Romance and the Resonance of the One

Posted by admin on February 18th, 2007 filed in theory

I have recently been thinking how in much of my work, be it based in sound or text, I retain what I am increasingly thinking of as a romantic notion of the One. This has become an issue for me recently as I’ve been making an effort to read more Badiou, but there is also a certain thrill in reading texts that undermine the way you’ve become accustomed to thinking, as long as they are unapologetic and cutting, and Badiou is surely that.

I will quickly try and explain where this has all come from (in its unashamedly romantic form):

The fascination with a primordial chaos, a vibrational expanse is something which has grown out of working with sound as the primary material of artistic expression. The extension of this interest into a selective reading of Deleuzian ontology is built upon the idea of the Big Bang, and that from this initial explosion ⎯ to which scientists are still listening in order to determine the age and expansion of the universe ⎯ all matter was eventually formed. From this I entertain the notion of sound having a potentially immanent relationship with the the event which founded our universe. We are in a sense shot through with the vibrations of this initial opening or Throw. From this perspective, to work with sound (or to experience Wolf Eyes…) is to attempt to access, to tap back into, this vibrational and primordial continuum from which All emerged. In the context of a performance or installation, as sound acquires adequate force, one submits to the flow of things, to the affectations of sound which have a literal impact upon the body in its passive-receptive state. Working with sound, with the aural and sensory perception of noise, becomes an act of stitching oneself back into the textural, vibrational continuum of the One.

A Brief Argument For and Against the One:

It may or may not come as a surprise to find that a concise exposition of the primordial nature of the Big Bang theory can be found in Žižek’s The Metastases of Enjoyment. His discussion is concerned with the cinema of David Lynch but in this he finds room for a thinking of sound and ontology:

… the primordial noise, the last remainder of the Big Bang, is constitutive of space itself: it is not noise ‘in’ space, but a noise that keeps space open as such… this noise forms the ontological horizon, the frame of reality itself, the very texture that holds reality together… From the ‘open’ infinite universe of Cartesian-Newtonian physics, we thus revert to the pre-modern ‘closed’ universe, bounded by a fundamental ‘noise’.(Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 115).

It comes as no surprise to read that, for Žižek, this Noise corresponds with an over-proximity to the Real, to the withdrawal from the symbolic frame towards a chaotic sub-strata. This becomes particularly interesting if we consider Žižek’s coalescence of the Lacanian Real and the Deleuzian reality of the virtual at the beginning of his book on Deleuze. This withdrawal towards the Real is also to be thought of as one towards the Virtual, towards the primordial chaos that links both of these concepts.

It would seem that this coalescence also works for Badiou (who, it should be noted, also talks about the Virtual with reference to sonority); his understanding of Deleuze as a classical thinker would fit with the conception of the Virtual as the primordial ground for a distinctly ‘pre-modern’ understanding of the universe. Complications arise when we consider this pre-modern universe as being ‘closed’, as Žižek does. Following Badiou’s critique (found in One, Multiple, Multiplicities), Deleuze’s universe of multiplicities are ‘open’ in the sense that they are grasped by an infinite becoming, powered by the vital One. This openness is, however, flawed due to its being open to the infinite richness of substantial reality and not to the infinity of the set which, according to Badiou, is infinitely richer and more complex than substantive reality. For both Žižek and Badiou, this ‘open’ is in fact ‘closed’ as far as it is grounded in a primordial and elementary chaos. Badiou situates this confusion of the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ multiplicity in a limited conception of the infinite with regard to number, in a failure to see that numbers are but a small part of the infinity which is provided by set theory. It is here that the immanence of any given multiplicity falters as its being ‘open’ is consistent only as far as it is open to the Virtual, and therefore does not find its vital power in immanence but within the transcendental plane of which it is a singular instance. This transcendental plane, or ‘opening’ is of course Virtual and as such the opening to which it signals is that of the One, the Big Bang or the Throw. This is clearer If we return to Žižek’s coalescence of Virtual and Real, and in particular his development of the parallax Real:

The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns to its place”… the parallax Real is, rather, that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is … the hard bone of contention that pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances … this very hard core is purely virtual. (Žižek, The Parallax View, 26)

Here Žižek seems to be placing his own argument for the Virtuality of the parallax Real directly in the scope (and not necessarily as an obstruction) of Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s subsumption of multiplicity within the One; multiplicities are n modes of the Virtual and are therefore subject to the consistency and sameness of the One. Which brings us back to the issue of immanence, or rather to the fact that immanence is only an issue when we are concerned with the consistency of Deleuzian multiplicity. For Žižek, immanence is not the issue here (dude), and he situates his ontology in competition with Badiou through maintaining a notion of the One which is separated by a gap from within. It is this issue of immanence which determines the way in which we are to think of the coherence of the Virtual as the primordial noise of the One, from which multiplicities are actualized or appear. Here I find myself at the point of a decision (false or otherwise…); if these critiques of Deleuze are granted sufficient priveledges, either immanence holds and the substantive Virtual (or the Real) as the defining feature of our ontological horizon, along with the coherence of the One, does not. The primordial noise of the Virtual is, as Žižek claims, in fact ‘closed’ as far as it is reduced to its own immediate locality, which situates its immanent power in actuality at the expense of both the Virtual and the One, and therefore ‘opens’ it up to the immanence of Badiou’s fully actual infinity. Or, immanence is of little concern and the One remains, albeit divided from within by the impossibility of any direct access to the Real/Virtual from which the frame of reality emerges. Of course the final option would be to dismiss both these arguments and get back to Deleuze in an act of faith, affirming both the immanence of the Virtual and coherence of the One.

It is in this point that these arguments have the strongest impact upon my initial interest in a substantive theory of the Virtual and the One, which has as its opening the theory of the Big Bang. The consequence of a decision at this point would mean a fairly dramatic rethinking of my, admittedly romantic, artistic use and understanding of sound as an affective force based on the idea that we are somehow able to ‘tap into’ this ‘wave of becoming’, or at least the resonances of this initial event, which still echoes throughout the universe. But it also goes beyond that…

No, no decisions yet.