All are invited to attend the 4th annual John Fekete Distinguished Lecture on Nov 3rd, featuring Dr. Dominic Pettman, professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College and New School for Social Research.
Roland Barthes famously discusses what he calls “the punctum”: the unexpected element of a photograph which pricks or wounds the viewer, thus creating an uncanny, authentic connection between people across very different moments in time. This talk introduces and explores a sonic analog to this concept – an “aural punctum” (first, as it relates to the gendered female voice, and then more generally across different species). This paper seeks to better understand how “the voice” might be a site of not only human communication, but also “creaturely” concern (whales, parrots, etc.). Indeed, it asks to what extent we can take seriously the possibility of a non-subjective expression of the elements themselves – a “voice of nature” – without succumbing to New Age delusions. Quite simply: who or what can rightly claim to have a voice? Is it a property or capacity that belongs to a subject, even a nonhuman subject (such as SIRI)? Or might “the voice” be lo cated somewhere between beings of very different existential types (and thus potentially creating a sympathetic bridge between them)?
November 03, 2016 : 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM
• Building: Traill College
• Room: Bagnani Hall
• Cost: Free
