Ruining the Vibe:
Resonance and Its Discontents

Instructor: Cecile Malaspina Date & Time: July 30, August 6, 13, 20, 27, September 3, 10, 17 10:00-12:30 ET.

DESCRIPTION: In this Seminar we will pick up a thread that emerged during a recent international conference, Ecouter, Ecrire la Résonance: Entre Musique et Philosophie, Lyon (17-19 Nov 2021). During this conference, philosophers, composers, musicians, musicologists, and scientists discussed the concepts and phenomena related to the idea of resonance. This survey Seminar will pick up a thread that ran, like a background noise, through this event: the limits of idealized resonance. The positive connotations of the idea of resonance resound without difficulty: notions of harmony, amplification, synergy, and coherence animate its metaphorical reach. Upon closer inspection, however, the idea of resonance trails a shadow.

The measuring of acoustic resonance, for instance, typically blindsides divergent and localised resonance (reverberation): too hard to measure and deemed irrelevant. The ideal of resonance, too quickly synonymous with harmony, also casts its metaphorical shadow over the prospect of compulsive social cohesion: a political ideal of a phase-locking, analogous to the ‘enslavement principle’ of synergetics in optical physics. As a simplistic ideal, finally, resonance may all too soon favour a state of denial about social and psychological dissonance, degrading the idea of concerted action into the suppression of jarring voices.

Even in the rarefied realm of philosophy, an ideal of axiomatic resonance may lead philosophers to overstate the formal coherence and reach of its postulates. This survey Seminar will bring together leading and emerging voices from different fields, unseduced by a self-congratulatory fiction of harmonious intersubjectivity.

How do these fields and their theorisation foster the potentials of non-consonant, jarring voices? How do theorists, artists, and curators nurture the ‘divided subject of partial identifications open to constant flux’ (Claire Bishop)? What can philosophy learn from contemporary artists and curators that may countervail the anxious fallback on overstated ideals of axiomatic resonance? The objective of this survey Seminar is to contextualise the ways in which the making and curating of art remain recalcitrant to the metaphorical simplification of resonance.

IMAGE: Bertram Brooker, Symphonic Forms, 1947

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