Useful Maps

Of Being in Sur

In a documentary noted vocalists from the Gwalior gharana Rajan Sajan Mishra mention of one question their father used to ask them: 

"What is the opposite of sur?" 

Sur, in common parlance - is a note - an established harmonic frequency of sound between which the musician glides to produce delightful experience. 

"A quick answer to this question,"  Mishra brothers elaborate, "is besur meaning, off-note. However, we don't believe that is so. The opposite of sur is silence. Music is the play between sur and silence. If we dont allow silence, we cannot appreciate sur." 

The generosity of such a definition of sur certainly needs discussion. Now, sur is often understood as to be in sur. So the opposite of it could mean to not be in sur. One could approach the understanding of sur from speech too: For example, why is speech not considered music? Why is speaking not singing? In this line of thought, singing or music is that experience of hearing that glides between or through particular frequencies of sound. These frequencies are ascertained as harmonics of a base note in ascending or descending order, clearly distinguishable as different from the previous. We thus have 12 key notes - including harmonics and intermediate sharp/flat notes. A more trained ear would be able to decipher 23 - which demands immense hearing acuity. At a simply level then, to be in sur means to glide from one identified note to another through an aesthetic rule. Any sung or heard note, off the aesthetic register shall be deemed off-note or besur. Speech does not follow musical rules thus, but is not bereft of sur thus. We all speak in some pitch - however, our subsequent words are not uttered in complimenting musical pitches. Speech my have lyricality, but still, it ceases to be called musical, or surail (surila). 

To think of sur held in conjunction with silence rather than be-sur offers a fundamentally insightful way of thinking about music, people and the world at large. For music, it calls to identify each utterance as a musical frequency - in some scale. If not identifiable, it coaxes the listener and the musician to rethink their own knowledge so as to locate the sound in an appropriate scale. In such an understanding, Pt. Rajan-Sajan Mishra not only go past the binaries of sur-besur, but they suggest, in fact that every uttered word in a part of the world, in some sur - that exists in some scale - identified or unidentified. Such a reading speaks of the emancipatory potential of musical knowledge in its abstraction, making it inclusive through the transcendence of spoken language.  

What is there in enjoying (Hindustani Classical) music? Sometimes, I feel it's so simple - dwell on the glides and transitions between the different notes and what they make you feel. You suspend yourself in a pure abstract space - you are free to make your meaning out of it. A free wheeling journey that you can totally indulge in. Sometimes, it answers the internal questions in bypassing jargon of verbalism completely. If you are able to decipher, the tone, texture, quality, ingenuity of moving between the notes  will reveal to you the emotions that speech carries in its intonations, instead of words. And at times, the economy of words that dot the intonational will upen up multiple words between speech and silence. It is perhaps this interplay of sound and silence that defines the world of sur in the musico-philosophical conception of Pt. Rajan-Sajan Mishra.

Notes on Play

Maps and Power

Maps and Power

JNAF

21/06/2024

Maps and their powerlessness. when many maps come together, they create an impermeable matrix where one cancels the other, and eventurally, the available space becomes redundant for any meaningful upgradation and /or occupation. Maps also become a way to соmpete, escape or obstruct an opportunity. Most of the times, maps lie with the powerful, power-holding bodies, and not with the people who оссuру ground, who live the life of map in reality. How do we give charge of the place and its maintenance to the actual inhabitant rather than getting lost in the multiple overlapping and conflicting bodes that wantingly or unwantingly lay claim or parcels of land that seem to have produced or arrived at a different social change?

How does time play a role in producing such incongruencis? (How) is planning (the practice of planning) related, complicit in such misalignments? Are such misalignments themselves ways of asserting producing power. Is such power a way to create political dialogue that feeds political interest? whom does such dialogue benefit? In other words, what is the "economy" of such misalignments, such conflicting maps? How is responsibility deflected through such maps, and how are delays produced- whom do delays like these benefit?

--

Does a forest become a forest in its unfamiliarity? (as compared to a garden) One knows all plants and species one brings to a garden.

Sum up note / Shanghai Other Other Conference May 2024

on ethnographic practice

It has been a wonderful two days. And I must put a disclaimer - I dont know what to think about it but I'm probably the only person who is not a PhD person. But still and also I'm an architect, I've not done much ethnographic work, really, but still I mean, I want to say that from what I could learn from all the presentations, that it's a lot about negotiation of meaning. And what I was thinking throughout is: ‘is or isn't meaning provisional? and you know, and does meaning operate temporally in experience? Because how do we understand ethnography which is inscribed in the meaning that is the changing locus of both the subject and the object? Like what I understand today is not what I understand of this object tomorrow, and what this object is today will not be the same object tomorrow? So, you know, if the meaning of an event is continually changing with the evolving lives of the subject and object, then what do we make of a given ethnographic process or product? and this was the thought that, you know, was running in my mind.

And the second is my engagement in this, in, like, my closest association with ethnographic kind of practice, is to kind of coordinate with many kinds of people. In the sense that you know, my or even my context of other other coordinating with many others in curating. Or when i'm kind of bringing many people together to kind of understand what are the vulnerabilities they are experiencing or assuming or foreseeing in getting somewhere, doing something, and as a curator, I'm always kind of trying to help them mediate that - sometimes effectively, sometimes not, sometimes Getting into many fights, and because of lack of, you know, conversation, and I wonder if this can itself be an ethographic reflection. 

