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Wave Space

May 21, 2012

Three experimental approaches to the production and analysis of “sound geographies”:

Wallace Sabine

In this study, Sabine did not employ an air-driven organ pipe as his source of sound; he instead used an electrically druven tuning fork. The detector—usually hiw own ears—was, in this case, a telephone receiver or earpiece. The tuning fork was placed at the centre of the room and covered with an amplifying resonator. The receiver was rigged to a complicated mechanism that was just two waltzing mice short of a Rube Goldberg machine. A falling weight caused the pole on which the receiver was mounted to rotate; at the same time, the rotary motion caused the receiver to be gradually pulled from the end to the center of the pole. The result was that the receiver traveled in a continuous spiral path through the room at a constant height. The telephonic receiver generated an electrical current that represented the variations in sound intensity it encountered as it spiraled through space. That current was then fed to a sensitive “Einthoven string dynamometer,” where it set up vibrations of varying amplitude in a silvered string. Sabine rigged a motion picture camera to photograph the image of the vibrating string onto a strip of film and the constantly changing intensity of vibration could then be read off the developed image on that film. Sabine mapped those intensities back onto the spiral path traversed by the receiver, to create by a point-by-point plot of the relative sound intensity in the room. Finally, by connecting locations of equal intensity, Sabine created the contour map illustrated [below].¹

Mark Bain

For some time I have been involved in an ongoing research into the area of sound and architecture and how different sonic events can condition bodies of inhabitants and buildings they occupy. For the most part this has focused primarily in two fields of research that both relate to each other and act as separate entities, that being the activation of structures and the acoustic recording of materials that make up structures [...] [into the floor of an isolated room I] added six large frequency inducers (vibration exciters) to the underside of the floor which were connected to a floor which connected to a control mixer. After the room was reassembled, the instrument was complete and I had a kind of tectonic sound machine which spectators could walk on a feel through their bodies [...] Part of this piece also involved the use of a fine powder material spread on top of the floor panels to visualize the waveforms travelling throughout the floors …²

Alvin Lucier

Create standing waves in space caused by constructuve and destructive interference patterns among sine waves from loud speakers. With single sine wave oscillators, amplifiers, and pairs of loudspeakers, design sound geographies for dances consisting of troughs and crests of soft and loud sound that form in outward-arching, symmetrically mirrored hyperbolic cuurves between the loudspeakers, the size and number of which are determined by the frequencies of the sine waves and the distances between the loudspeakers. Add loudspeakers, creating additional sets of hyperbolas, some of which intersect. When necessary, clear pathways for dancers by slightly changing the frequencies of the sine waves, shifting the location of the hyperbolas.³

1. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, 67-8. [↩]
2. Mark Bain, ‘Sonic Architecture’ in ArchiSound, 6-7. [↩]
3. Alvin Lucier, Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1973-4) in Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings: 1965-1994, 344. [↩]

Comments (0) | Tags: Acoustics, Alvin Lucier, Architecture, Auditory Space, Mark Bain, Wallace Sabine

Non-cochlear Sound

February 20, 2012

This is the first draft of an new essay that will appear here temporarily. This text will continue to change over the next couple of weeks as I attempt to refine it and provide some kind of decent ending. Comments are greatly appreciated.

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Non-cochlear Sounds: On Affect and Exteriority

This essay considers the notion of the sonic affect: what it is, what it can be and what it does. The definition of affectivity is ordinarily 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 more generally, 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 the exteriority normally ascribed to vision according to what Jonathan Sterne has called he `audio-visual litany’ (Sterne 2003, 19-29). 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 Deleuzian ontological framework that is assumed as a basis for the following argument.

The notion of `sound itself’ is repeatedly returned to throughout this text—with 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>. The term problematic, as it is used herein, should not be thought to denote negativity—in the sense of something that needs to be fixed—as the term problematic is here used in the Deleuzian sense of something which forces thought and provokes responses or creative `solutions’. is used here in. For a concise explanation of the Deleuzian concept of the problematic see Toscano (2006, 2).) Most important for the present argument is the importance that `sound itself’ holds in Christoph Cox’s recent call for a sonic materialism sympathetic to contemporary developments in philosophical realism (Cox 2011).<sup>3</sup> In advancing a 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 the present 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 (Sterne 2003 & 2011). 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 that we need not pass over it in silence.⁵

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 (Shaviro 2010, 3). 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 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 and sounds independently of their being heard, excess becomes a key issue in defining that remaining outside the subjective interiority that, according to common sense, affect is thought to affirm. The necessity of this excess is 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. Considered from the point of its 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 two 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 requirement 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’ (2003, 164). In the instance of its being of art—as opposed to another equally productive situation—the affect remains `independent of the viewer or hearer [...] independent of the creator’ and—as an addition to Deleuze and Guattari’s list—independent of art (Deleuze and Guattari: 2003, 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: 2003, 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 (see Greenberg 1995, 85-93). 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: 2003, 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. 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’.⁶ This question can be stated more simply as asking what remains of the affect excised from the necessity of affirmation, of its being felt? 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 the centrality of 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, reduced to the bare minimum of constitutive relations, 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. Affects are in this sense primarily functional and informative, the agents of qualitative, sensory appearances that remain irreducible to them.

Clarifying some Deleuzian jargon, qualitative extension can be—for present purposes—thought as being synonymous with external appearances, 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 knowledge of affective excess and autonomy. It is the necessity of this subjective, relational extension that is shed, stripped away or cut down in a process of `prodigious simplification’. The necessity of anthropic 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: 2003, 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.⁷ Before diving into yet another exposition of terms, we can consider the extent to which ontological equivalence of affective autonomy and intensive quantity can be expressed aesthetically, specifically with reference to a process of compositional simplification or reduction whereby intensive quantity may be mobilised independently of qualitiative or experiential extensity.⁸

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>9</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 underpinning 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, of course, 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 a 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 (2004, 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 independently 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.¹⁰

Affect and Intensive Quantity

Affect and intensity are considered structurally equivalent, as both are understood according to common sense to be bound to affirmative experience, yet both are identified by Deleuze as persisting in excess of that which is empirically given, 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.<sup>11</sup> 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 be 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 or 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 outlined 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>12</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.<sup>13</sup> 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 to 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).¹⁴ 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. 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).¹⁵

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.¹⁶ 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 Lucier describes how:

Joan [La Barbara] 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.¹⁷ 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 affirmation 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. The equivalence of affect and intensity shows how the notion of intensity is not so easily aligned with one of an interiority that is necessarily affirmative `for us’, insofar as it accounts for a kind of excessive process of becoming over the apparent.¹⁸ This appears contrary to the ideology of immanence according to which one is always on the inside of sonority, insofar as it effects an enveloping field of vibrations which includes the listening subject within it¹⁹. Yet the `inside’ of sonority remains the inaudible territory of sound itself, as that which we call and experience as sound is necessarily manifest as qualitative extension `for us’.

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: 2004b, 97). While experience is conceived as occluding intensity it is not thought to be necessarily or absolutely qualitative—beyond the modalities bound to recognition and intentional objectivity. We must, therefore, conceive of an abstract and non-qualitative, i.e. intensive, empiricism, an `absolute’ or `transcendental’ empiricism. This is what reductive simplification aims at and what is implicated in the statement that `intensity is simultaneously the imperceptible and that which can only be sensed [...] it is that which gives to be sensed and defines the proper limits of sensibility’ (Deleuze, 2004, 290). In claiming the equivalence of affect and intensity we can read the above passage 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 a notion of `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 praxical notions of sound in excess of 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 positions of which are 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.²⁰ 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 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.²¹ 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 concern²².

