The Acoustic Community
February 5, 2011
R. Murray Schafer presents a notion of the acoustic community in his book The Soundscape, wherein in it is described as a relational space defined along acoustical lines as much as the geographical, political, religious or social. His notion of an acoustic community is broad in that it encompasses the smallest of social units, such as a single room or home, to the largest, such as a city. The size of acoustic community is defined according to distance across which acoustic communication can take place.
[ Incoming sounds constituting the acoustic horizon of Dollar, Scotland (from Five Village Soundscapes, R.M. Schafer, ed., Vancouver, British Columbia, A.R.C. Publications, 1977) ]
It is, however, in Barry Truax’s Acoustic Communication that we find a more detailed and expanded notion of the acoustic community, one which pays greater attention to the nuances of the technological complication of acoustic space:
The acoustic community may be defined as any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants […] therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or a building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication. In short, it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged (Truax, Acoustic Communication, 66).
Here Truax’s definition of the acoustic community is broader than he perhaps intends; while it is assumed that this community be comprised of humans, the expansive definition that Truax furnishes us with, according to which an acoustic community ‘is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged’, extends the notion of an acoustic community to a point where its definition easily encompasses the inhuman. We may, for example, take the notion of acoustic information along physical more than semiotic lines, treating sound as McLuhan does light: as a medium independent of its ‘meaningful’ content or symbolic encoding, a medium that transmits ‘pure’, affective information. This affective notion of information is perhaps best thought in the Simondonian terms of transduction (see Steve Shaviro’s summary here: shaviro.com/blog), wherein information is that which makes a difference and performs a ‘structuring operation’; the propagation of sound finds resonances in bodies and in doing so determines a relational network or acoustic community defined as such according to a common resonant capacity. Truax’s expansive notion of the acoustic community is interesting for a number of reasons, the first of which can be discerned from his consideration of a ‘broadcast area’ as an acoustic community. In such a structure or community the transmission of content is often one way, and the body in which the transmission finds a resonance may have no idea about the other individuals or nodes which constitute the acoustic community of which it has just become a part, a community that may easily span the globe. This relation may also be independent of the content provider who is partly responsible for the broadcast, i.e. the presenter or DJ on a radio show may not be present at the time of broadcast and so is physically removed from the acoustic community that her voice and selection of music is projected into. The various nodes linked within this broadcast area may also be wholly unaware of each other, only able to imagine that others are listening but having no idea about who or where they are. Of course this is entirely different on a talk show, where the phone-in plays a big role, but Truax’s expansive definition of the acoustic community does not necessarily require two-way interaction, merely the transmission of acoustic information between bodies: the exchange of acoustic communication may simply mean that it has been sent and received, not necessarily that a reply was sent back.
The main reason for my interest in Truax’s definition of the acoustic community is in its capacity for inhuman extension: again, an acoustic community is ‘any system within which acoustic information is exchanged’. Acoustical information is a physical phenomenon and therefore exists anterior to or in excess of its cultural conditioning and rendering as sound. Acoustic information is independent of its being heard, something which is clearly evident when we consider the use of ultrasonic frequencies for measurement or medical purposes, or the simple fact that many a perturbation of the air goes unheard. As acoustic information remains independent of the act of human audition we can conceive of the acoustic community as something that is established between bodies of any kind, and so an acoustic community may be comprised of a piano, an idling engine, a pane of glass, two hamsters and a glass of water, all of which are the recipients and potential producers of acoustic information. It is just such an acoustic community that is presented in Jacob Kirkegaard‘s ‘alternative festival reality’, which is comprised of field recordings documenting the acoustical interactions of tent pegs, rocks, beer taps, aluminium stairs and techno at the Roskilde festival 2010.
The secret festival sounds – recorded by Jacob Kirkegaard by Roskilde Festival
Kirkegaard’s extrahuman or ‘object orientated acoustic ecology’ presents the acoustical interactions of the inhuman, interactions that may, of course, include the human but do not necessarily depend upon it; there is a world of acoustical interaction beyond the ear and acoustic information beyond the audible. For Schafer, the human ear and the human voice constitute the basic modules of acoustic ecology (see The Soundscape, 206-7). We now find ourselves in a world where these basic modules no longer suffice. What we find in Kirkegaard’s documenting of an extended acoustic community is the extension of the ear in a manner that the microphone is not capable of, its extension into the interiority of objects, enabling the exhumation of their internal resonances by means of a subterranean audition. The assemblage of accelerometer and hard-disc recorder provides a set of additional modules that enable Kirkegaard to increase what can be identified as a component or member of an acoustic community. It is this expanded set of modules that present the possibility of determining the influence and interactions of the inhuman within the constitution of an acoustic community.
The acoustic community, if we are to assume Truax’s definition, does not require that acoustic information be a correlate of human or even organic bodies, but as that which is established through the vibrational relation or resonant capture of anybody. To the acoustic ecologist this may at first seem absurd, but then acoustic ecology cannot be said to be ignorant of the inhuman, as it has a longstanding and thorough engagement with the inhuman and extrahuman, as is most clearly seen in the concerns for animal life shown by the Acoustic Ecology Institute. The project of acoustic ecology can only be better served by taking account of and including the inhuman more thoroughly within that which it considers to constitute an acoustic community.
Comments (2) | Tags: Acoustic Ecology, Jacob Kirkegaard, McLuhan, Schafer, Subterranean, Truax
Vertical Listening
February 1, 2011
While killing some time in WH Smiths, waiting for a train at Newcastle station, I’m drawn towards Salomé Voegelin‘s Epiphany: Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (See this month’s Wire). Voegelin’s experience of this piece is as a vertical sound world more than horizontal or temporal variation, a kind of spatial insert that descends upon the listener. Of course, to separate the temporal out from the spatial as if autonomous makes little sense in terms of the physical description of phenomena, but there is something about this descripton of the verticality―which I read as a spatiality―of Feldman’s piece that resonates with a certain awakening I’ve been having to a distinctly harmonic mode of listening since last march―when I was working on Space Against Itself―a mode of listening whereby a sound is heard as a harmonic structure more than a melodic progression, this harmonic structure being understood as a distinctly vertical kind listening as opposed to the horizontal or more overtly temporal mode of melodic listening.
After some weeks of putting it off for financial reasons I finally bought a copy of John Cage’s 44 Harmonies from Apartment House, performed by Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet; the idea of a vertical listening―whether or not this is exactly what Voegelin means by the phrase―describes perfectly how I find myself listening to and using these pieces, pieces which assert a verticality, a harmonic structure that can be inhabited, used to reconfigure or rather modulate both the space that surrounds the listener and the soul considered inseparable from this surround, a soul considered in a kind of Pythagorean sense as itself a harmonic structure capable of modulation and external harmonic influence. For the past four months I’ve been travelling a lot between North Shields and the various cities I’ve had residencies in, so I’ve been listening to this album on the move, mostly on headphones while travelling around on trains, buses, metro and foot while getting lost for the purposes of work. This reconfiguration of space in many ways depends upon this headphonic listening, as such use of music cannot help but reconfigure the spaces we are occupying, frequently providing relief on over crowded buses and trains through the creation of a phantasmic acoustic buffer zone, what Barry Truax refers to as the ‘“embedding” of an environment within another’ creating synthetic spatial relief through the useful production of a ‘schizophrenic split between electroacoustic and natural environments’ (Acoustic Communication, 135). The reconfiguration that the minimal harmonic structures of 44 Harmonies provide serves to mask just enough of the concrete or acoustic space around me to make a difference, enforcing a degree of separation and isolation towards a personally inhabitable space against the confusion of the carriage.
