***

This essay considers the notion of the sonic affect: what it is, what it can be and what it does. The affect is ordinarily considered to be bound to subjective feelings—to what I will refer to as the affirmation of interiority—yet there remain alternative conceptions of the ontological status of affects that claim their autonomy from the necessity of subjective affirmation. It is this autonomy that—albeit at the price of a degree of abstraction—allows for a broader consideration of sound in the arts and aesthetics, while at the same time augmenting the efficacy of an affective politics by freeing up the affect from the affirmation of subjective interiority which serves only the ideology of individualism. Notions of interiority, immediacy, immanence and individuality tend to dominate discourse on sonic experience and affectivity—normally opposed to the supposedly more removed criticality of vision and visual culture.¹ Yet such assertions do little more than undermine and disempower the creative, critical and political potentials of sonic practice; autonomy is thereby invoked in support of an affective theory capable of thinking exteriority. While the political implications of a theory of autonomous affects and affective exteriority are of concern to this argument, the constraints of space require that these concerns be left to linger in the background of the present argument, to be developed at a later date. The emphasis of the present argument is to be placed not so much on the subject of sonic affects as sonic affects themselves, on the possibility of a praxical scission whereby affect is excised from the necessity of affirmation. Accordingly, emphasis is placed upon experimental and specifically artistic praxes that, in exploring the possibility of such a scission, focus upon the nature of sonic events, the exploration of sound in excess of the ear and signals in excess of sound. An emphasis is placed upon the excess of signals beyond their audibility or perceptibility as we will consider signals to be synonymous with affects, or—for reasons that are clarified below—structurally equivalent within the framework of the Deleuzian ontology that is assumed as a basis for the following argument.

The notion of `sound itself’ is repeatedly returned to throughout this text—with particular reference to the canonical work of Alvin Lucier and John Cage—as, although appearing somewhat antiquated after the critique of sonic and aesthetic experience according to its social construction, this notion remains a somewhat persistent problematic, receiving significant attention in a number of recent publications.<sup>2</sup> Most important for the present argument is the importance of a notion of sound itself to Christoph Cox’s recent call for a sonic materialism sympathetic to contemporary developments in philosophical realism.<sup>3</sup> In advancing the theoretical background to the experimental conditions of a sonic realism, sound and signal are subsumed within the more general term affect. The assertion of a structural equivalence between these terms is carried out in order to map the terms of this particular argument onto the work of others who have extensively explored and expressed a theory of affects, arguing for their independence from the necessity of their subjective affirmation. More specifically, a notion of sound-itself is to be developed and aligned with—or rendered structurally equivalent to—arguments for an `autonomy of affects’, towards the establishment of a theory of sonic materialism.⁴ The move towards a sonic materialism or realism is considered pressing for a number of reasons—beyond simply wishing to keep up with philosophical trends. Firstly, such a move appears necessary if—echoing Seth Kim-Cohen—we are to move beyond the `dead end’ of phenomenology (Kim-Cohen: 2009, xix). Stating this point more carefully, a sonic realism is required if we are to move away from what Jonathan Sterne has identified as the onto-theological debates regarding the `inherent’ interiority and immediacy of sonic experience in contrast to the supposedly discrete, externalising criticality of vision.⁵ A consequence of this critical move is that a step is taken beyond the sufficiency of perception, of that which appears given, in providing an ontology of sound and an account of the conditions of sonic experience. The second point that necessitates a move towards sonic realism is—as has been outlined by Christoph Cox—the insufficiency of certain critical approaches, developed under the broad scope of the linguistic turn, in accounting for the importance of sound practices and sonic experimentalism whose function exceeds the critical capacity of analytical methods bound to signification. In moving towards a theory of sonic realism or materialism it is not suggested that we undertake a futile attempt to abandon representation towards an immediate expression of the real, but that there is much to be said of that remaining in excess of the ontological sufficiency of the symbolic, and we need not pass over it in silence. According to the analytical methods favoured by KIm-Cohen, for example, the importance of many approaches to sonic matters are rendered meaningless insofar as meaning resides within a symbolic domain that experimental practices and sonic realism partially elude.

Where we are concerned with the extent to which affect can be excised from affirmation, excess becomes a key issue insofar as there is to be anything left of the affect to speak of once the necessity of its being felt is removed. Rather than signifying impoverishment due to its excision from symbolic and subjective sufficiency, this excessive remainder is considered characteristic of affect, the feature which can be considered to distinguish it from emotion, identifying it as ontologically independent of its being felt. It is in dealing with the excess of sonic matters beyond their symbolic and subjective affirmation that a turn towards a theory of autonomous affects is to be assumed in developing a theory of sonic materialism. As this is not simply a metaphysical argument, consideration is also given to the experimental methods and aesthetic implications of what can be considered a step `outside’, from affirmation to exteriority. In arguing for a sonic materialism that builds upon excessive and autonomous theories of affects, an attempt is made to move beyond the narcissistic circuit of auto-affective affirmation—that is both synthetically underwritten and socially constructed—towards an ethics of exteriority.

The Affective Affirmation of Interiority

Towards providing an account of sonic realism it is necessary—due to the stated equivalence between sound and affect—that a case be made for the severance of affect from the necessity of affirmation, and therefore sound from the necessity of its being heard. Affirmation here refers to the subjective `capture’ of affects towards an affirmation of interiority or the somatic consistency of the subject. Insofar as affect is thought as being necessarily relative or bound to feeling it cannot be thought in terms other than those of affirmation, even where this affirmation is considered negative. Whether `negative’ or `positive’, the affect remains productive yet reduced to a unit of feeling, bound to the affirmation of interiority, somatic consistency and the experiential individuality of the subject. The nature of this capture that ontologically defines affects as strictly relative to a receptive subject is concisely outlined by Steve Shaviro for whom `emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject’ (Shaviro: 2010, 3-4). Emotion is here considered affirmative of the subject in which it is produced, yet also as being selectively and reductively derived from an affective impulse that persists in excess of its partial capture. Insofar as affects are to be thought independently of their being felt, excess becomes a key issue in defining that remaining outside the subjective interiority that, according to common sense, affect is thought to affirm. Ontological excess becomes a necessity in defining a theory of independent or autonomous affects—and therefore a notion of sound-itself—a requirement pinpointed in Shaviro’s statement that `behind every emotion there is always a certain surplus of affect (2010, 3-4).

