On Shame: or, Kate Soper's Hermaneutics

“Soper’s music, then, performs what might better be called the crisis of hermeneutics. It knows well, but cannot avoid, the unhappy reality—that to fix any solitary interpretation of a polyvalent object is always to abandon that object’s encrusted dimensionality: to flatline by overdetermination the joyful generativity that vitalizes any desire to read critically. Her work reaches for culture’s four-dimensional objects, well aware that to grasp them, one must choose a dimension and fundamentally lose contact with the object’s true nature. Music animates both the anxiety and thrill of that decision’s risk to loss..