While his withdrawal, modulation or embedding of environments is characteristic of headphone use in general perhaps, there is something peculiar about the manner in which this happens when listening to Cage’s music, and the 44 Harmonies in particular, as it performs a similar spatial modulation whether I listen to it on loudspeakers at home or on headphones on the move. The space left in the music, not only within the silent pauses but also within the harmonic structures Arditti moves between, sucks the world into the music as much as it keeps it at a distance; the hum of an engine of the warning sound as an underground train’s doors close is drawn into the harmonic structures, reconfiguring both the music and the complex space I inhabit between the acoustic and electroacoustic. The withdrawal into the electroacoustic is not total as the minimal arrangements of these subtractive compositions draw in the noise of the world, however selectively, their sparse structurations inviting interaction and participation with those noises that surround and exceed these composed and synthetic spaces. Through this inclusion of the sound without, the listener is modulated not only by the composed harmonic structures but by those that appear through chance, through the inclusion of the noises of the world that sleep into Cage’s subtractions and harmonic structurations, secreting themselves into the gaps in the music. The verticality of this listening experience is felt in the extent to which this music functions as a kind of spatial insert, an island or an auditory wedge that drives apart while creating a space between, a habitable harmonic structure that does not block out the noise of the world but filters, modulates and includes it.
Comments (0) | Tags: Auditory Space, Cage, Harmonic Structure, Headphones, Salomé Voegelin, Truax
Unsound Interpellation
October 3, 2010
In reviewing the recent attempts to ground diverse sonic practices within their inaudible conditions as opposed to qualitative appearances (featuring Christoph Cox’s ‘Sonic Unconscious’ and Seth Kim-Cohen’s Non-Cochlear Sonic Art), I’m taken back to some notes taken on Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare. On the point of inaudible sonic influence, Goodman’s notion of ‘unsound’ maps out the extremities of audibility, focusing upon vibrations slipping into the imperceptible bandwidths of the infra and ultra-sonic. The approach taken to the sonic event is one of a functional infraesthetics, assessing its impact and affective implication within systems of somatic determination ahead of its specifically qualitative rendering, focusing less on sound itself―taken in a phenomenological sense―than on the difference that sound makes. I’m particularly sympathetic to Goodman’s notion of unsound insofar as, in accordance with this latter point, it positions Goodman’s sonic concerns beyond the audible without discarding the materiality of the sound event (which is a consequence of Kim-Cohen’s consideration of the sonic purely in terms of its “extensive explication”). In the notion of unsound we find an attempt to connect the bandwidth of audibility to that which resides beyond it in a manner that need not discard the particular or intensive force of the sonic itself.
Through outlining an ecological orientation around the ‘politics of frequency’, the emphasis placed upon frequency invites (without necessarily delivering) a more nuanced engagement with the problematics of noise that are so often limited to questions of amplitude within more conservative approaches to acoustic ecology. Goodman’s book is interesting for the invitations, openings and potentials that it identifies, more than the extent to which it develops any of its ideas in depth, reading more like a series of blog posts than an extended study. Before this turns into a book review, I should say that it is some of these openings and potentials that have brought me back to Goodman’s book this afternoon, in particular those openings into individual subjects that Goodman identifies as having been exploited by the implication of sonic affectivity within what we might refer to as the ‘repressive state apparatus’ (RSA, police, military, etc.), insofar as it operates according to violence. I’m inclined to put this in such explicitly Althusserian terms as it is on the question of ideology that I find Goodman’s argument most provocative, insofar as it is primarily concerned with ‘a model of collectivity that revolves around affective tonality and precedes ideology’ (Sonic Warfare, xx). Despite Goodman’s distancing of the ideological, it is on the extent to which his thoughts on the affectivity of unsound can be read as an opening onto ideology through sound that I feel inclined to speculate. By no stretch of the imagination am I an expert on, or even particularly knowledgable of, Althusser, but his account of a voiced interpellation creates a specific opening onto a politics of sonorities. Insofar as ideological interpellation, thought in terms of Althusser’s classic example of the individual and the police officer, can be voiced, while this example remains primarily symbolic, can we not conceive of an expanded sounding of interpellation and an ideological function of sonority that more thoroughly entails the concrete individual, defined as such through a primacy of affective capacities and a certain collective confusion.
In Goodman’s account of sonic warfare, the implication of both unsound and the audible within a broad understanding of the RSA would constitute its primary orientation towards concrete individuals, as opposed to the properly subjective (thought as synonymous with the concept of self), insofar as it operates according to a certain degree of violence, being articulated not towards a significant and symbolic politics of identity but towards a physical and affective capacity. Goodman’s politics of frequency, orientated around a primarily affective continuum, are directed towards what we might call the concrete conditions of the nonetheless concrete subject, to an individual dimension of the affective as opposed to a subjective domain of the symbolic. This concrete individual defines both a capacity and a connectivity, a being not yet set apart from others, from the world, a being confused and enmeshed. Where ideology is understood to operate primarily according to the determination of subjects according to a symbolic hailing, Goodman’s account of the implication of both a sonic virtuality and vibrational materialism within the repressive operations of the state reminds us of the persistence of a concrete individual that constitutes the conditions of the subjective, an affective capacity that remains, that is not sealed off according to the linguistic operations whereby one is ‘always already’ interpellated, according to which, from the moment of conception a symbolic identity begins to form, a symbolic determination awaiting the mass of flesh or somatic complex for which it prepares the ground or saves a place.
Interpellation entails recognition, the knowledge that one is being hailed, insofar as interpellation is thought to occur by symbolic means or by voice. This is expressed in Althusser’s classic example of an instance of interpellation, wherein an individual is walking down the street and a police man shouts ‘Hey, you there!’, at which point the individual recognises that they are the subject of this calling (and, therefore, no longer just an individual), thereby establishing a symbolic and political relation with the state in the instance of its vicarious enunciation. Where interpellation establishes a relationship with the state through symbolic operations, and in this instance by way of voice, therefore entailing a sonic dimension to this calling, we can conceive of such a relation being established without a specifically symbolic significance, a hailing without voice that nonetheless remains sonorous. Goodman gives examples of this, the most obvious of which, currently springing to mind, is the use of sonic booms by the state of Israel (RSA) against Palestinians living in the Gaza strip; military jets fly low over the Gaza Strip at speeds that break the speed of sound, releasing a terrifying explosion of sound that has both a psychological and physiological impact upon the Palestinian population, being detrimental to both physical and psychological health. Here there is a definite subjection by explicitly repressive means, a subjection that does not necessarily entail a recognition, a sounding that despite its lack of significance nonetheless has an explicitly political function, forcing a relation between the subject and the state, or in this instance a subject trapped between (at least) two states. Where the individual hailed in Althusser’s example responds through recognition and identification with the calling, as well as the physical gesture of a 180 degree about-turn to face the police officer, subjection according to the violence of affects responds less with an about-turn than a static motion, a vibration or resonance, a capacity that responds to a hailing without a voice. ‘Hailed’ by a monstrous wailing, explosion or piercing emission, the sympathetic subject of an excessive vibrational affectivity is subject according to a resonance inseparable from an apparatus of capture. While this focus upon the affective entails a certain violence, especially when subject to the rhetoric of sonic warfare, it is where an emphasis is placed upon frequency ahead of amplitude, and where muzak is considered alongside experimental sonic weaponry, that sound is considered more dynamically and according to a subtle and subliminal influence.
While Goodman’s emphasis upon a politics of frequency is, according to the distinctly negative elements of his argument, more easily allied with repression than that which is explicitly ideological, one of the openings his writing creates is perhaps onto an ideological continuum that operates according to a complex confusion of the ideological and repressive, blurring the distinction between the lists detailing the constitution of RSA and ISA, more than an obvious distinction along lines of force. For Althusser the ISA and RSA are not completely distinct, each containing marginalised elements of the other. In this minimal confusion of ISA and RSA, of the concrete individual and the concrete subject, we come to settle upon a question of determination, insofar as it is understood to be implicated within a functional ideology. This becomes a question of the determination of subjects according to their individual conditions, according to that which is susceptible to force. Here I’d like to draw upon a set of somewhat uninformed and oversimplified binary relations, that of, on the one hand: RSA, individual and base (related through force), and on the other: ISA, subject and superstructure (related through the more strictly ideological and conceptual orientation). Atop this set of binary relations, I’d like to draw on the work of another Marxist I don’t know enough about, following Raymond Williams in saying that:
when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a process and not a state […] We have to revalue ‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exerting of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content […] And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relations, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process (Culture and Materialism, 34).