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’ (2009, 8). That which `belongs to humanity’ in Kim-Cohen’s argument 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 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 productive of affects, catalytic elements whose various signs did not represent sounds to be recalled but presented affective capacities beyond the possibility of any sonification. At a more general level, the experimental turn—identified by Cage as 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: 2009, 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: 2009, 14). The notion of the non-cochlear that I present here is aligned with this particular understanding of non-sound as a model of clamorous silence populated by inaudible yet affective signals, signals that are taken as structurally equivalent to autonomous and infraesthetic affects. It is in this Cagean sense of a extrasomatic affectivity that sound’s independence from the necessity of its being heard is to be understood, as its independence from the necessity of its being heard `by us’, suggesting a non-anthropic audition or a peculiar scientism of signals. Sound is thereby understood as being independent of its synthetic reproduction by the body but not necessarily all bodies or `sets other than the ear’. The affect thereby remains a relational event yet this relation is not necessarily manifest for us but, rather, for any body, taking steps towards an inhuman, `absolute’ or `transcendental’ empiricism and a consequent ethics of exteriority.

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.²³

References

Bryant, L., Srnicek, N., Harman, G. (eds.) (2011), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.

Cage, J., (2009), Silence: Lectures and Writings. London: Marion Boyars.

Cox, C., (2011), `Beyond Representation and Signification’. Journal of Visual Culture, 10 (2), 145-161.

Derrida, J., (1997), Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, J., (2005), Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge.

Gilles, D., (2004), Difference and Repetition. London and New York: Continuum.

Gilles, D., (2004b), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e).

Gilles, D., and Guattari, F., (2003), What is Philosophy?. London and New York: Verso.

Gilles, D., and Guattari, F., (2004), A Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Continuum.

Greenberg, C., (1995), The Collected Essays and Criticism vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Kahn, D., (2009), `Alvin Lucier: I am Sitting in a Room, Immersed and Propagated’. OASE, 78, 24-37.

Kim-Cohen, S., (2009), In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-cochlear Sound Art. London and New York: Continuum.

Lucier, A., (1995), Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings, 1965-1994. Köln: MusikTexte.

Massumi, B., (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Meillassoux, Q., (2009), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London and New York: Continuum.

Pasnau, R., (2000), `Sensible Qualities: The Case of Sound’. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38, 27-40.

Shaviro, S., (2010), `Post Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’. Film-Philosophy, 14 (1), 1-102.

Sterne, J., (2003), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Sterne, J., (2011), `The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Aurality’. The Canadian Journal of Communication, 36 (2), 207-225.

Toscano, A., (2006), Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Voegelin, S., (2010), Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, London and New York: Continuum.

1. This bias is what Jonathan Sterne has referred to as the `audio-visual litany’ (2003, 19-29). Sterne presents extensive critique of this position—the ahistorical opposition of sight and sound—in The Audible Past (2003) and `The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Aurality’ (2011). A recent example of the affirmation of the audio-visual litany—to which the present argument is opposed—or the ahistorical characterisation of the nature of sound can be found in Salomé Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010). [↩]
2. Kim-Cohen (2009), Voegelin (2010), Cox (2011 [↩]
3. Here I refer to the philosophical movement formerly known as Speculative Realism, also `continental realism’ in Levi Bryant et al. (2011). [↩]
4. Such arguments for an `autonomy of affects’ can be found in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2003), Brian Massumi (2002) and Steven Shaviro (2010 [↩]
5. 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. [↩]
6. The terms qualitative extension and intensity are returned to in more detail below. [↩]
7. 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. [↩]
8. For a detailed discussion of the concepts of qualitative extension and intensity see Deleuze 2004, 289-303. [↩]
9. 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. [↩]
10. 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. [↩]
11. Deleuze refers to intensity in quantitative terms as intensity is not considered an object of qualitative perception or experience, being a term used to describe the imperceptible dynamics that are considered the conditions of experiential qualities. See Deleuze 2004, 290-7. [↩]
12. These `innate’ qualities of sound being readily opposed vision, or a `hegemony of the visual’, to which the opposite qualities are ascribed (Cox 2011, 157). [↩]
13. Examples of immersion being claimed as a privilege of auditory experience against the discretion of the visual can be found in Voegelin (2010) and in Marshall McLuhan’s concept of acoustic space. [↩]
14. 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). [↩]
15. The full score for Still and Moving Lines affords greater complexity, but for present purposes this summary will suffice. [↩]
16. Wave field synthesis is a technique used in the creation of virtual acoustic environments and complex sound spatialisation and acoustical modeling. [↩]
17. This is, of course, the target 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. Regrettably there is insufficient space for a discussion of the gender politics implicated within this piece and its performance. [↩]
18. Even where the discussion of affective intensity is restricted to somatic terms, as we find it in Brian Massumi’s work, it is not taken to indicate an affirmation of interiority, but rather the extent to which the body is `radically open’ to the influence of external signals and events (Massumi, 2002, 29). [↩]
19. I use the phrase `ideology of immanence’ here as a generalisation of Sterne’s audio-visual litany. [↩]
20. This complement or undermining is considered transcendental in the sense of a transcendental materialism rather than idealism. [↩]
21. The term correlationism is taken from the work of Quentin Meillassoux and can be crudely summarised as naming philosophical positions wherein reality is only insofar as it is perceived, held or rendered in the mind (Meillassoux 2009). [↩]
22. For Deleuze `the Ideas as concrete universal stands opposed to concepts of the understanding’ (2004, 220), and so the relationship between Ideas as `the ultimate elements of nature’ (Ibid., 205) and concepts is that of `a profound complicity between nature and mind’ (Idem.). [↩]
23. A not dissimilar argument for non-being, as `not being’ without negation, can be found in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 76-7. [↩]

Comments (0) | Tags: Affect, Alvin Lucier, Douglas Kahn, Infraesthetics, Intensity, John Cage, Jonathan Sterne, Materialism, Noise, non-cochlear sound, Schaeffer, Seth Kim-Cohen, Silence, Sound Object, sound-itself

Affective Politics and Exteriority

January 28, 2012

Discussing the soundtrack to last year’s riots, protests and demos, specifically the noted shift from recognisable protest music and `right-on reggae’ to a wholly more ambiguous soundtrack comprised of Grime and chart rap, Mark Fisher notes what can crudely be referred to as an `affective turn’ in the politics of opposition, in the popular opposition to the scale and ideological agenda behind the coalition’s cuts.¹ What foregrounded the affective dimension of this popular and public opposition was the absence of a coherent and considered political message, people `failing’ to rally beneath a united and recognised banner, channelling a wholly more ambiguous and generalised current of anger, frustration and rage. The foregrounding of an affective dimension in certain popular movements is also noted by Jodi Dean with specific reference to OWS, who notes that some critics have characterised OWS as `acting out an affective politics suited best for social media’, lacking the direction of more organised and collectively coherent movement. This critique is aimed specifically at the affective orientation of much of the discourse surrounding current movements, focusing heavily upon emotional connections, anger and disaffection; it is, as Dean points out, the emphasis that affective discourse places upon the individual that is seen to disempower or undermine the coherence, validity and efficacy of popular politics:

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. [↩]

| Tags: Affect

A Natural History of Media

November 7, 2011

During the weekend I stumbled across a video of Douglas Kahn‘s recent presentation at Sonic Acts. Immediately interesting is the overview of a `natural history of media’ that he provides within the context of `aelectrosonic’ experimentation, a broad term that Kahn uses to refer to experiments with electromagnetism within experimental music and the variously sonic arts. Annoyingly, however, the talk is cut short, so I’m left guessing at Kahn’s conclusions, particularly those that specifically render this a natural history. Nonetheless, there are a number of points in Kahn’s outline of a natural history of media that resonate with a broader project of natural philosophy that I’ve been interested in for a little while; it’s these points, connections and resonances that I want to outline for future development.

