By challenging the state's prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens, political movements by and in support of migrants and refugees are forcing questions about what criteria, if any, can and should be used to determine who can claim membership in the political community. To illustrate the complexity of this politics this article analyzes the major demand that underscores every campaign undertaken by non-status refugees and migrants in Canada: a program that would allow them to "regularize" their (...) status. Notably, these campaigns are being directed at both the state and city levels of governance. Together, these are two sites in which claims and counter-claims about community, belonging, and citizenship are being made by, for, and against non-status immigrants. In each case, migrant political agency is asserted in places meant to deny, limit, or repress it. The article argues that the significance of these sites is that they allow for non-status refugees and migrants themselves to act as mediators or translators between the city and nation, between polis and cosmopolis. (shrink)

In colonial nations, such as the land called Australia, the two registers of settler and Indigenous jurisdictions compete at the level of symbolic certainty. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory neither can arrive at perfect symbolisation but the struggle and the proximity to their arrival can evoke anxiety. What insists to keep this anxiety at bay, in non-Indigenous Australia, is what Jacques Derrida calls justice. As an impossible object, similar to the Lacanian object petit a, justice must be interminably animated to hold (...) this object of desire in play. Humiliation of Indigenous people in Australia is, I argue in this article, one mode of this play. I interrogate the psychoanalytic discussions of anxiety by Freud and Lacan to consider firstly what might be the cause of anxiety for contemporary non-Indigenous Australians and secondly how this anxiety is ‘played out’ on the bodies of Indigenous people through practices of humiliation. As one example of this work of humiliation I consider several scenes of police practice in the Sydney suburb of ‘Redfern’ from the 1991 documentary Cop it Sweet. (shrink)

Declarations of law, of politics and of ethics have proliferated in contemporary discourses of public life. In this article, a terrain of research is unfurled that addresses the demand and repetition of declaration. Declarations are understood as relations of speech addressed between the masks of law, of sovereignty, of critic and of enemy. It is argued that what is instituted in the declarations of our time is a melancholic relation of speech which disavows the insistence of the remainder. The remainder (...) persists. How then to bear witness to the remainder? Mourning provides some headway in the effort. What remains undeclared here must be mourned. (shrink)

Zizek's battle cry to 'do nothing', or what is termed Bartleby politics, has been met with much criticism. At best, it seems, his Bartleby politics simply enables us to see the limits of society, and at worst, it leaves us in a state of impotent passivity. This article takes a position of preferring Bartleby politics. This paper reflects on Žižek’s Bartleby politics. It starts with briefly outlining the basic tenets of Bartleby politic, including concepts of the superego, enjoyment and the (...) Act. Next the paper examines different reactions to Žižek’s Bartleby politics, and how these help us to further think about the concept. The paper concludes with some reflections on the practicalities of Zizek’s Bartleby politics. (shrink)

Sound can be listened to in various ways and with different intentions. Multiple factors influence how and what we perceive when listening to sound. Sonification, the acoustic representation of data, is in essence just sound. It functions as sonification only if we make sure to listen attentively in order to access the abstract information it contains. This is difficult to accomplish since sound always calls the listener’s attention to concrete—whether natural or musical—points of references. Important aspects determining how we listen (...) to sonification are discussed in this paper: elicited sounds, repeated sounds, conceptual sounds, technologically mediated sounds, melodic sounds, familiar sounds, multimodal sounds and vocal sounds. We discuss how these aspects help the listener engage with the sound, but also how they can become points of reference in and of themselves. The various sonic qualities employed in sonification can potentially open but also risk closing doors to the accessibility and perceptibility of the sonified data. (shrink)

While vocal acts, such as interpellation and speech acts, constitute a network of theoretical nodes in Butler’s writings, her theory of gender performativity neglects to theorize the mediation of such acts through the voice and its technologies. In a close reading of Butler’s influential texts, the paper examines the ramifications of a notion of gender performativity that ignores the performative aspects of the voice, asking what it means to think a body without a voice. What notions of materiality and subjectivity (...) does such a thinking it assume? How does it understand the relationship of performativity, performance and sound technology? I argue that the repression of the sonoric aspects of the voice can be read as a symptom of the role of materiality in the theory of gender performativity. Despite Butler’s attempts to attend to the material body within a discourse of the performative, the notion of materiality is constrained through the economy of the sign and remains subordinated to the realm of intelligibility, a hierarchy that Butler explicitly rejects. However, the material voice will finally supplement and subvert the theory of gender performativity. (shrink)

