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1 Ruhm, Constanze, "Non-Simultaneity and Immediacy: Utopia of Sound," symposium keynote (Austria: Vienna Filmmuseum, May 29, 2008). 2 Christoph Cox, "Space, Time, and Sonic Utopia," symposium presentation (Austria: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, May 30, 2008). Special thanks to Christoph for his patience and good humor during my presentation.

Diedrich Diederichsen's original invitation letter asking for my participation in this symposium said today was "dedicated to debate," and defined the roles of Christoph Cox and I as "speaker" and "respondent" respectively. And last night in her opening speech, Constanze Ruhm said this symposium "does not just react to an increase of attention toward 'sound', but aims to provide a platform for critical and antagonistic discussion."¹ That means per my employers' request, at this moment Christoph is deliberately left open to contradiction and verbal attacks by myself. Depending upon the extent to which I pursue my task of inflicting critical abuse, he might ultimately find his words² twisted and bent in unintended directions until they are so foreign to him that it becomes senseless for him - or any of you - to respond, and all that will be left between us is silence. For example, I might point out how Christoph's narrative in praise of a kind of non-teleological heterochronic experience was still bound by cumulative language that linearly compiles information, compiled the names of writers and musicians and artists, all of whom cited and built upon one another, for the most part chronologically, piling upon one another through time until we, by the end of his talk, had arrived at this moment of being able to contemplate the heterochronic aspects of music and sound art.

Or perhaps I might criticize the way he starts his narrative with the assertion, "sound is time or it is nothing at all," attempting to contrast notions of space and time, when in fact sound is a phenomenological example par excellence of the intersection of space and time. There can be no sound waves without vibrations traversing three dimensional space. So at a future symposium with a different theme we could exclude time from the formula and just as assertively say, "sound is space or it is nothing at all." But what comes out of both assertions is an absence of the listener. We find ourselves discussing space, but not context. Time, but not history or memory. Christoph's initial act of severing the connection between sound-space and sound-time secretly performs a parallel task of severing the relationship between sound and audience. It insinuates that "raw sound" as phenomenon devoid of societal or personal interpretation carries some form of intrinsic informational value prior to our consideration of such sound (in this case, a value to inform the manner in which we proceed to consider and discuss said sound), or that the physiological experience of a listener may be extricated from the interpretive processes associated with bodily reception and appreciated in a precognitive state - although appreciation is a cognitive act. This is the conventional High Modernist position - the potential for sound-as-sound within the plastic constructs of musicology, or color-as-color within the plastic constructs of painting, or form-as-form within the plastic constructs of sculpture, or time-as-time within the plastic constructs of happenings and installations. It is a notion of materialism that, even when exhumed in the name of materialism with the aim of demystification, excludes and betrays the very notions of experientiality it claims to bring into focus. It betrays the social. This is precisely why I resent Art contexts - particularly "political Art" contexts - because this ideological corpse is always, always propped in the corner, its stench creeping like an all-enveloping glowing green fog. I say "corpse" because it had been laid to rest a century ago by the likes of Grosz, Herzfelde, Heartfield, Duchamp and countless other canonical figures we claim to have learned from. Yet in 2008 we remain so saturated with its odor that it has become commingled with our own cultural scent, only occasionally wafting into our consciousness for brief intervals like the subtle tang of one's own body odor at mid afternoon, to be ignored in the hopes that one's own denial shall make the scent unnoticeable by others and not warranting of a thorough shower. [Discretely sniff armpit to check for odor while pretending to believe the audience does not notice.]

3 Actual time.

As I frame Christoph's discussion in this way, he has to sit there because it's not his turn to talk, wondering how long I might go on like this... getting more petty, saying things like, "On page 16 of his transcript, or [thirty-five minutes and twenty-two seconds]³ into his presentation, he said, 'DJ Culture radically unhinges musical time,' but isn't turntablism overwhelmingly defined by the metric accuracy of the DJ's insertion of scratches and beat mixing?'" Each such sentence brings us closer and closer to a final, awkward pause. A closing silence that will be neither about the perception of sound or duration, but silence that is rooted in our shared emotional internalizations and frustrations which mutually drown us all in ego and shame and ambivalence and rage and black humour and boredom and a desire to leave before an unfruitful question and answer session starts. A silence constructed by a heterotopia of "free speech" that my job has thrown me into, which of course isn't free at all, but paid for by the Filmmuseum which has so generously financed our being here today; financed Christoph's performative patience, and my performative arrogance. Perhaps I'll even announce how much I've personally been paid, not knowing if it is more than some, or less than others, or who might be participating here today without compensation... [Pause for drink of water.]

