Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space 9780823264377, 0823264378

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)
2. “Dear Listener . . .”: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity
3. Scenes of Inner Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite
4. Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing
5. “Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains”: Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler
6. Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance
7. The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka’s “Der Bau”
8. Torture as an Instrument of Music
9. Stop It, I Like It!: Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure
10. Sounds of Belonging- Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
11. Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries
12. The Discovery of Slowness in Music
13. Negotiating Ecstasy
Notes
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Thresholds of Listening

F6540.indb i

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

F6540.indb ii

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

Thresholds of Listening Sound, Technics, Space

Edited by

Sander van Maas

fordham university press New York 2015

F6540.indb iii

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thresholds of listening : sound, technics, space / edited by Sander van Maas. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6437-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6438-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Listening (Philosophy) I. Maas, Sander van, 1968– editor. b105.l54t47 2015 128′.4 — dc23 2015009539 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15

5 4 3 2 1

First edition

F6540.indb iv

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

in memory of Helen Tartar

F6540.indb v

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

F6540.indb vi

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

sander van maas

1.

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

18

peter szendy

2.

“Dear Listener . . .”: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

30

lawrence kramer

3.

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

51

sander van maas

4.

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

70

david wills

5.

“Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains”: Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

89

melle jan kromhout

6.

Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

105

jason freeman

7.

The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka’s “Der Bau”

125

anthony curtis adler

8.

Torture as an Instrument of Music

143

john t. hamilton

9.

Stop It, I Like It! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

153

robert sholl

10.

Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

175

liedeke plate

F6540.indb vii

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

viii 11.

Contents

Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

192

kiene brillenburg wurth

12.

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

206

alexander rehding

13.

Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone

226

andrew shenton

Notes List of Contributors Index

F6540.indb viii

245 305 309

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

acknowledgments

The making of this collection of essays has greatly benefited from the generous support of a number of people. First I express my gratitude to and loving admiration for Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, who shared her enthusiasm for this project from its earliest beginnings and beyond her chapter contributed to its initial design. At Fordham University Press I thank Helen Tartar, Editorial Director, for encouraging this project ever since we discussed “liminal auralities” over dinner many years ago. It was with great sadness that I and everyone else involved in this book learned of her untimely passing while the manuscript was in its final stages. Together we dedicate Thresholds of Listening to Helen: to the exceptional editor she was; to her intellectually fearless, gentle, and caring personality; and to the sounds and silences of her knitting, which appeared to codify her listening for the ear of the other. At Fordham I also thank Helen’s outstanding colleagues Thomas Lay, Eric Newman, and Andrew Katz for turning the manuscript into this handsome book. Finally, I thank the authors for their patient support and outstanding contributions.

ix

F6540.indb ix

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

F6540.indb x

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

Thresholds of Listening

F6540.indb xi

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

F6540.indb xii

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

Introduction Sander van Maas

When in 1972 the U.S. presidential candidate George McGovern aired a television commercial that portrayed him as a listener, the commercial was hastily withdrawn by the campaign because, according to its producer, Charles Guggenheim, it “didn’t make him look presidential enough.”1 Recounting this telling decision in an essay on listening in contemporary politics Andrew Wolvin suggests how in the decades after McGovern the status and meaning of listening evolved to the point that by early the 1990s presenting oneself as a listener became mandatory in the eyes of many politicians and their campaigns. This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. Indeed, it argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics. As the essays in this volume show, the exteriorization of listening—which is brought into further relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a renegotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening.2 1

F6540.indb 1

6/17/15 8:29:59 AM

2

Sander van Maas

Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its (former) others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the essays here collected map new frontiers in the history of listening. They suggest that listening’s finitude— defined in some of the essays as its death or deadliness—should be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor. Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limits— or when it takes unexpected turns. As it will be argued along multiple lines and using a rich variety of (re)sources, listening’s recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance that have historically informed notions of aurality and that are often found at the heart of the new politics, discourses, and technologies of listening emerging today.3 A further example from the recent history of political listening may illustrate this point. Twenty years after McGovern’s television commercial was pulled, Bill Clinton’s biographer Robert Levin portrayed the new president as a good—more than good—listener. Bill is a legendary listener. This is not a party trick developed for Campaign ’92. He gets lost in people. He always has. I’ve never been out to dinner with him in Arkansas that someone didn’t approach him —a farmer, a teacher, a teenager—with a suggestion or complaint or a story. Bill turns all the way around to them and gives them his full attention and we’ve got lost him for awhile. When he turns back to us it’s “Listen to what he just told me!” or “Did you hear her idea? Listen to this!”4

While Clinton’s alleged ability to lend his ear is framed as a matter of a personal aptitude, the construal of political listening was soon to make its next transformation. Several years after the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton’s husband, Hillary adopted her adviser and polling expert Mark Penn’s concept of a “listening tour” when running for the U.S. Senate in New York in 2000.5 This concept proved successful insofar as it generated wide media coverage and was readopted in the decade after Clinton’s election to the Senate, both by herself and by other politicians on both sides of the political (and gender) spectrum, all wishing to put the listening before the talking in their campaigns.6 If things have changed since the days of McGovern, it is not only because the ability to listen has changed significance and meaning but also because listening itself has gone through a process of instrumentalization. Listening now sits on the side of power as a tool in the politician’s toolbox

