Since completing his architecture degree in Munich and Rome, Clemens Gritl has been designing artificial 3D computer models as a way of reflecting on and exploring urban utopias of the 20th century. His work focuses on the interactions between space, dimension, scale, monotony, and the materiality of urban mega-structures and their impact on human beings. The photorealistic presentation of his work is closely aligned with 1960s architecture photography which displays a unique unbroken optimism and the radical zeitgeist of its era. His works are created in black and white to ensure that the plasticity of brutalist architecture is illustrated in its truest form. Website: www.clemensgritl.com Instagram: clemens.gritl
{"title":"Images","authors":"Clemens Gritl","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Since completing his architecture degree in Munich and Rome, Clemens Gritl has been designing artificial 3D computer models as a way of reflecting on and exploring urban utopias of the 20th century. His work focuses on the interactions between space, dimension, scale, monotony, and the materiality of urban mega-structures and their impact on human beings. The photorealistic presentation of his work is closely aligned with 1960s architecture photography which displays a unique unbroken optimism and the radical zeitgeist of its era. His works are created in black and white to ensure that the plasticity of brutalist architecture is illustrated in its truest form. Website: www.clemensgritl.com Instagram: clemens.gritl","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"140 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45862114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:By offering a summary of Jacques Rancière's argument in the essay "The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian's Truth" as well as a brief survey of existing scholarly literature on anachronism, this introduction situates the original contributions in this special issue within a larger theoretical context. In addition, it argues that anachronism operates as a condition of possibility for history insofar as it is recognized as both registering a certain reoccurrence and signaling a potential for the emergence of the new.
{"title":"Anachronic Potentialities","authors":"Erag Ramizi","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:By offering a summary of Jacques Rancière's argument in the essay \"The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian's Truth\" as well as a brief survey of existing scholarly literature on anachronism, this introduction situates the original contributions in this special issue within a larger theoretical context. In addition, it argues that anachronism operates as a condition of possibility for history insofar as it is recognized as both registering a certain reoccurrence and signaling a potential for the emergence of the new.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"16 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48097584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay analyzes the changing temporality of colonization in the French context from the 1830s to the 1880s. Notably, Benson shows how Algerian colonization was considered an "anachronism" for many journalists, politicians, historians, and economists for much of the nineteenth century. Algerian colonization was seen as both occurring too late in history—since it began in 1830, long after the first major period of France's colonial expansion into the Americas—and too early, starting before France's expansion into Africa in the 1880s. Indeed, it was only after the founding of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) that colonization finally "caught up" with the ideology of the French state. Colonization was then conceived as the marker of French nationhood, an official element of republican ideology, necessary to establish the legitimacy of the fledgling democracy. Paradoxically, France's colonial history became the very thread that tied the new republic to tradition, while colonization itself was refashioned into a new and "modern" policy of progress. Benson concludes by relating his discussion to Massimiliano Tomba's notion of state temporality and Jacques Rancière's analysis of the historian's truth. Both the state and the historian need to reject anachronisms in order to control access to the truth of the past and the present, foreclosing possibilities for the (postcolonial) future.
{"title":"From a Laughable Anachronism to a Civilizing Mission: French Colonization, 1830–71","authors":"Dan Benson","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes the changing temporality of colonization in the French context from the 1830s to the 1880s. Notably, Benson shows how Algerian colonization was considered an \"anachronism\" for many journalists, politicians, historians, and economists for much of the nineteenth century. Algerian colonization was seen as both occurring too late in history—since it began in 1830, long after the first major period of France's colonial expansion into the Americas—and too early, starting before France's expansion into Africa in the 1880s. Indeed, it was only after the founding of the French Third Republic (1870–1940) that colonization finally \"caught up\" with the ideology of the French state. Colonization was then conceived as the marker of French nationhood, an official element of republican ideology, necessary to establish the legitimacy of the fledgling democracy. Paradoxically, France's colonial history became the very thread that tied the new republic to tradition, while colonization itself was refashioned into a new and \"modern\" policy of progress. Benson concludes by relating his discussion to Massimiliano Tomba's notion of state temporality and Jacques Rancière's analysis of the historian's truth. Both the state and the historian need to reject anachronisms in order to control access to the truth of the past and the present, foreclosing possibilities for the (postcolonial) future.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"72 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45434258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend reveals the tension between anthropomorphism defined as naïve or arrogant projection and anthropomorphism as a critical intervention with stakes for intimacy, mourning, and anti-violence. Through close readings of The Friend and Coetzee’s Disgrace, which Nunez’s novel evokes, this essay argues for a critical anthropomorphism and shows, with Nunez, how it can become a means of relating non-violently to others in their differences, including the dead, animals, and women.