It is in these terms, yet not restricted to the actions of men (that really need to be elaborated upon in more depth … ), that we start to get a sense of the ideological situation within which Goodman’s accounts of infra and ultra sonic determination are implicated, a situation in which determniation is revalued according to an expanded base. Through a more explicit acknowledgement of this minimal confusion, engendered according to the reciprocal determination of those elements listed above as being in binary relation―in particular the indivdual and subject―rather than preceding ideology, we can perhaps read Goodman’s argument as an attempt to understand a wider bandwidth of ideological influence, as well as a confusion of the individual and subjective, taking into account more thoroughly its implication within the material forms of existence and the physical apparatus of repression. In this way the individual is more thoroughly implicated within the ideological, rather than being figured as its mute conditions. Such an opening engenders a more explicitly functional understanding ideology, according to which ideology is ‘nothing but its functioning in the material forms of existence’ (Althusser, On Ideology, 45), an understanding that could be taken to be inclusive of unsound within the operations of interpellation, in addition to explicitly vocalised sonorities.
Comments (1) | Tags: Resonance
The Lower Level
September 16, 2010
Mark Bain‘s collaboration with Arno Brandlhuber has been concrete for some time now, and recently received a honorary mention at this year’s Prix Ars Electronica. There are some great images and summary descriptions of the finished project on Planet:
I’ve yet to return to this site, that I first visited in 2008 during Tuned City. I was looking over the documented development of this now completed project earlier this evening and was reminded of some notes I took and developed during this trip to Berlin, in response to what was then a more embryonic project looking less like the cool, pristine building depicted above and more like the squatted site of dormant architectural intention presented below. Before Bain’s systems of auditory surveilance was fully installed and the walls of this space erected, a characteristically intense performance of synthetic infrasonics was given in the cellar of the then building-to-be. Below is a resonse to this performance.
An expectant crowd occupies the basement of Brunnenstraße 9, Berlin, a building yet to be built, a site more than a place, awaiting Mark Bain’s performance. All that surrounds is foundation and embryonic structure. The development of this building is underway yet it has barely got off the ground, it is the most basic of architectonic shells. This space is defined by the blank faced intimidation and overbearing presence of concrete, this homogeneous material bearing stains, the marks of an outside leaking in. This is a space of two floors. The upper level lies adjunct with the street, the presence of temporary construction fencing defines a crooked and weathered border. In the absence of façade or external walls the boundaries of this site are defined by those of two other buildings that mark its extremities; such gaps puncture the density of the city, a pause in architectural development that bares the signs of stalled construction. Such hesitations afford a rare stream of elementary forces, appearing outside the regular channeling they are subject to in the streets and alleyways. If anything defines this upper level it is its openness to the world; a site demarcated by a patch of concrete and the protrusion of iron rods, no doors or walls to define entry points or punctuate the flow of bodies.
A non-descript circular hole lying off centre towards the far corner of this patch of concrete and a temporary staircase grant access to the lower level. Despite the barren appearance of the surroundings this lower level is teeming with activity, it is saturated with waves that oscillate around the threshold of audibility. Those waves which set the ear in motion force the sensation of an intimate proximity; standing waves saturate the space in a gesture that both expresses the dimensions of this space while annihilating its identifiable acoustic signature. This lower level is defined by a vibrational density that iteratively pinpoints relations between organic tissue and architectonic foundation. As an individual amongst the crowd I witness the immanence with which the sound without excites and becomes the vibration within; waveforms define lines passing effortlessly through the body, making explicit the manner in which it is stitched and enfolded within its surrounds. A sound—barely a sound—knocks the wind out of me; the waveform enters my body, sets a lung involuntarily in motion and in response my body coughs, I cough. Just as a relational continuum is established between organic tissues and architectural materials, in this instance an interval between body and self resounds with the intrusion of waveforms that address and affect the organism before the soul. Here individuals are defined as those confused subjects enmeshed within the volatile surroundings of auditory space; intruding waves express relations between complex sets of materials constituting a body that extends beyond yet includes that which we would ordinarily call our own, that which can be seen to define our personal territory. Expressed is a tension between the complexity of the site, the material conditions of the events unfolding, and its expression in the reception, perception and actions of its subjects. These intrusive yet connective gestures, these sound events instigating relational matters, simultaneously invoke alterity; a forced cough constituting a loss of control forces me to appear momentarily, after the fact, at a distance from myself, from the body that coughed. In this moment, sedentary boundaries are disturbed as subjective topologies or proxemic territories are rendered problematic.
Comments (0) | Tags: Architecture, Auditory Space, Intensity, Site
Ecologies of Noise
September 11, 2010
Here’s the draft / structure of a paper I gave at Sounding Out 5 in Bournemouth this week:
As Douglas Kahn says in Noise, Water, Meat, ‘Noise is the forest of everything’.[1] As the practitioners and producers of an acoustic ecology we must take a walk back into the woods, into the forest. Yet this walk is not one of a retreat from the cities, from our houses, drum kits, synthesizers and iPods; certainly, it may require us to leave the city for a while, yet this forest does not peter out in the suburbs but extends itself into the cities. This forest remains immanent with regard to both the wild and the urban, it is comprised not simply of great oaks, wild moose, sky larks, rivers and daffodils, but also nails, your front door, tent pegs, microwaves, a smashing window, a cry for joy and someone’s not quite looping ringtone. David Tudor knew this well, his Rainforest was full of iron bars, steel hoops, pots and pans, microphones, transducers and a group of friends. Schafer did not know this quite so well—although he almost got there—he feared too much for the integrity of his mind, which resided in the barren and frozen land of the North, which humans have been chipping away at with their machines:
such instruments are destroying the “idea of North” that has shaped the temperament of all northern people and has germinated a substantial mythology of the world […] it was pure, temptationless and silent. The technocrats of progress do not realize that by cracking into the North with their machinery, they are chipping into the integrity of their own minds.[2]
Schafer’s North is not Nunavut, nor is it Greenland, or at least it is not only these places. This “idea of North” constitutes the transcendent conditions of Schafer’s ecological praxis—its grounding in silence—as well as the ideal state of his spiritual being, that which exists in frozen and petrified form, atemporal, pure and silent. The idea of North is also the ideal of an auditory subject, that which describes the plane of an unspoilt, authentic and unified relation with the natural—considered in the most common ideological sense—it is the auditory plane of existence of a pre-industrial listening subject.[3] Listening, as we know from experience, changes with time, with context, it is mutable and culturally contingent; yet Schafer’s listening subject remains petrified, frozen in the North, set apart from the ebbs and flows, the noises and the difference of the world beneath the arctic circle.
Despite these reinforcements of what are now somewhat common criticisms, we draw from the excerpt above an observation of particular importance: the relationship Schafer posits between sound and mind, between sound and self, touching upon the extent to which one may inform the other. Despite his reservations and concerns for the integrity of the mind, Schafer nonetheless points towards a sonorous individuation, towards sounds which make a difference to and within the auditory subject through their confusion in the mind. Insofar as he remains committed to a position of purity wherein changes in audition are cast negatively as divergence and a threat to the stability of a natural order, this individuating force is identified as the polluting ‘throb of the machine’ which ‘began to intoxicate man everywhere with its incessant vibrations’.[4] Beyond Schafer’s conservatism, we might say that these ‘incessant vibrations’ are not solely the preserve of machines but rather that of sound itself, the murmur of an ever present background noise and subtle influence, that which brings difference to audition. It is insofar as sound propagates and influences by means of impacts, abrasions and displacement that this incessant and intoxicating throbbing can be considered to be a more appropriate analogy for the auditory self, for a listening subject not petrified, frozen in time, but mutable, open to the noise of the world, understood less according to an a-temporal purity than what Steven Connor has called a ‘disintegrative principle’.[5]
Against stasis, homogeneity and conservatism, against a notion of silence as a pre-Cagean purity silencing the noise of the world, posited is an equation of noise and difference as that by which we can come to understand the diversity of signals. We find such an equation in the work of Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze, but also in the more popular orientated work of Dick Hebdige and Jacques Attali.[6] For all of these authors, one way or anther, noise is a force of difference, the amorphous embodiment of a generative potential. It is as an embodiment of generativity that this equation is invoked, rather than as some kind of post-modern juxtaposition of the given as diverse, a clash of symbols and signs. Noise as generative potential may be a more subtle thing, not necessarily loud but nonetheless confused, a background murmur, those sounds which slip in somewhere between hearing and listening.[7] Yet we need not become embroiled in Deleuzian jargon to reach such an understanding of noise, as such a thing exists within one of the core texts of acoustic ecology, in the work of Barry Truax who adds depth to the potential Schafer identified—yet shied away from—in those incessant vibrations:
Noise, in the sense of information that is unpatterned and unordered by the brain, is the only source of new information […] People often use the word “noise” in a non pejorative sense to mean any undefined or unrecognized sound that is potentially meaningful […] noise as the source of new information is open-ended and offers the promise of all that we may possibly experience.[8]
Although somewhat marginalized in Truax’s text this non-pejorative sense persists, remaining underdeveloped in his own work but becoming more thoroughly engaged with in most recent ecological work such as the Positive Soundscape Project. The Positive Soundscape Project has set out to address the issue of noise and negativity within earlier ecological work in moving beyond the praxes and philosophies of Schafer and Truax towards a more inclusive, expansive and nuanced praxis. Yet this necessary movement might perhaps progress by means of an inversion of acoustic ecology, rebuilding its ideological core around its own marginalized notion of a generative rather than negatively divergent noise, moving beyond Schafer and Truax by reading them inside out.