F6540.indb 2

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

3

rather than as a contingent aptitude of a particular individual. It is no longer thought of as a quality belonging to the realm of the individual psyche but as something that can be projected, represented, performed, manipulated, communicated, shared, and monetized. Since the late 1990s listening has moved center stage in leadership theories and business-management literature with dozens of publications appearing.7 It may legitimately be asked what this apparent turn to listening is about, beyond the ebb and flow of trends in (political) leadership culture. If listening’s time to step into broad daylight has come, the question is why this should be the case. Why now, in this particular form? How can these events in the history of listening be accounted for, and how do they project onto its future? Is listening still the right term for the practices discussed under its name? What is listening, in the first place? Coinciding with the emergence of listening as a political factor in the early 1990s, cultural theorists and scholars of music began to make a significant turn toward listening as an object of historical and theoretical reflection.8 This field of research was inaugurated by the lifting of the faculty of hearing from its double status of pure receptivity and hyperconductivity. The ears, the oft-repeated perception holds, do not have (ear-)lids, separating them biologically and culturally from notions of voluntary selection.9 This view of the ear as a biological, wetware recording device is complemented by its construal as a type of hyperconductor. With reference to its anatomical position between the outer world and the inwardness of the mind, the ear is often construed as subservient to the integrity and content of the acoustic and auditory signals it transduces. The ear leaves no trace or it malfunctions, in which case it needs medical or technical intervention to restore it to its presumed natural silence. A key challenge of the new cultural and theoretical listening studies has been to criticize this dominant view that expresses and maintains a minimal or liminal awareness of listening in Western culture by listening into its active, sonic, and conceptual presence. This criticism introduces the question of sources and methods, that is, of where, when, and how listening can be accessed if it cannot be reduced to any particular object of listening. Even though this introduction started by listening into the intersubjective political ear, musical experience has remained to be considered an important area for such access. According to Theodor W. Adorno, whose typology of musical listening from the 1960s (even though he had drafted them as early as 1939) provides a major point of reference for the early development of the field, the presence of musical works is essential for understanding the nature of listening.10 Construing

F6540.indb 3

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

4

Sander van Maas

listening as a subjective relation to an object, Adorno nevertheless believes that any aesthetic theory should begin on the side of the produced work rather than that of the listener. His typology of listening (more precisely, on music relations, musikalisches Verhalten) reads as a gradient that starts at the top with the “expert” listener who is capable of “fully adequate” and self-accounting listening to types of music relation determined by undefined subjective sensations and motor reactions that, according to Adorno, are only remotely related to the musical work’s dialectical form and structure.11 Critical responses to Adorno’s typology, which intensified with Rose Subotnik’s celebrated 1988 essay on structural listening, have typically targeted its implicitly hierarchical and elitist presuppositions, defending the subjective content of modes of listening that are less determined by the object (or by an object conceived differently).12 Recently Peter Szendy has highlighted the multiplicity of “points of listening” implicit in accounts of listening as an object relation by reading musical works—in particular musical arrangements—as layers of listening that are engaged by listening listeners.13 Jean-Luc Nancy argues that no musical work could ever possess identity without having a self-relation, which he finds no other concept is better able to express than the concept of listening itself (écoute). Musical works, he argues, are always engaged by the ear while in the act of listening to themselves (s’écoute) and only present themselves as objects for listening to the extent that they express such self-relations.14 Indeed, Nancy argues, when listening to music, our ear addresses listenings rather than (intentional) objects. The examples of Szendy and Nancy suggest how the distinction between the who and the what of listening has become less clear-cut since the inception of aural studies. Whereas in Adorno this distinction is still capable of organizing the relation between the subject listening and the object listened to, in contemporary theories listening appears to turn around and fold back on itself. This turning and folding is at the heart of the listening tour (in the sense of a circling, turning, torsion, version) conducted throughout this volume. Which musical, aural, sonic, historical, philosophical events cause listening to perform this turn and engage and represent (impress, inscribe, project, touch) itself ? How is this aural reflexivity mediated? That is, what kind of traces does listening produce? How could these traces be identified, archived, analyzed, read, theorized, exchanged, broadcasted, translated? Finally, how could these otographical and otological practices be supported by an aural epistemic (or acoustemics to come, as proposed by Wolfgang Ernst)?15 In this collection such questions arise

F6540.indb 4

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

5

from the discussion of practices of listening that, both in the realm of music and beyond, are becoming ever more (inter)mediated— ever more important as examples of how listening is progressively understood as always being “out loud” rather than silent, immediate, and implied. The underlying process of what might be called (but only problematically so, as these essays make clear) an emancipation or enlightenment of listening has been a slow and protracted one.16 Roland Barthes may have been among the first to call attention to the historicity of listening by highlighting the great changes the twentieth century brought to the concept of listening (écoute). In his seminal essay “Écoute” (“Listening”) from 1976, starting from a general distinction between hearing as “a physiological phenomenon” and listening as “a psychological act,” Barthes defines three different forms of listening.17 The first form, called indexical listening, is exemplified by the animal that pricks up its ears after hearing a sound and is directed toward the realm of possibility as it transforms noise into an index. The second, called hermeneutical listening, Barthes defines as a listening for meaning. This type of listening is exemplified by the dialogue through which man “metamorphoses . . . into a dual subject” in that each utterance will be heard as a sign to be decoded or, more generally, a secret to be disclosed, in an act of interpretation.18 This second type of listening, then, paves the way for a third that Barthes situates historically with Freud. According to Barthes, psychoanalysis courted the risk inherent in its aim to listen past a patient’s words and into their origin in the unconscious. The listening cure of psychoanalysis acknowledges that the object of its listening—the other’s desire—is a thing not quietly to be listened to but to be engaged through and to some extent produced by the act of listening. If Barthes argues that listening “cannot be constructed under the shelter of a theoretical apparatus,” it is because in psychoanalysis listening is ultimately determined by displacement.19 Listening is displaced, first, by the logic of shifting and condensation in the patient’s unconscious that it aims to bring to speech. Second, it is displaced by the analyst’s own unconscious, which dissimulates the truth of listening in soundless dream images that convey aural experiences only in indirect visual, and sometimes narrative, form.20 In Freud, then, listening is reconceived as a mode of productive perception that is a prerequisite for dealing with the newly invented “outside” located inside the human mind, called the unconscious, but that can never be fully equal to this eminent task. Hence, even though he foregrounded the ear as a site for the analysis of the modern self and culture, Freud insisted on its liminal status to the point of evoking the “danger inseparable from deliberate attentiveness” through the ear.21