Mapping Shaviro’s terms onto those used throughout this argument, emotion resides on the side of subjective affirmation while affect itself constitutes something akin to the carrier of this affirmation while remaining distinct from it. It is this distinction that locates affect— according to the structure of both Shaviro’s argument and my own—on the side of autonomy, of that which is radically other than or without the self in which it is rendered as feeling or emotion. With reference to this distinction we are able to clarify exactly what is meant by affirmation, aligning or asserting its structural equivalence with emotion. It is emotion understood as the subjective capture of affects which defines the nature of affirmation, the way in which affect is taken to affirm interiority and the experiential individuality of the receptive subject who renders affect as emotion. Counterpoint to affirmation, autonomy is herein taken as naming pre- or a-subjective exteriority, that which remains in excess of both perception and affirmation. Where we are concerned with defining a sonic realism that accounts for the persistence of affects beyond the affirmation of interiority, remainder, excess or surplus becomes our primary concern. Considered from the point of this excess, its being unbound from affirmation, the affect need not be felt in order to be thought of as ontologically coherent. Where we stress the equivalence of sound, signal and affect—the former terms referring to differing relational states of an object belonging to the broader ontological category or class of affects—the consequence of ontological excess means that the sound-affect need not be heard in order to be defined as such. Considering sound as the sometimes silent signal of nonetheless affective efficacy we move through an art-historical continuum of experimental practice from sound as the object of music to signal as the object of sound, to that which may remain imperceptible yet nonetheless efficacious, inaudible yet functional. Clarifying the ontological status of sound-affects in light of the claim that excess is to be considered characteristic of affects in general requires that, in applying this condition of excess to the specifics of sound, the sound-affect itself be identified as silent, residing—at least in part—beyond the ear.

The Autonomy of Affects

Equivalence has been claimed between sound, signal and affect, the terms of this equivalence being primarily derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari for whom `harmonies of tone or colour, are affects of music or painting’. In the instance whence it is of art—as opposed to another equally productive situation—the affect remains `independent of the viewer or hearer [...] independent of the creator’ and—in addition to Deleuze and Guattari’s list—independent of art (Deleuze and Guattari: 1994, 164). According to this formulation the affect holds an existence independent of its reception; so as not to make undue claims for art as the privileged site of affective production, it must be made clear that the relationship between affect and art does not fully account for the production or ontological status of affects insofar as the excess considered characteristic of affects applies equally to their artistic and more general emotional implication, thereby defining their existence as irreducible to their appearance by way of either. If, following Deleuze and Guattari, we are to consider artistic productions in the terms of a bloc or `compound of percepts and affects’, it is art that is composed of affects as much as affects being of art (Deleuze and Guattari: 1994, 164). Sound constitutes the affective matter of which music is considered a compound, of which it is composed. In distancing these statements from what we might call Modernistic disciplinary isolationism and the concern for internal consistency—as we find in Greenberg’s definition of Modernist painting, for example—it should be made clear that these claims of autonomy and independence are not made on behalf of the art object or work, as if elevating it from all—social, cultural, economic, etc.—context, but the affect implicated in yet remaining in excess of both art and aesthetics. Rather than professing the autonomy of art, the autonomy of affects undermines such claims in attempting to account for work that takes as its object its materially transcendent conditions, orienting itself towards its outsides—towards its external contingencies. The independence claimed for affects does not, therefore, claim art’s immunity from the productive contingencies of the subjective and socially conditioned selectivity of viewer, hearer or creator, but rather—asserting affective excess—states that these latter conditions do not account for the totality of the perceived or an affective remainder that persists beyond perception. The ontological excess of the affect with regard to what is felt is summarised concisely by Deleuze and Guattari:

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 (Deleuze and Guattari: 1994, 164).

This statement outlines the extent to which, if we are to assume this `autonomy of affects’, we assume a notion of the affect counter to common sense, according to which it is necessarily bound to feeling, to subjective experience. Consequently it becomes necessary to clarify the means or method whereby we arrive at a notion of autonomous affects, severed from the affirmation of interiority, a method by which we arrive at an alternative notion of sound as that which claims synonymity or equivalence with affects.

In claiming the equivalence of sound and affect, as well as their independence from affirmation, we must ask how we move from a definition of sound in the terms of experiential, aesthetic and qualitative extension to one of sound as autonomous affective intensity. This question can be stated more simply as asking what remains of the affect excised from the necessity of affirmation, of its being felt? Here the question of remains is key, as where we follow the Deleuzian path towards a definition affects the process to be taken is one of `prodigious simplification’ (Deleuze and Guattari: 2004, 380); what is lost in this process of subtractive rarefaction, of what Alvin Lucier refers to as `cutting things down to their simplest form’ (1995, 232)? Less shed in its entirety than diminished—within an experimental framework and ontological perspective—is aesthetic experience or qualitative extension, the point of subjective synthesis that constitutes the conditions of perception. This remainder presents a peculiar kind of non-phenomenological sonority that persists in inaudibility, in silence: the inaudible interior of sound-itself which remains in excessive exteriority with regard to both objective source and listening subject. It is this sense of a persistent and excessive—i.e. inaudible—sonority that we need if we are to think affects beyond their conservative limitation to anthropic experience and in the Deleuzian sense of an autonomy of affects. It is in this sense that affects are neither thought nor known in a sense but are, rather, primarily functional and informative, the agents of qualitative, sensory appearances that remain irreducible to them.

Qualitative extension can be—for present purposes—thought as being synonymous with external appearance, with the pinning of percept to perception, affect to affection, the affect’s being `for us’ rather than `in itself’. Qualitative extension, due to its necessary relationality, is that which occludes affective autonomy, and so it is the necessity of this subjective, relational extension that is shed, stripped away or cut down in a process of simplification. The necessity of relational extension is in this sense understood as providing an obstacle to the autonomous definition of affects, and so a step must be taken beyond given experiences if we are to conceive of the affect itself, of affects as `beings whose validity lies in themselves’ (Deleuze and Guattari: 1994, 164). This abstract methodology of stripping away qualitative extension towards affective autonomy can be clarified with a further reference to Deleuze, but this requires positing and clarifying a further structural equivalence between the terms affect and intensity.⁶ Before diving into yet another exposition of terms, we can consider the extent to which ontological equivalence of affective autonomy and intensive quantity can also be expressed in aesthetic terms: specifically with reference to a process of compositional simplification or reduction whereby intensive quantity may be mobilised independently of qualitiative or experiential extensity.

The process of reduction or simplification that leads towards an autonomy of affects has aesthetic consequences that are manifest in the explicitly experimental practices of a number of artists and musicians. For Deleuze and Guattari this `prodigious simplification’ appears most clearly in the work of La Monte Young, whose extreme durational works are often comprised of simple tones, sonorities that have shed or never possessed complex overtones, the harmonics or timbre that allows a note or frequency to be identified as of a banjo, voice or particular individual, thereby becoming referential and diverting attention from the intensive quantities of the sound-itself to the image of its somatic origins. Despite Young being an excellent example, for my present purposes a better example is found in the equally canonical work of John Cage and Alvin Lucier.<sup>7</sup> Approaching the notion of affective autonomy and its importance within experimental practice by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract schema of `prodigious simplification’ could, if left to the example they make of La Monte Young, suggest an aesthetics of the pure and simple tone as that which veridically manifests `unspoilt’ duration. This would, of course, be too simple, and would also fail to recognise that Deleuze and Guattari `are not at all arguing for an aesthetics of qualities, as if the pure quality (color, sound, etc.) held the secret of a becoming without measure [...] A functionalist conception on the other hand, only considers the function a quality fulfils in a specific assemblage, or in passing from one assemblage to another’ (2004, 275). We might better refer to the `functionalist conception’ of sound that this passage suggests as an infraesthetic functionalism insofar as its focus lies with interactions between and within assemblages—such as those composed of oscillators, bass drums, human bodies and ping-pong balls in Lucier’s work—with the intensity and affective capacity of sonorous quality. Beyond an aesthetic orientation concerned with the experience of pure qualities, how is this simplification realised, if not just in the reduction of sound to simple tones? How do we conceive of the process of simplification in practical terms? At the most basic level we can conceive of this simplification as composition using only simple tones, filtration or, in a more abstract sense, composition by way of subtractive synthesis, yet here we remain bound to the appearance of simplicity rather than its infraesthetic function. Where a `bloc’ or `compound of affects’ is taken as describing a complex waveform, its reduction towards `prodigious simplicity’ may realise its complex being as the sum of simple parts, that is, its quantitative composition in terms of degrees of phase and magnitudes of frequencies. Simplification may be manifest in an aesthetically or strictly qualitatively simple sound—such as those heard in the work of Young, Ryoji Ikeda, or Toshiya Tsunoda’s `Bottle + Signal 121Hz.’—or perhaps less obviously through the selective exploitation of the affective capacities of fundamentals and partials that are the functionally deployed, simple components of compounds or complex waveforms. The process of simplification, understood in these terms as being not exclusively aesthetic but also functional and affective, can be understood to have been deployed as a practical methodology within what is now a canonical experimental tradition, and in particular within the work of Alvin Lucier.