4 Cage, "A Composer's Confessions" [1948], in Kostelanetz, 1993, p.43.

...I'm talking about feeling silence as anticipation for conclusion, for things getting back on track, back to normal. Feeling silence such as in a performance of John Cage's 4'33", not as musicologists have described how we are to experience it, but the actual minor dread we all feel - musicologist or not - when thinking about sitting still for the next four and a half dull minutes, attempting to let go of our desires for entertainment value while simultaneously attempting to appreciate a moment, the genius of which is only paralleled by its self-conscious stupidity. Four years before scoring 4'33", Cage wrote, "I knew it would be taken as a joke and a renunciation of work, whereas, I also knew that if it was done it would be the highest form of work."⁴ Just so you understand this dread I am talking about, we shall do a performance of 4'33" right now. I'll start the clock... [Pull out stop watch, start the clock, pause for 10 seconds before continuing.]

5 At the symposium, an edit of the climactic final refrain from the song "Vienna," by Ultravox, was used as the opening theme, looping the phrase, "This means nothing to me, oh, Vienna..."

Is this an experience of sound or silence or duration? Or does a desire for conclusion - for getting it over with - factor in to make it something else? Shall we revise Christoph's opening assertion that "sound is time or it is nothing at all" to an experiential concept of listening such as, "sound is sensed or it is nothing at all?" Has the performance of 4'33 actually stopped at this point? Sorry, maybe I should begin once more. [Mumbling.] Let me reset the timer. Here we go... [Hold up stop watch.] You see how humor fades, patience fades, enough is enough already. This is no longer amusing. But I promise you, this is moving us closer to the final silence of when I am done. A moment I think we all want to get to, quickly. So, with us all carrying this feeling of being thankful we escaped one silence of four and a half minutes only to want to accelerate our arrival at the upcoming silence of my completion, let me officially begin my response which occupies the void between.⁵

The breaks in daily rhythm triggered by heterotopias - those heterochronic shifts in time - may invoke a sense of chaos, but they are rarely chaotic, and often outrightly planned. Think of Cage's need to score 4'33", including page turning by the performer. I have recently been involved in a project that remixes his catalog, and I can assure you the lawyers, publishers and record labels - all of which I can honestly say have been very cooperative and friendly - are nonetheless all very organized and in contact around the control and use of his works. I had read about Cage's work, but I confess I had not actually heard much of it before working on that remix project. After hearing over 20 albums of recordings, I was overwhelmed by his inability to escape musicality. In listening to performances of his compositions I lost any lingering hope of dissonance between their promise of rupture and their commercial administration. Their heterochronic passing through the same stereo speakers on which I play albums by George Michael and Sade occasionally offered liberating experiences, but nothing that could be mistaken for liberation. They did not break my stereo. They were disappointingly beautiful.

Heterochronia's orchestrated palpitations are part of all social structures, and their overwhelming function is to re-sync us with daily life. The sound of heterochronia could be the noise and base humor of morning radio shows intended to physically and mentally jar us from our sleep, or the background music at fast food restaurants which accelerates our eating and departure, or the background music at department stores which clouds our perception of time passing while shopping. In our daily lives we are constantly moving through heterochronia after heterochronia, many of them sound based, and all of which are compared to the steady metering of our watches that within a single day will be in synch with our senses, ahead of them, and painfully lagging behind them... You have undoubtedly been experiencing these times slips first-hand while occasionally glancing at your watch throughout this conference. And in heterochronia's complicity with daily life - it's being part and parcel of the social rhythm, like the body experiences countless sneezes, or palpitations, or orgasms - heterotopias seem to be definable by their potential for duplicitous parody. The parody of crossing social boundaries, of redefining space and experiencing multiplicities, while in fact simply enacting fantasies of otherness. They rely upon a suspension of disbelief, in which the mundanity of social relations may be perceived in heroic terms and regain their allure to minds numbed by daily monotony. For example, consider the massive suspension of disbelief held by those who insist the notorious Burning Man rave-festival is an amazing, life changing experience, as opposed to a urine-stenched cesspool of co-dependent humanists out to prove their capacity for self management. Burning Man is a staged parody of the attendees' desire for faith in their own human goodness. It is a willing subjugation to the spiritual in an age in which many First World inhabitants feel untouched by the social dangers of enforced religious praxis. A duplicitous parody.