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. [↩]

Comments (0) | Tags: Douglas Kahn, Electromagnetism, Iain Hamilton Grant, Information, James Turrell, Joyce Hinterding, Materialism, McLuhan, Medium, Simondon

Auditory Immanence and Affective Intensity

July 12, 2011

1. Affective Immanence and the Listening Subject

Affect and immanence are frequently confused (in a productive rather than a negative sense) towards a kind of sonorous, vital affirmation. This productive confusion is frequently expressed as testament to sound’s enveloping and visceral corporeality, which is then normally immediately contrasted to the critical distance and linearity of vision. As an example we can take Douglas Kahn’s description of auditory experience:

Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences [...] Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality (Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 27).

From this I’d like to draw only what are common statements regarding auditory experience, namely it’s `all-round corporeality and spatiality’. It’s worth pointing out at this point what is another common trope in the discussion of auditory experience—as Kahn gives a particularly clear example—namely the aforementioned contrast between the enveloping nature of sound and the frontal linearity of vision. This contrast is normally made by scholars within the diverse field of sound studies wishing to affirm and champion particular qualities, as well as the social and political significance, of the sonorous which are considered to have been historically undervalued. This comparison only serves this purpose, however, insofar as it remains imbalanced, comparing the medium of sound with the sense of sight; this imbalance allowing for an affirmation of sound’s affective, corporeal affirmation against sight’s somehow immaterial and transparent criticality. As I’ve said before—and as Jonathan Sterne has pointed out in detail through his criticisms of the `audiovisual litany’—this argument falls flat where the comparison is balanced and sound is compared to the equally enveloping and sensual medium of light, and sight is compared to an equally critical capacity for listening—or what Sterne refers to as audile technique. Kahn also addresses another binary distinction contributing to the `audiovisual litany’ or the ideology of immanence, namely the conceptual nature of vision and the sensual corporeality or `affectivity’ of audition. It is the latter part of what is largely an indefensible binarism—as much has been written on the sensuality of the vision and affective sight, Hannah Higgins and Mark Hansen spring to mind—that contributes to the confusion of affect and immanence towards a vitally affirmative conceptualisation of auditory experience; the sensuality of sound is, in this schema or tradition of thinking sonority, thought inseparable from its enveloping immanence—the specificity of which is (poorly) affirmed in contrast to the conceptual remove of vision. Yet, I would argue, the vitalistic nature of this confusion—linking affect and immanence—fails to adequately think either terms, but particularly immanence, reducing the latter to a particularly conservative notion.

The vitalistic conception of sonic and sensual immanence is thought in order to affirm the corporeality of auditory experience, the affective affirmation of somatic consistency lending to the constitution and unification of the embodied listening subject, to thinking the listening subject as one. Yet this affective affirmation requires a decisive distinction in order that one can be thought, that the sensual corporeality of the listening subject can be discerned as such through being set apart from others. It is this decisive distinction that violates any radical thinking of immanence as it requires that the self set itself apart in subtractive constitution for it to be. Immanence remains a conservative notion insofar as it is only for us or for an individual, as immanence must be immanent to something else that nonetheless sets itself apart. The consequent idea—following the conservative thinking of immanence as vital affirmation—of a kind of `immanent transcendence’ is perhaps better replaced by a kind of extimacy as immanence in the latter sense only serves as a conceptual vehicle or `trojan horse’ for thinking a kind of interior exteriority—that which is in me yet more than me or not only me but also other, the nesting of exteriorities—and itself remains poorly and conservatively thought. In place of this limited conservative conception, immanence should be thought radically or as a `pure immanence’ yet an immanence that cannot be lived insofar as life effects an aberrant bifurcation from the `cosmic truth of extinction’ or the more proximal, strangely familiar and `immanent’ exteriority or extimate alterity. Immanence, thought as a pure and absolutely unifying principle eschews both alterity, identity and life, and so there can be no ethics of immanence insofar as it makes room for neither exteriority nor decision.

2. Affective Intensity and Transcendental Empiricism

Sonic experience is often thought in the sense of a kind of Deleuzian intensity by virtue of its manifest ephemerality and transience, its `durational becoming’, yet quality remains the identifiable exterior and congealed exhaustion of intensity insofar as this exteriority or extension is what becomes identifiable and knowable of a sound, a sound which nonetheless persists in objective excess. The experience of or qualitative rendering of sound is always and necessarily for another and therefore—contrary to the conservative nature of the ideology of immanence—external to intensive becoming, covering over and even cancelling it. Affect is, in this line of thinking, closely related to intensity insofar as both are thought as a kind of energetic becoming or force, with affective intensity thought as a kind of pseudo-objective (I use this in a positive sense) rupture of the real or contact with a kind of durational—as opposed to spatial—becoming. Intensity is, however, not so easily aligned with an interiority `for us’ insofar as it accounts for a kind of excessive process of becoming over what appears. This appears contrary to the ideology of immanence according to which one is always on the inside of sonority, insofar as it effects an enveloping field of vibrations which includes the listening subject within it. Yet the `inside’ of sonority remains inaudible, as that which we call sound is necessarily manifest as qualitative extension `for us’. As Kahn describes in the above quote, sound surrounds both the objective source of the sound and the listening subject yet, I would add, without being reducible to either and therefore exterior to both, leaving an unknown and inaudible remainder that persists in between source and subject without being heard by either or by itself. This remainder presents a peculiar kind of non-phenomenal, and therefore non-Schaeferrian, sound object that persists in inaudibility: the inaudible interior of sound-itself which remains in excessive exteriority with regard to both objective source and subject (both of which are nonetheless surrounded by this sound, to a varying degrees, hearing it and thereby forming a kind of Truaxian `object orientated’ acoustic community). 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 properly 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.

Developing Deleuze’s more general notes on sensory distortion, taken from Difference and Repetition, to the present argument regarding sound, intensity is that which is only revealed wherein what a sound `is’ or, rather, `is of’—what it represents, even where that is the image of its objective source rather than some more abstract subjective or cultural meaning—is stripped away:

The point of sensory distortion is often to grasp intensity independently of extensity or prior to the qualities in which it is developed. A pedagogy of the senses, which forms an integral part of `transcendentalism’, is directed towards this aim. Pharmacodynamic experiences or physical experiences such as vertigo approach the same result: they reveal to us that difference in itself, that depth in itself or that intensity in itself at the original moment at which it is neither qualified nor extended. At this point, the harrowing character of intensity, however weak, restores its true meaning: not the anticipation of perception but the proper limit of sensibility from the point of view of a transcendent exercise (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 237).