Before moving on to further discussion of Lucier’s work and the aforementioned equivalence of affect and intensity, it should be clarified how the above attests to how the ontological equivalence of affective autonomy and intensive quantity can arrived at through—while not remaining limited to—aesthetic terms, and specifically how this is achieved by way of simpification. Explicitly linking the method of simplification to the mobilisation of affective intensity, Deleuze an Guattari state that `to grasp or capture intensity, sonic matter must be molecularized, simplified in order that it might be able to `move’ more freely (ATP, 378-9). Through aesthetic and compositional simplification such as the shedding of overtones, the sound affect is thought to be mobilised with a degree of—if not absolute—independence from representation insofar as it lacks a clear timbral indication of its origins, expressing only intensive quantities such as duration, frequency and amplitude. It is in this sense that a sound may move freely of representation, drawing attention to intensity by way of affective capacity. In more functional and explicitly affective terms this simplification, as described above, `captures intensity’ through the exploitation of resonant frequencies, through the mobilisation of the simple yet resonant components of an otherwise complex sound.⁸

Affect and Intensive Quantity

Affect and intensity are considered structurally equivalent, as both are understood according to common sense as bound to affirmative experience, yet both are identified by Deleuze as persisting in excess of that which is empirically given while constituting the conditions of experience. It is for this reason that we must state the nature of this equivalence a little more precisely, so as not to confuse the matter with common sense which binds affect to the necessity of its being felt. The affect excised from the necessity of affirmation—whereby it may be thought independently of experience—is in the same gesture excised from what in Deleuzian jargon we would call its `qualitative extension’. What remains of the affect after this critical excision is—again using the terminology of Deleuzian ontology—intensive quantity. Distinct from the formal appearance or experiential qualities of a unified sound object, intensive quantity refers to the magnitudes constituting the affect’s own `internal’ composition: degrees of phase, bandwidths and magnitudes of frequencies. These magnitudes define what we might call affective capacities, the capacity to affect and be affected that are dependent upon degrees, strengths or amounts of force. It is in this sense that the autonomous affect is considered structurally equivalent to intensity or a set, bloc or compound of intensive quantities not necessarily manifest in experience yet nonetheless real. This quantitative definition of intensity is carried out in order to clarify what might left to speak of where affect is excised from affirmation, and therefore—due to the equivalence posited above—sound from the necessity of its being heard. The intensive quantities that define affects considered as independent beings rather than necessarily the objects of experience can be considered in the terms of affective capacities, such as the capacity to move or be moved. With this in mind, we find concise summary of this point in Robert Pasnau’s statement that `the more a definition of sound is linked to motion and vibration, the more it becomes defined in quantitative rather than qualitative terms’ (2000, 31). It is precisely such a linking of sound to movement and vibration that is carried out where sound is identified with a notion of affects that, insofar as they are considered within the structure of Deleuzian ontology, occupy a position of excess and independence with regard to feeling and perception, thereby maintaining their ontological status as sonic events beyond the ear, at degrees of movement, vibration of frequency in excess of audition. It is this quantitative definition of sound that forms the grounds for claiming its being equivalent to the more general term and ontological category of affective intensity, as well as detailing what remains to be said of affect excised from affirmation.

Perhaps the most exemplary instances of an intensive notion of sonority affectively deployed—in accordance with the definition of these terms carried out above—can be found throughout the work of Alvin Lucier. Lucier’s work is of great significance to the present argument for the manner in which it meticulously and tenaciously investigates the elementary conditions of sonic experience without recourse to the binary oppositions of Sterne’s `audio-visual litany’ which pit sight against sound. It is the explicitly experimental approach to both sound and music taken by Lucier that allows him to concisely and often poetically circumvent grossly simplified assertions of sound being the privileged site of an internal, precritical, immediate and superiorly embodied experience.<sup>9</sup> Drawing attention to this circumvention, or rather the irreducibility of Lucier’s work to the affirmation of interiority, to which the above qualities contribute, Douglas Kahn has highlighted the irreducibility of the spatial dimension of Lucier’s practice to immersion, an experiential quality frequently taken to be a particular privilege of sound. Kahn describes how the understanding of `Lucier’s architectural dimension needs to be extended from immersion to include propagation’ (2009, 26). The distal orientation arising from emphasising propagation is also manifest in Lucier’s understanding of sound in terms other than those limited the durational, whereby `long’ is conceived both spatially and temporally: `I think of sounds in terms of wavelengths [...] I’m dealing with lengths of sound, its physical dimensions’ (Lucier:1995, 44).¹⁰ Where immersion places the listening subject at the centre of the sonic event, the equal importance of propagation to Lucier’s work understands the sound event itself as being at the centre of the sonic event, with listening subjects decentralised, ushered and propelled, along with the sound itself `into another room’, `out the front door [...] and down the freeway’ (Kahn: 2009, 26). Sound-itself features as a central and primarily affective agent in Lucier’s work; in the understanding of sound in terms wavelengths we can identify a deployment of sound according to its intensive quantities: its being in terms of vibration and movement, its capacity to propagate, move and be moved. The This is also particularly evident in Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1973-74). An edited version of Lucier’s prose score for the piece is as follows:

Create standing waves in space caused by constructive and destructive interference patterns among sine waves from loudspeakers. With single sine wave oscillators, amplifiers and pairs of loudspeakers, design sound geographies for dancers consisting of troughs and crests [...] the size and number of which are determined by the frequencies of the sine waves and the distances between the loudspeakers. When necessary, clear pathways for dancers by slightly changing the frequencies of the sine waves, shifting the location of the hyperbolas [...] Sing within intervals, beating upper pitches at one speed, lower ones at another, creating double rhythms (Lucier: 1995, 344).¹¹

