Techniques of Ecstasy: Rumori - Tracing Sound

Abstract: This doctoral thesis proposes the philosophical concept of ontopoetics in relation to an artistic practice of sound (music) and listening. The concept of ontopoetics is used as the backdrop of the developed notion of techniques of ecstasy essentially as an intermediary between listening and language. Ontopoetics becomes the bridge between the archaic and contemporary man. My research is practice-based but nevertheless finds a form of dissemination where the word, the sound and the image work together like a body. Through placing the shaman and the mystic (the ones who originally wield the techniques of ecstasy) as the figure of our present-day artist the thesis offers a more immersive understanding of the artist, and the possibility of imagining how sound, listening and a form-of-life (understood as a way-of-being-in-sound) still can be considered as a way and method of shaping our world. The shaman and the mystic are also a gateway to exploring ontopoetics as a way of understanding sound, listening and communication as something preceding interpreted meaning, yet still producing knowledge. On an equal level of importance, the thesis consists of several musical compositions which extend and materialize what in the thesis is proposed as potentiality and the condition for making music. This interdependence of sound, word, and image (the tracing of sound) is given its own importance in the realization of a strategy of sound. A method, but at the same time not; the strategy gives way to this thesis’s tentative conclusion. Listening is a way of knowledge, through listen ing the world emerges. And this knowledge is accessible through music’s immediacy of expression. Throughout the thesis the work on sound is given predominance. However, a rich material of dialogue partners of both musical, artistic, and philosophical characters is included, most prominently exemplified by the writing of Lotta Lotass where the thesis’s strategy of sound findsa dialogue partner—a dialogue also with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, the ravings of Antonin Artaud and Giorgio Agamben as well as the music of Diamanda Galás, Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono. The author of this work places them in a strange and shared space where the artist and the shaman are brought to a common, wordless end in a music which is as much sound as silence.