F6540.indb 5

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

6

Sander van Maas

As recent interventions suggest, liminality remains a recurrent theme in the history of listening as it is in the process of being written. Veit Erlmann suggests in his historical study of aurality’s relation to reason, Reason and Resonance, how Cartesian reason as it was construed by the antirationalist critique of the later twentieth century is decisively at odds with Descartes’s thinking. The latter’s focus on vision (such as in the “clair et distinct” of the ideas) as well as the theatricality of consciousness in the elaboration of the Cogito, Erlmann argues, should not blind us to the fact that Descartes spent many pages on the workings of the ear and on the perception of musical relationships. These provide a view of the ways in which, even for Descartes, the Cogito should never be understood as a power and a principle that would be fundamentally alien to the logic of resonance or percussion— or, for that matter, to the realm of the aural in general.22 On the contrary. Even though his interest in the ear never crystallized into a coherent theory . . . Descartes did ponder . . . the deeper association of sum with sonus. In fact, instead of the alleged exclusion of the ear from the search for truth, Descartes’ philosophy enacts an uneasy truce between cogito and audio, a precarious entente between entendre, hearing, and entendre, understanding. More than a thought experiment, Descartes’ nocturnal ruminations can thus be interpreted as a psychosonic exercise, setting off what one might call the philosopher’s lifelong (and never quite complete) quest for “reasonance,” for the joining together of reason and resonance in a new concept of personhood.23

The critique of ocularcentrism and rationalism of previous generations of scholars, then, calls for a more complete and nuanced picture.24 The histories of reason and resonance appear to run in parallel, one never allowing the other to be excluded or eclipsed. As a consequence, being entangled in resonance, reason cannot stand as a principle that would allow for a pure and complete enlightenment of aurality. Its process will perhaps always be that of a liminal “reasonance” rather than of a “clear and distinct” elucidation of the foundations of the aural. Generalizing this point, it might be asked whether—against the rising tide of available listening studies, which each in its own way lays claim to the progressive enlightenment of its subject—listening may remain to be understood as a liminal phenomenon, if liminal is taken to mean “in the process of formation, not yet established or identifiable as such, emerging.” If this collection of essays bears the idea of the threshold in its title, it is in order to maintain an awareness of the important role of limits, thresh-

F6540.indb 6

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

7

olds (limen), and turning points in our approach to, and understanding of, listening. Without suggesting that each of the essays here collected can be reduced to a single and stable constellation of concepts, it might be observed that in each such an awareness is expressed. To quote Stanley Cavell, collecting resonance (or should we rather say, reasonance) from one another, these essays do not quite compose a book, but they do invite a consideration of the ways in which listening emerges while hearing such re(a)sonance.25 The following account of one essay to the next aims to retrace some of these ways by hearing or listening out loud the resonances produced along these series. In “The Auditory Re-turn (The Point of Listening)” Peter Szendy critically reviews the recent debate on listening in the wake of the “auditory turn” in the humanities and the rise of sonic studies. Szendy argues that while over the past decade there has been an admirable effort to expand the study of listening practices, proponents such as Lawrence Sterne have tended to construe this turn by misrepresenting the achievements of poststructuralism in this area.26 Szendy foregrounds the practicing of hearing in the medium of theory in the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, emphasizing the ways in which these thinkers had made countless auditory turns well before the advent of the fields of aural and sonic studies properly speaking. Szendy’s presentation of their otological work expands the lexicon of listening to include a series of prefixes, inflections, and sematic expansions. Nietzsche reconceived thinking in terms of an “Überhören,” an overhearing that Szendy interprets as eavesdropping, as kleptomaniac Abhören, and as a panoramic hearing. Placing Nietzsche in the historical context of medical auscultation, he argues that Nietzsche was the first to expand listening into (and out of ) the human body by means of knocking on the bodies and idols of the world. Through this percussing and listening out of the hollowness of the idols, Nietzsche was able to articulate his philosophy of nihilism. Creating a new alignment between the fingers, the ears, and the eyes, he conceived of a liminal knowing that announces what has been echolocated rather than submitted to a knowing gaze. According to Szendy, Heidegger used the ear of his thinking to listen into philosophical discourses, insisting on the detectability of the unison (Einklang) between concepts or between thinking and sensing. Derrida, in deconstructing the alleged logocentricity and monaurality of Heidegger’s ear, nevertheless stops short of the binaural or interaural approach that Szendy later developed in his own work on listening.27 With regard to thresholds of listening, Lawrence Kramer in his essay “ ‘Dear Listener . . .’: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity” points to-