Still and Moving Lines … calls for the construction of a structural yet shifting `sound environment’ constructed through the use of sine waves or `pure wave oscillators’ (Lucier: 1995, 212-6), a sonic terrain or `geography’ that is not metaphorical but physical, a `soundscape’ not evocative of the pastoral but productive of invisible peaks and troughs that nonetheless propel or inhibit movement. Performers occupy and find their way through the sound field established at the outset of Still and Moving Lines … wherein the voice meets the `pure wave’ on a synthetic plane that is primarily spatial in nature yet nonetheless ephemeral and necessarily durational. A kind of wave-field synthesis is performed, yet one opposed to the replication or modelling of space in favour of a kind of vibrational burrowing or parasitic occupation of intervals and harmonic structures. Both the voice and the body of the performer find a place between the waves within this piece, yet while the score calls for singing, the voice need not be heard. Recounting the rehearsal of this piece with Joan La Barbara, Lucier describes how:

Joan was finding a place for herself in which she felt comfortable. And I was never sure whether that was in a crest or a trough. She would be receiving constant sine tones from the loudspeakers, and what she did when she sang was to beat against these tones, alleviating the constancy of the sound waves. She said she felt as if she were pushing the wave away from herself [...] By trying to alleviate the constant pressure, she probably added to it, but her effort gave the illusion of pushing it away [...] One of the things we decided was that her voice should be inaudible; she should use it to move sounds, not to create them. In Paris she stood for twenty-five or thirty minutes and sang, mostly inaudibly, but nobody in the audience budged because they knew she was doing something, even if they didn’t know she was singing (Lucier: 1995, 162).

Particularly interesting here is the use of voice, as the affective capacities deployed in the movement of sounds are far from the usual auto-affective associations of voice as an affirmation of internal and immediate self-presence.¹² The voice is used in the dispersal as opposed to the audible creation of sound, as a means of hollowing out a space within a saturated environment; the voice is here an additive producer of silence as much as sound. Whether the voice is heard or not, by either La Barbara or the audience is of secondary importance to its functional and affective capacity for spatial production, its inaudible distortion of a field of otherwise pure waves. Through its use of voice this piece makes particularly clear the ambiguous affectivity of sound, that its affective capacity is not always an affirmative of interiority. The emphasis placed upon the intensive quantities and autonomous affective capacities of sound, rather than leading to auto-affective affirmation and contributing to a pervasive ideology of individualism, can orientate both sound and its listening subjects towards their outsides, towards their external contingencies, emphasising here as much as elsewhere.

Having stated the terms of the claimed equivalence between affect and intensity above, we are now in a position to state the relationship between affect and extensity that underpins the abstract methodology of accounting for affective autonomy through a process of simplification or the shedding of qualitative extension. Deleuze writes that `though experience shows us intensities already developed in extensions, already covered over by qualities, we must conceive, precisely as a condition of experience, of pure intensities enveloped in a depth, in an intensive spatium that preexists every quality and every extension’ (Deleuze: 2004, 96-7). In claiming the equivalence of affect and intensity we can read this quote as making an equal claim for `pure affects’ as the preexisting conditions of experience. It is this `depth’ or `intensive spatium’ that names the noumenal realm from which the conditions of experience are drawn ahead of their synthetic actualisation; it is the noumenal to which we turn in a movement from the experience of qualitative extensity to the autonomy and imperceptibility of intensive quantity, from affects bound to affirmation to their independence and indifference with regard to their experiential extension. Here we make a distinction between two categories that while distinct are not considered entirely discrete, with each being complicit in the other: on one side we have the qualitative, experiential and affirmative, on the other the intensive, quantitative and autonomous; in locating the affect as residing in the latter we perform a transposition of its ontological status from the necessarily subjective to the immanent yet indifferent real. Identifying the sound-affect as residing within the real, beyond that which is subjectively determined and synthetically produced, we return once again to `sound itself’, insofar as the acoustical real need not appeal to the ear, nor ever be heard. Having returned in this argument to the notion of sound-itself popular amongst leading proponents of the mid twentieth century North American experimental scene, it becomes necessary to disambiguate the equation of sound-itself with affective autonomy. Clarifying both the terminology used and the experimental context from which this term is explicitly derived it should be stated that the matter of primary concern is thought less in the terms of objects than things; less according to the approximation of Husserlian intentional objects that concerned the experimental practice of Pierre Schaeffer than the notion of sound-itself that can be identified most clearly in the work of John Cage and Lucier. For Schaeffer, sonorority comprised pure appearance, the object of a universal perceptual synthesis not to be confused with the physical domain of signals. This latter domain is more the territory of Cage and Lucier, who both developed a praxical notion of sound in excess of its audition, providing an experimental precursor for contemporary attempts at outlining a theory of sonic materialism. Experimenting with physical signals and their affective capacities beyond the ear, this work shared an `object’ with science while ignoring its methods. In taking sound not only or `purely’ as the intentional object of auditory experience, but as physical thing in excess of its perception, this thing—the sonic event whether heard, unheard or inaudible—is neither reducible to nor dependent upon its being heard for its ontological status, thereby falling outside the horizon of Schaeffer’s experimental objectivity. It is in this sense that the Schaefferian object does not suffice insofar as the objective autonomy that it claims is claimed for perception, for the intentional objects of experience. In siding with the notion of sound-itself this argument is aligned with a history of experimental practice, the ontological and aesthetic position of which is plugged into an ethics of exteriority capable of thinking affect beyond auto-affection.

Non-cochlear Sound

Seth Kim-Cohen has—following the conceptual and contextual turn ushered in with Duchamp’s non-retinal art—outlined a theory of non-cochlear sonic art, the importance of which is to be found in its primary aim of diverting the sonic arts from a well trodden `phenomenological cul-de-sac’, from the dead-end argument of the in-itself, the essentialising logic of which is capable only of futile attempts at describing what the thing is in-itself (Kim-Cohen: 2009, xix). Seeking to avoid the shortcomings of a critical route blocked by the in-itself, Kim-Cohen—seeking context and connections within the history of conceptual art—attempts the production of a framework whereby sonic practices might avoid the phenomenological traps primarily associated with Schaefferian objectivity, instead embracing the relational logic and discursive contingencies of the linguistic turn. Yet Kim-Cohen’s argument betrays numerous symptoms indicating the persistence of a traumatic object occupying a spot that cannot be itched; despite this persistent agitation Kim-Cohen would rather that we pass over the in-itself in silence—or turn a blind eye—a kind of avoidance tactic that only maintains it as the persistent site of agitation that has drawn out Kim-Cohen’s critique. Despite the conceptual sufficiency at the heart of Kim-Cohen’s polemic, I fully endorse his call for a sonic praxis that steps beyond phenomenological sufficiency and the assumption of ear and audition as simply given; I, however, wish to take this step must be taken in the opposite direction. Accordingly, this argument does not constitute a negation of Kim-Cohen’s position but rather a `transcendental’ complement and undermining, an attempt to begin accounting for its conditions. Where Kim-Cohen’s notion of the non-cochlear firmly positions virtuous sonic practice within the context of conceptual art, the step that I wish to take towards a theory inclusive of affectivity requires that we move towards—rather than simply passing over in silence—the conditions and material contingencies of a conceptual practice. This move, rather than being counter-conceptual, intends to reposition conceptual practice within a materialist continuum, opening conceptual practice onto its conditions through an experimental practice that explores relations between the concept and the material. Where it is treated as sufficient, the turn towards the conceptual appears equally as isolating a gesture as that associated with phenomenological sufficiency or intentional objectivity; both positions restrict significance to the strictly anthropic, whether that be primarily of experience or meaning—insofar as they might be opposed. To critically approach the problem of the in-itself—which herein is considered equivalent to affective intensity—does not require the abandonment of relations in favour of objective essentialism, but rather argues that to pass over in silence that which persists in excess of its subjective capture or representation is to ignore the conditions of the conceptual, positing its existence as a mysterious miracle, as simply given. Neither must attempts to engage the in-itself in terms of affective autonomy be understood as restricting what can be said of sound to auto-affective affirmation, as a disavowal of difference and alterity. This solipsistic isolationism occurs where the real is identified as intentional, as an object of experience—universal or otherwise—and so in thinking affective autonomy as anterior to and in excess of both experience and representation, the problem of the in-itself attains an exteriority capable of thinking alterity beyond the anthropic terms of linguistic and conceptual correlationism. It is precisely the nature of such a non-anthropic alterity or exteriority that can be seen to have been engaged in the history of experimental practice, in work exploring the conditions of the conceptual, the relationship between the elements of nature and the elements of thought—between Idea and concept—revealing the latter to be of the former in place of any dichotomy, as was John Cage’s concern.