What is immediately of importance in this dense excerpt—which I quote at length as many of the points therein will be developed throughout the remainder of this post—is the sense of the qualified or extended, as it is this which defines or rather affords the referentiality and identity of a phenomenal experience, which must necessarily entail—without being reducible to—its sensory rendering, which is extensive to what it is in and for itself (which where sound is concerned, I argue, remains inaudible). The qualitative extension of intensity itself is its perception as a fixed or rather identifiable appearance, what it is for us rather than that which it is in-itself. We are well adept as listeners at binding the vast body or quantity of sonority by means of a critical audile technique, wherein sounds becomes signs, and of localising or locating sound objects within alteritous spatiality (here the term space is used in the narrow Bergsonian sense of the term). It is, however, at the extremities audition that the audile system is problematised: at the lower end, where wavelengths extend beyond that of the diameter of the head, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate sounds in space due the absence of significant inter-aural time differences: sound is heard as non-localised exteriority or, with sufficient amplitude, extimacy. At the higher frequencies where wavelengths find a resonance within the ear canal, localisation is equally difficult and sound is heard as a quite literally piercing, non-localised extimate event: appearing within yet coming from without (perhaps the most refined example of this latter case can be heard in Jacob Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis). What is important is that in both cases a sound cannot be easily located in space, pinned to an original point to which the sound itself is heard to refer. The non-localisable extremities of sound contribute to its becoming unknown in a sense and therefore permit something of its intensity to be felt, to emerge from the strictures of its qualitative, phenomenological extension.

Due to the sustained attention given to music and sonority by Deleuze, but most notably that carried out in collaboration with Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus an important question is raised: “why this privileging of the ear?”. Sound is granted a series of peculiar privileges, the most striking of which is perhaps—fascinating and seductive for the sound artist—that it acts as as the `cutting edge of deterritorializations’, thereby being recognised as an active force within processual determinations or individuation. In revisiting this question we should also address the `antithetical’ medium with which a contrast would be made in bolstering the audiovisual litany as a somewhat tepid tirade against `ocular tyranny’. There is, of course, an informative intensity to light implicated within processual individuation by way of sight, occurring by means of non-classical or “non-image forming photoreceptive pathways” which would be comparable—if not in a physiological sense—to the synthetic receptivity of hearing that Sterne contrasts to the analytical selectivity of listening (for more on this see Vandewalle et. al., ‘Spectral Quality of Light Modulates Emotional Brain Responses in Humans’ (pdf)). These affective capacities of light are exemplified in the work of James Turrell and more explicitly in Philippe Rahm’s use of UV light within the Hormonorium, directly exploiting its metabolic affectivity—yet it is perhaps due to the difficulty with which the `internal’ temporality or duration of light is perceived within given or common sense that it is not the recipient of the particular privilege Deleuze and Guattari place upon sonorous affectivity, insofar as it operates at a speed inhibiting its perception as other than a static constant. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari might be seen to make a similar move to that carried out by McLuhan in his—metaphorical—definition of `acoustic space’, making use of a commonly perceived if oversimplified experience of sound—its enveloping, immersive, etc., qualities—in order to make a more general comment about the nature of mediums. The danger of this tactic, however, is that it brings one’s argument into proximity with a certain transhistorical idealisation of mediums and senses, as Sterne has shown in his exposition of an `audiovisual litany’. This danger aside, the privilege accorded to sound would then be thought as depending upon it’s constitutive bandwidth and the specificity of its medium or material contingencies—which Deleuze and Guattari make reference to in a non-metaphorical and specific sense—while acting conceptually as a vehicle for a more general statement regarding the `transcendental’ or excessive informative capacity of a medium. This privilege might then be thought to receive further grounding in the confusion of the sonorous and the haptic, most clearly and commonly felt at the thresholds of audibility wherein its durational determination and temporal fluctuation is most pronounced to the senses. We find a similar argument put forward by Christoph Cox in his discussion of Max Neuhaus, Bergson and drones; where the latter, through frequency, constancy and repetition—the constitutive invariance of the drone in a kind of musical, extensive or identifiable sense—presents a kind of abstract duration apart from qualitative extension. In citing the drone as approaching something resembling the Bergsonian notion of duration, Cox quotes the following from Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity:

A melody to which we listen with our eyes closed, heeding it alone, comes close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of inner life; but it still has too many qualities, too much definition, and we must efface the difference among the sounds, then do away with the distinctive features of sound itself, retaining of it only the continuation of what precedes into what follows and the uninterrupted transition, multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation, in order to finally rediscover basic time. Such is immediately perceived duration, without which we would have no idea of time (Bergson, `Duration and Simultaneity’, in Key Writings, 205).

This procedural stripping away of the distinctive and perhaps specifically timbral qualities of sound that allow for its identification as the sound of a thing, i.e. it’s referential operation, is thought to uncover what we might think of in a technical sense as its spectral composition of frequency components, those simple waveforms whose sum is rendered qualitatively distinct in audition yet the internal composition of which persists in a kind of obscured `pure duration’ and `unspoilt’ frequency. This practice of stripping away the specific towards exposing an underlying or otherwise occluded durational intensity is a practice championed by Deleuze and Guattari, who site La Monte Young as an exemplary case employing a `prodigious simplification’ towards the deterritorialization of sound. Deterritorialization can be thought as a certain mobility or movement between territories, a mobility attained by sound, according to Deleuze and Guattari, through its refinement or simplification, a certain shedding of overtones and spectral complexity: ‘what is necessary to make sound travel, to travel around sound, is very pure and simple sound, an emission or wave without harmonics (La Monte Young has been successful at this) [...] a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited, selected’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 383). Sonic intensity, then, is known, thought or felt only in the sense of a pure sound, whether this be understood in the sense of pure and simple tones—as in A Thousand Plateaus—due to their approximation of a kind of Bergsonian duration, or in the sense of a kind of white noise, understood as the ‘Idea of sound’, as in Difference and Repetition:

the Idea of colour, for example, is like white light which perplicates in itself the genetic elements and relations of all colours, but is actualized in the diverse colours with their respective spaces; or the Idea of sound, which is also like white noise (Difference and Repetition, 258)

In both senses, sonic intensity cannot be thought apart from or without the concept of `transcendental empiricism’, wherein `purity’ is not of a thing—i.e. referential—but must remain highly abstract (if not `in-itself’ due to it’s being felt and therefore `for us’) in order to limit or shed extension. This peculiar empiricism is transcendental not in an ideal sense but, rather, in a real and a-referential sense insofar as such sounds are not known to be the sounds of anything other than a-referential intensity, if not strictly themselves (resembling a kind of hyper-Schaefferianism through the shedding of timbral qualities as yet another layer of extension occluding the intensity of the in-itself). This version of empiricism is transcendental in the sense that the qualities with which it concerns itself are not of or reducible to an `objective’ other as recognisable or known thing, but rather remain in excess of the localised objective identities that such a knowing would constitute, pertaining more to a transcendental materialism, substrate or excess of the objective beyond the ideal.

This peculiar empiricism is also thought as transcendental with regard to the specificity of the faculties and senses, marking the point at which they break down. The `transcendent exercise’ of the senses would entail a kind of critical empiricism drawing upon the point at which the limits of the senses are felt and ungrounded-in-a-sense. This is, again, thought as transcendental not in an ideal but real sense, identifying an excess of the objective beyond the phenomenal. Transcendental empiricism, in this sense, draws to the fore the subtractive nature of sensation, or its operation according to a kind of subtractive synthesis , i.e., that there is more to the event (in this case a sound) than what is perceived or rendered sensible in any one extensive instance. The revelation of the subtractive nature of sensation and perception reveals the transcendent nature of that which is sensed, specifically a quantity of its transcendental excess. This excess may bring to the fore the `transcendent exercise’ of the senses where the subtractive nature of one is insufficient in rendering the the excessive object sensible and defaults to the capacities of another. Again, an example of this can be taken from the extremes of audition, and specifically the `grey area’ of infrasonics. Marking the lower passage of the audible’s slip into inaudibility, the point at which audibility begins to falter and default upon hapticity in order to bind or render sensible the objective excess of a waveform, the point at which sounds are no longer heard but felt. The transcendent exercise of the subtractive discretion of the senses by an excessive objective stimulus performs a critical function in bringing to the fore—or to thought—the subtractive nature of the senses, but also in the manner with which this excess reveals the nature of the medium which itself persists in excess of its sensory or sensual subtraction. An example of this can be taken from the lower end or `depths’ or infrasonics where `sound’ is not heard as sound but felt as a kind of wind beating against or buffeting the flesh, revealing the medium of sound itself which is `cancelled’ or obscured in its qualitative rendering in audibility. To guard against this `intensive revelation’ being thought as a privilege of sound, a comparable example can be found in the lower registers of electromagnetic vibration where light becomes felt as heat. Transcendental empiricism points thought to an objective excess of the real by focusing upon the way in which the medium of sound-itself—air—persists in excess of the subtractive discretion of the senses, bridging—without completing or conjoining towards a common sense—the gap between them and their respective inadequacies. To put it another way, transcendental empiricism reveals something, a quantity, of the intensity of the in-itself by exercising the inadequacies of the subtractive limitations placed upon what appears to be or is sensibly rendered `for us’.