F6540.indb 7

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

8

Sander van Maas

ward the importance of address in the constitution of listening subjectivity. He argues that in contrast to hearing, listening is not merely concerned with the event of sonority but with its cultural appropriation in what he calls the theater of human agency. Rather than subjectively receiving musical address, this appropriation is mediated by the tropes and structures of call, echo, and response that emerge at the threshold of subjective or, Kramer writes, “asubjective” forces. As the history of musical thought since the nineteenth century suggests, these forces may be imagined to arise both from within subjectivity (for instance, as the monstrous or the undead) and from music as an impersonal, prosthetic, ghostly, but no less compelling source of address. In contrast to what Louis Althusser’s theory of interpretation would lead us to believe, such address will not elicit listening subjectivity. According to Kramer, listening subjectivity is never given but results from an oblique and inventive response to musical address, which, as is illustrated by his reading of a concerto of Vivaldi, in certain cases may be determined by the possibility of asubjective cancellation. Kramer’s account of listening, then, shows how the figure of the threshold operates to support a historically and contextually sensitive account of the ways in which musical address has been key to the invention of listening subjectivity in Western classical music. In Kramer’s essay in this volume as well as in earlier texts, his account furthermore suggests that, as the epoch of musical listening’s coming into its own is drawing to a close, it may have entered its endgame. This epoch, he suggests in Why Classical Music Still Matters, runs parallel to the epoch of classical music, which, he claims, invented listening itself. “The music attuned itself to previously unheard and unheard-of potentialities of listening and made them available to be given. The recipient is the modern self, which has to listen differently, as it has to live differently, from its forebears. This music gives subjectivity ears.”28 If classical music is now losing ground in terms of its cultural presence and authority, this may partly be because the way it is perceived by listeners and audiences has transformed under the impact of media technologies.29 The fate of listening would then be played out in the triangle of technology, address, and subjectivity. In “Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite” I respond to Kramer’s account of musical address by offering a reinterpretation of the failure of interpellation as an explanatory model for listener subjectivation. The starting point for this dialogue is Kramer’s celebrated analysis of Jane Campion’s film The Portrait of a Lady, based on Henry James, in which the protagonist, Isabel, appears interpellated by the music of Schubert. I argue, with Kramer, for the importance of both address and subjectivity in

F6540.indb 8

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

9

listening but emphasize the role of infinity and negation over against what I read as an insistence on the finite and positive in Kramer (who, in his essay in this volume, responds with his view of these matters). Introducing a distinction between finite and infinite interpellation, I turn toward the Orphic ascent from Hades as recounted by the neomodernist composer Beat Furrer. For me, Orpheus’s turning around (and around) exemplifies the dark and devastating power of interpellation as an infinite process, as an aural call into being that maintains a radically asymmetrical relation to any attempt to respond and reconnect. Listening subjectivity, I conclude, always remains on the side of Eurydice, that is, behind the one who is interpellated. In “Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing” David Wills returns to the tropology of the back that he developed in his work on technology and the concept of dorsality.30 At issue here is the common distinction between hearing and listening, which some languages make and some do not (ancient Greek, for instance, does not) and which begs the question of the priority of either. Do we begin to listen after we have first heard? And if we listen to the extent that we hear, are we then supposing that reception (listening) and perception (hearing) coincide to create immediacy? As discussed at the beginning of this introduction, questions such as these have come up throughout the history of listening and its theorization. Like Adorno, Wills is interested in the relation between hearing, listening, and technology. But unlike Adorno, he is not suggesting that listening is on the side of the musical expert, whose ears have been trained to listen skillfully and technically and who, due to this, may resist a media-induced “regression of listening,” whereas nonexperts supposedly hear music in a nontechnical way.31 On the contrary, Wills argues that technologization, as he calls it, is the key determining event of both hearing and listening. His interlocutor here is Laurie Anderson, who in an electronic song from the 1980s asks that we listen to her heartbeat. Introducing the notion of dorsal listening, Wills proposes to think and hear listening as an interruption of pure hearing by prostheses, including those that seem surprisingly continuous with the natural body and its organs. An illuminating example is Wills’s discussion of the figures of the “tending” and “lending” of the ear, which, he argues, show that listening needs to be thought of as an exposure to detachment, substitutability, and ultimately inanimation. Wills suggests in reference to Anderson’s song that listening, being coextensive with hearing, is about what we hear out of earshot, on our way back to her heartbeat. With the market introduction of music-identification applications, the gesture of lending an ear has recently become quite literally practicable. In

