David Wills (SUNY, Albany)
Positive Feedback: Towards an Ecology of Sound
The idea of ecology, traditionally conceived, relies on principles of proximity that are determined in turn by notions of affect. We are concerned, in ecological terms, by what affects, touches (on) something near, within a certain environment. That would be maintained even, and especially, within a more or less mythological chaos theory of the butterfly effect. How then does ecology deal with an originary environmental rupture—that of the human/animal divide, or that of the technological—and maintain that rupture rather than presume to reduce it by means of various other (and necessary) »conservationist« principles such as respect and caring? That is on the one hand the question of (an ethics of) difference and of the other, but if ecology is to retain its specific etymological domestic (oikos) sense, it will have to broker a new concept of spatial extension for the teletechnological age; to imagine the confines of an eco-system determined by structures of tracing and iterability.
I’d like to examine those questions by means of the examples of two sound systems: »human« sound as auto-affective heartbeat, whereby the sensory process in general is opened to a type of hereto-affective drift; and animal sound exemplified by the bird song in the context of its »inanimate« reproducibility.