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Offering Theory
A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.
Percussion
Percussion is an attempt—in the author’s words—to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating—specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll—comes to matter for raced, urban subjects. For Mowitt, percussion is both an experience of embodiment—making contact in and on the skin—and a provocation for critical theory itself. In delimiting the percussive field, he plays drumming off against the musicological account of the beat, ...
Text
The concept of textuality in recent decades has come to designate a fundamentally contested terrain within a number of academic disciplines. How it came to occupy this position is the subject of John Mowitt's book, a critical genealogy of the social and intellectual conditions that contributed to the emergence of the textual object. Beginning with theTel Quelgroup in France in the sixties and seventies, Mowitt's study details how a certain interdisciplinary crisis prompted academics to rethink the conditions of cultural interpretation. Concentrating on three disciplinary projects—literary analysis, film studies, and musicology—Mowitt shows how textuality's emergence called into question ...
Radio
In a wide-ranging, cross-cultural, and transhistorical assessment, John Mowitt examines radio’s central place in the history of twentieth-century critical theory. A communication apparatus that was a founding technology of twentieth-century mass culture, radio drew the attention of theoretical and philosophical writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon, who used it as a means to disseminate their ideas. For others, such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams, radio served as an object of urgent reflection. Mowitt considers how the radio came to matter, especially politically, to phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelian Marxism, anticolonialism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. The first systematic examination of the relationship between philosophy and radio, this provocative work also offers a fresh perspective on the role this technology plays today.
Sounds
This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond hearing and listening we ÒauditÓ sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of "sound studies." To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant soundÑincluding a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silenceÑto show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.
Keywords in Sound
In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies, and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history, outlines its role in cultural, social and political discourses, and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying and conceptualizing sound, and sets new challenges for the development of sound studies. Contributors. Andrew Eisenberg, Veit Erlmann, Patrick Feaster, Steven Feld, Daniel Fisher, Stefan Helmreich, Charles Hirschkind, Deborah Kapchan, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, David Novak, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Thomas Porcello, Tom Rice, Tara Rodgers, Matt Sakakeeny, David Samuels, Mark M. Smith, Benjamin Steege, Jonathan Sterne, Amanda Weidman
Sound Objects
Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’s elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in the forefront of contemporary sonic discussions but also underscore auditory experience as fundamental to sound as a critical enterprise. In so doing, they offer exciting considerations of sound within and beyond its role in meaning, communication, and information and an illuminatingly original theoretical overview of the field of sound studies itself. Contributors. Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Michel Chion, Rey Chow, John Dack, Veit Erlmann, Brian Kane, Jairo Moreno, John Mowitt, Pooja Rangan, Gavin Steingo, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne, David Toop
Sounds
This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond hearing and listening we "audit" sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of "sound studies." To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound—including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence—to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.
Concentrationary Cinema
Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrat...
Pandemic Media
With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media's adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.