F6540.indb 9

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

10

Sander van Maas

“Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains: Listening to ‘the Other Music’ in Friedrich Kittler” Melle Kromhout reads the media revolution in music from the pages of Kittler’s oeuvre. As Kromhout shows, throughout Kittler’s career the German theorist—known for his project to drive the spirit (Geist) out of the humanities—had been consistent in his musical preferences, focusing as he did on Richard Wagner, Jimi Hendrix, and most important, Pink Floyd. For Kittler this music exemplified an “other music” that was no longer based on a theory of harmonic order but on a cutout from the totality of “worldwide noise” as it was theorized after Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Kromhout construes Kittler’s turn toward noise as a turn away from language as a model for music and toward mathematics and media as a model. The development of Fourier analysis and the invention of the phonograph paved the way for a concept of music based on sound (Klang). Reducible neither to meaning nor to pure materiality, sound became the new anchor for listening in the twentieth century. Kittler’s practice and concept of listening, Kromhout argues, may be understood as replacing interpretation with feedback systems, suggesting the redundancy of concepts such as inwardness, Geist, and soul in musical engagement. In Kromhout’s analysis of Shazam, a music-identification application that allows users to identify recorded songs by having a mobile device “listen” to their sounds, he further examines the impact of digitality on our concepts of listening and listenership. Listening, his account seems to suggest, is no longer in the position to perceive the fundamental tone (auf seinen Grundton hören) that Heidegger wanted to auscultate (erhören) in his philosophy.32 Instead, digital music technology, Kromhout writes, may be said to have programmed a detachment of the ear by increasing the speed of processing and the vastness of information beyond the human perceptual scale. When the medium creates listeners, they in turn may discover new possibilities through their status as substitute (Ersatz). In these first five essays issues of space and place come up more than once, in particular in relation to the border zones between listening subjects and sounding objects. Peter Sloterdijk argues in his 1993 essay “Where Are We, When We Hear Music?” that aurality is always positioning itself in the midst of things, in the mode of enstasis. “No listener (Hörer) can believe himself to be standing at the edge of the audible.”33 Hence, in a dialogue with Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger, Sloterdijk develops a notion of the subject as a medium percussum. With a slightly different emphasis, JeanLuc Nancy argues that aural relationships with the world are modes of partaking (methexis) rather than mimesis, that is, of participation “without being contained or comprehended (enclosed) in terms of identity and the

F6540.indb 10

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

11

implied notions of community.”34 In Jason Freeman’s contribution to this volume, “Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance,” the author discusses several compositional projects, including three of his own, that thematize such aural being-in-the-world (soundscapes) and partaking of music (interactivity). Starting with examples of contemporary works that rethink the static, frontal positioning of listeners in traditional concert venues by allowing listeners to wander around the real space of the hall and to penetrate the performers’ space, Freeman proceeds to examples where real space and virtual spaces are layered over one another. While retaining properties of real space in one layer, new freedoms are allowed by the virtual layer in that it enables listeners to become more active and creative by sharing and modifying both the space and the musical content. Movement and navigation are key to understanding how listening in a sense has moved inside the musical work, now reconceived as a place where users, performers, and composers meet. Freeman argues that this allows him as a composer to challenge listeners to make individual and collective creative decisions that feed back into the work and that may ultimately move all parties, as he writes, “beyond the background listening experiences that dominate most of our lives.” All the while these works and frameworks only appear to give more urgency to John Cage’s question in Freeman’s epigraph, asking what composing, performing, and listening have to do with one another. If Freeman’s listener appears to have reinvented the work as a place to meet other listeners, performers, and composers, in Anthony Curtis Adler’s “The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka’s ‘Der Bau’ ” the listener is moving in the opposite direction. In Adler’s reading of Kafka’s story of an unidentified creature whose life unfolds in a burrow just below the earth, it almost appears as if the animal has retreated into its own auditory duct. As Adler shows, the creature lives its life listening to its inner voice(s) and to noises that occur in and around the burrow. Associating property with silence inside the burrow, noise for the creature is an index of intrusion, violence, and death. Adler argues that Kafka’s narrative may be understood as a mapping out of three different political spaces. Above the burrow, along the surface of the earth extends what Adler calls the “classical” political, nomadic space as theorized from Plato to Kant and that is closely related to panoptic visuality. It is a space in which signals are able to appear above the noise. Below the burrow, there is the nonclassical, chtonic space of the earth that is, by contrast, compact and unexposed. In between, Adler writes, the burrowing creature builds its existence on a wholly different kind of space that originates from its individual body, from its silences

F6540.indb 11

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

12

Sander van Maas

and noises, and from its labors, that is, from a biopolitical sphere that, Adler claims, mediates classical and nonclassical political spaces. Read in this way, he argues, Kafka’s narrative may be said to juxtapose two political regimes. In the first part of the story the creature attempts to assess its security situation on the basis of classical space, foregrounding silence and a desire for panoptic control. In the second part the creature attempts to come to terms with a hissing noise—“a noise that cannot listen”—that puts it on the alert and forces it to rethink the aural map of its existence biopolitically. For Adler, Kafka incites to rethink the sense of noise (and for noise) as transforming our sense of the political. John Hamilton’s “Torture as an Instrument of Music” presents a radical intervention in the debate on music and violence—in particular war violence—that intensified during wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), notably by the public outrage at the Abu Ghraib (musical) torture and prisoner-abuse case of 2006.35 While Suzanne Cusick, Jonathan Pieslak, Steve Goodman, and others have gathered and discussed evidence of music being used as a weapon of war and as an instrument of torture, Hamilton approaches the question of music’s relation to such violence in a new way. An underlying theme in the debate, Hamilton writes, is the old puzzlement regarding the special power of music to circumvent or bring down the protective barriers of individual subjects and, in some cases, of entire communities or even material objects (e.g., the walls of Jericho). Whence music’s power to penetrate, circumvent, disorient, confuse, deform, hurt, terrorize, and torture the other? One possible answer, Hamilton suggests, may be found if we reverse the notion of music as an instrument of torture. Taking the expression “to make someone sing” (also familiar in French, fair chanter, meaning to blackmail or to release information while being under threat or tortured) as his starting point, Hamilton shows that the notion of torture as an instrument of music has a rich history in the Western imagination and literature. His selection of examples includes the torturing of animals and humans into music from ancient times through medieval Christianity to modern secular culture. In response to the recent debate on music as an instrument of torture Hamilton may be understood to suggest that, in the West, music itself is not without its own complicity with imagined or real acts of torture of living beings. This fact is often overlooked when in contemporary discussions musical torture is construed as an act of violence against music’s supposed nonviolent nature. In listening, Hamilton reminds us, the crossing of the other’s threshold of pain often looms as a cruel prerequisite for our own musical pleasure.36

