The music of Salvatore Sciarrino doesn’t just interrogate our strictly musical expectations, it probes the very boundaries of aural and temporal perception. Conjuring cavernous voids punctuated sparingly by fleeting outbursts of instrumental colour, the Italian composer confronts the listener with stretches of inactivity so vast that the sheer absence of event begins to imbue a near-excruciating sense of tension and urgency to his music.
Graham Harman " is not providing us with a model of considering the object, but rather a vast and damaging oversimplification of what any such consideration may be" according to Andrew Gibson. He goes on to argue, as I have, that Harman gives a vast and damaging oversimplification of science itself, ignoring the incommensurable levels described by our scientific theories. Harman's homogeneous reality (it's all objects) leads him to see scientific theory as more homogeneous than it is, even attributing a homogenising tendency (reductionism, "undermining" in Harmanspeak) that is yet another figment of his imagination.
UPDATE: I was going to add this to the comments but they are getting a bit out of control. Here is the gist of my position:
1) The dude was involved in the process – I don’t care how he came to be involved, but his involvement happened and it was accepted by the parties involved. No one just wanders off the street into this. Sure, maybe there were some issues – don’t care. The fact of involvement is established.
2) The dude got no mention in the book at all. We can argue the finer points of what does and does not constitute editorship – everyone knows high ranking folks don’t do shit on edited volumes, but still get listed at the top of the bill so books can sell – but the final fact remains – his name is nowhere in the final book.
I (and two other students at the time) helped my adviser edit a volume when in grad school. I helped him finish the last part of the introduction. Should I have been included as an editor? No. But he did generously acknowledged my help in the Acknowledgements section. If he didn’t, I would have survived but I would have been pretty annoyed.
To sum: if someone’s involved in your project and negotiates a contract on your behalf, don’t be a dick, even if things go sour later, mention the dude in your Acknowledgement. Period.
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Read this story and weep, comrades!
I received a copy of the book today and my name is nowhere to be found.
Lesson: Volunteering your labor to help others is overrated, especially when academic egos are involved. Beware!
Whoever did this great service to humanity deserves a medal – great book on music and culture: Listening in Paris. One of the few books I have read cover to cover. Enjoy!
From here.
“I have a question for you:
What is the proportion between the time you spend, on the one hand, reading and thinking and writing in your field, and the time you spend, on the other hand, selling yourself by writing proposals and applications, shmoozing with colleagues and professors, and so forth?
And I have another question:
Did you know that the most cold-blooded corporations spend on advertisement anywhere between about %1 of their revenues (in the retail business) and about %7 (for companies selling packaged goods)?
This is just an educated guess, but I have a feeling that, on average, successful academics spend a much bigger chunk of their intellectual resources on self-promotion than what good capitalists spend on marketing their wares.”
Just for the kids who follow this shit – I was against objectology before it was cool…
update: some people whose opinion I respect criticised the initial version of this post as unfair and homogenising. I have changed the title and slightly modified the first paragraph. May the conversation prove fruitful!
I do not like the term "para-academics" as it suggests a mere neighbouring but parallel postion in relation to academia, as if the ghetto were isomorphic with the official hierarchy and seeking merger.
Too many great movies to watch over the weekend (too cheap to actually pay Hulu to stream it for money after the President’s weekend) – must watch some more Bergman!