8 "Shock and awe" was the infamous term used by the US military to describe their rapid dominance blitz on Bagdhad in 2003..

Returning to the beginning of my response, while the "sonic politics" behind this job listing are likely not shared by many members of this particular audience, we can agree it has a brutally literal relationship to themes of audio's role in "liberation," "resistance," and "deterritorialization" put forth by Christoph and this symposium. Obviously, in the case of this advertisement those terms resonate with the military aspirations of mainstream US Global Capitalism in Kuwait and Afghanistan - an opposite ideological point of reference than that outlined by Christoph. However, it is opposite in a way that is more than word-play or a battle of words. On the contrary, the scale of the social mechanisms behind this advertisement cast a shadow over today's proceedings so dark and cold that we must humbly concede that by comparison this "Utopia of Sound" is little more than a matter of word-play; that we as a collective could never conceive of, yet alone execute, such an impressive synergy of liberatory terminology, systemic social transformation and sound. We are outgunned. Shock and awe.⁸ If we compare our various desires for transformation with the desires expressed in this ad, we can learn things about ourselves. We can see that desires for social transformation - our desires - do not lead us outward from today's circumstances (an awakening of the self into something other), but actually drive us inward, deeper into the pathological undercurrents of transformative desires. This is one function of the heterotopic system of closing that Foucault spoke of, our return to conventional space, to conventional time, to convention period.

9 Foucault.

If revolution as the some-hundreds-year-old epitomy of transformative actions is destructive by definition, there is clearly a protective or moralistic component to the destructive urges we wish to manifest. They contain a sense of prophecy for a target state of arrival, belief in a time when normalcies of "daily life" shall be resumed through as-of-yet still foreign and unknown social stabilities. We revolt to establish social relations that simultaneously strike us as normal yet absent, when in fact the most "normal" thing about such goals is their material absence. Nonetheless, we can already identify with the unknown experiences yet to come. It is optimistic destruction. For myself, this optimism is the death-nail in every ideological coffin. It is the final seal that ideologically separates one system of behavior from another - seals the after from the before - while actually remaining bound to the praxis of the day. As Foucault described, "There are [heterotopias] that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into these heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion - we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded."⁹

For example, for Karl Marx it was the point where Historical Materialism gave way to Communist fantasy; the fulcrum between looking backward and looking forward. For Jacques Attali, it is the point where an analysis of the social functions of sound give way to a desire to see music as a prophetic medium; the fulcrum between music as a manifestation of social currents and music as something transcendent of or proceeding material praxis, which has ultimately given way to a non-material notion of information based economics. In either case, it is a willing if not unwitting retreat to thinking within the boundaries of "accepted knowledge." It is where criticality about one's context is seduced by a presumption of understanding one's context, almost like a mathematician, whereby formulas intended to elucidate the flow of variables become the rules to which variables are subjected. (In social terms, people are the variables passed through social formula after social formula.)

When I read this advertisement seeking applicants for a rock band tour of military positions in Kuwait and Afghanistan, I see musical performance represented as a heterochronic event intended to rupture the utopic ideals behind the battlefield, which is in itself a heterotopia of crisis. We can clearly see music functioning simultaneously as a device of experiential rupture (the rock concert as an "escape" from the trials of warfare), and as a device of mainstream reconciliation (the rock concert as an exercise in "normalcy" amidst social chaos). If the "hetero" in "heterotopia" refers to a notion of "difference" between standard and heterotopic social space, then perhaps we could refer to this homogenizing reconciliation of heterotopic space with standard social space as a "homotopia." (I realize that sounds like the name of a weekly party at a Gay nightclub, but in this instance take "homo" in its root form of "sameness" which is in opposition to Queerness.) Like Burning Man, this rock tour is a staged parody of the organizers' and attendees' desire for faith in their own humanity amidst the inhumane. But unlike Burning Man, that sense of reconnecting with one's humanity and capacity for self-management does not focus on a mythology of the "other," but deconstructively points back toward non-military life, the life before, the life to come again. The passage of time in such a concert is simultaneously heterochronic in it's ability to entertain and distract the soldiers, and homochronic in it's ability to invoke nostalgia and "normalcy" in a zone of social instability.