For Cage, experimental practice entailed a turn, the first step of which was necessarily psychological, in attempting to orientate thought beyond that which appears given to it, a turn towards nature and a turn towards the in-itself. Cage—in a passage, the sentiment of which might appeal to Kim-Cohen’s linguistically defined view of human nature—states that `this turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity’ (1978, 8). That which `belongs to humanity’ is in many ways resolutely conceptual or rather linguistic in nature, entailing—with specific reference to composition—the musical control and organisation of sound, executed through symbolic discretion and according to representation. Stated crudely, the definition of experimental music to which Cage was devoted would concern itself with both the referent of such systems of musical organisation—sonic matter or sound-itself, that which is mobilised and organised in the composition of music—but also with the extent to which systems of representation such as musical scores were not limited to representation, but themselves productive of affects, catalytic elements whose various signs did not represent sounds to be recalled but presented affective capacities independent of any sonification. At a more general level, the experimental turn—beginning in the 1940s with the introduction of magnetic tape into musical practice—lead away from `everything that belongs to humanity [...] to the world of nature, where gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together’ (Cage: 1978, 8). It is due to this concern for opening creative practice up that which is thought beyond the horizon of humanity, an attempt to realise a continuum between thought and nature, that I believe we find stronger, richer accounts of non-cochlear sound in the history of experimental practice than we do in that of strictly conceptual practice, as the former does not exclude the latter from its concerns, nor that which resides outside it: its materially transcendent conditions and inhuman others. Here we can pinpoint the difference between Kim-Cohen’s notion of non-cochlear sound and my own. While we are both concerned with sound beyond the ear, for Kim-Cohen non-cochlear sonic art concerns itself with the discursive impact of sonic practice, with an order of sound effects—i.e. the effects of sound and sonic practice upon language. My interest in the non-cochlear—remaining open to the conceptual—resides in its ability to account for sound affects beyond the ear, for what Cage refers to as `non-sounds’: the affectivity of sonic events both unintentional and unheard, sounds that may percuss membranes other the ear drum and find a resonance in a body other than the body. Presenting this extra-somatic affectivity, Cage’s experimental practice expresses how `non-sounds [...] received by other sets than the ear, operate in the same manner’ (Cage: 1978, 14). Opening onto a larger vibrational continuum of sonic affects, both non-sound and the non-cochlear can be utilised in accounting for the inaudible conditions of the heard. Insofar as a sound is necessarily listened to, what is heard is not in-itself, yet sound-itself is posited as a necessary anteriority to the synthetic production of what is heard. In itself sound is set apart from audition, and so from the perspective whereby sound must be heard to be defined as such—according to which there can be no sound apart from the ear, no affect apart from affirmation—sound-itself is not sound but rather a kind of non-sound or clamourous silence. Non-sound thereby presents a kind of `immanent transcendence’ insofar as it is that which is affective within sound yet goes unheard, thereby remaining external to it; it is that which resonates with sets other than the ear, or fails to resonate at all.¹³

1. This bias is what Jonathan Sterne has referred to as the `audio-visual litany’. Sterne presents extensive critique of this position—the ahistorical opposition of sight and sound—in The Audible Past and `The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Aurality’
2. Seth Kim-Cohen, Salome Voegelin, Christoph Cox
3. Here I refer to the philosophical movement formerly known as Speculative Realism, also `continental realism’ in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) (2011), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press. See Christoph Cox (2011), `Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’. Journal of Visual Culture, 10, (2), 145-161.
4. Such arguments for an `autonomy of affects’ can be found in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro
5. See Audible Past and `Theology of Sound’
6. The equation of affect and intensity is also carried out by Brian Massumi; despite this precedence its is necessary to state the reason for this equation more explicitly herein. See Massumi, 2002, 27.
7. More contemporary examples—of what I have begun referring to as infraesthetic functionalism, or infraesthetics—could be made of the work of artists such as Jacob Kirkegaard, Toshiya Tsunoda, Kanta Horio and Christine Sun Kim, yet the limited length of a single article makes it more feasible to make reference to work and historical contexts that the reader may already be familiar with.
8. It could also be said that this functional orientation towards the affective capacities of sound at the expense of its aesthetic qualities is what gives much experimental practice as certain `lo-fi’ appearance, as its concerns reside elsewhere, beyond appearance, with interactions between assemblages that are technical, organic or otherwise.
9. These `innate’ qualities of sound being readily opposed vision, or a `hegemony of the visual’, to which the opposite qualities are ascribed.
10. This understanding of sound is considered `distal’ due to the decentralised listening subject and existence of sound as a physical event beyond its perception, rather than in a sense strictly concomitant with the distal theories of sound presented by authors such as Pasnau and Casey O’Callaghan. The spatial and durational understanding of length in Lucier’s approach to sound is also pointed out by Douglas Kahn (2009).
11. The full score for Still and Moving Lines affords greater complexity, but for present purposes this summary will suffice.
12. This is, of course, the object of Derrida’s famous critique of the `metaphysics of presence’, according to which `the logos can be infinite and self-present, it can be produced as auto-affection, only through the voice: an order of the signifier by which the subject takes from itself into itself, does not borrow from outside of itself the signifier that it emits and that affects it at the same time … ‘ (Derrida: 1997, 98.) It should be pointed out, however, that the critique of the of voice according to the auto-affective capacities thought to expel the exteriority of writing does not constitute the sum of Derrida’s thinking on the voice. See, for example, Derrida (2005), Writing and Difference, 292-316.
13. A not dissimilar argument for non-being, as `not being’ without negation, can be found in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 76-7.

