sensory commons: scenting the air for a political economy of the sensory

Juhana VenäläinenPhD, post-doc researcher

University of Eastern Finlandjuhana.venalainen@uef.fi

SENSOTRA Pre-seminar "Sensory Transformations", Stara elektrarna, Ljubljana, 3 July 2017

What would it imply to understand senses, sensing, or the sensory as ”common” / ”a commons”?

What kind of methodological, epistemological, ontological and even ethical consequences

might it carry with?

How and why would it ”make sense”?

� ”Common has an extraordinary range of meaning in English, and several of its particular meanings are inseparable from a still active social history.” (Williams 1983, p. 70)

� Lat. communis: ”shared by all/many” Jean-François Millet: The Gleaners (1857)

Commons =� Resources shared by a group of people� A third form of “property” (partially) outside the market

and the state� However, they do not only constitute a resource system,

but also manifest particular social logics and cultures of sharing

� Subject to social dilemmas and conflicts – e.g. “tragedy of the commons”, where unrestricted use of limited resources open to anyone “brings ruin to all” (Hardin1968)

(Hess & Ostrom 2007; Barnes 2003; Hardt & Negri 2009)

� Traditionally, the commons referred to natural resources such as grazing lands, forests, and fisheries

� In 1990s, understanding of Internet as a common “infosphere” (as a space analogous to the natural ecosystem) influenced commons debates and shifted the focus to different kinds of “immaterial” commons (social, cultural, intellectual, affective…)

� Gradually, commons became a methodological umbrella term� Emphasis on social interaction, practices of sharing, distribution of

power relations, institutions of decision-making, rules and norms, and sources of governance

Charlotte Hess (2008): “Mapping the New

Commons”

SensoryCommons?

Charlotte Hess (2008): “Mapping the New

Commons”

� “the space that we human beings share by dint of our constitutive embodiment” (Hansen 2006, p. 20)

� The things we can sense; and the things we produce to be (potentially) sensed

� Profoundly reshaped by the digital transformations� A hybrid commons – escapes many of the binary oppositions in

commons analysis� Inhabited and shaped by human and non-human actors alike� Partly ”given”, partly ”constructed”� Partly limited (wears down in use), partly unlimited (enriched in use)

Aural commons

"a life-like acoustic space, where people interact and on occasion intrude, deliberately and

accidentally, into one another's space” (Haag 2002, p. 119–120)

Helsingin Sanomat 3 March 2016

“Once again, a dispute about the volume of the music played in a bar is emerging in Helsinki. […] During the two years of its operation, the restaurant [Bones] has been given over 200 reclamations of the nightly noise disturbances from music. The restaurant keeper talks about soundproofing, adjustments, and frequencies, but the problem itself is not touched’, states the residents’ letter to the municipal environmental committee.”

Helsingin Sanomat 3 March 2016

“According to the restaurant, the residents’ demand and the imposition of a penalty payment would be unreasonable for the business. ’The demand of not playing music between 22–3.30 is unreasonable because of the harm caused to the nightly sales’, writes the restaurant in its statement for the environmental committee.”

Helsingin Sanomat 3 March 2016

“In the measurements conducted in three bedrooms of Iso-Roobertinkatu 13, the average sound level carried from the restaurant was 22–27 decibels. […] In the two measurements in the bedrooms of Annankatu 2 the average level was 22–29 decibels. […] Just to compare, the ticking sound of a watch equals to about 20 decibels […]”

Helsingin Sanomat 3 March 2016

� Conflicting interests (low environmental noise levels vs. high sales of the restaurant)

� Differing valuations (sleeping vs. going out)� Hierarchic, bureacratic, and externalized

mode of governance (the municipal environmental committee as the communication channel, the mediator, and the decision-marker)

� Naturalization of the sensory phenomena

� Because of their density and heterogenousness of lifestyles, urban spaces accentuate the disputes around the sensory commons

� Questions to consider in the political economy of sensescapes might include:� What is it that makes sensescapes valuable for the people sensing

them?� What kind of processes add value to sensescapes or remove value

from them?� To what extent are these valuations converging (or disagreeing)?� How to negotiate and manage the potentially conflicting uses?

”The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise.”

(Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1946)

”Noise is any sound signal which interferes. Noise is the destroyer of things we want to hear.”

(R. Murray Schafer, Ear Cleaning – Notes for an Experimental Music Course, 1969)

Making noise ≈ appropriation of the sensory commons as private property…

Making noise ≈ appropriation of the sensory commons as private property…

…but by what right?

Making noise ≈ appropriation of the sensory commons as private property…

…but by what right?

cf. John Locke (in 1689, in building the philosophical case for private property):

if ”God […] has given the earth […] to mankind in common”, ”it seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing”

(Second Treatise of Civil Government, § 25)

”The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature,

lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.

The right to the city is far more than the individual libertyto access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends

upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.”