Heterotopias conceal homotopias. Implicit in the construction of heterotopias is a moment of reconciliation with conventional social spaces; the fact that ceremonies - symposia - come to an end and we can finally go have dinner. While there are heterotopic lifestyles that attempt to exist in a state of sustained and controlled heterochronia out of sync with daily life, such as nuns or yoga gurus or deadheads or vegans or artists or professional musicians or transgendered persons or queers or carnival roadies, we find that our activities as gatekeepers of heterotopias remain framed in relation to conventional daily life, and in fact set the boundaries for conventional daily life. We see how civil rights movements shift these boundaries, moving traditionally heterotopic communities such as "Gays" and "Lesbians" into definitions of the mainstream by opening those communities' heterotopic rituals to the spaces of "daily life" until they lose their sense of otherness. Rituals of difference and Pride^TM which simultaneously perform a homotopic function of reunification with the mainstream, celebrating our "normalcy" above all else. The phrase "we are everywhere" no longer implies that the person next to you at the office or in church may not be who you think she is, but declares the arrival of the self-identified Queen you'll just have to live with from now on. Looking at transgenderism, in most cases it is a heterotopic lifestyle that is inseparable from individuals' desires for social reconciliation; a heterotopia of crisis in which an abandonment of male or female gender signifiers is usually coupled with a homotopic immersion in the opposite signifiers. The quest for passability is the quest for reconciliation with the status quo. Heterotopic lifestyles actually serve to amplify our subjective crises, traumas, desires and fears around social abandonment. They are orchestrated homotopic responses to alienation. They define and stabilize our relationships to dominant culture, as unstable as the conditions of daily existence may be.

I believe these homotopic undercurrents to heterotopias wittingly or unwittingly inform, even undermine, our critical attempts to develop and experience social relations in ways that challenge canonical models of knowledge and experience as accumulative. A heterotopic experience carries with it a counter-revolutionary impulse - not counter-revolutionary in the sense of preventing revolutions from happening, but as an impulse to minimize all the potential shades of social, emotional, physical, and economic violence the term "revolution" implies, no matter how warmly the term has come to be used (such as with the "internet revolution," or "musical revolution," or "revolutionary hair care products"). If utopias lead us through our daily lives while pointing us toward myths of stabilities deferred - that mythical island of Thomas More's upon which we are conditioned to pointlessly hope to one day beach - heterotopia's lead us through atypical rituals all the while returning us in the undertow to an ocean of mythical stabilities obtained. Myths of stable access to food, shelter, medicine, physical safety, and self-direction in daily life. Myths that fail to lose power despite our knowing they are only vaguely applicable to less than one out of ten people on this earth. Myths so powerful that none of us here now show signs of feeling - of intensely experiencing - the horror and suffering that last sentence entails. I don't point that out to invoke liberal guilt. I point it out as a function of listening, of understanding the words without deeply registering the material circumstances they represent. Perhaps this ambivalence conjured by my passing words on global strife is the closest we can come to the abstract and detached notion of "sound as time" that Christoph spoke of. It is an informational dead time of sorts in which we experience our comprehension of sounds and language passing without affect. Ambivalence - a-politicality - appears before us as the holy grail in the Modernist quest for "pure experience." [Once again, discretely check armpit for odor.]

In relation to music, I read this denial of circumstance - denial of the micro-social and global exploitations inflicted in the name of First World standards of living - into the ideologies framing our transition toward download audio, and the obsolescence of CDs and other product-based media formats. Through downloads, music is gradually being recast as a matter of "pure information," the rhetoric of which makes us further lose sight of the material methods of such information's production and distribution. At the forefront of this misinformation is Jacques Attali, who said at the 2001 Cybersalon Net Music Conference:

Digital audio finally brings recording and distribution processes in synch with other Modernist archival systems such as museums and libraries. As Foucault described:

