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We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski. Amit’s recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its topic through mythology, etymology, history, technology, and philosophy. The book challenges the notion that echo is mere repetition. Instead, Pinchevski argues, echo is a generative medium that creatively expresses our relations to others and the world around us. Just as a baby first learns to speak by repeating the sounds of others, a philosophy of echoes reminds us that our own agency and creativity reside in repetitions that respond to the past. 

For our Patreon members we the full two-hour conversation with Amit’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower. 

Amit Pinchevski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are in theory and philosophy of communication and media, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication; media witnessing, memory and trauma; and pathologies of communication and their construction.

He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne UP, 2005), Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford UP, 2019), and Echo (MIT Press, 2022). He is co-editor of Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (with P. Frosh; Palgrave, 2009) and Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and M. Madianou; Palgrave, 2013). His work has appeared in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Public Culture, New Media & Society, and Theory, Culture & Society.

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. 

Original music by Graeme Gibson. 

Transcript

[5:58; Amit Pinchevski Interview]

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Robotic Music]

Amit Pinchevski: We start out as relational beings. You know, echoing and being echoed. The most important relation that we have, that models us, later on molds our relationships with others. Echo is necessarily both. Both repetition and response.

Mack Hagood: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where artists and scholars talk about sound. I’m Mack Hagood and I want to start off by saying this is episode 50! 5-0. It’s kind of hard for me to believe. 

We started this show, my friend Cris Cheek and I, back on March 12, 2018. And of course we had actually started working on it back in 2017, and we put out our first episodes in the spring of 2018. That is five years ago! 

Chris and I parted ways after a couple of seasons. I’ve kind of been flying solo ever since then, although not really because I’ve had the amaz...

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