(David Harvey, “Right to the city”, 2008, p. 23)

� Sensescapes as a ”com-munus”, a ”co-duty”: something that we – as its inhabitants – are obliged to take care of

� To articulate sensescapes as common can be understood as an onto-political performative that seeks to deconstruct the dominance of the individualist social ontologies� Sensations not as private property that belongs to an already-

established subject, but as something constitutive of the subject in its “psychic and collective individuation”(à Simondon 1989; see Combes 2013)

� Commons as a laborious process of coping with our inevitable coexistence

� “to common”: a “powerful term of sharing, agency, and equality” (Linebaugh 2008, p. 279)

� ” Commoning is an activity that develops relations preoccupied by [the] reproduction and therefore – to use ecological terms – the ’sustainability’ of the commons [...].”(De Angelis 2017, p. 122)

� Mutual recognition, empathy and ”co-feeling” are guaranteed by neurophysical capabilities (mirror neurons), not (so much) by any kind of cultural mediation

� While language is a way of sharing feelings, it also renders possible the negation of this elementary togetherness� Language ”destructively counteracts” upon the ”’we-centered space’ […]” (Virno

2008, p. 181)

� At the same time, language is the ”antidote to the poison that language itself pours into the innate sociability of the mind” (p. 176)

� Making sense of our collective sensations through language is a negation of a negation, constituting an ”unstable result of a tearing-apart and a patching up of […] intersubjectivity” (p. 176)

� Gramsci: common sense [senso comune] as inherently unsystematic – a ”chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions […] ambiguous, contradictory and multiform […]” (Gramsci in Hoare & Smith 1971, p. 422–423, quoted in Crehan 2016, loc 1243)� Common sense can be ”good sense”, i.e. reasonable

judgements, that reflect the innate creativity of collectives, but it can also be a vehicle that sustains erroneous beliefs and spurs misunderstandings

à thus, common sense should be continually questioned(Crehan 2016 à Rosenfeld 2011)

”The fear of wind power stopped the village’s turbine. Thewind turbine of Jakokoski had been running for the wintermonths, until some of the villagers got worried about thepotential health effects. Now the turbine stays still, waiting for thesituation to be solved.”

Pielisjokiseutu 28 Jun 2017 (http://www.pielisjokiseutu.fi/uutiset/item/1312-tuulivoimapelko-pysaytti-kylan-tuulivoimalan )

Noise researcher: Infrasound misunderstood -"The sound of a spinning washing machinestronger than the sound of a wind turbine"

Tekniikka ja talous 7 Jun 2017(http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/kaikki_uutiset/melutut kija-infraaani-on-ym marretty-vaarin-link oavan-pe suko neen-i nfraaani-voimakkaam pi-kuin- tuulivoimalan-665548 9)

"The sound of contemporary wind turbines does not exceed

the threshold of hearing, a recent study suggests. The health effects associated with them are caused

by the experience of them or their sound as disturbing, not by

the sound itself, says noise researcher Valtteri Hongisto

from Turku Polytechnic."

Noise researcher: Infrasound misunderstood -"The sound of a spinning washing machinestronger than the sound of a wind turbine"

Tekniikka ja talous 7 Jun 2017(http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/kaikki_uutiset/melutut kija-infraaani-on-ym marretty-vaarin-link oavan-pe suko neen-i nfraaani-voimakkaam pi-kuin- tuulivoimalan-665548 9)

How to approach this mixing up of the negative attitudes towards wind farms and the negative sonic sensations attributed to them?

1. To regard this kind of sensations as ”nonsense”, irrational, and thus, irrelevant

2. To take more seriously the complex constructions of ”common sense” as shared cognitive and affective processes

� Sensations are never fully determined by or enclosed in physical phenomena, but rather are formed in a constantly mutating collective understanding

� To understand how the wind turbines "sound" like, we have to understand how people "listen" to them (how the sensations fit in their personal and collective life-stories, what kind of societal trajectories are they indexes of, etc.)

� This is not to say that all sensations are "only cultural", "fully subjective", or "mere social constructions”, but to search for a middle ground between the biophysical and sociocultural understandings of sensing and sense-making; between the material and the discursive

1. Political: dealing with the inevitable coexistence of different (and differing) sensory phenomena, expectations, and valuations

2. Ontological: sensory/affective faculties as elementarily shared; sensing as "co-sensing"

3. Discursive: making sense of the sensory through language; reinforcing, reinterpreting and contesting the formations of “common sense”

Thank you!juhana.venalainen@uef.fi

http://juhanavenalainen.netTwitter: @juhana_

� Barnes, Peter. 2003. “Capitalism, the Commons and Divine Right.” Speech delivered at the EF Schumacher Society, Oct. 25, 2003 . http://corporation2020.org/corporation2020/documents/Papers/SF_Prep/Barnes.pdf

� Combes, Muriel. 2013. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Translated by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.� Crehan, Kate. 2016. Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Durham; London: Duke University Press.� De Angelis, Massimo. 2017. Omnia Sunt Communia. London: Zed Books.� Haag, Stefan. 2002. “Listen and Be Touched: Aural Space in ‘Wandering Rocks.’” In Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks,” edited by Andrew Gibson and Steven Morrison,

107–120. European Joyce Studies 12. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.� Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (3859): 1243–1248.� Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.� Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (September-October). https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city.� Hess, Charlotte. 2008. “Mapping the New Commons.” Accessed March 19, 2012. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1356835.� Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom. 2007. “Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons.” In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory

to Practice, edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, 3–26. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.� Hoare, Quintin, and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence & Wishart.� Huxley, Aldous. 1946. The Perennial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus.� Linebaugh, Peter. 2008. The Magna Carta Manifesto. Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press.� Locke, John. 1967. Two Treatises of Government. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.� Rosenfeld, Sophia. 2011. Common Sense: A Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.� Schafer, R. Murray. 1969. Ear Cleaning. Notes for an Experimental Music Course. Toronto: Berandol Music Limited.� Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. L’individuation psychique et collective : à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité. Paris: Aubier.� Virno, Paolo. 2008. “Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, Reciprocal Recognition.” In Multitude between Innovation and Negation, 169–190. Los Angeles, CA:

Semiotext(e).� Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press.