Social Dissonance
Online & in-person open-access seminar organised on behalf of the Collège international de philosophie, with the collaboration of the University of the West of England, King’s College London, the Centre for Philosophy and the Visual Arts, and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Coined by Leon Festinger in 1957 (A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance) the term cognitive dissonance originally designates the tension between concurrently held contradictory beliefs, leading to the avoidance of situations or information that could escalate this tension, conversely favouring beliefs without rational justification so long as they satisfy the pressure to mitigate cognitive dissonance. This seminar takes as its stimulus the recently published Social Dissonance (Urbanomic, MIT Press, 2022), by philosopher and artist Mattin, with the aim to extrapolate the social, aesthetic, and metaphysical dimensions of dissonant cognition. Philosophers and thinkers from the human sciences and digital culture will intersect their perspectives on the challenge of social dissonance. Characterised by the tension between the capitalist hypertely of individualism and the pathologies of sociogeny, discussions will revisit Franz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter’s analyses of the correspondence between the reproduction of violence, injustice, and forms of exploitation and phenomena of collective neuroses, complexes, mental states of noise, and catastrophic reactions.
What is Social Dissonance?
ORG.: Cécile MALASPINA
In collaboration with Miguel PRADO CASANOVA (UWE), Francesco TAVA (UWE), Mark COTÉ (KCL), Patrick FFRENCH (KCL)
@CMalaspina4
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM6eQVydoPzPcTT2YYRFezg
Coined by Leon Festinger in 1957 (A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance) the term cognitive dissonance originally designates the tension between concurrently held contradictory beliefs, leading to the avoidance of situations or information that could escalate this tension, conversely favouring beliefs without rational justification so long as they satisfy the pressure to mitigate cognitive dissonance. This seminar takes as its stimulus the recently published Social Dissonance (Urbanomic, MIT Press, 2022), by philosopher and artist Mattin, with the aim to extrapolate the social, aesthetic, and metaphysical dimensions of dissonant cognition. Philosophers and thinkers from the human sciences and digital culture will intersect their perspectives on the challenge of social dissonance. Characterised by the tension between the capitalist hypertely of individualism and the pathologies of sociogeny, discussions will revisit Franz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter’s analyses of the correspondence between the reproduction of violence, injustice, and forms of exploitation and phenomena of collective neuroses, complexes, mental states of noise, and catastrophic reactions.
What is Social Dissonance?
ORG.: Cécile MALASPINA
In collaboration with Miguel PRADO CASANOVA (UWE), Francesco TAVA (UWE), Mark COTÉ (KCL), Patrick FFRENCH (KCL)
@CMalaspina4
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM6eQVydoPzPcTT2YYRFezg
THURSDAY 27.04.2023
16:30 PM
THIS SEMINAR IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE.
LOCATION: Bookhaus bookshop, 4 Rope walk #4 unit, bs1 6zj bristol
TICKETS: https://WWW.EVENTBRITE.CO.UK/E/SOCIAL-DISSONANCE-SONIA-DE-JAGER-AND-MARTINA-RAPONI-TICKETS-596984686267?FBCLID=IWAR3LD3T-0TEXYAS5NHASSABMORM6DVAW5DSLK05YY492S_KE3UTCIL7-ZRM
PSOFOTOPIAS
SPEAKER: MARTINA RAPONI
Psofotopias observes how different media, cultural artifacts, and narratives depict dreams and the act of dreaming. I connect these popular media examples to critiques of contemporary technology and media theory, to brain science and philosophy of noise, and I conclude with a commentary on one of my recent art installations. In refusing the often clear-cut separation of dreams and nightmares into either utopias or dystopias, I align with cases and theories that treat dreams with moral indeterminacy, opening up a space for interpretation, analogy, and (trans)individuation. This space of ambiguity and uncertainty is what I call a “psofotopia”. Psofotopia is a portmanteau (psofos, noise; topos, place) that allows me to argue that dreams, with their cognitive, interpretive, and affective ambiguity, are “spaces of noise” that offer a model to deal with complexity. This presentation is part of a work in progress.