A problem is perceived–a bad vibe–and either the therapist or the victim (or victim’s defender) now wants to focus on the feelings around this problem. Therapeutization–the means to turn class conflict into personal conflict, or to hide class conflict underneath an ideology of individualism. It’s like the opposite of consciousness-raising. Instead of connecting people to the world, the world is reduced to the interior life of one or two people.

The affective turn in recent politics thereby becomes auto-affective and in remaining bound to an individual’s feelings and emotions undermines the possibility of its breaking out into collective action and mobilisation. Yet, referring back to Fisher’s article, it is where this affective orientation is inscribed into the social circuits of musical use and sonorous production that it perhaps begins to break out of the ideology of individualism through tapping into a transpersonal or `machinic’ dimension of affective signals that never find a voice yet remain expressive and hopefully inch towards efficacy. What is important to express here is that much of this affective content is inscribed in the use of music as much as its composition. As little of the Grime and Dancehall that Fisher and Dan Hancox catalogued towards a playlist of the riots and uprisings expresses in explicitly linguistic and lyrical content the sentiments of political activism, it is in the use of music and sound as a carrier of affects at the point of both playback and composition that its importance lies.<sup>2</sup> Where music is deployed as a more affective than symbolic force in resistance, its significance becomes obscure and ambiguous from the perspective and expectations of symbolic coherence. This noted lack of coherence and communicable message marks, as Fisher points out, a certain exhaustion of recognised channels of musical resistance: the protest song seems worn out, lacklustre, its own disempowerment, apparent obsolescence and displacement in pop culture a symptom compounding the apathy and estrangement that has characterised much of the still fairly recent discourse on youth and `political engagement’.

Despite the incoherence—if not the absence—of any message in the turn towards an affective understanding of music’s political implication, a degree of meaning remains: meaning or message in the medium, an attachment and entwining of sentiment and the material underpinnings or matter of expression that no-doubt contributed to the ambiguity of what was being channelled. The affective excess that characterised so much of the expressive content of 2011′s uprisings and demonstrations displays a certain decline in the faith of symbolic efficacy, in the power of the word or recognised discursive channels and forms to effect change. It is, of course, unsurprising that those who feel themselves to be without voice, those who remain unheard, should turn from the voice as the primary site of political exchange, shifting from the voice and language as the primary means of expression towards more abstract and purely affective sonorities.

What Fisher highlights—more than Dean—in describing the political implications of affects is a shift from the efficacy of `desublimating’ narratives or a symbolic testimony of dissent—e.g. protest song—to an affective undercurrent in musical expression that remains poorly understood and therefore both confused and obscure. Yet the reference to an undercurrent here requires some clarification, as the playback of Rihana and Nikki Minaj at student protests shows a undercurrent operative at the surface, insofar as this music is utterly pop, operating at the surface or forefront of popular culture and removed from anything resembling Hebdige’s subcultural cool. In the use of this music its affective capacity is mobilised, and so where we speak of an affective undercurrent it is not to be understood in terms of style but something more obscure and ambiguous, something operative inbetween and beyond genre, whether they are historically or traditionally associated with dissent or not. The `horizontal’ indiscretions of sonorous affectivity prove momentarily problematic to classification—as protest music—and understanding—of those who expect coherence and demand the use of recognised channels. Again stating that this is to be taken as distinct from style, this affective impetus is not to associated in either Adornian or Attalian terms as political mobilisation by means of avant-garde aesthetics or—at least where the use of Rihana is concerned—reorganisation and distribution of the means and ownership of musical production (no doubt that Rihana track came from a torrent). Affective implication of music in recent political mobilisation has not taken the form of a collective awakening to the transgressive truth or aesthetics of noise as an alternative to the exhaustion of the protest song. That the mobilisation of an affective current through musical use should prove problematic to classification and understanding must in part come from the extent to which the genres from which this affective current was excised are already over-codified, classified and commodified in terms of genre, style and so on. As the material underpinning music that is already classified, filed and marketed with precision, the affect as politically mobilised agent operates and originates from within music wholly unresistant to the market, commodification or popularisation, yet nonetheless existing in excess of the stylistic systems and markets in which it is implicated. The affective signal as a material instance able to be excised and mobilised politically constitutes a parasitic matter or channel in excess of its stylistic implication, a `nested exteriority’ at work within yet indifferent to the codification of genre and the meaning of style.³ The signal is considered in the terms of both excess and exteriority insofar as it constitutes the material conditions of both music and its stylistic classification, it is that matter which can be encoded, inscribed and deployed any number of ways across countless genres yet is reducible to no single instance. The signal is that of, through or in complicity with which music is composed, yet also that which remains outside, in excess of, or extimate to music and so its primarily affective political implication takes a form apparently obscure from a political and aesthetic perspective that expects formal coherence—genre or stylistic specificity.

While style, of course, remains an important factor in the choice of music played, the political implication of affective signals—more than political expression of signs—is perhaps best understood in terms akin to Eyal Weizman’s `political plastic’, referring—according to crude summary—to the mobilisation of ideology and the performance of interpellation beyond the voice, beyond the symbolic, through material practice and political implication in plasticity. If political plastic recognises and describes ideological operations in excess of the strictly symbolic—operative through design, composition and fabrication—and interpellation therefore being exercised—beyond the classic Althusserian example—in excess of the voice or the spoken word—whether uttered in song or from the mouthes of the police—then, sticking with sound, we have a model of ideological operations more akin to a kind of `unsound’ interpellation, exercised through what Steve Goodman calls the `the politics of frequency’.⁴ An affective turn in politics open—beyond its being bound to emotion, as in both Fisher and Dean’s articles—to an autonomy of affects, of affective signals, excised from their stylistic implication within or without the recognised forms of protest music, mobilises an affective element that perhaps, through its ontological excess, shows potential of escaping the ideology of individualism without having to submit to calls for a more clearly defined and categorised mode of expression in the easily identified—and therefore easily ignored—form of the protest song.⁵ In the apparent obscurity and ambiguity of music’s political implication according to its affective capacity ahead of its symbolic efficacy, we can perhaps locate a generalised and autonomous theory of affects and thereby an affective politics capable of thinking exteriority.

1. See Mark Fisher, `Autonomy in the UK’ in The Wire 355, January 2012.
2. All references to Grime are made on the back of Fisher and Hancox’s work, as I’m almost entirely ignorant of this music.
3. This phrase can be found littered throughout the work of Reza Negarestani
4. more on this to come …
5. As Goodman discusses, this is already underway in the forms of `sonic warfare’ initiated by the more experimental outings of the ISA.

Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it.¹

Analogical to the graphologist who finds in scrawls, scribbles and illegible inscriptions the signals and signs of unconscious dynamics (illness and so on), geophonographic practice finds in the illegible and `meaningless’ traces distributed across the earth’s surface the signs of a machinic unconscious, as `in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics’, and so the aforementioned unconscious dynamics or `intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself’.² Certain planes or dynamic informants of this machinic unconscious or pre-individual background are to be located terrestrially; thought and the individual appear as a fold or twisted contraction of this—at once tropospheric and subterranean—unconscious, or perhaps a kind of mole or miner, bombarded with and making pathways through endless and indefinite wavefronts that pound and transpierce the individual/object via all available mediums. Accordingly, we should remain suspicious of the phenomenological conditions according to which Deleuze and Guattari ascribe a certain privilege and power to sound:

Sound owes this power not to signifying or “communicational” values [...] nor to physical properties, but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us³

The privilege ascribed to sonority by Deleuze and Guattari is itself to be `deterritorialized’ in recognising this incisive function or information as indicating the affective capacity of a larger vibrational continuum inclusive of a broader set of mediums—including, for example, the electromagnetic. The incisive function that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to sound, when adequately deterritorialized constitutes a synthetic field comprising ontologically diffusive and taxonomically diverse wavefronts, a synthetic field—or wavefield synthesis—that engenders `syntheses of the impersonal unconscious’.⁴

1. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, 335.
2. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 283.
3. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 383.
4. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 322.

T5 Quantitative Extraction by schrimshaw

First attempt at a spectral reduction of the results of prior iterations of geophonographic approaches, an attempt at identifying intensive quantities behind the surface appearances that previously documented techniques have traced and rendered audible.

A development of the Ur-writings series. Technical details can be found here.

What I find particularly interesting about Kahn’s overview is the notion of an experimental natural history of media—outlined with reference to various works by Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Joyce Hinterding and James Turrell—that entails a shift from things, from individual objects or bodies to dynamics, towards a broad energetic continuum that exceeds objective discretion while making its perception possible. This natural history of media becomes less one of individual objective medias than one of the dynamic or problematic field of their production, the natural phenomena to which they are a response. The emphasis placed upon energetic mediums is done so as the expense of content, of sign and signification, as it is, as Kahn points out, the mediation of the medium of electromagnetism that occludes its perception as natural phenomenon. We find a similar sentiment and critical orientation in McLuhan’s work, for whom `the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium’.¹

This orientation towards the medium at the expense of symbolic or representational `content’ is discussed by Kahn with reference to the work of James Turrell, who’s understanding of light is in many ways similar to McLuhan’s notion of light as `pure information’. While this term isn’t used by Turrell, the extent to which he nonetheless presents a similar understanding of the affective capacities of light is made evident in Craig Adcock’s writing on Turrell. For Turrell, light was not simply a passive and immaterial medium but an affective and informative matter in itself:

From the beginning of his carer to the present, [Turrell] has endevaoured to isolate light, to detach it from the general ambient array, so that the basic characteristics of sheer electromagnetic flux can be seen directly, unsullied by the presence of anything else.²

In Turrell’s work, light is what is seen rather than being rendered imperceptible according to the efficacy of representation; the medium of sight becomes the `object’ of study, unmasking any apparent passivity and transparency in making evident its material conditions and informative contingencies, its active and deformative implication within the process of information and transmission. Through the abstraction of light from its implication within objective representation, what we might call its affective capacities are uncovered: its capacity to both deform information-as-content and its capacity to perform a deformative information of matter. This affective capacity names light’s distortive qualities, the manner in which it affects and often undermines that which is encoded within it—far from simply yielding to formal imposition—as well as the matter and medium that receives it. This informative potential or affective capacity, brought to the surface through its abstraction from objective representation is evident in Turrell’s use of `light not to disclose the observable structures of the world, but to demonstrate light’s own presence and power’.³ What Adcock describes and identifies within Turrell’s work as `light’s own presence and power’ also finds expression in McLuhan’s notion of `pure information’.

Electromagnetism and Pure Information

Electric light was perhaps McLuhan’s favourite example of pure information. For McLuhan, `the message of electric light is total change. It is pure information without any content to restrict its transforming and informing power’.<sup>4</sup> This abstract, affective and ontological conception of information would appear concomitant with its appearance in Simondon’s work, for whom `information is a primer for individuation; it is a demand for individuation, for the passage from a metastable system to a stable system; it is never a given thing’.⁵ Information is not `given’ but a manifold process of production, it is associated not with discrete and `typographical’ units but informative process, with individuation rather than the appearance of the individuated. More precisely, for Simondon `information is not a term’ and therefore lacks the identifiable and indexical discretion associated with this term in common sense usage.<sup>6</sup> Opposed to the synonymity of information and symbolic content, it is for both McLuhan and Simondon considered as a presymbolic informative process implicated within individuations, within the information of matter. It is in this affective and influential sense that we consider information not as symbolic but, in McLuhan’s terms, as `pure information’. This purity is attained through the medium’s not being occluded by symbolic content which would divert attention from the medium’s affective and informative capacity towards its symbolic encoding, a diversion or focusing of attention that depicts the medium as neutral by way of neglect, ignorance and bewitching narratives. This purity, then, is presymbolic and asignifying; pure information names the affective capacity of a medium, its capacity to inform and be informed, to make a difference, to affect and be affected. Information, in this sense, is not epistemological but ontological, its informative or affective capacity being synonymous or indistinguishable from a process of individuation. The purity ascribed to information should not, however, be thought to lay claim to atemporal immutability or the transcendence of ideas as forms. For Simondon, `information can only be inherent to a problematic; it is that by which the incompatibility of the non-resolved system becomes an organising dimension in the resolution [...] Information is the formula of individuation, a formula that cannot exist prior to this individuation’.<sup>7</sup> The purity of information does not, therefore, refer to eternal and transcendent immutability, nor anything resembling fixity or discretion, but rather an anteriority devoid of `content’ that is nonetheless productive of its conditions. This is, then, a peculiar and counterintuitive purity that has nothing to do with essentialism.

Dynamic Nature Philosophy

The nature of this natural history of media can be made clearer with reference to a broader nature philosophical project with which Kahn’s historical narrative would appear to have a number of resonances. The natural history that Kahn outlines with reference to Turrell and Hinterding would seem to mirror the concerns of Iain Hamilton Grant’s nature philosophical project. For Grant `the philosophy of nature itself is [...] is no longer grounded in somatism, but in the dynamics from which all grounds, and all bodies issue’.<sup>8</sup> What makes this a natural history of media is, following Grant’s nature philosophy, the shift from an orientation towards the objective, somatic and phenomenological towards anorganic dynamics and energetic continuums, a shift from apparent bodies to to the medium of their appearance and ultimately the imperceptible dynamics that constitute the conditions of both. It is this dynamic orientation that approaches what Grant refers to as `nature itself’, a ceaseless and blind productivity that is `no longer grounded in somatism’. Sticking with the subject matter of Kahn’s natural history, this dynamist orientation approaches what Grant has referred to as an `electromagnetic ontology’ in his attempt to define nature philosophy as an account of the dynamics from which the objective and apparently discrete emerges, as well as that by which the latter are undermined.⁹ Connections between Grant’s nature philosophical project and Kahn’s natural history of media are further strengthened with another reference to the work of Turrell whose anobjective approach remains nonetheless physical. For Adcock, ‘Turrell’s achievement is allied with his abandoning physical objects altogether, yet his use of light retains a relationship with physicality [...] light itself takes on substance’.¹⁰ The shift from an object orientated approach towards one embracing the dynamics of an extra-somatic or pre-individual energetic agency is concomitant with Grant’s nature philosophical approach that is `dynamicist rather than somatic [...] non-phenomenal [...] without being non-physical’.¹¹

Towards a Larger Vibrational Continuum

Focusing solely upon the visual spectrum we radically limit ourselves to a narrow if not insignificant bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum, to the margins within which art history as so far been–largely–content to nestle. It therefore becomes necessary to turn towards the invisible and imperceptible, to those frequencies which stretch beyond not only the visible spectrum but that which is in any way phenomenologically apparent or apparently given. In addressing the extension of electromagnetic oscillations below the visible spectrum, Kahn draws upon the work of Joyce Hinterding, whose various pieces involving VLF (3-30kHz) develop approaches to natural radio and frequencies that fall within the range of audibility and so can through a relatively simple method of transduction be rendered acoustical, mechanical and audible.