F6540.indb 12

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

13

If such pain is rephrased in terms of sadism, Robert Sholl can be said to explore its counterpart in “Stop It, I Like It! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure.” Presenting a series of musical case studies, Sholl focuses on three aspects of masochistic interaction in musical listening: first, the oscillation or reversibility of role play; second, the dissolution of narrative into fantasy; and third, the desire for but absence of fulfillment or synthesis. Throughout his case studies Sholl explores how listening is inscribed at the limits of identification, ecstasy, and the phantasmatic, respectively. Its liminal position is closely associated with a logic of embodiment as it takes place “right at” the body as the site of masochism’s endless (and painful) delays and deferrals. The first part of Sholl’s triptych reinterprets Adorno’s critique of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a reading of the spectators’ reversible relation to the girl who is chosen to dance her sacrificial dance. In order to understand a listener’s relation to the girl, Sholl argues, it is first of all necessary to acknowledge the opacity of her body. While the work appears to invite an identification with power, it is in fact a masochistic reversal that dominates the scene. Embodying the Law of the Father, the girl’s (ultimately silent, dead) body deflects and reverses the aural gaze to confront the listener and to occasion a diagnostic auscultation at the border of life and death. The second part of Sholl’s essay turns toward Saint Francis’s ecstasy in Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise. Dissecting the opera’s representation of Francis’s spiritual development, Sholl argues that musical silences and dissonances in the work resist the phantasmatic bridging of the gap between the human and the divine that is suggested by the narrative. They create apertures for the listener to experience the self as contingent and to become aware of a certain “neutralization of religion” in the opera. Listening to Saint François appears as a confrontation with the absence or death of God—a movement that began with the crucifixion and that, according to Sholl, is answered by Moshe Feldenkrais’s concept of maturation. Finally, Sholl completes his triptych by examining Cathy Berberian’s visceral rendering of Luciano Berio’s 1960s work Visage, again bringing the body in full focus as a site of liminal aurality. Placing the work in a postwar musical historiography informed by attempts at aural control over the listener, the vocal performance by Berberian is read as an example of how masochistic reversal may ultimately, and surprisingly, provide a point of listening on the aural, granular self-relation of the other. Berberian, Sholl argues, supremely in control as she is over the phantasmatic dimension of listening, opens her body so as to allow the listener to “hear her hearing herself from within.”

F6540.indb 13

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

14

Sander van Maas

Such reconnecting by traversing power and rationality returns listening to a more mature, embodied, but also aporetic spontaneity reminiscent of Adorno’s vision of an “informal” music to come. In The World Viewed, Cavell commented on the difference between sights and sounds by arguing that hearing has a different relation to the here-and-now than seeing does. “It is the nature of hearing that what is heard comes from someplace, whereas what you can see you can look at. It is why sounds are warnings, or calls; it is why our access to another world is normally through voices from it; and why a man can be spoken to by God and survive, but not if he sees God, in which case he is no longer in this world.”37 If Cavell has a point in claiming that hearing always implies questions about other spaces and other worlds, Liedeke Plate, in her essay “Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight,” argues that in literature seeing and hearing can be spatially mediated through accent. Reading Rhys’s novel “as much with the eye as with the ear,” Plate lends her ear to the ways in which textual-aural accents organize protagonist Sasha Jansen’s life of displacement. Against the backdrop of late 1930s Paris, Sasha’s sense of longing and belonging in this rapidly internationalizing environment is expressed through the inflections of the vocal sound world in which she finds herself. Plate reads the novel as a soundscape composed of a variety of voices and languages, intertextual references, urban spaces—including the 1937 International Exposition—songs, and other musical references. Plate’s intermediating method of listening allows her to follow the ways in which Sasha uses accent and other aural markings to navigate her life of lostness and displacement. Accent, Plate suggests, is ultimately a sound of the self that can be played up or down depending on location and that requires in a sense an accented ear to be sounded out. Listening with this ear supplies Cavell’s notion of “hearing from” with accents and other precise sonic markings in literary texts that allow for an account of what Plate refers to as an “acousticity of exile.” In “Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries” Kiene Brillenburg Wurth returns to the question of the sense specificity of listening touched on by Barthes and others. Analyzing Young Hae Chang Heavy Industry’s Flash-encoded audiovisual work DAK0TA (2002), she argues for a rethinking of aurality in terms of the transmediation that informs such works of digital literature. Whereas the debate on digital literature has foregrounded notions of interactivity—allowing users to organize the temporality of reading on their own terms—Brillenburg Wurth highlights the ways in which DAK0TA’s strictly timed sequencing