This article is interested in ‘voice imaging’ as a technical field through which people experience new relations between organic and inorganic forms of life. Grounded in a study of voice imaging in historical and contemporary scientific research, the article applies and expands on Bernard Stiegler’s ‘General Organology’, with an eye to understanding the voice as a dynamic capacity for volition. By exploring the scientific research into voice imaging, the article argues that the voice, as a cultural image, is an imaginary (...) organ that transgresses the boundaries of technological, biological, physical, psychological, social and cultural frameworks. (shrink)

In lowland South America, breath animates human and non-human bodies, pulsating through the materialities of organisms. Humans, however, should manage their bodies to recast and reconfigure breath in its most life-enhancing manifestations: singing and smoking. These are the specialized domains of those able to manage their vitalities in such a way as to produce potent effects in themselves and in the world around them, including influencing atmospheric conditions, the lives of animals and plants and the harming and healing of others. (...) In these relational onto-epistemologies, intersubjectivity, intercorporality and states of non-cognitive interaffection find new depths. Breath, properly managed, can make and unmake worldly forms, including bodies and the societies they come together in. Focusing on two Amerindian communities, the Warekena of northwestern Rio Negro, Brazil and the Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, this article examines the interface between human and non-human subjectivities, and how resonant interaffective atmospheric conditions are induced to promote health. (shrink)

‘Tympaniser’, Alan Bass tells us, is an ‘archaic verb meaning to ridicule publicly’ or to decry. In the essay fronting Margins of Philosophy called ‘Tympan’ Derrida decries the philosophy that would own its limits, absorbing ‘the margin of its own volume’. While it is Derrida’s late work on the ‘animal question’ that has brought his insistence on the nourishment of the limits between species as limitrophy to wider attention, it is also named as the general condition of the interface of (...) the limits in the much earlier text, ‘Tympan.’ There, in dislocating the tympanum, the margins of philosophy are eaten. Equally, given the rhythmic address of the tympanum, we might say that the margins of philosophy are beaten. Struggling within the strictures of a small town amateur dramatic rehearsal, Selma, the lead protagonist in Dancer in the Dark, makes a plea for more rhythm. But there is no license for tap-dancing in The Sound of Music. This chapter considers Dancer’s persistent play on rhythmic sounds as that which trip Selma’s fantasy song and dance numbers as a ‘tympanising’ of the limits, notably of the limits of the law in both juridical and symbolic senses, as they also work the edges of the film’s two styles. In a provocative analysis of this film, Cary Wolfe suggests that we might understand Selma’s vocal style as a refusal of the phallic imposition of language, and that her virtually suicidal submission to the death sentence construed as a Lacanian ‘feminine’ act, allow for a notion of a ‘posthuman feminine’. ‘Tympan Alley’ redirects Wolfe’s tantalising term ‘posthuman feminine’ through a more consistently Derridean line of thought. It draws on Derrida’s late work on the animal, in which it is polemically clear that deconstruction has never been confined to the signifier nor to the human, and sounds out the implications of his early work on b/eating the limits through Selma’s percussive ear. (shrink)

Focusing primarily on Therigatha,1 the poems by the first Buddhist women, and correlating them with the compositions of non-Buddhist women mystics like Meerabai, Lal Ded, Muktabai, Janabai and Akka Mahadevi, this article is a study of spirituality, femininity and poetic expressions in a comparative mode. The article aims to address two major issues: First, it attempts to understand how the women mystics asserted their authority as the conveyers of divine message in a society which was essentially patriarchal and suspicious about (...) the credentials of feminine utterances. Second, the article seeks to delineate a certain womanizing of saintliness through the invoking of domesticity and the use of metaphors related to the female body and desire by these select women mystics as the denouement of a radical stance of an ascetic ‘feminine spirituality’, aimed at discovering transcendence even by retaining the conscious deploying of the components, often viewed as mundane. (shrink)

