Sonorous Individuation and the Dangers of Deterritorialization

Posted by admin on January 13th, 2008 filed in theory

Ibitsu has produced yet another interesting development to the ongoing discussion of silence, noise and sonorous individuation. It seems that we’re both bashing out an idea of what we believe sonorous individuation to be, so I’m going to try and develop things a little here. There are a number of interesting points that he raises and the post deserves your full attention, so I’ll quote only excerpts here. This is a rambling post but Ibitsu’s latest post has joined a few dots and raised a few difficult questions, so this is in an attempt to tackle all the ones that jumped out at me in the absence of time to do so in a thorough and detailed way.

I find the above image (which is intended as an elucidation wave/particle duality) particularly useful for imagining a number of ideas raised in Difference and Repetition, such as the conception of Difference outlined in chapter one and as a way to “imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it” (Difference and Repetition, 28). Additionally, in a way that is relevant to the ongoing discussion with Ibitsu, I find this to be a good way of thinking of individuation as contraction: individuation occurs as a contraction of the murmur of the inaudible ground. Through contraction a single point or peak rises from the ground, as it passes a certain threshold (which could be pictured as a ring around the base of a peak in the image above) it appears as an individual. If we are considering sonorous individuation, the ground is the noise of inaudibility, beyond a threshold which marks the process of individuation that noise is rendered sonorous, outside of that threshold all movement falls silent or inaudible.

This first point I’d like to pick up on is this:

In hearing and silencing we are constantly renewed or perhaps in a Deleuzian idiom: sonorous individuation must hereby name a perpetual deterritorialization

It is essential to remember, as Ibitsu will later point out, that this perpetual deterritorialization is inseparably linked to reterritorializations. Such a discussion of sonority is well suited to considering the reciprocity of territorialization and deterritorialization as Deleuze and Guattari identify in sound the potential for it to become the ‘cutting edge of a deterritorialization’. But sound also plays a key role in the emergence of territories in their description of the refrain (I would provide some proper quotes here but I’ve left my copy of A Thousand Plateaus at work). This very point has been receiving some attention over that past month or so in a somewhat fragmented discussion between myself, Ibitsu, Mark and Levi. I was reminded of this discussion when I recently read Spaces Speak, are You Listening: Experiencing Aural Architecture, a book that introduces some interesting topics and provides a general discussion of what constitutes aural architecture, it’s relation to culture, behaviour, the expression of power and a number of other points. Despite these interesting ideas I wouldn’t really recommend the book as, outside of what is an interesting introduction, the discussion becomes too general, the core ideas aren’t discussed in much depth, there is little referencing and it is littered with grand and unsupported statements. Here’s an example: ‘Soundscapes are alive by definition; they can never be static’ (p.15). I later realised that, taken out of context, this statement is quite interesting with regard to the ongoing discussion of sound, silence and noise: if soundscapes are alive, static is death. This static is not merely immobile but that static and purely random noise that appears in the absence of all signal (that noise which is disappearing with the birth of 24 hour broadcast). It is this purely random noise, a distribution of unconnected points, that violates what Levi, in a comment over on Struggles with Philosophy identifies as the central axiom of Deleuze’s philosophy:

It seems to me that if there is one central Deleuzian axiom, it is that beings only are in relation. An absolute deterritorialization would be a direct violation of this.

Static is the absolute deterritorialization of signal, devoid of all relationality and therefore dead; static is death, for even in the chaotic murmur or noise of inaudibility there exists differential relations or tensions between singularities which provide a primitive framework for emergence. All that lives sounds but this sound can remain inaudible. Perhaps there must be a distinction between static noise, however inaudible, and an absolute static in silence. A deterritorialization is always in movement, it swings between an innevitable reterritorialization, only when the movement stops, when it becomes purely static and the deterritorialization is absolute does it also become silent. As long as static sounds it signals relations between its constitutive singularities, only when it falls silent does static become absolute. For Deleuze, as Ibitsu points out, a deterritorialization is always on course for reterritorialization in one form or another, it is a process in continual flux, only when it is absolute does is stop or become static:

deterritorialization and reterritorialization are never separate, rather they occur simultaneously. Thus, to speak of territorialization is to speak of something which is at once constituted and unconstituted, something which never fully settles as a fixed territory but is always becoming Other than itself. Perhaps more acutely and less abstractly, one may suggest that sonorous individuation does not involve a pre-existent body which unconsciously filters sound, rather in filtering sound the body is individuated. But if silence is never silent, and noise ceaseless, then the process of contraction must likewise be continual. Thus, if we are continually hearing and thereby silencing, surely we are never fully individuated, but rather our very individuation names that ceaseless process of hearing and silencing.

To draw this ramble to a close I would like to pick up on the body in Ibitsu’s post. I find it hard to shed the body or to grasp the idea that it does not preexist its sonorous individuation, partly because this suggests a fully sonorous ontology, but also because a body, or an embodied complex, surely provides the resonant chamber or field in which inaudible vibrations can resound, without such a field there is no space in which the dramatization of inaudible forces can take place. In other words, sonorous individuation presupposes a body in which it can resound. Sonorous individuations are perhaps always re-individuations as individuation must remain a constant process; such a process, as Levi has previously pointed out, occurs amidst chaos as an attempt to make sense of an overwhelming problem and constitutes a pedagogy as an essential continuity of becoming amid chaos. The question is perhaps whether, in order to maintain this discussion of sonorous individuation, we identify in sonorous intensity the provision of a metastable state presupposed by individuation, or we conceive of sound as an intermediary, dramatizing force. This is going to take a little more thinking about.