F6540.indb 14

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

15

of text to the sound of jazz drumming taps into an oral/aural logic anterior to writing and interactivity. In this work the experience of looking and reading, she argues, must be understood as a kind of listening or as the experience of being sung to. Framing her argument with Walter Benjamin and Michael Fried on the cultural fate of modes of absorption and distraction, Brillenburg Wurth teases out the various elements contributing to the liminal, transmediated aurality in this form of electronic literature. Rereading as the piece does Ezra Pound’s reading of Homer’s Odyssey in a classic example of remediation, DAK0TA resonates with the aesthetics of difficulty found in modernism. As the piece approaches the listener with apparent tactics of visual shock and creating a unidirectional thrust by means of a relentless Afro-jazz beat reminiscent of jazz poetry performances, Brillenburg Wurth contends that all is not what it appears in this work. DAK0TA references its own screen-based flatness, allowing the listener neither absorption nor (theatrical) engagement nor for that matter distraction. It evokes the impossibility of interpellation and responsiveness (or responsibility) to the point of appearing to presuppose a certain deafness in its mode of address. The work’s relentless performance of a “silent orality” ultimately leads Brillenburg Wurth to argue for a more sustained inquiry into machinic modes of reading that expose the point where reading, viewing, and listening collapse into one another. If thresholds is what concerns listening in this collection of essays, Alexander Rehding’s “The Discovery of Slowness in Music” develops a case for highly challenging instantiations of these concepts. The turn of the millennium, Rehding writes, saw the emergence of a number of projects that involve extremely extended time scales. For example, at the Science Museum in London artist Danny Hillis designed an installation called the Clock of the Long Now, which started at the threshold of the year 2000 and will run for the next ten thousand years. In the musical domain, starting at the same moment in time, Jem Finer inaugurated his composition Longplayer, which, based on a constant algorithmic variation, will play continuously for one thousand years before it restarts. Rehding contextualizes these and other projects by reading them against the history of the (musical) sublime. Evoking the mathematical sublime from Immanuel Kant to Jean-François Lyotard, he asks what happens in these very long works when the musical now virtually breaks and each single instant takes up many months. What kind of dimension is it that seems to be opening in the experience of music beyond musical experience properly speaking? And what happens if the “it happens” in such pieces is at the verge of no longer happening? Rehding argues that the answer cannot be given in terms of a Wagnerian conversion

F6540.indb 15

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

16

Sander van Maas

of time into space. Approaching the issue anew via the experience of slowness, he discusses the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project and Leif Inge’s digital twenty-four-hour stretch of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. By linking these case studies to historical precedents such as Pérotin’s medieval Notre Dame school organa, Rehding shows how slowness can be reconceived in terms of a Kittlerian time axis manipulation. Uncoupling the musical tone from its natural decay, pieces based on time axis manipulation act to reconceive the parameter of tone in terms of a second-order spatiality that, Rehding concludes, then may become a liminal aural space for listeners to explore. Finally, moving from the expanse of millennial time to the planes of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, Andrew Shenton explores electronic dance music’s contribution toward a reconceptualization of listening. Shenton argues in “Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone” that electronic dance music (EDM), developing since the 1980s at the outer edges of mainstream culture, has now become a highly diversified major genre in globalized popular music. Discussing its general formal properties, Shenton shows how EDM exploded the confines of the song—the currency unit of mainstream pop—to include multilayered and polymetric sonic textures that, as puzzled early adopters of the genre were soon to figure out, invoke a different notion of listenership and audience address. Shenton argues that while the concept of acousmatic or “reduced” listening as conceived by Pierre Schaeffer is helpful toward describing key aspects of this listening, the subjective impact of the music calls for further qualifying. Although tropes of depth and inwardness do play a role in the experience of EDM, he suggests that it is ultimately a complex of spatial, musical, experiential, and legal borderlines that make up the genre’s inclination toward liminal forms of aurality. A case in point is Melbourne’s Wonderland Festival and the way this teknival (a portmanteau of techno and festival) is audiovisually mediated. Quoting one visitor to the event who says that the music, “if it is good,” will provide an entry point to another world, Shenton describes the teknival as a heterotopia—a temporary autonomous zone—that is animated by the dramaturgy of music and designer-drug-induced mental modulation. The music cocreates and, in its temporal unfolding and decline, formally mirrors the ecstatic experience that, on a different level, is elicited by the drugs. For many who are inside the temporary autonomous zone the act of listening transcends itself to include the listener’s sense of embodied self in its very process. For this reason Shenton is interested in the ways in which EDM works around the habitual patterns of both musical structure and listening subjectivity to

F6540.indb 16

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

Introduction

17

create a sense of listening as taking place right at (à même, as Nancy would say) the wetware of the ecstatic, musicking body and brain. The importance of EDM for listening culture, he submits, lies in the reopening of the question of the self through the ontological anarchy that it provokes. The essays in this book seek to rethink the relations among listening, sound, music, and space. If these relations connect with a turn toward space and the body in the study of music and the sonic, it is by claiming that listening can only be grasped if a certain spatiality of the aural is taken into account. Conversely, the body and embodiment will only be capable of gathering the spatiality of the aural through a general tropology of the aural. In order to bring out this tropology the essays here collected may be understood as insisting on an approach to listening that focuses on such spatial figures as dorsality, liminality, the turn (or tour), stretching, and touching. In each of them tropes are constellated differently and in a different rapport with the (musical) technologies and subjectivities at stake. Together they suggest how, throughout recent phases of the theorization, enlightenment, and instrumentalization of listening, it keeps extending beyond its own concept.