According to such a restructuration noise is no longer ‘the enemy of the acoustic community’, but rather its sustenance, the condition of its existence, the central problematic defining its ground.[9] It is both that which is produced through the frictions of a population and that which persists beneath and informs them or, rather, us. In centralizing noise, positioning it at the heart of acoustic ecology, the discretion of traditional ecological territories are confused, an overlapping of the natural, the societal and subjective. These three territories correspond roughly to Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies which maintain their respective distinctions but not their discretion, territories which are not fixed or static but which ‘drift in relation to each other like tectonic plates’.[10] Guattari provides a basic framework or provocation for what we might initially think of as an inter-disciplinary ecological praxis that maintains a degree of intra-disciplinary specificity. Yet more profound is the extent to which Guattari characterizes the ecological as that which operates according to openings rather than strictly preservations, as that which seeks out new connections as much as conservation: ‘at the heart of all ecological praxes there is an a-signifying rupture, in which the catalysts of existential change are close at hand’.[11] It is in this notion of an a-signifying rupture that we can identify the affectivity of a generative noise, that which appears not as sign or symbol but according to a displacement and confusion cast not in negativity but felt as catalytic. While Guattari’s ecological model is interesting for its inter and intra-disciplinary orientation, it is to the extent that it opens onto an infra-disciplinarity, onto the field or interactions, confusions, noise, figured as antecedent to disciplinary specificity, that it is particularly powerful, expressing an ungrounding of ecological ideas, images and orientations towards their reconnection or reconfiguration. It is such an ungrounding according to a praxical opening onto noise that is required in the move beyond Schafer and Truax that nonetheless passes through them.
Here we must return to the North, to Schafer’s ideal and transcendent domain of pure and frozen silence, as that which constitutes the ground of Schaferian ecology. Insofar as Schafer’s North persists in silent homogeneity, in looking to an ecological praxis open to difference, a praxis that understands ecology not simply according to reductive naturalism but a far broader interconnectivity, a diversity of practices and differential noises, we seek an ungrounding of this Northern territory according to the ruptures described by Guattari, opening the pure and the ideal onto the noise which persists to the south and within the subterranean. Despite Schafer’s warnings the North—a pure and frozen territory synonymous with the ideological sanctity of the mind—is something that must be chipped away at, tapped into in order to produce an opening, yet an opening that is not taken too far, an opening-up that proceeds according to subtle gestures as opposed to gross violations.
This ungrounding of acoustic ecology, its opening onto noise, is of course well underway in contemporary practice. We hear something of the interdisciplinary or inter-territorial ecological praxis that Guattari describes in a number of Room 40 releases—in particular the Audible Geographies and Incidental Amplifications compilations—wherein a confusion of site and intervention, of the social, technological, organic and inorganic constitute the auditory environment.[12] Ubiquitous in these recordings is the presence of a certain background noise, noise that is not considered the enemy of the ‘acoustic community’ but the persistent and constitutive expression of its possibility, a determinant of the space it occupies and to which it lends definition. In these recordings we hear the necessary problematization of acoustic-ecological practice, a foregrounding of that which is stifled where this rubric is left to its traditional romanticization.
Russell Haswell’s work can also be heard as chipping away at Schafer’s North, inviting an opening of the mind onto the noise of the world. In his binaural recording of the entrance to a wasps nest—placing a microphone either side of the entrance—the wasps are located not at a distance but relocated within the head, crawling inside.[13] Haswell’s acoustic documents exemplify an approach to environmental recordings that wholly discards the romanticized earth and idealistic naturalization that the term might immediately engender. The environments documented and catalogued by Haswell are set apart from any puritanical naturalism; inclusive of the noises that mark participation within an environment, the notion of an objective audition and transparent observer are jettisoned in favour of an audible engagement. In Haswell’s work, field situations common to the nature documentary, such as the inside of an ant colony, are frequently interrupted by the noise of passing military aircraft, noises that attest to a variety of spatial contestations as well as the mutability and ambiguity of ‘natural’ environments. The ant colony we hear in Haswell’s recordings has been subjected to the violence of his hydrophone placements: the sound we hear is possibly that of ants, according to Haswell’s liner notes, rebuilding the disturbed area of their colony into which the hydrophone has been forced. Here we come across a practice in which recording equipment is used to scratch beneath the surface of the earth to reveal the noise which resides therein.
This movement beneath the surface towards the establishment of a subterranean audition is taken much further in Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion, wherein a hole drilled approximately one mile beneath the earth reveals a tectonic murmur, the audible expressions of the earth’s constant deformation and internal disquiet. Through the Sonic Pavilion, Aitken attempts to establish “a new relationship with the earth”, one which must be heard to add depth to the constitutive connections of an ecological practice. In this new relationship the listening subject finds an opening into the transcendent realm of subterranean conditions and geological noise, the audible expression of the earth’s generative potential, its potential to both engender and destroy. Aitken’s pavilion gives expression to that which persists beneath apparent quietude, the noise active beneath the petrified form of Schafer’s North, a noise which persists to the south. Here we find a relationship to the natural formed not around the purity of silence but the generative impurity of noise and confusion brought to the surface, a relationship which foregrounds activity as opposed to stasis while directing the auditor to that which lies beyond and in excess of the immediately apparent. The ambiguous productivity of the subterranean receives considerable attention in Jacob Kirkegaard’s Eldfjall, in which accelerometers grant audible access to the activity residing beneath the Iceland’s surface; the ambiguous catalysis of geological depth finds expression in the titles Kirkegaard gives to his recordings: Ala, Kali, Gerd, Nerthus, gods of both life and death.[14] Kirkegaard’s recordings provide an opening onto the rumbling of a continuous productivity and deformation, a vital emergence and formal dissolution; this is the noise of a creative potential that simultaneously threatens ultimate destruction, the medium of a chaotic ground that presides over the oscillations of existence. Within this plutonic murmur resides the frictions and agitations informing the productive potentials of sound. The ground to which Kirkegaard places his ear is one of a fundamental chaotic impurity productive of an anti-essentialism that is found to reside within the flux of material interactions rather than the eternal formal stasis of the heavens. With Eldfjall Kirkegaard can be heard to return to the North, yet in order to probe beneath its surface, revealing not a homogeneous, ‘pure, temptationless silence’, but the ceaseless activity of a heterogeneous Northern territory driven by its internal and subterranean differences.