This article explores interpersonal and human–computer interaction in the era of big data through the lens of Martin Buber’s relational ethics. Doing theory otherwise, it analyses the importance of other voices and speech through the case of digital assistants, questioning the implications of naming them ‘companions’. Following recent proposals to ascribe legal subjectivity to synthetic agents, the article explores the effects on agency, interaction with flesh-and-blood others and democracy in an attention economy enmeshed with technologies of behavioural manipulation powered by (...) users’ utterances that enable novel forms of social control by owners of the means of communication. (shrink)

In the 1980s, new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer became commercially available in the United States, and somatic cell nuclear transfer—the cloning process by which Dolly the Sheep would be conceived in 1996—was in its experimental phase. While anxieties concerning these new technologies escalated in the popular sensorium, Laurie Anderson explored the phenomenon of cloning in a short musical film called What You Mean We? (1986) in which Anderson consults a design team to clone herself (...) in order to manage her demanding workload. The videographic image of the clone is Anderson herself, performing in drag, and her clone’s body is partially created through the use of a pitch shifter which changes Anderson’s voice to that of the cloned—but ostensibly male—version of herself. In this article, I investigate Anderson’s technological consideration of the body, which extends beyond her own corporeality, to interrogate the biological and affective capacities of clones. I consider how Anderson addresses the convergence of reproductive technologies, the market and the creation of subjects within this market as participating in a shift in how voices are heard, governed and reproduced in the latter half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I venture the hypothesis that music confronts education with the possibility to think violence in ways that are both inherently educational and radically affirmative. Beginning with a reflection on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which emphatically evokes the violence within the genesis of music, I then move in a different direction in the second section, which surveys how extant (music-) educational has thematized violence so far. Concluding that this thematization, notwithstanding many nuances, invariably implies a (...) negative validation of violence, I devote the third section to a search for more affirmative concepts of educational violence. Eventually, this culminates in a return to the issue of a possibly intrinsic, positive relation between violence and music education. I first discuss this possibility more generally, connecting the discussed affirmative concepts of violence to the antipodal music-educational ideas of Plato and Nietzsche. Finally, in the last section, returning to Browning’s poem, I specify it by reclaiming the particular violence of music’s instrumental aspects for music education. (shrink)

According to Rousseau, conscience and conscience alone can elevate human beings to a level above that of animals. It is conscience, understood as infallible judge of good and bad, which makes man like God. Conscience itself is, in this context, understood as divine, as an ‘immortal and celestial voice’. Therefore, if the voice of conscience is the same as the voice of God, then conscience is nothing human. However, although this interpretation is correct, there are some problems with it. If (...) we take into consideration the fact that conscience is in the same context defined first as a unifying principle which makes us like God, second as a thing which is in the middle between God and man and thirdly as a middle thing or mediation that integrates extremes organically, then conscience cannot be either simply human or divine. The second problem is the following: How can one who hears the voice of God know that he really hears his voice? And, if he is the only one who hears it, how can we know that he hears it? (shrink)

Tragedy was considered ‘highly serious, political —and religious’, at its origin in Athens in 427 BCE. In spite of its centuries-old existence the trope still troubles theatre and performance philosophy scholars. As Simon Critchley recently put it: ‘What kind of hedonism is the pleasure we take in tragedy, which depicts not just suffering and death, but the ghostly porosity of the frontier separating the living from the dead?’. This paper makes use of, and critiques Critchley’s scholarship. It explores his notion (...) of tragedy’s porous frontier in relation to the skene, the boundary that bisected the ancient stage and restricted audience vision at critical moments in the drama. The paper links the skene functionally to other such pivotal boundaries or ‘scenes’, to generate an interdisciplinary range of approaches to the precarious experience of having sight and hearing momentarily dislocated from each other. In the process the paper contests Critchley’s Platonic concerns about tragedy’s deceptive and sadistic inflections, to offer an entirely new take on the ancient art form; one which may shed fresh light on Performance Philosophy’s foundational debates concerning the use, or demolition, of boundaries. (shrink)