Historical Imagination, Form and Aesthetic Experience in Sound Installations

Abstract

This paper reflects on the problem of form and its political implications in some specific kind of sound installations. It is argued that a historized conception of imagination allows us to tear through the detemporalized continuum of such artistic devices thus grasping the material relationships ciphered in them. In order to do that an articulation between the empirical analysis of some sound installations and a theoretical journey is proposed. At first, Jacques Rancière’s thesis on politics of aesthetics are discussed, especially his contraposition between François Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime and Theodor Adorno’s stance on art as critique. Sublime art is, for Lyotard, one that allows reason to be exceeded by sensitive experience and is characterized as being “pure difference”, an indeterminate “immaterial matter” –which, in music, can be found in timbre. It is argued, however, that Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments indicate that today such an experience is not possible. This article posits that formal thought can be found in sound installations as the synthesis that reason elaborates from the fragments produced by a historical imagination, which can penetrate the “indeterminate”.