Through such openings, acoustic ecology’s relationship with the earth acquires depth through its ungrounding, through its opening onto and inclusion of noise amidst its subject matters. The isolation of noise to the exterior of both the natural and the private in many ways ignores the existence of an inescapable problematic, remaining ignorant of Truax’s assertion that ‘the soundscape and the phenomenon of noise are not things that are “out there”, apart from ourselves. They are inextricably related to us’.[15] Here we must take Truax’s point further; noise and the soundscape are, in addition to not being ‘apart from ourselves’, not apart from ‘themselves’, from each other, but inextricably linked. It is in the work of the artists mentioned above that Truax’s proposed interrelation of noise and soundscape finds its most precise expression through the identification of a noise residing at the heart of ecological practice. Such work performs an ungrounding of acoustic ecology, rebuilding its ideological framework around the ambiguous catalysis of a noise that displaces the stasis of silence. It is this praxical and ideological restructuration that opens acoustic ecology up to difference, dramatically increasing the field of interactions with which it is capable of engaging. Where acoustic ecology has concerned itself with the natural, with a specific image of nature taken as its ground, its ungrounding through listening practices orientated towards a protean noise that persists within nature and throughout the world leaves it less likely to limit difference to divergence—to that which strays from the conservative image of the natural—and leaves it increasingly open to a more nuanced understanding of the noises of everyday life.
[1] Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 22.
[2] R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977), 21.
[3] Similar criticisms are voiced by Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 20-21.
[4] Schafer, Soundscape, 74.
[5] Steven Connor, ‘Sound and the Self’ in Mark M. Smith (ed.) Hearing History: A Reader (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 61.
[6] Michel Serres, Genesis (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1979), Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
[7] On this distinction see Sterne, The Audible Past, 2 and 96.
[8] Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Westport and London: Ablex Publishing, 2001) , 97.
[9] Truax, Acoustic Communication, 66.
[10] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), 36. It is also notable that this tectonic analogy suggests a certain subterranean activity, defining fields of influence that operate outside or in excess of human consciousness.
[11] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 45.
[12] Various Artists, Audible Geographies (Room 40: EDRM416, 2008), Various Artists, Incidental Amplifications (Room 40: EDRM405, 2006).
[13] Russell Haswell, Wild Tracks (Editions Mego: 099, 2009).
[14] Jacob Kirkegaard, Eldfjall (Touch: T33.20, 2005).
[15] Truax, Acoustic Communication, 106.
Comments (0) | Tags: Acoustic Ecology, Douglas Kahn, Jacob Kirkegaard, Russell Haswell, Schafer, Subterranean
Resonance
September 4, 2010
Resonance is a means of capture as much as connection. The body which resonates lies in waiting, a trap or resonant capacity, awaiting an activating movement in the air. The resonant entails an irradiation impressing itself back upon the medium of its excitation, extending its influence and territorial determination beyond the limits of its visible body. Resonance is a means of capture insofar as to irradiate is also to occupy, to extend, a move outwards simultaneous with internal agitation and vacillation. It is according to the simultaneity of internal and external excitements that resonance is considered relational, a proportional movement of bodies contributing to the perturbation of a medium of common excitation.
Comments (0) | Tags: Resonance
Towards a Non-Cochlear Sound Object
August 24, 2010
Despite being opposed to most of the main points of Kim-Cohen’s thesis (see In the Blink of an Ear: Towards a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art), there is something about his emphasis upon a non-cochlear sonic art that I really like, insofar as it approaches the extensions of the sonorous beyond the bandwidth of its audibility. From my own perspective, Kim-Cohen’s approach to the non-cochlear goes too far in the wrong direction, limiting the understanding of the inaudible to the realm of the symbolic and representational. Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear approach seals off anything like what we might call a sound object, sound in-itself or the reality of the inaudible—considered as that which persists in excess of its recognition. I’m interested in the extent to which we can take non-cochlear aspects of sound art in the other direction, taking an approach not of flight from the sound object into its representation but further towards it, a trajectory through it in its Schaefferian form. Insofar as I’m interested in the inaudible or non-cochlear impressions and extensions of the sonorous, the Schaefferian sound object does not go far enough, remaining firmly within the bandwidth of audibility, within the realm of what we might call the external expression of material interactions. The notion of the sound object is something I find interesting insofar as it persists due to the insufficiency of the purely symbolic, yet also to the extent that it posits an objectivity that is not simply a static or inanimate lump, but something transient, durational, mutable, etc., something that has more in common with Deleuze’s notion of the objectile than a perhaps more common understanding of objects as inanimate or static:
the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—in other words, to a relation of form-matter—but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form (Deleuze, The Fold, 20).
(There’s a lot more to be said about this notion of the object, yet this is perhaps for another time.) The Schaefferian sound object is often referred to in the sense of a descriptor or praxical understanding of sonority as a mutable materiality of sonic compositions and that which exists in a degree of abstraction from the movements of the objects within and between which it originated. It is in this latter sense that it is often summarized as referring to sound in-itself, as that which exceeds the indexical listening by which it simply refers to another object, being the sound of a shattering window, for example. The sound object in this sense is perceived according to a ‘pure perception’, a perception unbound from memory, recognition and signification. The Schaefferian sound object doesn’t really stand up on its own, insofar it should necessarily appear as abstract, divorced from its origins and always out of context beyond the strictly audible. The sound object in this sense appears as more of a potential, the potential for it to appear out of context, a rupture according to pure sonority. More than a common state of things this appearance as contextual rupture describes an exceptional instance or potential that often fails where it is sought out.
Yet here sound is not so much in itself as in relation to me or to the ear of the auditor, it is that which appears between the event of its excitation, movements in the air and the auditory system. If it is to be considered in-itself this surely implies its status, its existence, beyond the act of its perception, outside the event of its being heard and cut off on both sides from its point or objects of origin and that of its reception, determining it as itself an object. For the sound object to be an account of sound in-itself it needs to be one that approaches sound according to its bare minimum of internal relations, relations apart from the ear. It is here that Kim-Cohen’s notion of the non-cochlear is interesting for me, insofar as the Schaefferian sound object is already perceived apart from its conditions, the non-cochlear takes care of the other side in potentially accounting for sound apart from the ear. According to these requirements sound in-itself would not be sound, insofar as it would remain inaudible, beyond the act of hearing which renders audible movements of the air. Sound in-itself is in this sense nothing insofar as it is not sound apart from its relation with the ear; this could perhaps be put better in saying that sound in-itself is nothing from the point of view of its audibility—insofar as it is not heard it is silent, silence carried beyond its Cagean sense.
Here I need to jump tracks slightly in order to begin to entertain a certain thought experiment (although perhaps more an instance of tinkering) which has been lurking in the background of my mind for a little while, yet never getting much attention: to what extent can the sound object be reconfigured from its Schaefferian definition to that of an object in the sense of the term used by Levi Bryant and Graham Harman. While Bryant’s work on Deleuze has been of huge use to me over the past few years, I’ve not really had chance to give his ‘object orientated ontology’ stuff much attention of late, so what follows is me showing my working out so far according to the points which have stuck, which I will come back to once I’ve had chance to read more of their work, this hopefully being a productive externalization.
Insofar as sound is not sound apart from its relations with ears and membranes, it doesn’t constitute an object in the sense that this term is being used by Bryant and Harman, to describe the existence of things beyond their relations with other things. I’ve been reading Bryant and Harman’s blogs only very casually, so there is no doubt a gulf of discordance between what I’m working tinkering with here and what they mean. Nonetheless, I was interested to see how I could possibly reconcile their objects with the notion of the sound object insofar as the latter is fundamentally relational, existing only through the minimal relation of sound event and ear, never mind the immense subjective and socio-cultural determinants (wherein the brain and auditory apparatus is a member of such a culture) that allows for the perception of sound as a signal distinct from noise.
The Schaefferian sound object is not one, according to what I understand to be the axiom by which an object must maintain its existence apart from its external relations with other objects. Insofar as it remains audible in essence the sound object is, in Lefebvre’s words ‘not quite an object’ (Writing on Cities, 219), being defined as such only in relation to an ear. So close yet so far, as we have this intriguing notion of the sound object left over from Schaeffer, yet in this context the sound object is not one, something which seems weird considering Harman’s claim that everything is an object (at some point I will get time to one of his books). The question is how can, or in what way does, sound exist in-itself, only according to its own internal relations, apart from its originary or catalytic objective interactions and auditor. Sound is defined as such only in relation to an auditor, and as such it is no less real or efficacious, but there must be something of it beyond this relation, something of it that exceeds its interaction or connection with the ear for it to be considered in-itself as an object and to account for its physical excess of that which is perceived.