Martina Raponi is a writer and artist researching noise and complexity; she holds a Bachelor in Humanities (University of Padua), a Master in Art Mediation (Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna) and a Master in Fine Arts (Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam). Martina authored a book on noise, "Strategie del Rumore. Interferenze tra Arte Filosofia e Underground" (Milano, Auditorium Ed., 2015). She is co-founder of Noiserr, an interdisciplinary research group focused on sound. With artist [M] Dudeck, Martina founded the Ansible Institute, a transitory speculative fiction laboratory. She is part of NRU (Noise Research Union) and is an art theory tutor at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Martina is now working on her second book, Unheard.
http://noiserr.xyz/
https://n-r-u.xyz/
Martina Raponi is a writer and artist researching noise and complexity; she holds a Bachelor in Humanities (University of Padua), a Master in Art Mediation (Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna) and a Master in Fine Arts (Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam). Martina authored a book on noise, "Strategie del Rumore. Interferenze tra Arte Filosofia e Underground" (Milano, Auditorium Ed., 2015). She is co-founder of Noiserr, an interdisciplinary research group focused on sound. With artist [M] Dudeck, Martina founded the Ansible Institute, a transitory speculative fiction laboratory. She is part of NRU (Noise Research Union) and is an art theory tutor at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Martina is now working on her second book, Unheard.
http://noiserr.xyz/
https://n-r-u.xyz/
SATAN'S SCHEMATISM
SPEAKER: SONIA DE JAGER
First semi-uncontroversial statement to be taken for granted in this presentation: pattern recognition, interpretation, translation, projection, etc. is a movement which expands and contracts between the complexification of simplicity, and the simplification of complexity. We orient ourselves, communicate and relate by way of patterns, i.e. repetitions of difference, insofar as we can find ourselves pooling into comparable attractors of complexity or simplicity. A pattern most basic is our dimensional symmetry: the fact that we can perceive ourselves moving left or right, back and forth, up and down. The proportional dynamics of this dimensionality (what could also be understood as ratio), are another type of 'basic' pattern, which we will briefly discuss in relation to Wittgenstein's use of the infamous expression "what shows itself" in logic, which also shows itself in his "family resemblances" in language at large. The combination of these two "patternal factors" already sets the stage for negintelligibility quite quickly. We will explain this concept.
Second semi-uncontroversial statement: we tend to orient ourselves, communicate and relate by patterns which promote degrees of social organization (complexity/simplicity attractors which pool us together). This can be observed in the fluxus of grammar, all the way up to the rhythms of sociopolitical inclinations. But what happens when certain patterns of proportion (e.g.: ideas about distributions, distances, granularities: i.e. about the speeds of how quantities (should) change into qualities and vice versa) render anti-social programs? (E.g. a lot of centralized mass media, traditionally installing one-dimensional narratives of malignant normality, or currently a lot of "viral" media, i.e. situations where divisive controversiality drives attention and behavior). In these situations generative contradiction is plastered over by a dominant narrative which, at root, is not only always unavoidably contradictory, but can also usually be found to stem from desires to oppress and dominate, as a top-down way of creating social 'cohesion' (which is, unavoidably, a fake presentation of actual cohesion, and can thus be termed anti-social). We will think about this by referring to the current paradigm as one of "post-control script societies".
What do we make of these two observations given our question about anti-sociality? We will try to find an answer by relating the notion of the sociality of patterns to a) the characteristics of fractal patterns. A fractal is a distinctively procedural pattern (in other words: a pattern of becoming), intelligible only in its 'logic', it is therefore traceable yet incomplete as it is always perceptually possibilistic: never fully accomplished, it is a simple function rendering complex phenomenal dynamics which permanently affords more of a certain 'expectable unknown'. And b) the perceptual experience of another pattern, moving away from the visual towards the sonic: the tritone paradox (Deutsch). The tritone paradox can be considered the proof-of-concept of how our sociality structures our perceptual pattern orientations, given that the way tone is perceived as either rising or declining depends on one's language/dialect. Finally, at the end of the presentation we will explain why the presentation is titled: "Satan's schematism" (hint: the devil is in the details).
Sonia de Jager is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Rotterdam. De Jager's project combines transdisciplinary perspectives in order to analyze the biopsychosocial underpinnings that ground normalizing concepts in the pursuit of artificially intelligent language modelling.
https://n-o.ooo
Second semi-uncontroversial statement: we tend to orient ourselves, communicate and relate by patterns which promote degrees of social organization (complexity/simplicity attractors which pool us together). This can be observed in the fluxus of grammar, all the way up to the rhythms of sociopolitical inclinations. But what happens when certain patterns of proportion (e.g.: ideas about distributions, distances, granularities: i.e. about the speeds of how quantities (should) change into qualities and vice versa) render anti-social programs? (E.g. a lot of centralized mass media, traditionally installing one-dimensional narratives of malignant normality, or currently a lot of "viral" media, i.e. situations where divisive controversiality drives attention and behavior). In these situations generative contradiction is plastered over by a dominant narrative which, at root, is not only always unavoidably contradictory, but can also usually be found to stem from desires to oppress and dominate, as a top-down way of creating social 'cohesion' (which is, unavoidably, a fake presentation of actual cohesion, and can thus be termed anti-social). We will think about this by referring to the current paradigm as one of "post-control script societies".
