Just wanted to post a few links in an intial response to Grosz’s chapter 2:
Whale songs mapped and ‘framed’ into art:
“Subtle Math Turns Songs of Whales Into Kaleidoscopic Images”
http://aguasonic.com/
“The First Australians” - A really excellent documentary series on Aboriginal history in Australia. First episodes discuss the Dreaming & Songlines. Fascinating.
Here is the interactive content link: THE DREAMING
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I am compelled to look more closely at Grosz’s example of the Aboriginal Australians (Grosz herself is an Australian), whose Songlines embody the very essence of her discussion around territory: the convergence of milieu and rhythm from which territory emerges (“..it is only when a rhythm and a milieu cohere, form internal relations with each other, induce each other to come together, the rhythm functioning now as that particular temporal form of a region, that a territory can emerge, that the raw materials of art can erupt and the processes of deterritorialization, which are the condition of art, can begin. 47-48.) The Songlines are an incredible example of these processes, forming deeply complex mappings and mythologies of a land. That a people could navigate the vast, gaping openness of the Australian landscape through song itself is simply amazing.
(I’m going to quote from Wikipedia now, sorry.) “Since a songline can span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Languages are not a barrier because the melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes. The rhythm is what is crucial to understanding the song. Listening to the song of the land is the same as walking on this songline and observing the land.” (my emphasis)
The songlines, comprised of localized (read: milieu) compositions “sing the world into existence” - so, together through rhythm and milieu, many songlines form and join together; a territory (or many) emerges, songlines perform a deterritorializing of the earth as they frame its chaos into coherence. Through the creator of the songline, the earth and the body are joined in a becoming-together: “It is because there is a direct connection between the forces and features of the earth and those that produce the body, it is because the earth is already directly inscribed contrapuntally in the body, that the body can sing the earth and all its features,… A song sings the earth and signs the body, a song brings a body to earth and the land to the body, enabling one to touch the very core of the other, singing the story of a past while bringing about a new future, a new marking of the earth, a new inscription of bodies and territories” (my emphasis, 49-50).
Human song, bird song, whale song… “elements of convergent evolution” (39)
Grosz eloquently makes these connections between the body (human, bird, whale), the earth, and song, further elucidating her philosophical proposals in regards to art and the conditions from which it must arise. The beginnings of the chapter concerning bird and whale songs I also found quite compelling, and could not help but make the connections, albeit loosely, to Haraway’s companion species — these readings together forming a conceptual, philosophical framework for understanding this becoming-together of human, animal, insect, bird, rice, earth, cosmos. There is a common thread of this inscribing into each other, which both Grosz and Haraway explore in various ways - biological in terms of evolution and sexuality, ideological, philosophical. I included the links above to the whale song visualizations as they relate to Grosz’s ideas around the whale song and the framing of chaos as the work of art. Here, it is through the wavelet as the framing of the whale song (itself a frame) which finds the visual articulation through circular patterns.