Insofar as sound is a movement through a particular medium, or more specifically the movement or displacement of a medium whether air, water, wood or earth, what this sound is—the components that constitute it, the elements of its medium and their perturbation—exists beyond the instance of its being rendered audible. There is more in a sound than what we hear, this being the expression of its external relation with the ear, the audible rendering that occurs when the elements of the medium and the membrane against which they reside constitute a point of confusion, with the medium having been perturbed, causing it to interact with the membrane. The sound object is a sensual object, the instance of a rendering audible, yet it is also more than this insofar as it is made up or constituted according to the internal relation of the elements of the medium set in motion, it is this which is in sound yet exists beyond the instance of its rendering audible. It is in this sense that sound in-itself is inaudible, it is the mute yet mutable flux that persists within the medium yet does not enter into external relations with an ear in the instance of its being rendered audible.
I should perhaps point out at this point, that the inclination to think about sound in this way—set apart from both its original interactions and the instance of its being rendered audible—was brought about by a post Bryant made recently, wherein he highlighted Deleuze and Guattari’s percept as being and therefore object:
Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself. (164)
It is the understanding of affects being objects, emphasised by Bryant, that gets to the heart of the idea of sound in-itself beyond its association with the Schaefferian sound object, as an affective capacity considered apart from its reception and audible rendering. For sound in-itself to be considered apart from the perception in which it is rendered audible, for the sound object to have an existence beyond or in excess of its audition, it must be considered as in-itself inaudible, simply a vibration, movement through a medium. It is this movement of the medium which constitutes the minimum of internal relations necessary for the realization of sound in-itself as the inaudible potential of audibility that remains in excess of its localized audible rendering, what we might call an inaudible or non-cochlear sound object. Schaeffer’s sound object is not so much sound in-itself as sound for us, for another, despite its being removed from its origins and treated as pure sonority. While removed from relation to its origins, to the object from which it emerged (the throat or belly of a horse for example), to count as an object in-itself it should also exist independently from its reception and audible rendering in the ear.
The particular insufficiency of the Schaefferian sound object suddenly leapt out at me as I wrote down in my note book earlier on—the physical action of doing it with a pen on paper rather than reading it on a screen perhaps—“if an object must be able to persist apart from its relations with other objects in order to be considered an object, and the audible sound object is only audible by virtue of its relations, the sound object cannot be one, which is weird insofar as for Harman, everything is an object”. It was the thing that leapt out at me. Harman’s object’s are inclusive of things whereas Schaeffer’s are not. This distinction is neatly summarized in the words of W.J.T Mitchell—as quoted in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (which someday I’ll get round to reading beyond the first chapter):
objects are the way things appear to a subject—that is, with a name, an identity … Things, on the other hand … [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other … when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls “a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up toward our superficial knowledge.”
An non-Schaefferian and potentially non-cochlear sound object, an objectivity that exists in excess of its perception and original context or ground, should entail a confusion of the thing and the object. The thing in sound which resists, escapes or exceeds its local manifestation as sonority is the movement of a medium that nonetheless persists inaudibly. This movement is the thing of which an object is produced through its entering into interactions with a membrane or resonant capacity.
Comments (4) | Tags: Deleuze, Graham Harman, non-cochlear sound, Schaeffer, Seth Kim-Cohen, Sound Object, sound-itself
The Persistence of the Real
August 22, 2010
The forthcoming Wire Salon looks particularly interesting: We Hear a New World: Microphony, Technology and The Rise of Sound Art, hosted by Salomé Voegelin, Helen Frosi and Will Montgomery. This is something I’d love to be able to attend but I can’t quite justify a 600 mile round trip for the event. Nonetheless, the will to engage remains, as three of the texts are by people I’m particularly interested in one way or another, so below is a response to some of the ideas they deal with.
Focusing on three of the suggested readings, we find Seth Kim-Cohen cornered between the neo-modernistic impulses of Christoph Cox and Francisco López.
Kim-Cohen’s The Whole Truth responds to Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion along the lines of the argument put forward by Kim-Cohen in his book In the Blink of an Ear. Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion comprises a hole drilled approximately one mile below the surface of the earth, lined with concrete and an array of microphones and accelerometers. At the surface, loudspeakers translate the otherwise inaudible, subterranean and tectonic murmur into the bandwidth of human audibility. Kim-Cohen quotes Aitken’s intention to establish “a new relationship to the earth […] revealing its mysterious living dialogue”, a relationship that can be read as taking up Deleuze’s charge to ‘make inaudible forces audible’, to take as one’s object that which persists beyond audibility. Through this subterranean audition Aitken directs ears to a beyond beneath, the rendering audible of a geological substrate and transcendent conditions. Kim-Cohen critiques such approaches according to their affirmation of a “metaphysical abundance”, yet this critique is borne by such works insofar as they attest to a real that persists.
Kim-Cohen seems perturbed by the persistence of a traumatic object, in particular the Schaefferian sound object which details specifically audible matters. It is the excessive materiality of Aitken’s pavilion that falls short of Kim-Cohen’s requirements, insofar as it does not adequately reduce itself to symbolic interplay and significance. Kim-Cohen’s main point is that such excessive matters neglect the importance of context, that of “the exhibition space, the institution, economics, gender, sociality, and politics”. While Aitken’s pavilion clearly ‘fails’ to engage with gender politics and the economic impact of monolithic land or installation art in Brazil, it can also be considered to evoke another ‘context’, that of the earth beyond us. Here I am tempted to say “Kim-Cohen, get over yourself”, not directed personally towards Kim-Cohen, but rather at his unwillingness to consider matters beyond those of the self or human context, that which remains in excess of the symbolic. It could be said that Aitken’s pavilion draws us towards ‘contextual relations’ of huge importance, those of geological dynamics or subterranean disquiet, the forces of nature which persist beneath its apparent stability and may one day (perhaps through an eruption in Yellowstone park, or BP’s potentially apocalyptic disturbance of a methane bubble beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico) wipe humanity from the face of the earth. Such references perhaps adequately enmesh the piece within Kim-Cohen’s required network of human relations, but we could just as easily hear the murmur rendered audible by Aitken as that of expressive relations between geological substrata that remain autonomous from our human existence and symbolic operations.
For Kim-Cohen, within sonic arts practice, “there is a pervasive sense … that the sonic is truer, more immediate, less susceptible to manipulation, than the visual, as if the adjective sound (meaning “solid, durable, stable”) should somehow constitute the noun”. Yet this would appear contrary to the transience, ephemerality, mutability, etc., more commonly ascribed to the auditory by writers and practitioners within the sonic arts. Admittedly, Kim-Cohen picks up on the cliché according to which the audible has a kind of privileged access to immanence, immediacy, and lacks the scissions and critical meddling of mediation that riddle the visual domain, the kind of claims often behind the now somewhat tired criticisms of ‘ocular tyranny’. Yet Here Kim-Cohen gets lost amongst his string of signifiers in attending to the linguistic at the expense of the material: sound as adjective rather than sound as sound, ignoring the experience of the sonic event. Far from the solidity and stability Kim-Cohen ascribes to sound, we more readily find reference to sonic ‘immateriality’ (a claim of equal annoyance insofar as it assumes that which operates beyond the realm of the visual or human thresholds of perception lacks substance), something which is particularly prevalent within the few architectural texts dealing with the auditory experience of space.
The noise produced by Aitken’s pavilion would appear to be not so much a cipher to unlock “the coded mystery of the deep”, as that which persist despite our decodings, an irreducible excess that will always in part ‘resist’ its decoding. It is according to his own emphasis upon symbolic coding that Kim-Cohen remains closed off from acoustic space, in the sense put forward by McLuhan. Such pieces will forever remain unintelligible to Kim-Cohen insofar as he remains a ‘print orientated-man’, as McLuhan puts it:
Auditory space […] is usually defined as a ‘field of simultaneous relations without center or periphery’. That is, auditory space contains nothing and is contained in nothing. It is quite unvisualizable, and, therefore, to the merely print-orientated man, it is ‘unintelligible’.