It is worth pointing out at this stage in order to make it clear that intensity is not herein idealised as some kind of pure state of perception to be lived and attained through a kind of `deep listening‘, but rather that intensity is never absolutely revealed, but appears with bits, fragments of what-it-is-the-sound-of stuck to it like pieces hard and brittle shell stuck to the otherwise smooth and flowing interior of a snail that has recently been stood on. Intensity—insofar as it appears—appears encrusted with qualities (timbre), although never absolutely or totally covered.

***

Addendum: A recent and related post on Larval Subjects Deleuzes Transcendental Aesthetics and Empiricism

Comments (0) | Tags: Affect, Bergson, Deleuze, Douglas Kahn, Drone, Duration, Ideology, Immanence, Intensity, Jacob Kirkegaard, Transcendental Empiricism

Subterranean Architectonics, The Vicissitudes of Verticality and a Crisis within Vision

June 10, 2011

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.

Comments (0) | Tags: Architecture, Auditory Space, Ballard, Deleuze, Fernández-Galiano, Invisible, Jonathan Sterne, McLuhan, Noise, Subterranean, Urbanism, Walking

Any Place Whatever

May 8, 2011

At the moment I’m trying to write an abstract. This always entails writing more—way more than the permitted word count—about whatever the topic might be before I’m able to pin in down to whatever I want to say, so here’s a little more on the specific and the general within field recording practice.

Field recording, soundscapes, acoustic ecology and phonography; while distinct, these various rubrics are readily associated with a site-specific sound practice, with work that seeks to directly engage with a given space or place, with found sounds and environments. This engagement often uncovers or amplifies through abstraction the peculiar or the specific, auditory objects, events and residues produced according to the specific contingencies of a given location. Yet to foreground this specificity is too gross a simplification, reducing field recording to documentary and grounding it within the representation and preservation of place. What marks the most interesting practices working with site and sound is the foregrounding of an ambiguity that arrises through the schizophonic dislocation with which such practices must necessarily engage. Such practices, rather than seeking to hold fast the relationship between sonic signifier and referent, engage with the distortions, transformations and composition manifest in the act of recording, as well as the spatial productions manifest in sound’s re-presentation. The necessary abstraction involved in recording and composing with site-specific sound entails a shift from the specific to the general, or an oscillation between place and non-place, between site specificity and an abstract space in general. This shift from specific to the general can be considered to address an ‘internal’ generative potential in sonority that is exposed only where sound is not reduced to representation but considered along the lines of its particular productive force. What is acknowledged and put into practice by artists working with the problem of site and sound is the capacity for sound to create, reconfigure and modulate space, to produce space anew, presenting an auditory spatial practice does not entail a documentation of place but a modulation and production.

This shift or oscillatory tension is perhaps most clearly exemplified in Asher Thal-Nir‘s expressed ‘desire to create recordings which have the unique characteristics of a particular room or space which only exists in the context of that recording‘, and his piece ‘Any Place Whatever’ (Audible Geographies, Room 40), showing the movement of thought between the contextually specific and a general mutability. This shift is also manifest in the work of Francisco López, whose nature recordings place an auditory focus not upon individual constituents, events, bodies or animals occupying a place but upon the dynamics of environments ‘as a whole’, recording and transforming the auditory expressions and influence of an acoustic community that includes the ‘inert’, industrial, inorganic and inhuman alongside the human. The movement from the specific to the general is one from the grounded to the generative, from the sound of place to the sonorous production of space.

These are practices that maintain a relationship with site, yet here the notion of site is not rigidly fixed to the specific, but rather invokes a spatial capacity for mutability, a notion of space as being in flux, as unfinished, as proto-place being composed or decomposing. It is place that suggests specificity, a place has definition, it is identifiable, located, it has a name, a defined function. A home, an office, a monument; all are places marked by known qualities and signal events, they are defined and well grounded. Site, on the other hand, may not be usable, it remains obscure and ambiguous. The building site, camp site are transitory, associated with ephemerality, mutability, passing through and an existence in-between: necessarily incomplete and unfinished. Site-specific practice, I would argue, engages with place or its determination, whereas the site of sound that emerges from the practices mentioned above, the site of sound in general—as presented in López’s tendency towards abstraction and the ‘environment as a whole’—performs an ungrounding of place synonymous with a production of space. In this sense a site orientated sound practice need not necessarily entail specificity but the mutability of ‘any place whatever’.

| Tags: Acoustic Ecology, Auditory Space, Field Recording, Francisco López, Phonography, Site, Site-Specific, Soundscape, Space

Nature Recording and The Broadband World

May 7, 2011

Some notes on Francisco López and Nature recording:

Francisco López’s recordings present to the ear nature in general more than anything specifically natural. In his recordings we hear sounds that can easily be classified as natural, but the ontological function of López work does not serve a taxonomy of the natural and unnatural or one of preservation. At the same time this work can, for a number of reasons, be classified as nature recording. In López’s work we get a sense of nature not as that domain into which humans encroach with their incessant throbbing machines, a domain that would remain pure and unspoilt without us, but as something more fundamental, ambiguous and obscure. Nature is in López’s recordings heard to be something which both gives shape to and destroys domains and the well grounded, something that persists in excess of the division of kingdoms—it is that which may remain clear and referential or slip into monstrous a-referential obscurity. López’s recordings present a focus less upon the specific individuals, bodies or species constituting a given natural domain than one upon nature in general:

I find particularly limiting the habitual focus on animals as the main elements of the sound environment […] If our perspective of nature sounds were more focused on the environment as a whole, instead of on behavioural manifestations of the organisms we foresee as most similar to us, we could also deal with plant bioacoustics … a sound environment is not only the consequence of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements. The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the bird as of the trees or the forest floor. If we are really listening, the topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials in the topsoil are as essential and definitory as the sound-producing animals that inhabit a certain space (Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter).

Against a limitation of the practice of nature recording to that of a limited set of organic or biotic species, López opens nature recording onto a radically  expanded set of agents that are considered influential within the determination of a sound field: not only animals but plants and apparently ‘inert’ base matters. This expanded focus that takes into account the inorganic acknowledges the broadly contingent nature of sonorous productions, their dependencies upon bodies of all kinds for their production, transmission and reception. The extensive contingency of sound space, sonic environments or acoustic ecology that is acknowledged in López’s expanded audition mirrors the expansive definition of the ‘acoustic community’ that we find in Barry Truax’s work:

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 (Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 66).

