The Figure of the Amateur for a General Organology of Sound Art Practices

Abstract

The development of new technologies not only contributes to a new musical organology, but also drastically changes our forms of engagement with sound. A reassessed model of acoulogy informs new listening intentions through a first-person enquiry of the listening act, to define the heterogeneity of listening intentions as a way to frame the experience of sound. In this framework, composers, listeners and curators alike are defining and promoting new sound practices through heightened attention and support a process of grammatization which calls for a general organology, as defined by Bernard Stiegler. Within this theory that articulates bodily, artificial and social organs, the figure to the amateur as listener, composer or curator proves to be central. In its qualificative definition, the amateur develops particular relations with a class of object, to experiment with aesthetics technical, social, mental and corporal bodies. Drawing upon the theory of taste of Antoine Hennion, different actors can be identified in the process: the collective as a general framework, from which the definition of a particular taste can emerge; situations, or the spatio-temporal conditions that might be required for the emergence of a particular taste or experience of the object, like a specific ritual, or ways of doing things; and of course the object itself and its effects, not as being contained in the object, but as being discovered by the attention of the amateur, in a performative meaning. Within this particular setting of experimentation with this temporal object that is sound, composers, listeners and curators can engage in the different levels of Stiegler's general organology and contribute to a de-proletarianization process by creating a positive pharmakon.