Hinterding’s move is one of an undermining of media, insofar as it runs counter to any emphasis upon content by drawing into the audible domain the medium of a pure and anomalous information. This undermining is also an unconditioning of both the phenomenal and media as constitutied and discrete objects or systems, bringing to the surface the contingencies, affordances and capacities of the matters that underpin both. The undermining of the media through critical attention to its material conditions—what we might refer to as critical engineering—descibes a praxical reorientation around the real term of McLuhan’s decisive dyad, the medium as a ‘matter of indifference’.¹²

1. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 16.
2. Craig Adcock, James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space, 1
3. Adcock, Art of Light and Space, 2
4. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 62
5. Gilbert Simondon, The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis available as pdf here
6. Simondon, The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis
7. Simondon, The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis
8. Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 8
9. Grant, Chemistry of Darkness, 44. Available as pdf here
10. Adcock, James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space, 2
11. Grant, Philosophies of Nature, 55
12. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 16.

Tynemouth Surface 5 by schrimshaw

Tynemouth Surface 8 by schrimshaw

Experiments in geophonography: a process of tracing ‘meaningless’ and illegible inscriptions that are nonetheless informative, following distorted lines and figures that intersect both the history of phonography and recent geophilosophical speculation. Each iteration of the process entails tracing the contours of a particular geological rupture or protrusion, the abstraction of its structure, and its eventual re-inscription into wood and vinyl.

It would appear that we have entered a new Dark Age. Far from this being a lament for the loss of clear vision, the stagnation of thought, or forewarning against rising fundamentalism seeking to reinstate the dominance of religious dogma, the darkness into which we are heading presents itself as the site or sector of unimaginable potential. An irritable object indifferent to prying eyes, a spot that cannot be itched, a bubo nested within the armpit of the Enlightenment; this darkness presents a strange attraction, the power of a mode of thought whose strength resides not with punitive certainties or that which speaks loud and clear, but in constantly uncovering, from within the obscure murmur of the universe, the humbling if not humiliating extent of our ignorance.

The narrative of cosmology, far from presenting the greatest story ever told, appears riddled with plot holes, presenting more a kind of cheap horror or soap opera, whose internal contradictions and inadequacies are patched-up or filled out with the sudden appearance of new figures and forms, dubious subplots and returns from the dead. A new darkness engulfs us on a cosmic scale, dark matter, dark energy, dark flows, a `dark sector‘ that constitutes around ninety five percent of what we currently understand to be our universe. For all our advances, we now more than ever find ourselves  alone in the dark, the extent of this blackness presenting another point on a long list of humiliations that have seen humanity irrevocably withdrawn from any leading or central role in the cosmological narrative.

Yet, beyond dejection, once we have recovered from any anthropic sulk or fit of pique at the erosion of our cosmic significance, this darkness is to be recognised as the source of great desire, of hope (not of salvation but of a better grasp of reality, whereby we might come to terms with the inevitability of our demise), of incomprehensible potential, an ominous shadow of futurity that itself embodies quite the opposite. As Katie Paterson has said of her History of Darkness (2010) “every time we look into the sky we are looking into the past. For example, the light from the sun is reaching us from a few minutes ago. The light from the moon, from a few seconds ago. So when we look through a telescope, we are looking right into cosmic history”. This black beyond blackness presents a cosmos both temporally and spatially before our eyes. This darkness presenting imperceptible electromagnetic wavelengths whose journey began well before the dawn of humanity and will extend beyond our brief window in cosmic history. In its combination of blackness and cosmology, History of Darkness presents a peculiar kind of `gothphysics’, manifesting the aesthetics of scientistic nihilism.<sup>1</sup> The impact of this scientifically inspired realism or dark materialism is not, however, constrained by the kitsch aesthetics of gothic darkness, as it is in attending to the imperceptible that its power resides. Many of Paterson’s works are concerned with that which persists beyond anthropocentric epistemologies and the bandwidths of empiricism, taking as their various `objects’ or forces that which is otherwise or remains imperceptible. These concerns are variously manifest in the construction of her Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand (2010), the imperceptible motion of As the World Turns (2010), in which the revolutions of a 12” record are synchronised to those of the earth, and to the extension of the medium of light beyond the thresholds of sight in History of Darkness. In all instances thought is propelled towards an ontology beyond the manifest image of what is empirically given. In such instances the conceptual work indexes the gap constitutive of our cosmic ignorance, that between nature and intuition, cosmic exteriority and perception, matter and knowledge, or (as in the case of the Ingleby Gallery‘s curatorial intent for Mystics or Rationalists?) that `between an idea and an object’.

Mounted and framed, each iteration of History of Darkness presents a hole, a puncture or gap within the whiteness that surrounds each black, rectangular image. This darkness presents a kind of blind-spot, marking the contingencies of vision and the epistemologies built upon it. The blackness of this cosmic darkness is such that its depth cannot be known; this blackness presents a seed of doubt and uncertainty that on the one hand attests to our ignorance and, on the other, presents infinite allure. As one is drawn towards these images, thought is drawn towards the void. While not jettisoning representation, it is of significance that this blackness presents not only to the eye an abstract, empirical blackness, nor to the mind the sign or symbol of any-thing, but a `nothing’ that is nonetheless what it is, a residual artefact and impression of a cosmic exteriority that attests to its reality: “I like to think that while they [the images comprising History of Darkness] show `nothing’ they are also latent with the future and all things that came after”. While not escaping representation (nor trying particularly hard to do so) this Darkness nonetheless presents what resides beyond representation’s `ultimate external illusion’, according to which this blackness or `groundlessness should lack differences, when in fact it swarms with them’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 347). Beyond apparent and empirical homogeneity, this blackness remains, as Paterson states, “latent with the future”, swarming with differences, with the generative elements of the universe that while imperceptible remain productive on cosmic scales. In our questioning and scouring of the universe we enter a new age of darkness, one where the black presents neither dejection nor speculative exhaustion, but infinite allure, boundless potential and unfathomable depths. Despite its radically non-anthropic consequences, this darkness, far from stagnant homogeneity, attests to the unfathomable productivity of the imperceptible, its potential to undermine and pierce the often apparently immutable state of things; it is only from these shadowy regions and `dark sectors’ that the radical and truly contingent event can emerge, coming as if out of nowhere, out of nothing.

1. The phrase `gothphysics’ first came to my attention through conversation with Julian Oliver. See #gothphysics on Twitter.