Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture

169 Pages·2017·2.332 MB·English

by  The Occulture (David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert, Eldritch Priest)

Ludic Dreaming is provocative and adventurous in thought and style,
offering a fresh approach to the thinking of sound, and a whimsical, highly
productive, excursion from the field.
—Frances Dyson, Emeritus Professor in Cinema and
Digital Media University of California, Davis, USA
Dreams do not distort reality, so much as they are the reality of that
distortion. Ludic Dreaming puts dreams in contact with electronic sounds,
and digital devices more generally, in order to trace out the exotic topology
of our post-everything society.
—Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of
English Wayne State University, USA
This book is a piece of sound writing. Blurring the boundaries between
dream, vision and physics, it stretches the reader’s imagination into playful
and oneiric realms of sonic materiality. A gift.
— Deborah A. Kapchan, Associate Professor of
Performance Studies New York University USA
If contemporary networked capitalism is built on promissory
hallucinations to which we wake in fright, then Ludic Dreaming is both
sonic boom and boon for an altogether different reverie. Its essays hum
with the aural ludicrousness of technocultural phenomena – from black
holes that emit B-flat frequencies to new generation ear buds that purport
to (almost) playback the voice inside our heads. But in ludically tuning
in to our nightmarish technologies, Cecchetto, Couroux, Hiebert and
Priest [or The Occulture] concurrently compose a delirious counter-
counterpoint accompaniment. And herein lies the remarkable and
highly original contribution of this book to cultural theory, media and
sound studies, and speculative thought. Affording listening a speculative
creativity rather than mere receptive functionality, Ludic Dreaming
performs an ‘elsewhere’ listening; a sounding of novel spectra into
existence. You will never want to wake up from Ludic Dreaming!
—Anna Munster, Associate Professor, Art and
Design University of New South Wales, Australia

LUDIC DREAMING

LUDIC DREAMING
How to Listen Away from
Contemporary Technoculture
BY
THE OCCULTURE:
DAVID CECCHETTO
MARC COUROUX
TED HIEBERT
ELDRITCH PRIEST
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
NEW YORK • LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2017
© David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert, Eldritch Priest, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in
writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2079-8
PB: 978-1-5013-2080-4
ePub: 978-1-5013-2082-8
ePDF: 978-1-5013-2081-1
Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 Auralneiricizing Time (Listening Away) 17
2 Nietzsche in B-flat: Attuning to the ’pataphysics
of data 31
3 Absolute Ventriloquy (or, Earing the Senses) 45
4 Psycho(tic)acoustics 57
5 The sound of both ears oozing: Chasms,
collapses, and phono-digital networks 81
6 Motivational dreamers and the ’pataphysics
of exploding heads 95
7 Imaginary magnitudes and the anoriginal
hypocrisy that vanishes in the meantime 109
8 We are Lesion 121
Conclusion 141
Notes 145
Index 156
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We’re grateful to Bloomsbury for following our dreams with
this project, and to Laura Banducci, Daniel Benneworth-Gray,
Sarah Blake, Michelle Chen, Ally-Jane Grossan, and Patience
Moll for their informed, flexible, and enthusiastic support. The
Occulture exists in part as a node of the generous and lively
community that has coalesced around the Tuning Speculation
conferences and workshops, and many of the ideas in this book
were amplified, tuned, and sometimes undermined by the
fantastic—fantastic!—folks who commune with us there.
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Introduction
Fidelity is not something absolute but something
dreamed, sensed, and felt.1
There has never been a night when we dreamed we were writing
an Introduction. Why? Because it isn’t altogether clear whether
the much-maligned pronoun we can really be dreamed. After
all, doesn’t the singular nature of dreams pose a challenge to the
kind of participatory or collaborative action that would pluralize
their visions? But then again, the opposite can be true. That is,
dreaming can also be understood as a method—the method—for
thinking the multiplicity of the singular. If dreaming is anything
at all, it’s that it always amounts to more than any one thing.
Thus, if we had dreamed of writing an Introduction, we might
have dreamed the singular plurality of the questions that are
taken up (or down, or around … what is the oneiric topology of
taking questions?) in this book: Why, when Nietzsche went mad,
did he sit at a piano for hours playing the same note over and