16 See "Operating in Musical Economies of Compromise (Or... When do I get paid for writing this?)," in Organised Sound (UK: Cambridge University Press, December 2001, Volume 6, Number 3), pp. 177-184; and "El iPod está violando a los violadores que violaron mi pueblo: Una perspectiva económica de la producción de audio contemporánea (iPod is Raping the Rapists Who Raped My Village: An economic overview of contemporary audio production)," in Zehar: Revista de Arteleku-ko Aldizkaria, (Spain: Arteleku, 2005, No.55). After my presentation, another speaker told me about the problems she and others have had with accusations of "self-plagiarism" when repeating oneself, in some instances resulting in loss of payments, etc. Sadly, beyond the ideological contradictions conjured by many publishers' bizarre insistence upon "originality" (particularly when dealing with themes that take a critical stance toward notions of authorship), I find their main concern is usually simply one of "getting what they paid for." Since many magazines and journals pay by the word, they consider such repetitions as a matter of the author "cheating" the publisher out of their requested word count.

I might add that the record demands to be repeated; a strategy of information looping and self-sampling that I have not only applied to my audio productions, but to my writings as well. For example, the publication of this essay in the forthcoming Utopia of Sound book shall mark the third time passages of today's critique of Attali have found their way into print.¹⁶ It combines strategies of information dispersal to a wider audience, repetitive conditioning for those who might read more than one of my texts, as well as creating redundant backup hardcopies of text fragments themselves.

When this archival impulse combines with download technology, the scale of our home collections also begin expanding in odd and infinite directions. While looking to download a song using BitTorrent, Limewire or similar file sharing software, how many of us have ended up downloading a hideous discography of ten or more albums by some artist from which we only knew, only wanted to hear, and only will every listen to one song? Although one may attempt to draw parallels between such easy access to file collecting and, say, the carefree collection opportunities offered by one euro used record boxes at flea markets, it seems we as individuals are entering a digital audio heterotopia in which our home collections cease to be the expression of our individual choices in favor of a sort of general archive. It represents an informational dead time of sorts in which we experience our comprehension of sounds not only passing without affect, but often without playback or any possibility of listening to it all... without duration.

Statements such as Attali's which purport all of this access to information marks our entry into a new economic phase are generalizing statements that could only be made by people in those minority of countries such as ours where we have the luxury of excessive access to information archives. Its arrogance becomes apparent when compared to something such as the underground library movement in Cuba, in which disconnected groups of one to thirty people secretly store a small collection of books, any books, only to be periodically raided with the opositors imprisoned and the books burned. Ultimately, the ideological underpinnings of our bold, new information economy are straight in line with the development of traditional capitalist systems in which all experience is reified and regurgitated in the form of abstract relations. As capitalist processes become more refined and unhindered in the post-Soviet era, it seems only logical that we find it difficult not to conceive of abstract information - of our own knowledge - as external commodities of the ether for barter. To paraphrase from Karl Marx's Capital, we might say that information, like use-value, "possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labor and, consequently, a creation of value." But given that information starts in worthless singularity (such as a thought), it can only be traded for its "surplus-value" through transference and replication, in which case it "reproduces the equivalent of its own value [zero], and also produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to the circumstances." As information only takes on value in the late phases of surplus-value once it is somehow recorded, it becomes easy to dismiss the materials of information development (such as my home-studio production time), which assumes a corollary use-value of zero. We enter the world of the "no overhead" bedroom studio capable of yielding pure profits, forgetting about the actual costs of studio gear, space and utilities. Economically, the advent of the bedroom studio meant an album's "advances" that were traditionally paid in advance in order to subsidize studio expenses (imagine that), are now typically paid on or after an album's release, and are considered advances strictly on the future sales revenues of the end-commodity itself. Labels act as though the "bedroom musician" produces audio with no raw materials, auxiliary materials, instruments of labor, cost of living, nor any other material expenses. Audio without overhead. Therefore, we can see that the ultimate underpinning of Attali's information economics is no more than the capitalist dream of profits unmitigated by circumstance.

The technology industry refers to this ethereal internet-based information economy as "the cloud," but given its ecological reality it would be more aptly referred to as "the smog." Lurking in the vapor are server storage facilities by companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask.com and AT&T, each currently consuming enough megawatts of electricity to power a town of about 80,000 homes, or the World Trade Center at peak power on a hot summer day. These facilities require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, just so we can troll through petabytes of data on key words such as some of 2007's most popular searches, "iPhone," "Pavarotti" and "Radiohead." In the US, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com are all building data centers along the Columbia River, demanding handouts from local officials in the form of tax exemptions, assurance of cheap energy rates from state-owned power facilities, and city-funded fiber-optic connections. As was noted in the March issue of the US magazine Harper's:

18 On this theme, after participating at "Non-Simultaneity and Immediacy," I spent the following two weeks at York University's Sir Jack Lyons Music Research Centre where I recorded what is likely the world's first full-length MP3 album, a thirty-one hour piano solo titled, "Mediation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album." The recording will eventually be released as a single 3.98GB 320kbps MP3 audio file (FAT32 System File compliant, less than 4GB) on DVD-ROM. As with most albums, the actual recording session had to be faded out in order to fit the media format's limitations - in this case, the acoustic performance (recorded in sittings of 3 to 6 hours) was edited to a little under thirty hours in order to keep the file size under 4GB. Live performances of the piece shall always be at least eighty-one minutes long, exceeding the length of an audio CD. However, the difficulty of staging a "full performance" of thirty-one hours clearly indicates the historical end of any practical relation between the length of concerts and the excessive album durations allowed by contemporary media formats. As the 4GB size of the MP3 file is currently too large for convenient download and gives unpredictable playback results with some computers and MP3 players, it highlights the current boundaries of MP3 media performance (although it can be assumed that the majority of playback problems will disappear with future improvements in the ways operating systems handle large files, and increased internet bandwidth, at which time a new analysis of the boundaries of the "album format" should be considered). The effects of these ongoing changes upon the relationships between a producer's labor, production wages/royalties, and performance wages/royalties should also be monitored.

The only reason I could develop and produce the audio projects I have released is because I demand to be paid for my labor. To complicate things, the lack of employment opportunities in this niche field (particularly in countries without public arts funding) means record advances or performance fees must cover one's living expenses between paying events. It creates a kind of economic heterochronia in that one can no longer think of labor in terms of an hour's wage for an hour's work, but rather a series of brief and disjunctive behavioral bursts for which financial compensation is rationed on a glacial scale of weeks, months, quarters, half-years, years. So long as daily living expenses are covered, my work at home continues, seemingly independent of income. The money received from this event will go toward the manufacturing of a vinyl record (to be precise, the John Cage remix I mentioned earlier), or some dental work. When my luck runs out and paying opportunities cease, or if recent computer tracking makes crossing borders without proper work permits supplied by my employers too risky, I will direct my energies elsewhere because: 1) I will be unable to eat or pay my rent, and 2) I have no intention of supporting the myth of a goodwill-based music industry or any other industry of cultural production. Our reckless extension of goodwill is ultimately an act of self-sabotage. The impassioned artist's stance, "art for art's sake," obfuscates a labor issue. The iconic struggling artist who volunteers her work is a scab, but does not know it. If demanding payment for our labor means culture industries would collapse, then so be it. Perhaps we would finally begin conceiving of cultural production in terms larger than industry. Or more likely, we might find that we cannot exist without those industries which fail to support us, making us already pathetically irrelevant. Either way, I shan't be mourning.¹⁸

If, as Ultra-red points out, recent decades of conventional activism and the act of demanding has often left us without audio records other than sound subjugated to video; and if the majority of orchestrated heterotopic audio interventions fail to address their own homotopic roles in supporting the politics of daily life we presume them to be other-than; what other ways are there to conceptualize sound as not only social, but political... particularly when the sound of politics is more often than not the silence of memory?

As social-minded audio producers, perhaps some of our tasks could be not honoring the heterotopic as a window into experiential otherness; to clearly understand heterotopias as regulatory aspects of the status quo; and to learn to identify homotopic processes of reconciliation and closure as we pass through them, if only to better sense the boundaries and borders of the cultural processes they facilitate. Even more important, to remember days like that of the Ladies in White in which some homotopic process or another is oddly eschewed, disclosing the boundaries within which many seek liberation only to leave us with the sound, "And still to this day, I'm baffled by that."

...I have a note here, it doesn't make much sense... While trying to wrap up this text I seem to have lost my point... It looks like I was just trying to work in key words like listen, and silence one more time... I'm sorry, this conclusion is becoming wishy-washy like Christoph's, which kind of avoided taking any stance and was politically neither here nor there... Well, I guess I'll just stop now, because what I'm saying is no longer interesting. I'm sorry, everyone. I hope Christoph doesn't hate me. I know I was just doing my job, but this symposia format is all rather anti-social when it comes right down to it... I hope they still pay me.

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