Again, we should note that 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 and the inorganic (Truax’s notion of the acoustic community is also discussed here). The subjects of acoustic ecology can therefore not be limited to the organic nor the living, but must take into account the inorganic, ‘inert’ and base.

This extensive awareness of the contingency of the soundscape and an expanded notion of the acoustic community—taking into account weather, systems, soil, plantlife, animals (including humans), considered amidst López’s tendency to include or not remove human and inorganic sounds from his recordings—marks a more general tendency in López’s thought to move from the specific to the general, or from the somatic to the dynamic. López’s approach attempts to focus attention on an environment as a whole, upon the confusion of bodies that leads to a blurred distinction between the otherwise discrete. This purposive confusion which aids a shift from the specific to the general entails a confusion of the distinction between foreground and background, as here signal distinction does not hold the privilege that it does within Schaferian ecology, wherein such confusion leads towards the emergence of a ‘lo-fi’ soundscape: the confusion of background noise and signal transmissions (what Lopez’s work suggests is that we consider nature itself as the ultimate lo-fi soundscape). Foreground is, in López’s recordings, strictly relative to the position of the listening subject (whether that be a human or a microphone, as both are considered to have agency within López’s work):

sound-producing animal species appear together with other accompanying biotic and non-biotic components of the sound environment that happened to be there when the recordings were done. In this sense, there is no purposeful a priori distinction of foreground / background, but only their unavoidable arisal due to the location of the microphones, as it happens with our ears. I’m not claiming objectivism […] but rather that the ‘focus’ of my attention was the sound environment as a whole (Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter).

This approach towards ‘the sound environment as a whole’ rather than discrete signal events contained within it is exemplary of a more general tendency to shift from the specific to the general, from that which is clear and distinct to that which is more confused, abstract or obscure. López’s Nature or field recording is a site orientated practice that is more abstract than specific. The practice of field recording frequently deals with the specifics of place or that which we might most readily associate with site-specific practice: identifying the auditory determinants of place and identity, the interactions and individuals that make them significant, drawing out that which is specific to a particular location, amplifying the peculiar details or framing them through dislocation, setting it apart from others, or from space in general. Yet it would be too gross a generalisation to suggest that field recording is primarily concerned with the representation of place, with an accurate auditory reconstruction of a given or specific site. In many—what I consider the most interesting—cases the intention of the artist is not that of representation but the transmission of a generative sonic materiality that may appear abstract to the ear when schizophonically dislocated. A site-specific sound practice can be broadly considered to deal with that which is peculiar to a given locale. Yet such practices lock sound into the operations of representation, drawing it out of itself towards the image of the referent and into a symbolic framework that leads to the sacrifice of sound itself to the efficacy of the symbolic. What is problematic in such instances is not that sound is drawn out of ‘itself’ but that the image of the referent remains too rigidly fixed, limiting the scope of the extension. Many artists, however, progress from a specificity to the particular abstraction that is sound itself, or the qualities of a sound that are only uncovered where the mind is not drawn into indexical operation, searching for the originary cause or referent from which a sound emerged or to which it refers, but to that which is particular to the sound itself as an a-referential and affective object. This progression towards abstraction forces a displacement or dislocation insofar as the site-specificty or locational referentiality of a recording becomes obscure, it moves from the sound of the specific place to sound itself, a sound that immanently constructs a space, forces relations and simultaneously drives apart. This progression away from the specific through a practice of abstraction can be discussed in terms of a movement from the specific to the general, moving from the referential specificity according to which ‘difference in intensity is already cancelled because it is drawn outside itself’ towards the uncovering of the power of sound ‘in general’ through its abstraction, a movement towards a sonic energy in general:

energy in general or intensive quantity is the spatium, the theatre of all metamorphosis or difference in itself […] energy or intensive quantity is a transcendental principle […] in terms of the distinction between empirical and transcendental principles, an empirical principle is the instance which governs a particular domain […] The transcendental principle does not govern any domain but gives the domain to be governed to a given empirical principle; it accounts for the subjection of a domain to a principle. The domain is created by difference of intensity, and given by this difference to an empirical principle according to which and in which the difference itself is cancelled (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 301).

Where abstraction drives a practice of phonography what is revealed to the ear is not necessary a site-specific audition—that which pertains to a particular domain—but rather that which tends towards domains in general, that which ‘gives the domain’; this progression is one from specificity to intensity, from identity to difference—or identities differential conditions—a process towards abstraction that uncovers the ‘the nature of difference (as individuating difference)’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 339). The uncovering of an individuating difference in a shift from the representational and specific to the general, abstract and obscure draws audition towards the intensive production of space anterior to the recognition of its constituent and apparently discrete bodies, it marks a shift from the specific identity of a place to the generative conditions of space, from site specificity to a catalytic ‘site-magnification’ (to borrow a term from Mark Bain).

This transition from the specifics of identification and audile taxonomies to sound in general is mirrored in López’s preference for the notion of sound matter over sound objects, a terminological preference that mirrors his preference for the general ahead of the specific, the confusing over the clear and distinct, for environments as a whole rather than the well grounded identities of the individual bodies that compose them. The shift from objects to matter is one that seeks to place some distance between a practice of nature recording that is based upon the audible representation of a place or individual animals, objects, bodies or events and a field recording practice that aims to uncover something of the generative ‘interiority’ of events, of those sounds that in their abstraction are heard as noise, sounds that in their obscurity reveal something of the material capacities underpinning their implication within representation, recognition and indexical listening: ‘The richness of this sound matter in nature is astonishing, but to appreciate it in depth we have to face the challenge of profound listening. We have to shift the focus of our attention and understanding from representation to being’ (Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter). López’s notion profound listening is set apart from Schaefferian reduction, yet nonetheless retains a critical function in the form of an abstract auscultation. The shift from ‘representation to being’ again mirrors a shift from objects to a more abstract notion of matter; where an objective orientation is considered to submit to easily or willingly to representation aided by its necessary discretion, López’s sonic materialism is orientated towards an informative noise in excess of objective discretion, towards a dynamic and generative capacity of sound in general that understands ‘sound matter in nature’ as an ontological problem and nature in general as ‘the nature of difference (as individuating difference)’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 339). In this transition from a Schaefferian discourse of objects to one of sonic matter, we move from a somatic conception of nature to one that is primarily dynamic, focusing upon that which is either anterior to or in excess of that which appears unified and discrete. Insofar as López’s practice remains identifiable as a practice of Nature recording, we are dealing with what Iain Hamilton Grant refers to as a ‘philosophy of nature itself […] [that] is no longer grounded in somatism, but in the dynamics from which all grounds, and all bodies issue’ (Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 8).

It is such a dynamic conception of nature that López appears to ascribe to, one where nature is not something pristine that is to be preserved but a force of constantly unfolding difference, an unceasing generative capacity, an understanding of nature as ‘the nature of difference’. López is famous for his disregard for the distinction between noise and nature, a distinction usually enforced through the identification of human and non-human sounds. Here we take noise to be synonymous with difference and difference with nature, thereby identifying the primary subject matter of nature recording as noise. This noise names the confusion of objects, bodies and events that López refers to as the environment as a whole, a noise that is not the enemy of the acoustic community but its generative potential, a ‘broad-band sound environment of thrilling complexity’. The broad-band nature of this sound environment places it in proximity with common understandings of noise, and more precisely the noise of nature. Noise, understood as the expression of nature’s generative potentials,  can be otherwise considered as the Idea of sound:

the Idea of colour, for example, is like white light which perplicates in itself the genetic elements and relations of all colours, but is actualized in the diverse colours with their respective spaces; or the Idea of sound, which is also like white noise (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 258).