{"title":"Critical Anthropomorphism after #MeToo: Reading The Friend","authors":"S. Guyer","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend reveals the tension between anthropomorphism defined as naïve or arrogant projection and anthropomorphism as a critical intervention with stakes for intimacy, mourning, and anti-violence. Through close readings of The Friend and Coetzee’s Disgrace, which Nunez’s novel evokes, this essay argues for a critical anthropomorphism and shows, with Nunez, how it can become a means of relating non-violently to others in their differences, including the dead, animals, and women.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"30 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48541214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay reviews Stephen Best’s None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life in relation to the ongoing reading debates in literary studies and the methodological practices of black studies. Best’s work, I argue, expands upon the practice of surface reading he and Sharon Marcus introduced to reveal how an attention to surfaces, which I recharacterize as “topological reading,” disrupts misleading seductions of interpretation that remain grounded in allegory. In doing so, Best further reveals the value of surface reading for black studies in particular, which, with its focus on recovery in the archive, is particularly susceptible to “deep” reading practices that aim to construct utopian communitarian notions of black being and belonging. I conclude the review by explicating a brief allusion Best makes to Afropessimism in order to detail the political implications of Best’s insistence on negativity and the “anti-communitarian undertone” he locates in black studies.
{"title":"Anarchival Dislocations: Modes of Reading (in) Black Studies","authors":"M. Scully","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reviews Stephen Best’s None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life in relation to the ongoing reading debates in literary studies and the methodological practices of black studies. Best’s work, I argue, expands upon the practice of surface reading he and Sharon Marcus introduced to reveal how an attention to surfaces, which I recharacterize as “topological reading,” disrupts misleading seductions of interpretation that remain grounded in allegory. In doing so, Best further reveals the value of surface reading for black studies in particular, which, with its focus on recovery in the archive, is particularly susceptible to “deep” reading practices that aim to construct utopian communitarian notions of black being and belonging. I conclude the review by explicating a brief allusion Best makes to Afropessimism in order to detail the political implications of Best’s insistence on negativity and the “anti-communitarian undertone” he locates in black studies.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"28 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47521191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay shows how popular and technical discourses of autism treat the condition as a form of artificial intelligence. Offering a genealogy of so-called mechanical brains, it argues that attempts to rehabilitate liberal subjectivity in an age of information overload created the conceptual and cultural conditions necessary for computational theories of mind, which inform the most prominent studies of autism. As distinctions between biological and machinic intelligence gave way to distinctions between authentic and artificial intelligence, autism emerged as an intermediary for consolidating divergent understandings of cognitive difference. Since the mid-twentieth century, autism has come to signal the superhuman potential of artificial intelligence and, at the same time, mark the threshold computers must surpass to achieve authentic intelligence. Autism contains anxieties about automation while also sustaining fantasies of maximized brainpower. It indicates both deficit and surfeit, strength and weakness. This essay leverages those oppositions to suggest how theories of disability and posthumanism might productively trouble one another: first to track constructions of intelligent personhood alongside information technologies, then to read an alternative construction of autistic intelligence that points toward new cognitive subjectivities.
{"title":"Mechanical Brains: Autism and Artificial Intelligence","authors":"D. Squires","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay shows how popular and technical discourses of autism treat the condition as a form of artificial intelligence. Offering a genealogy of so-called mechanical brains, it argues that attempts to rehabilitate liberal subjectivity in an age of information overload created the conceptual and cultural conditions necessary for computational theories of mind, which inform the most prominent studies of autism. As distinctions between biological and machinic intelligence gave way to distinctions between authentic and artificial intelligence, autism emerged as an intermediary for consolidating divergent understandings of cognitive difference. Since the mid-twentieth century, autism has come to signal the superhuman potential of artificial intelligence and, at the same time, mark the threshold computers must surpass to achieve authentic intelligence. Autism contains anxieties about automation while also sustaining fantasies of maximized brainpower. It indicates both deficit and surfeit, strength and weakness. This essay leverages those oppositions to suggest how theories of disability and posthumanism might productively trouble one another: first to track constructions of intelligent personhood alongside information technologies, then to read an alternative construction of autistic intelligence that points toward new cognitive subjectivities.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"52 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49320311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay begins by examining Hannah Arendt’s meditations on labor, work, and thought in The Human Condition (1958) and The Life of the Mind (1978), in order to probe the relationship between representations of work and the work of literary composition in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). I argue that these two female intellectuals exhibited a shared concern for exploring the nature of the peculiar “work” of the imagination as analogous to, and importantly distinct from, other kinds of labor. Turning to The Voyage Out, I show how the novel dramatizes this relationship between labor, work, and authorship within the context of the contradictions inherent in its fictionalized imperial setting. Examining The Voyage Out in light of the later Arendt’s thought thus offers an opportunity to uncover the ambivalence at the heart of an early modernist experiment regarding the extent to which labor—particularly domestic and feminized labor—is or should be equatable to the work of literary production. I conclude by suggesting that reading Woolf together with Arendt illuminates the development of modernist critiques of mechanized and alienated labor, their relationship to modernist aesthetics, and an ambivalence at the core of such literature and theory about the activity of intellectual life.