Contrary to Kim-Cohen’s conclusions, Aitken’s pavilion would appear direct us straight towards the void, yet a void not considered to be a hollow, sterile vacuum but that of a saturated spatium. The auditory void is nothing, persisting in unintelligibility from the perspective of the ‘print orientated-man’ restricted to the meaning of the symbolic and the operations of representation.
Counter to Kim-Cohen’s project which seems to suggest that the majority of sound art needs to ‘catch-up’ with postmodernism, Christoph Cox’s Return to form: on neo-modernist sound art identifies the persistence of modernistic ideals within sound art. Here Cox turns his attention to the agitative, traumatic object to which Kim-Cohen cannot look nor listen, that of a post-Schaefferian objectivity, foregrounding the perceptual event of sound itself (Here I can’t help but be reminded of David Lynch’s Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, terrified of looking ‘within’: “There is a place terrifying to us… to women.” Except in this case it should perhaps be rephrased as “There is a place terrifying to us… to pseudo-Derrideans”, that place being McLuhan’s auditory space).
Cox focuses upon the return of modernism within sound art. In questioning the reason for this return, we should ask what problem has not gone away, to which the likes of Ryoji Ikeda, Francisco López, Steve Roden, and William Basinski, under the rubric of neo-modernism, are compelled or forced to respond? The problem to which these artists ‘return’ is that of a sound object that persists beneath or in excess of the endless string of signifiers characteristic of post-modernism.
Neo-modernism is characterized by Cox as being concerned with “the fundamental conditions of perception”, with the ‘purity’ of sound itself taken apart from its subjection to mnemic recognition and cancellation in representation, an orientation towards the ‘pure perception’ of sound. Yet, perhaps Aitkin’s piece goes even further insofar as it specifically addresses the inaudible conditions of sound-itself, that which persists within sonority yet remains in-itself inaudible, an orientation towards the transcendent conditions of sound.
Comments (0) | Tags: Auditory Space, Conditions, Doug Aitken, McLuhan, Schaeffer, Seth Kim-Cohen, Sound Object, sound-itself, Subterranean
Subterranean Architectonics, The Vicissitudes of Verticality and a Crisis within Vision
June 8, 2010
At a recent workshop on ‘Science Fiction in the Present: Military Technology and Contemporary Culture‘, an interesting tension emerged between the spectacle of a kind of military-techno-porn (mostly focusing upon developments in drone technology and autonomous killing machines) and a much more banal or subliminal militarisation of the quotidian. Despite a level of moral outcry, a sense of awe still permeated certain presentations and their focus upon the autonomous agents of war. Largely this was a fascinating day, although what remained a little disappointing—beyond the all-male panel’s perhaps inevitable descent into the role of guys talking about big guns—was the way that the notion ‘Science-Fiction in the the Present’ was thought almost exclusively in terms of technology as a gift from the future or an appearance out of time (most clearly exemplified in Noel Sharkey‘s use of Terminator 2). It would have been nice to hear more on the notion of science-fiction without futurity that the title also seemed to propose. Here I’m thinking specifically of Deleuze’s claim, in the introduction to Difference and Repetition, that philosophy should be a kind of science fiction, and perhaps more loosely the recent discussion on ‘the ontological status of fictions‘—a kind of science fiction in the present, a science fiction without futurity, that concerns itself with ontological speculation within the present, contemporaneous or universal.
Beyond a certain fascination with the spectacle of warfare, two interesting threads emerged from the presentations, focusing on (1) subterranean architectonics and what is perhaps most easily summarised as (2) the vicissitudes of verticality or a crisis within vision, both of which see spatial organisation take on a more ‘horizontal’ organisation, an orientation that in its most idealised form suggests a flat, non-hierarchized or at the very least highly contested, ambiguous or smooth space, to be contrasted with the hegemony and hierarchy ascribed—within this simplified and idealised schema—to verticality (perhaps most clearly laid out in Ballard’s Highrise, wherein the floor each resident lives on correlates precisely with their social status and power within the organisation of the tower). This latter thread was perhaps most clearly expressed in Stephen Graham‘s paper on ‘Cyberpunk imaginaries in the new military urbanism’. This opposition between orders is clearly too simple, but I’ll come back to this point below. Discussion of both the vicissitudes of verticality and the crisis within vision dealt with the difficulty that state military technologies have in dealing with ground level insurgency where no visible distinction can be made between the peaceful citizen and the insurgent. I’ll come back to what I found interesting about this latter point; firstly I’d like to address a couple of points that came out of John Beck’s discussion of subterranean and bunker architectures.
1. Subterranean Architectonics
John Beck focused upon bunkers, their creation, excavation and their role in sci-fi films. Amidst the various points brought up, I was drawn to the question of what it is that drives these sci-fi narratives underground, towards subterranean dwellings and societies? Perhaps a wet—or rather subnaturally dank—dream of experimental potential and absolute architectonic synthesis, a movement beneath the surface to a realm where the established order and contingencies of the surface do not apply?
The production of subterranean space is depicted—according to the particular catastrophes of countless dystopian futures—as sustaining life against constant siege, whether in a common sense of warfare or from a more subliminal barrage in the form of nuclear radiation, solar storms, scorched earth, toxic airs or diseases (some of which were discussed in Mark Dorrian‘s Weather Control) which have come to dominate the surface which, in these dystopian futures, becomes populated not but somatic beings but by forces that entail the extinguishment and exhaustion of all life. Life is driven underground and the surface is abandoned as a space dominated by death. While burrowing under the earth becomes necessary—in these future scenarios—to escape terrestrial calamity—nuclear impositions of either the sun or waring nation states, solar economy or meteorological imposition—there is also a certain ‘liberatory’ dream that is manifest in the movement underground, that of the total state, the possibility of absolute organisation amidst a new subterranean thickness not yet rendered transparent, granted through a degree of freedom from terrestrial contingencies, a ‘freedom’ that must nonetheless be mined. Here the bunker retains its importance within the architectural aesthetics of late Modernism while maintaining the ongoing search for a ‘totalitarian smoking gun’ within this field of aesthetic and architectonic production (Owen Hatherley, ‘Fossils of Time Future’. Collapse VI, 236). In addition to the preservation of life, retreat underground permits a state of autonomy, distinct from the established regulatory contingencies of the surface, an attainment of autonomy permissive of an absolute state, attainable only through absolute architectural control. Hollowed out and sealed off from the surface, the underground permits a purely synthetic environment, a space of total control, the absolute realisation of architectural freedom in the form of an emancipation from the regulatory rhythms of the solar system. The dissolution of circadian regulation entailed in a movement underground permits an otherwise unrealisable plasticity of time, permitting total bio-chemical control of the human organism and regulation beyond the incumbent contingencies of the surface, subject as it is to meteorological imposition and dynamics, the chronology and rhythmical regulation of a solar system. The movement beneath ground has not only architectural implications—where this discipline is conceived as the production of purely exosomatic forms—but also has implications for a more complex Theatre of Production, the production of an environment that entails processual individuations due to the contingent relationship that exists between individual and the spatio-temporal dynamisms of the built environment. The total design of the subterranean environment entails an endosomatic or extimate determination, a modulation of bodies both organic and architectonic through the conditioning of airs and atmospheres in general that are required if life is to survive its plutonic incarceration.