This brief reference to Ideas appears obscure until we consider that, for Deleuze,  ‘Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 205), therefore locating noise within nature and identifying the generative and informative site constitutive of López’s ‘non-bucolic broadband world’. Yet we must go further than López if we are to address the problem of noise both within and as nature. López touches upon such a step where he refers to the necessity of shifting from questions of representation to being, a step towards a specifically ontological question. Yet to recognise the importance of this step we must take it a step further than López, moving not only from representation to being, but from perception to the being of the in-itself, a shift from the phenomenological to the imperceptible, a shift that is evident in Michel Serres’ considerations of noise:

Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog [...] every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself (Serres, Genesis, 13).

López’s call for a shift from representation towards a being that treats as synonymous Ideas of noise and nature must also, if we accept Serres’ observations, entail a shift away from phenomenological sufficiency if we are to being to grasp both ‘the Idea in nature’ and ‘the excess of physical becoming over the phenomenologically accessible’ (Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature, 44).

| Tags: Acoustic Ecology, Contingency, Deleuze, Francisco López, Genesis, Iain Hamilton Grant, Ideas, Materialism, Nature, Noise, Schaeffer, Schafer, Sound Object, sound-itself, Soundscape, Truax, White Noise

Somewhere Inbetween Things and Nothing

April 26, 2011

My current thinking is stuck somewhere between Things and no-thing, between objects and what might on the one hand be called the void or nothing, and the virtual, flux, powers or a plane of immanence on the other. What follows is to a certain extent a kind of onanistic argument against myself in a step towards resolving this indecision one way or another. To a certain extent this comes down to a question of the One or the multiple as the most generally applicable concept regarding the ontological foundations or ground of reality, with the One naming a univocal proper being or a plane or pure immanence, difference in itself or ceaseless becoming, and the multiple naming a state of infinite and differentially discrete existential units.

To a certain extent this is a question concerning what, if anything, is at base and whether positing the irreducibility of Things—not in themselves but as Things rather than no-thing—constitutes of caters for phenomenological comfort more than ontological necessity or apriority—a point raised some time ago by Ben Woodward. The position according to which at base no Thing can persist—according to which each Thing or every thing must give way to unstoppable powers or forces of (de)composition, the constant ungrounding of ceaseless becoming—holds considerable allure where one observes the semblance of stability and consistency as such, where image and representation, identity and consistency are seen to mask, obscure and block access to the constant decay, confusion and composition of things in themselves. According to the latter perspective—that of the ontological validity or necessity of no-thing as a state of an-objective flux—constant deformation appears—and, I would argue, is—fundamental in contrast to the constancy of consistency, yet the transcendent and immanent status this processual deformation remains problematic, i.e., how valid is the assumption or positing of the virtual or immanent as an immanent plane of Being that constitutes a base, ground or rather ceaseless ungrounding?

Much of the dialogue within speculative realism requires that a choice be made between the ontological necessity of either Things or a diversely defined nothingness. It is between these two claims to ontological validity that I have recently found myself oscillating, between Things and no-thing, objects and powers, the multiple and the One—understood as a univocal materialism. More precisely, this indecision is sustained through the rhetoric of, one the one hand, OOO, and on the other, Iain Hamilton Grant’s ‘attempt to produce a “powers” metaphysics’, an indecision fuelled by what—within or amidst this philosophical, terminological and rhetorical confusion—seems like the incompatibility of the equally observable tenacity and affordances of Things, and their constant deformation, decay, confusion and composition, driven by an apparently underlying tendency towards (de)composition. These two positions or observable tendencies appear incompatible where on the one hand we have Grant’s submission to what Alberto Toscano refers to as the ‘sufficiency of the virtual’ and, on the other, Graham Harman‘s vicariously enforced objective discretion.

Towards some kind of resolution of this indecision, the ontological discomfort and irresolution it causes can perhaps be identified as arising from the search for what is at base or “at bottom”, i.e. from the suggestion that there is at some level a base, a fundamental plane or unit from which all becomes and which is in itself all and therefore no-thing—in the sense of a univocal and universal indiscretion constitutive of One, a univocal equality reached at the conclusion of every thing’s tendency towards disorganisation, a conclusion that establishes a univocal all synonymous with no-thing, not as a contemporaneously persistent and underlying inconsistency or virtual capacity for change understood as an alternate plane of equally real and immanent existence, but in actuality.

Perhaps we can maintain the assertion that there is no-thing at base because there is no base, no originary plane or particle—understood as ontological expressions of univocal powers and atomism respectively—from which all that is becomes, i.e., there is no plane of immanence. The search for what is at base, or for a base at all, entails a search for another plane of reality, a higher or lower (dis)order from which actuality is derived or emerges, from which it becomes and to which it returns. Perhaps a disservice is done to both history and difference in maintaining a base at all as any kind of return may posit an almost mechanistic reversibility or recurrent descent into the depths of proper Being. Perhaps few would suggest that a plane of pure immanence or virtual (dis)order necessitates, entails or even allows return to a proper or fundamental state of no-thing, yet where what Toscano refers to as ‘the sufficiency of the virtual’ is allowed to prevail, the actual appears as concrescence yet also problematically as congealed, petrified form, a secondary order of residual being floating atop a more fundamental order or depth of change and composition; such a position requires that change and composition be thought apart from actuality, as processes that occur only at a more fundamental depth, a position according to which it is thought that ‘suborganizational pattern is where things really happen’ (Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, 495).

Change, difference and powers should perhaps be thought otherwise as persisting in actuality—an actuality encompassing the real—thereby accounting for the virtual as a capacity for change within actuality that cannot be thought apart from Things, as existing independently as a plane of immanence in itself, as a plane at all. Thought in this way there can be no planes of reality apart from Things, but rather, differences within Things that give shape to capacities for differences. This is perhaps beginning to sound a little like Deleuze’s dyadic objectivity according to which:

every object is double without is being the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other being an actual image. They are unequal and odd halves’ (Difference and Repetition, 261).

Here we take a step away from the sufficiency of the virtual towards a dyadic and dynamic objectivity—what we might refer to as objectility after Deleuze’s account of the objectile in The Fold. This shift can be expressed diagrammatically as follows, in a shift from an ontological schema depicting the becoming of a waveform with Virtuality and actuality depicted as thresholds occupying the extremities of its oscillations or peak amplitude … :

… to a schema depicting the interaction of things as dyadic objects via their respective capacities for interaction:

Yet the problem with this diagrammatical formulation is that within Things there is not a dualistic, binary or dyadic composition of capacities for change and stasis, as each Thing is not simply double but multiple (if not infinite), and each element composing a Thing is only, or only becomes, a capacity for change within a particular relational state or situation. The Deleuzian dyadic object is in this way thought to lack resolution in its consideration of the composition of Things. Each element constituting a capacity for change in the meeting of two Things, between a+b, my be rendered dynamically incompatible, incapable of change, of making a difference, when the relational state is not that of a+b but a+n and b+t. It is not simply that ‘each object is double’ but that each object is multiple and incomprehensibly complex, composed of elements that cannot be universally or generally reduced to pertaining to the dyadic orders of virtuality and actuality, but rather an innumerable collection or actual particles or elements that are capable of becoming or dynamic interaction only within a particular relational situation or event. In this sense, change according to the dynamic interaction of Things is better expressed diagrammatically as follows:

Yet in the above schema objective interaction appears unduly vicarious due to the depiction of a mediating and becoming body between to objects that are not in direct contact. For this reason their interaction is perhaps better depicted as follows, where the interaction is direct, partial but nonetheless dynamic, producing a new thing through their interaction.

