Listening without interpretation...is it impossible?


I came across an interesting quotation about texts which applies, it seems, to music listening and audio:

"We never really confront audio immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, audio comes before us as the always-already-heard; we apprehend it through sedimented layers of previous interpretations or --if the audio is brand new -- through the sedimented listening habits and categories developed by those interpretive traditions." [Paraphrased from Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981)]

If this application to audio is accurate, it indicates that what we hear and how we listen are profoundly influenced by how we talk about it, argue about it, interpret it. The ways we talk about it and who we talk about it with change the very ways we “confront” or encounter it the next time.

This would apply not only to the macro impressions about entire songs or even passages of songs, but even the minute ways we describe the details. (Using “etched” to describe the “highs” or “boomy” to describe the “lows,” and so on.) It also would set aside, as obtuse, the repeated suggestion that one can ignore what people say and “just get back to listening for oneself.” There is no such way of listening. Yes, one can move away from the computer, for days or weeks or more, but the notion that one can move one’s “own” mind away from the “sedimented layer of previous interpretations” is, well impossible.

I’m not sure, personally, where I fall on this interesting question. Just wanted to share it.

128x128hilde45

"I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy"

Your words here (and Allah forfend philosophy) have zero to do with what I'm talking about.

To give you an example, the odds are 100% that at least one time in your life you met a man, woman or child and they reminded you of your mother, father, first girlfriend, cousin etc.  At that moment you were not capable of accurately seeing that person who was in front of you because of your past.  You were not seeing reality, because reality was being filtered.

It is unlikely that your mind will let you see this, but perhaps this will be of use to someone else reading this.

You were perfectly right to criticize the superficial notion of "representation"...

It is already in Schopenhauer reading Goethe and the Veda, thinking about the dead road of Kantism and Cartesianism...

But the representation theory so wrong when it want to explain perception, come from an history and from the evolution of consciousness with language...This must be explained but not here for sure...

Your Darwinian direct "participation" cannot explain perception either...

The truth is more complex....

There is no interface between us and the world you are right, but the "world" itself appear like an interface between "us" and us...Man is double, from evolution come history and these 2 are the 2 faces of man...History is cultures and civilizations, it is  is a "symbolic form" related to the history of consciousness...

It is not the world which is divided in two...

It is us who are double: an animal body and his embryonnic ego and a spirit.....

The world is not double but it cannot be perceived in his "wholeness" without a yoga of the consciousness  lived THROUGH our own body  which is explained by Husserl but way better by the Goethean phenomenology...You can try Aurobindo if you are more interested in oriental attitude...

Perceiving anything in his true nature ask for a discipline of the mind and of the attention, alien to the common man prisonner of his habit and living in a "virtual" world...

There is no interface between us and the world , the interface is between our sleepwalking ego and our spirit and soul.... The interface is our own body between my ego  and my soul....We must learn to inhabit our own body....We must learn to hear and see...

The history of philosophy is founded on the history of language and on the history of consciousness itself ...

The representation theory of perception is not even wrong, it is an half truth born from history.....

The Darwinian theory of evolution is not even wrong, it is an half truth born also from history....

The whole truth ask for the experience of oneness....This experience is the real basis to the participation in the cosmos and in the natural world at the animal level... In human this experience ask for a reappropriation of our animal nature instead of his negation and at the same time a spiritual transcendental experience of the "one"....All that in our own body/soul or External/Internal...

Like said Swedenborg very economically, Swedenborg stuttered al his life and learned to speak with very few words, speaking about death:

« In death the internal become the external and vice versa»

Then trhe relation between my body and the cosmos is a double in- flowing and out-flowing, like in respiration...It is a dynamic polarization which has been transformed in a static  duality by habit and conditioning... 

 

This is where we part company. I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy and it has a fatal flaw -- namely, that there is some way we could step outside of ourselves to view, simultaneously, both the "reality" and the "perception" in order to determine if the representation is correct. Cannot be done.

Rather than mind as "representer" of reality, think Darwin; think, adaptive organ for getting along in a wider environment. Think of perceiving-thinking as nodes in an ongoing and transactional sequence. Perceiving is like breathing. In other words, our perceptual experiences are world-involving transactions involving eyes, ears, brains, and eventually language. There is no interface between "us" and the "world." We are the world interacting with the world.

Gestalt psychology is only a fragment of the Goethean method who anticipate it completely...

I doubt reading your sarcastic posts about me for the last 7 years, without ever any arguments, i doubt that your amount of good will is enough to understand anything... Certainly you miss Geoffkait who you mocked in the same TROLLiNG way for all the years i was here with you childesque "tin foil hat" insult reflex....I must be your new scapegoat obsession...Old age create habit... And your sarcastic habit reflect the beginning of a health problem perhaps : how old are you?

Acting like a children or a troll make it difficult for me to guess it...

The only excuse i can give you is that this last post is only an inoffensive sarcasm, and my strong reaction come from the annoying habit you have to troll my posts...

 I apologize but forget me and look for an another windmill...

 

Anyway if you want to understand the relation of part and whole in a living perceptive experience try this:

http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php

But the book is too big for alzheimer sufferer who use sarcasm against other all the time or for very old man ensconced in their own "opinion"....

 

More on the Gestalt principles of perception, please.

Check out the term "transderivational search"

Oh, great.

Which restroom will they be using?