The preliminary stages of this architectonic liberation from the solar system or the contingencies of the surface was in part ascribed to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work by Fernández-Galiano, who opposes this work to that of Le Corbusier’s, specifically the latter’s submission to a distinctly solar organisation: ‘To Le Corbusier, the sun is a luminous and regular sign that normalises and organises the life of human beings. To Wright, the sun is more heat than it is light, a beginning more than a regulator, a factor of change rather than of stability. His is a warm, chaotic, igneous sun: a cosmic fire’ (Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory, 29). A generative dynamics of terrestrial combustion opposed to the organisational, regulatory rhythms of the solar system; Wright’s fire is not exclusively terrestrial but associated with both depth and internality: ‘The fire is not only present in the centre of the house but burns “deep in the masonry of the house itself”‘ (Fire and Memory, 29)—as in Jacobs II. The fire embedded within the building links depth with both vitalistic concerns and functions, a metaphorical and actual maintenance of life beneath the surface, set apart from the exterior, yet set apart less from the world than from the solar system. The opposition of a regulatory and igneous sun, a solar system and a cosmic fire, ‘links Le Corbusier’s brise-soleil to a respectable architectural tradition of buildings governed by the stars […] and there is little doubt that Wright’s chimneys invoke a no less archaic tradition in which the fire is the soul of the house and the city, a symbol of fertility and life, a sacred and beneficent flame” (Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory, 31). Wright’s fire is set apart from Le Corbusier’s light, thermic, intensive capacity set apart from the transparent medium of (pan)optical regulation, terrestrial combustion set apart solar organisation. Here a thermic insurgency distributes itself across the surface before burrowing into the darkness of plutonic depths, away from the transparent clarity afforded by the solar system. Despite liberation from the terrestrial subjectivity to the solar system, this movement underground readily sees the establishment of an equally oppressive chthonic regime. The totalitarian dream of a chthonic time capsule sees the elite buried alive as life retreats underground to escape any number of tropospheric catastrophes, their inhumation marking less expiry and extinction than the planting of a seed that at some point will remerge to claim the surface and establish an elite terrestrial order, once again under the sign of the sun and subject to another star.
Within Fernández-Galiano’s schema fire is opposed to light and, by extension, heat opposed to sight. Positioned in critical relation to the role of sight and the clarity of light within the ideology of the enlightenment, favouring a localised, internal combustion set apart from the organising light of the solar system positions political and architectonic productions in darkness, away from the rationality, reason and optical control structures ascribed to sight and afforded by the clarity of light. In this sense Fernández-Galiano’s thermic insurgency is blind, it is opposed to the “luminous and regular sign” of the sun. Both cosmic fire and localised combustion are conceived as primarily thermal rather than optical; in its opposition to the sign of the sun a thermal insurgency is set apart from the clarity of vision and associated with a certain dynamic darkness allied with the chaotic energy of an igneous sun and the internalisation of a cosmic fire, shunning organisational normalisation attained through the imposition of an apparent transparency that constitutes only the efficacy of an ideological order.
2. The Vicissitudes of Verticality and a Crisis within Vision
This movement from an optical organisation to thermal combustion mirrors a shift from vertical organisation to horizontal movements, from the stratification of verticality to the destratifying decompositions of horizontal slippages and subsidence. Insurgency forces a loss of vertical domination and the disorganisation—if not dissolution—of ubiquitous, centralised vision. Here we can recall the Iranian Green Revolution were, rather than a dissolution of the dominance of visual domination it was a decentralisation and diffusive distribution of vision within globalised electonic infrastructure of an ‘auditory space’ that proved one of the greatest threats to the state. Through this disorganisation and decentralisation vision is forced to pass into the acoustic or ‘auditory space’—understood in McLuhan’s sense as a space defined as a ‘field of simultaneous relations without centre or periphery’—afforded by the electromagnetic medium that subsists amidst its infrastructure or conditions. The horizontal orientation and disorganisation of thermic insurgency and ‘sonic warfare’—characterised as such according to its instantiation, production and execution within ‘auditory space’—driven by the localised combustion of an igneous sun, effects the collapse of verticality and the instantiation of an extremely ambiguous power that manifests only the conditions or potential for architectonic experimentation yet to be actualised. This abstract battle space is thought as occurring within a spatial organisation that McLuhan would describe as auditory, and by means of a concordant notion of sonic warfare (somewhat distinct from Goodman‘s use of the term), in the sense that both its targets, objects and tactics remain abstract, with force applied in general due to a loss of discretion. Where the insurgent or target remains invisible it cannot be identified as a specific individual, and therefore thermal mass or the collective auditory expression of a crown are read as the signature of the target without a face. In assertions against the solar system, the shift from an ideological edifice wherein “the sun is a luminous and regular sign that normalises and organises”, movements towards localised combustion and the intensive thermic productions of an igneous sun are mirrored in a shift towards the the dark ambiguity of the invisible, towards wavelengths at the extremities of and beyond the visible. In this sense there is no surprise in The Invisible Committee’s composition of The Coming Insurrection. Thermal organisation in its opposition to optical imposition occupies a portion of the invisible, or rather its internal and obscure differentiations cannot be determined through optical representations operating according the sign of the sun. This is the threat of insurgency, a disorganisation of vision that unfolds in the nightmare of contemporary urban warfare, manifest in a loss of vertical domination (death from above) as imagined by the mechanical infrastructure or cold war ideology. Insurgency forces a shift from the distinct, visual space of the battle field—that obeys distinct lines and a discrete organisation of engagement combined with a moral code of visible, uniform identification—to the generalised ambiguity of a contemporary urban ‘battle space’ that is at best blurry if not invisible or indistinct from the quotidian and civil, unfolding or irrupting in the middle of the home or marketplace before dissolving once again into the everyday (see Weizmann‘s discussion of the IDF’s (de)construction of a smooth space throughout the heart of the Gaza strip). The loss of the visible discretion of the battle field, disorganising horizontalism, decentralisation and the chaotic redistribution or diffusion of total vision forces vision to negotiate the invisible spatiality of a thermic insurgency or ‘sonic warfare‘—after McLuhan—wherein the invisible and unidentifiable insurgent, refusing to move along lines of sight, necessitates a non- or omni-directional ‘sonorous’ imposition in order to deal with a generalised and invisible insurgency wherein the civil and quotidian is militarised. Counter insurgency attempts to reinstate the order of verticality and the centrality of total vision in the form of either vertical domination (death from above) or the discrete organisation characteristic of the primarily visual space it occupies, constructs and enforces under the transparent sign of the sun.
Yet this idealisation of the horizontal movements and (dis)organisation of insurgency is too simple, its insufficiencies becoming clear where it is allied with the broadly invisible against vision, as such assertions submit to the transhistorical idealisation of not only the senses but mediums in general as well as structural and spatial orientations. The invisible and horizontal is idealised as a smooth and hierarchically flat space, yet it teems with blockages, interceptions, dead-ends and delays, operations that on one hand constantly assert and impose power while at the same time undermining it towards the imposition of a new order. Where this imposition, organisation and structuration is undermined ad-infinitum towards the establishment of a permanent insurgency it leads only to catastrophe and death. The ideological flaws in the opposition between light and fire, the horizontal and vertical, and the visual and acoustic become clearer when considered in relation to a generalised version of Jonathan Sterne’s critique of the ‘audiovisual litany [which] idealises hearing […] as manifesting a kind of pure interiority. It alternately denigrates and elevates vision […] vision takes us out of the wold. But it also bathes us in the clear light of reason’ (The Audible Past, 15). From Sterne’s critique of the transhistorical idealisation of audition we can excise the form of an argument against the sufficiency of both internality and the intensity of immanence, as this is manifest in the vitalistic privileging of heat over light in Fernandez-Galiano’s work, and the idealisation of a ‘rhizomatic’ horizontality as state of perpetual and hierarchically neutral connectivity to be sustained in a state of universal and eternal anarchy. We can extend this critique into the idealisation of the tactics of insurgency through applying it to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics, where the former names the operations of the state, total centralised vision, visual discretion, vertical organisation and imposition, while the latter is to be identified with the intuitive and immanent horizontality that defines the movements or ‘flows’ of the pedestrian or the insurgent across the surface of the earth. As Weizmann has shown, the state apparatus is only too happy to move and assert itself in a similar fashion through an interpretation of abstract tactics, just as ‘typographic man’ is well rehearsed in transcribing order from the noise and confusion of auditory space. What is required to add the necessary complexity to these distinctions is acknowledgement of militarisation of the everyday that sees state control and capital readily bend towards an occupation, exploitation, appropriation and commodification of the invisible, of that which attempts to move sideways effecting constant displacement and subsidence amidst incessant articulations of sedimentation and stratification. Against the spectacle of warfare, the militarisation of the everyday, the banal and quotidian exerts a subtle influence in a space more complex than that allowed in the simplistic division between, on the one hand, vertical and visual imposition and, on the other, horizontal displacement and an acoustical or ‘organic’ nodal emergence; Within the smooth there exist blockages, stoppages and interceptions, subtle and informative interruptions within the apparent uniformity of the everyday; an ideological imposition that asserts itself and attains utmost efficacy in invisibility.