Comments (0) | Tags: Deleuze, Diagrams, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Immanence

Every Thing is an Iceberg

March 29, 2011

Against a kind of phenomenological sufficiency wherein the synthesis of intentional objects–phenomenological essences–in perception constitutes the totality of what we consider to be the ontological constitution of objects and events, it is necessary to consider objects in excess of our sensory relation or perceptual correlation with them, thinking that which is (in) an object yet remains imperceptible despite our interaction with it. This position sets itself apart from positions wherein not only what can be known of a thing or object is limited to our sensory correlation or interaction with it, but its ontological constitution is equally constrained, a position wherein the in-itself remains a sensory correlation. This latter position, specifically orientated towards a notion of sound-itself, is clearly expressed in Salomé Voegelin‘s statement that:

Between my heard and the sonic object/phenomenon I will never know its truth but can only invent it, producing a knowing for me. This knowing is the experience of sound as temporal relationship. This ‘relationship’ is not between things but is the thing, is sound itself (Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, 5).

The position I wish to occupy is one that seeks a dissolution of the sensory constitution of the in-itself towards a notion of infraesthetics. It is only by directing our attention to that which remains in excess of the constitutive thresholds of perception that we can grasp the infraesthetic implications of objective intensities. There is always something of the object that remains in excess, beyond the thresholds of perception, a position that requires an object to be thought as being primarily in excess, in-itself anterior to its being for-us. It is this point of excess that I have previously tried to express in the notion of a non-cochlear sound object, that which remains in excess, in-itself and inaudible within a sound.

Where the sound object is considered to be primarily in excess of its audibility, in-itself anterior to its being for-us, audition concerns itself with those impacts that ‘poke through’ or leave an impression within the ‘phenomenal realm’. Graham Harman nicely describes the phenomenal realisation or rendering of objects in this way: ‘we must discover how real objects poke through into the phenomenal realm [...] the various eruptions of real objects into sensuality’ (Harman, Vicarious Causation, 181).

Where the sound object is thought in excess of its audition, its phenomenal rendering can be thought as a kind of subtractive synthesis, only those quantities within the complex sound object that find or excite a resonance within the ear are rendered audible, and those within the flesh haptic; there are components of this auditory event that remain both inaudible and imperceptible, that which remains sound in-itself. Perhaps counter to the object orientated ontology put forward by Harman, at this point I’m inclined to assume the position of a recursive dissolution of objective consistency whereby the sound object is in-itself nothing–but the particular exposition of this point can wait for another time. That which is heard is only part of the object or event (or perhaps objectile), that which–as a minimum or base requirement–excites a receptive capacity, it is that which crosses not only the threshold determined according to a refined listening practice or audile technique, according to which background noise is determined as such, but that which lies anterior to this decidedly subjective technique and determines the initial subtractive conditions and potentials of audibility. It is thinking of the phenomenal appearance of an object, auditory or otherwise, as a crossing of thresholds, a means by which the object or event itself makes an impression or constitutes the ‘eruption’ of a real object within sensuality, that lead me to think of every thing as an iceberg, hence the title and diagram above. That which crosses perceptual thresholds, breaks the surface of perceptibility or makes an impression within the phenomenal realm is only a part of object which itself remains in excess of this perceptual or sensory relation, and therefore below the surface. That which crosses a threshold of perceptibility becomes qualitatively determined in the act of audition or perception–hence the shading. That which persists in excess constitutes a potentially unrealisable potential or ‘intensive quantity’.

While finding Harman’s article on ‘vicarious causation’ (.pdf) particularly useful in re-thinking the sound object, it is this thinking of things or objects as always persisting in excess that leads me to question the necessity of this vicariousness, along with the notion of withdrawal that seems so fundamental to followers of object orientated ontology. For Harman, direct contact between things remains impossible, or at least unthinkable: ‘given that real objects never touch directly, their causal relations can only be vicarious’ (Harman, Vicarious Causation, 177). This aversion to direct contact, as understood through my limited reading of Harman’s work, remains a peculiar symptom of the necessity of withdrawal, whereby relations can never be thought to be totalizing (as where this is the case and a thing maintains relations at every point, alterity breaks down along with identity in the absence of excess). For Harman, relations and interactions always take place in an intermediary space forged between two things, this being the space of vicarious causation. Yet is it not possible to think of this ‘vicarious’, intermediary space in terms of interactive (de)compositions, as a point of confusion that defines direct if not total interaction. Why, within the amorphous and fluctuating vicarious channel created between two objects can this interaction not be considered direct? Harman’s own description of vicarious causation sounds direct enough to me, despite his assertion to the contrary: ‘forms do not touch one another directly, but somehow melt, fuse, and decompress in a shared common space from which all are partly absent’ (Harman, Vicarious Causation, 174).

To what extent is this interaction necessarily vicarious, as this melting and fusing sounds like a suitably direct, if not total, interaction and confusion of objects? The necessity of withdrawal is perhaps to ward off any inclination to think of relations as totalizing, within which an object would be grasped in its totality by another object, a conception of relations that dissolves objective excess in a kind of totlaizing vision that simultaneously sees an object from every angle while also comprehending the various resonances of its internal cavities, its chemical composition and so on. Despite sympathising with the extent to which withdrawal preserves ontological excess, I presently find this notion problematic, partly for the extent to which it seems to invoke objects that are somehow shy or secretive. Withdrawal seems to functioning as an animation or weirding of objects, as if they are something that actively and consciously shies away from connections in the manner of a turtle retracting its limbs within its shell. It is not the agency of objects that I take issue with here, but the way in which withdrawal seems to render objects unnecessarily shy of direct interaction and relations. If we can adequately think of objects as existing in excess or their relations what need do we have of either withdrawal or vicarious causation? It would seem that we can maintain excess without need of withdrawal and therefore also maintain direct contact and interaction between things, retaining a notion of causation that need not be vicarious.

What I remain fond of in Harman’s vicarious model is the sense that objective interactions happen within a common space inbetween, a channel for their interaction in which they ‘melt, fuse, and decompress’. Towards a maintenance of direct interactions–that are neither total not constitutive of complete relationality–within an intermediary spatial production, I often find myself thinking of such a space as a ‘point of confusion’ rather than vicarious causation, as this suggests a similar interaction of objects–melting, fusing, etc.–without the need for their respective withdrawal from this particular interaction. The idea of a point of confusion maintains direct contact without need of a vicarious intermediary maintaining and mediating withdrawal.

It is this point of confusion that is depicted in the diagram above, showing the meeting of two icebergs. The point of confusion is shown as an intermediary spatial production within which the two ‘melt, fuse and decompress’, yet the exact details of this interaction, exchange and (de)composition remains obscure from the outside–even to those parts of the icebergs that remain outside or in excess of the point of confusion–appearing merely as noise, yet not necessarily remaining so. Within the point of confusion there is a direct physical and chemical intermingling, interaction and exchange constitutive of a connection between each object. Areas of each object, thing or, in this case, iceberg–both within and beyond the thresholds of perception–remain outside of this point of confusion and resist the changes happening therein towards the maintenance of respective consistencies and individual discretion, not so much as a case of withdrawal, bit rather as a resistance that is entailed by the fact that they meet as two individuated bodies that necessarily maintain an internal and constitutive tension that binds their respective elementary composition.

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Addendum: here is Graham Harman’s response to this post: Direct but Partial Contact.

Comments (0) | Tags: Diagrams, Graham Harman, Infraesthetics, non-cochlear sound, Sound Object, sound-itself