[...] and as an architect, I am trained to read spaces. And so I kind of do ethnography of spaces and objects, and I kind of like to think through Appadurai's Social life of Things or Kopytoff’s Cultural Biography of Objects, because we feel that people because we think of people as embodiment of spaces; or embodiment of spatialities and therefore I'm interested, or I also think of it as archaeology of space, or in some sense, reading space to excavate behaviors of people. So in that it is in that sense that I kind of think of ethnography and ethnographic practice. And so, you know, in that sense, i've been thinking that what other qualities than an ethnographer must possess. And what, after all, is the ambition of ethnography, you know, because we all were kind of discussing some time ago that, you know what jobs we'll do, or whether we should do academic practice, or whether or not we should join corporate spaces and stuff like that. But what do we really want to do as ethnographers? And I think in the least it can be, of whatever we want to do, it could be about culling out of concepts of space and living. You know, rather than creating regimes of control because you've seen that colonial ethnography has mostly been about controlling, and I've also been very skeptical about these Area Studies Departments that come in many Western universities, because they have, primarily, it's the historic force behind. Kind of a new colonization. So i'm always skeptical of these Area Department or area department studies, so I don't know how to think about it. But also I mean, therefore, how do we produce frameworks of alternative practice through our new ethnographic context?

So with that, I kind of invite you all to think and linger through these thoughts and bring this Bring this two day intensive workshop to conclusion and invite you for dinner.

Chinature

notes from a lecture delivered by Prof. Nannan Dong at the Tongji University in 2017.

Architectural Sketches

Urban Studies vs. Urban Planning

Me: I do not understand the difference between urban Studies and urban planning. What is the promise of urban studies as opposed to urban planning?

Min: Urban studies is more into theory - like understanding the complexity of the city. Urban or architectural planning is more practice oriented. The fundamental difference is:

Urban Studies is theory: How to understand the city, 

Architectural planning: How to operate.

So, many urban studies scholars, especially urban geographers think architects do not have theory. That was the question [Gautam] Bhan was addressing yesterday - it's about theorising v/s. operationalizing. In either way, theory is related to operation. They can't be separated. But Chinese urban planning is far more practice-oriented.

On Being Urban

When does a person become "urban"? 

- Shreyank Khemalapure

We have to get rid of the urban-rural divide because most south Asian regions have been categorized under that rubric, but the sense of rural or urban is not really there. 

 - Rohit Mujumdar

Perhaps the question then is that what kind of memories does a person release from the part in order to consciously begin to belong to the city? What is the way in which "belonging" to/in a city gets worked out?

The way in which village is extended into the city...The city is a place which is layered with different kinds of rituals and practices which people bring from their original setting. 

- Prasad Shetty

The Politics of Walking

The Golden Section

Notes from 2003, Architecture School

 

Hampi

Planning for Hampi trip a decade ago.

Notes from Tapan Mittal Deshpande.

The Work of Culture

 

The Work of Culture

by Gananth Obeyesekere

Symbolic transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology

The Work of Culture is the process whereby symbolic forms existing on the cultural level get created and recreated through the minds of the people. It deals with the formation and transformation of symbolic forms, but it is not a transformation without a subject as in conventional structural analysis. Furthermore, the work of culture is not confined to deep motivation in the Freudian sense. While the symbolic transformation of the images of the unconscious into the public culture is the main focus of [the lectures in the book], I do not confine myself to this exclusive domain...

Archive as Home

If the condition of home is an imprint of collection of all things that help us find ourselves, and resonate with the world at large, could the making of archive be home-making / mirror the process of home-making itself? I still need to consider , rather reconsider if the title must be reversed, that is - to say 'Home as Archive' - but at this point of time, I am almost confident that hoe is not an archive, the homes that we occupy together with others (other to mean those who are not like us, and those who therefore do not think like us) - the home can therefore never reflect individuals purely. When people collect, they hold absolute agency of including precisely those things that give meaning to their lives and existence. Here of course, I am thinking of archive through a personalised act of collection - where the archive is not a general archive, but an accumulation of those things that matter to the collector. The archive in which the collector is able to mirror his/her self is thus a representation of home, for it sets the coordinates and conditions to feel comfort and security of containing a world view which cannot be necessarily challenged. 

"What is a screen Now-a-days?" by Francesco Casetti

On scientific thought

On Theory and Interdisciplinarity

Marxism

Earlier notes on my attempts to understand 'Who is a Marxist'?

Bodies Unprotected

notes from the introduction to a session of Bodies, un-protected, an international program series that Sandra Noeth was curating in close collaboration with Anna Wagner and the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt/Germany (www.mousonturm.de). it is dedicated to the (un)protection of bodies: which bodies are worth protecting (to us) and on what basis? Which bodies will we campaign for and which ones elude our notice and action?

"
Bodies, un-protected highlights the unequal distribution of bodily protection from different artistic, historical and theoretical perspectives by bringing together experts come from a variety of fields of research and practice to engage with how we can use aesthetic, performative and discursive means to create visibility for diverse bodies and their specific protective needs. The project unfolds over the course of ten months and manifest itself in two programmes of public events in at the beginning of the project (November 2021) and its end (July 2022). In between these two phases, further events modules are taking place in an international context. They are a crucial part of the project that aims at opening up the discussion to different perspectives, practices and realities.
"

Kant's Philosophical Project