What do we make of these two observations given our question about anti-sociality? We will try to find an answer by relating the notion of the sociality of patterns to a) the characteristics of fractal patterns. A fractal is a distinctively procedural pattern (in other words: a pattern of becoming), intelligible only in its 'logic', it is therefore traceable yet incomplete as it is always perceptually possibilistic: never fully accomplished, it is a simple function rendering complex phenomenal dynamics which permanently affords more of a certain 'expectable unknown'. And b) the perceptual experience of another pattern, moving away from the visual towards the sonic: the tritone paradox (Deutsch). The tritone paradox can be considered the proof-of-concept of how our sociality structures our perceptual pattern orientations, given that the way tone is perceived as either rising or declining depends on one's language/dialect. Finally, at the end of the presentation we will explain why the presentation is titled: "Satan's schematism" (hint: the devil is in the details).
Sonia de Jager is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Rotterdam. De Jager's project combines transdisciplinary perspectives in order to analyze the biopsychosocial underpinnings that ground normalizing concepts in the pursuit of artificially intelligent language modelling.
https://n-o.ooo
Thursday 10.11.2022
16:00 pm GMT/ IN PERSON & ONLINE
This seminar is free and open to everyone.
LOCATION: UWE City Campus at Arnolfini, Room: 4AF014, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA
TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-dissonance-naomi-waltham-smith-respondent-patrick-ffrench-hybrid-tickets-441534440397
Noise Strike: Wakeful Listening at the Limits of Liberal Cognition
Speaker: Naomi Waltham-Smith
Respondent: Patrick ffrench
When a loud and raucous protest broke out in 1919 at a women’s correctional institution in Florida, the New York Times labeled it a ”noise strike.” The Conservative government has also recently legislated to give the police greater and more arbitrary powers to curb protests on the basis of the disturbance caused by their noisiness. This talk works through Black-radical and queer conceptions of social transformation, democracy, and abolition—in particular alongside Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation of that noise strike, Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten’s equally generative notion of noisy improvisation, Sianne Ngai’s ”ugly feelings,” and Lauren Belant’s rewriting of noisy disturbance as the inconvenience of nonsovereign sociality distinct from trauma—in order to explore how they improvise with and disturb the normative figuring of noise as disturbance in European thought. To this end, it also draws upon heterodox arguments about the ”strike” and explosive plasticity in recent French philosophy to reinscribe a certain shattering effect of noise without opposing it straightforwardly to order, harmony, or consensus all the better to recuperate it. Out of Freud’s reflections on noise’s capacity to disturb sleep, the talk concludes by proposing a minor experiment in wakeful listening to noise that disperses the boundedness of liberal frames of mind, intelligences, and modes of aural cognition.
THURSDAY 13.10.2022
16:00 PM GMT/ IN PERSON & ONLINE
THIS SEMINAR IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE.
LOCATION: UWE CITY CAMPUS AT ARNOLFINI, ROOM: 4AF014, 16 NARROW QUAY, BRISTOL, BS1 4QA
TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-dissonance-mattin-respondent-cecile-malaspina-in-person-online-tickets-432912632337
Social dissonance
SPEAKER: mattin
RESPONDENT: Cécile MALASPINA
If cognitive dissonance is the tension that arises from having contradictory beliefs or the discrepancy between what one thinks and what one does, then social dissonance is a structural cognitive dissonance emerging from the contradiction between the values that we have in liberal western societies - such as individual freedom, equality and democracy - and what we do, which is to reproduce a system based on unfreedom, inequality, and oppression. Festinger in his theory of cognitive dissonance argues that one constantly tries to reduce dissonance. How do we try to reduce this structural dissonance? Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism might help us to answer this question: since there seems to be no outside to the capitalist mode of production after the fall of the Berlin wall, we can only continue to reproduce this system even though it is driving us towards extinction. Precisely because there is no horizon to change things at the systemic level, we are left with a more personalized expression of social dissonance: the idea that as individuals we are already subjects (i.e. agents with the capacity for freedom and self-determination). However, this liberal understanding of freedom is constantly being negated by forms of classism, racism, and misogyny generating frustration and discomfort. The failed promises of individual freedom and equality are not only the seeds for the emerging fascist tendencies but also for the growing mental health crisis. The ideological mess we find ourselves in translates into a mental state of noise. To disentangle it, we need a critique of capitalist realism. The understanding of social dissonance requires a careful engagement with a number of concepts, ranging from sociogeny, alienation, and reification to their relation with cognitive dissonance.