis which embraces ʻmore-thanʼ the terminations and operations of representational knowledge (Lorimer 2008). Non-representational theory highlights the failures of representational thinking to understand the palpable relevance of ʻthought-in-actionʼ as the foreground (rather than the background) of our lives. In non-representational research there is a focus on movement, action, and practice – the dynamic way that affect is folded within and between objects, spaces, and things (Thrift 2004). As radical constructivists, non-representational theorists go beyond social constructivism in sharing an approach to meaning and value as ʻthought-in-actionʼ (Anderson & Harrison 2010). As Dewsbury puts it: The non-representational argument comes into its own in asking us to revisit the performative space of representation in a manner that is more attuned to its fragile constitution … For me, the project of non-representational theory then, is to excavate the empty space between the lines of representational meaning in order to see what is also possible. The representational system is not wrong: rather, it is the belief that it offers complete understanding – and that only it offers any sensible understanding at all – that is critically flawed (2003, p.1911) Thus, non-representational theorists not only assert that all human life is based on and in movement, but that this movement captures the joy of living and an attitude towards life as potential. As such, the stream of activity that constitutes the social is seen to be constantly moving and changing. Within the ʻassemblages of lifeʼ, there is a kind of joint action between things and spaces which makes them inseparable from each other. As such, non-representational theories trade in modes of perception which are not individualised or subject-based (Thrift, 2008). It is this slippery nature of embodied geographies that is the focus of our empirical work
- Relation
- Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture Vol. 1, no. 2 (2012), p. 1-7
- Rights
- Copyright Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (Gradcam) Trinity College
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- 1604 Human Geography
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