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The Persistence of the Real

August 22, 2010

The forthcoming Wire Salon looks particularly interesting: We Hear a New World: Microphony, Technology and The Rise of Sound Art, hosted by Salomé Voegelin, Helen Frosi and Will Montgomery. This is something I’d love to be able to attend but I can’t quite justify a 600 mile round trip for the event. Nonetheless, the will to engage remains, as three of the texts are by people I’m particularly interested in one way or another, so below is a response to some of the ideas they deal with.

Focusing on three of the suggested readings, we find Seth Kim-Cohen cornered between the neo-modernistic impulses of Christoph Cox and Francisco López.

Kim-Cohen’s The Whole Truth responds to Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion along the lines of the argument put forward by Kim-Cohen in his book In the Blink of an Ear. Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion comprises a hole drilled approximately one mile below the surface of the earth, lined with concrete and an array of microphones and accelerometers. At the surface, loudspeakers translate the otherwise inaudible, subterranean and tectonic murmur into the bandwidth of human audibility. Kim-Cohen quotes Aitken’s intention to establish “a new relationship to the earth […] revealing its mysterious living dialogue”, a relationship that can be read as taking up Deleuze’s charge to ‘make inaudible forces audible’, to take as one’s object that which persists beyond audibility. Through this subterranean audition Aitken directs ears to a beyond beneath, the rendering audible of a geological substrate and transcendent conditions. Kim-Cohen critiques such approaches according to their affirmation of a “metaphysical abundance”, yet this critique is borne by such works insofar as they attest to a real that persists.

Kim-Cohen seems perturbed by the persistence of a traumatic object, in particular the Schaefferian sound object which details specifically audible matters. It is the excessive materiality of Aitken’s pavilion that falls short of Kim-Cohen’s requirements, insofar as it does not adequately reduce itself to symbolic interplay and significance. Kim-Cohen’s main point is that such excessive matters neglect the importance of context, that of “the exhibition space, the institution, economics, gender, sociality, and politics”. While Aitken’s pavilion clearly ‘fails’ to engage with gender politics and the economic impact of monolithic land or installation art in Brazil, it can also be considered to evoke another ‘context’, that of the earth beyond us. Here I am tempted to say “Kim-Cohen, get over yourself”, not directed personally towards Kim-Cohen, but rather at his unwillingness to consider matters beyond those of the self or human context, that which remains in excess of the symbolic. It could be said that Aitken’s pavilion draws us towards ‘contextual relations’ of huge importance, those of geological dynamics or subterranean disquiet, the forces of nature which persist beneath its apparent stability and may one day (perhaps through an eruption in Yellowstone park, or BP’s potentially apocalyptic disturbance of a methane bubble beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico) wipe humanity from the face of the earth. Such references perhaps adequately enmesh the piece within Kim-Cohen’s required network of human relations, but we could just as easily hear the murmur rendered audible by Aitken as that of expressive relations between geological substrata that remain autonomous from our human existence and symbolic operations.

For Kim-Cohen, within sonic arts practice, “there is a pervasive sense … that the sonic is truer, more immediate, less susceptible to manipulation, than the visual, as if the adjective sound (meaning “solid, durable, stable”) should somehow constitute the noun”. Yet this would appear contrary to the transience, ephemerality, mutability, etc., more commonly ascribed to the auditory by writers and practitioners within the sonic arts. Admittedly, Kim-Cohen picks up on the cliché according to which the audible has a kind of privileged access to immanence, immediacy, and lacks the scissions and critical meddling of mediation that riddle the visual domain, the kind of claims often behind the now somewhat tired criticisms of ‘ocular tyranny’. Yet Here Kim-Cohen gets lost amongst his string of signifiers in attending to the linguistic at the expense of the material: sound as adjective rather than sound as sound, ignoring the experience of the sonic event. Far from the solidity and stability Kim-Cohen ascribes to sound, we more readily find reference to sonic ‘immateriality’ (a claim of equal annoyance insofar as it assumes that which operates beyond the realm of the visual or human thresholds of perception lacks substance), something which is particularly prevalent within the few architectural texts dealing with the auditory experience of space.

The noise produced by Aitken’s pavilion would appear to be not so much a cipher to unlock “the coded mystery of the deep”, as that which persist despite our decodings, an irreducible excess that will always in part ‘resist’ its decoding. It is according to his own emphasis upon symbolic coding that Kim-Cohen remains closed off from acoustic space, in the sense put forward by McLuhan. Such pieces will forever remain unintelligible to Kim-Cohen insofar as he remains a ‘print orientated-man’, as McLuhan puts it:

Auditory space […] is usually defined as a ‘field of simultaneous relations without center or periphery’. That is, auditory space contains nothing and is contained in nothing. It is quite unvisualizable, and, therefore, to the merely print-orientated man, it is ‘unintelligible’.

Contrary to Kim-Cohen’s conclusions, Aitken’s pavilion would appear direct us straight towards the void, yet a void not considered to be a hollow, sterile vacuum but that of a saturated spatium. The auditory void is nothing, persisting in unintelligibility from the perspective of the ‘print orientated-man’ restricted to the meaning of the symbolic and the operations of representation.

Counter to Kim-Cohen’s project which seems to suggest that the majority of sound art needs to ‘catch-up’ with postmodernism, Christoph Cox’s Return to form: on neo-modernist sound art identifies the persistence of modernistic ideals within sound art. Here Cox turns his attention to the agitative, traumatic object to which Kim-Cohen cannot look nor listen, that of a post-Schaefferian objectivity, foregrounding the perceptual event of sound itself (Here I can’t help but be reminded of David Lynch’s Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, terrified of looking ‘within’: “There is a place terrifying to us… to women.” Except in this case it should perhaps be rephrased as “There is a place terrifying to us… to pseudo-Derrideans”, that place being McLuhan’s auditory space).

Cox focuses upon the return of modernism within sound art. In questioning the reason for this return, we should ask what problem has not gone away, to which the likes of Ryoji Ikeda, Francisco López, Steve Roden, and William Basinski, under the rubric of neo-modernism, are compelled or forced to respond? The problem to which these artists ‘return’ is that of a sound object that persists beneath or in excess of the endless string of signifiers characteristic of post-modernism.

Neo-modernism is characterized by Cox as being concerned with “the fundamental conditions of perception”, with the ‘purity’ of sound itself taken apart from its subjection to mnemic recognition and cancellation in representation, an orientation towards the ‘pure perception’ of sound. Yet, perhaps Aitkin’s piece goes even further insofar as it specifically addresses the inaudible conditions of sound-itself, that which persists within sonority yet remains in-itself inaudible, an orientation towards the transcendent conditions of sound.

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