{"title":"Labor, Thought, and the Work of Authorship: Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt","authors":"V. Baena","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay begins by examining Hannah Arendt’s meditations on labor, work, and thought in The Human Condition (1958) and The Life of the Mind (1978), in order to probe the relationship between representations of work and the work of literary composition in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). I argue that these two female intellectuals exhibited a shared concern for exploring the nature of the peculiar “work” of the imagination as analogous to, and importantly distinct from, other kinds of labor. Turning to The Voyage Out, I show how the novel dramatizes this relationship between labor, work, and authorship within the context of the contradictions inherent in its fictionalized imperial setting. Examining The Voyage Out in light of the later Arendt’s thought thus offers an opportunity to uncover the ambivalence at the heart of an early modernist experiment regarding the extent to which labor—particularly domestic and feminized labor—is or should be equatable to the work of literary production. I conclude by suggesting that reading Woolf together with Arendt illuminates the development of modernist critiques of mechanized and alienated labor, their relationship to modernist aesthetics, and an ambivalence at the core of such literature and theory about the activity of intellectual life.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"105 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47192471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This short essay was written in response to an invitation to speak at a symposium at the Royal College of Art in London in November 2018. The poem presented here, “Starting from low the light ascends in a single slow movement,” was, at the time when this essay was written, one section of a lyric in seven parts, all of it in roughly accentual heptameter tercets. The poem had the title “Moral Support,” or anyhow, I thought so; but the verses ended up taking a different turn, out of that poem and into another, and they now belong elsewhere. The poem “Moral Support” never made it into the world. Some of it was let go, but the bulk of it was redistributed, either intact or in pieces, into the first three poems of my book Scherzos Benjyosos. The eight tercets presented here can be found in scherzo number 3—twice, almost. A number of revisions were made, of a more or less emendatory or even explicitly redemptive character. The poem presented in this essay, the one that was stuck into Stephen G. Rhodes’s room full of the detritus of a violated childhood, ended up being a hoarded text, withheld from circulation—until now. This essay, conceived at the time as a space of reflection and reminiscence in which the poem would momentarily repose, or a space that it would visit before making its way in the world as a completed poetic work, has instead turned out to be the ironic reliquary of a poem that never got out.
{"title":"Moral Support","authors":"S. Rhodes, K. Sutherland","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This short essay was written in response to an invitation to speak at a symposium at the Royal College of Art in London in November 2018. The poem presented here, “Starting from low the light ascends in a single slow movement,” was, at the time when this essay was written, one section of a lyric in seven parts, all of it in roughly accentual heptameter tercets. The poem had the title “Moral Support,” or anyhow, I thought so; but the verses ended up taking a different turn, out of that poem and into another, and they now belong elsewhere. The poem “Moral Support” never made it into the world. Some of it was let go, but the bulk of it was redistributed, either intact or in pieces, into the first three poems of my book Scherzos Benjyosos. The eight tercets presented here can be found in scherzo number 3—twice, almost. A number of revisions were made, of a more or less emendatory or even explicitly redemptive character. The poem presented in this essay, the one that was stuck into Stephen G. Rhodes’s room full of the detritus of a violated childhood, ended up being a hoarded text, withheld from circulation—until now. This essay, conceived at the time as a space of reflection and reminiscence in which the poem would momentarily repose, or a space that it would visit before making its way in the world as a completed poetic work, has instead turned out to be the ironic reliquary of a poem that never got out.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"128 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47109756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Beginning from the Herodotean narration of the evacuation of the Ionian city Phokaia and the subsequent diaspora and foundation of Hyele (Elea), “Broken Light on the Ground of Home” traces some movements of that traumatic history within the Parmenidean Song of Being. Xenophanean poetry opens a view onto trauma rendered by displacement under bellicose conditions and forms a link to the Parmenidean poem on the ground of Hyele. Two themes in the poem outline the diasporic movements and traumas of the Phokaian-Hyelean population: first, the dynamics of similarity and difference; second, the turnings between memory and forgetting. The interplay of memory and forgetting animates much of the poem and can be read as one way diasporic trauma tremors in the Parmenidean Song of Being.
{"title":"Broken Light on the Ground of Home: Non-Being and Diasporic Trauma in the Parmenidean Poem","authors":"D. M. Spitzer","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Beginning from the Herodotean narration of the evacuation of the Ionian city Phokaia and the subsequent diaspora and foundation of Hyele (Elea), “Broken Light on the Ground of Home” traces some movements of that traumatic history within the Parmenidean Song of Being. Xenophanean poetry opens a view onto trauma rendered by displacement under bellicose conditions and forms a link to the Parmenidean poem on the ground of Hyele. Two themes in the poem outline the diasporic movements and traumas of the Phokaian-Hyelean population: first, the dynamics of similarity and difference; second, the turnings between memory and forgetting. The interplay of memory and forgetting animates much of the poem and can be read as one way diasporic trauma tremors in the Parmenidean Song of Being.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"48 1","pages":"108 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2020.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49479341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity’s front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity’s turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.
{"title":"Turning Ears; Or, Ec(h)otechnics","authors":"Naomi Waltham-Smith","doi":"10.1353/dia.2019.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity’s front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity’s turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":"47 1","pages":"110 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dia.2019.0036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48733585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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