F6540.indb 17

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

chapter 1

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening) Peter Szendy

As I approach a curve or bend on a road, I am often quite tempted, I confess, to turn about, turn back. And I am afraid that this may happen to me yet again, here and now. But unlike Orpheus, who performed what we could consider the first visual turn—turning backward to see if Eurydice was following him —my volte-face, my turnabout is about hearing.1 The point will be, then (hear it as you wish): about listening. It is always a weird experience to reread something that one wrote many years earlier—words about listening, for example, written when no one much thought about an “auditory turn in the humanities” or talked about “sound studies.”2 Please allow me to digress here, turning aside even before having properly started. Often regarded as one of the “founders” of “sound studies,” Jonathan Sterne, in his remarkable book The Audible Past, claims to have paved the way: While writers interested in visual media have for some time gestured toward a conceptualization of visual culture, no such parallel

18

F6540.indb 18

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

19

construct—sound culture or, simply, sound studies—has broadly informed work on hearing or the other senses. . . . Sound is not usually a central theoretical problem for major schools of cultural theory, apart from the privilege of the voice in phenomenology and psychoanalysis and its negation in deconstruction.3

In what follows, I hope to be able to suggest, at least indirectly, that this simplistic reading of deconstruction prevents Sterne from considering how hearing has been practiced in theory, if I may say so. And it seems difficult to really think hearing without lending an attentive ear to such a theoretical practice of listening. From this point of view, the “auditory turn” advocated by Don Ihde, decades ago, inside the phenomenological tradition is far more rigorous and consequent. Ihde is fully aware of the various traps awaiting such a theoretical gesture (for example, when he writes, “just as no ‘pure’ auditory experience can be found, neither could a ‘pure’ auditory ‘world’ be constructed”); and while emphasizing that “visualism” is “as old as our own cultural heritage,” he acutely takes into account what he describes as the “auditory tone” in Husserl and Heidegger.4 Those who, after Ihde, took over such an “auditory turn,” tend to misread the relationship between deconstruction and the phenomenological tradition with regard to voice, sound, or hearing. Reflecting on an “ ‘auditory turn’ in scholarship,” Douglas Kahn, for example, writes that “Derrida’s critique of the presence of the voice . . . engendered, among certain sensitive types, a phonophobia and favored instead the visual register of writing and inscription.”5 It should soon become evident that this, again, is an oversimplification. End of my digression. Let us turn back to where we started. Hearing the voice that “speaks” from pages half forgotten is an uncanny experience, much like listening to a recording of one’s own speech: you do not recognize it (you have never heard it like that), but at the same time, it sounds embarrassingly familiar. If it is true that reading always entails the hearing of a voice, if reading is also listening, what happens when one reads oneself? There is a word that could describe this strange effect: egophony. It is an old word—yes, I remember encountering it at the turn of a sentence in an old book, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec’s Treatise on Mediate Auscultation, published in Paris in 1819. I recall asking myself, What could such a sonority of the ego be? I was already rushing into all sorts of hypotheses when, seized by doubt, I checked the etymology: here, ego comes from the Greek aigos, genitive of aix, goat. And the “ego” that I mistook for “mine”

F6540.indb 19

6/17/15 8:30:00 AM

20

Peter Szendy

was meant, instead, to somehow translate the quivering resonance—like the voice of a goat—in a patient’s chest. I was disappointed—worried also, since I used to smoke a lot at the time. And my misunderstanding kept contaminating the correct sense of the word. While I went on reading Laënnec’s Treatise, it was impossible not to think that when a physician presses his ear against an ailing body and hears the noise of his own auditory act, he experiences a sonority of the self that prevents him from listening to the illness of the other: “One cannot apply the ear without pressing strongly the patient’s chest. . . . This circumstance produces irrelevant noises (des bruits étrangers) determined by the observer’s muscular contraction.”6 When auscultating without mediation, by applying the ear immediately to the body, one runs the risk of hearing only oneself— oneself listening and the rustling of hearing itself. Will I be able, then, to read again, hear again, and auscultate what I happened to write on or about the ear, without the unpleasant interference of egophony? In Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles and later in Sur écoute, I investigated many auditory postures, all of them leading to what we could call, using a word dear to Derrida, an exappropriation at work in the process of hearing. That which is audible, so fragile and evanescent, as if made of bubbles, urges the ear to steal, to keep, and to possess all the more intensely so that what it “has” instantaneously escapes its grasp. Long before the development of digital audio piracy, one of Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, characterized listening (Abhören) as “a kind of tolerated larceny” (eine Art erlaubten Diebstahls).7 If hearing is a sort of licit theft, then music lovers could just be, as I have suggested elsewhere, kleptomelomaniacs.8 This would be one of the main guises under which the “drive for mastery” (the Freudian Bemächtigungstrieb) appears in the auditory dimension. Another guise corresponds to a much more recent meaning of the verb abhören, which also designates various forms of electronic surveillance. Like overhearing in English, abhören belongs to a paradigm that I once tried to analyze as pertaining to the “aesthetics of spying”: I wanted to emphasize the active power of the ear, a power to which we are so oblivious today, since we conceive of hearing as a passive reception. I was looking for another way to name our auditory practices, without canceling their penetrating and punctuating potential but also without ignoring their appropriating strategies, which are always bound to fail. I realize now that I could also have enlisted, in my auditory vocabulary, the old noun, the good old signifier used by Laënnec, auscultation. This is

F6540.indb 20

6/17/15 8:30:01 AM

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

21

what I would like to do here, by briefly returning to some auditory turns, in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Thinking hearing as an auscultation: this is one of Nietzsche’s many legacies. And it is an injunction that Derrida took over and powerfully redeployed, first in the “Tympan” of his Margins and then in his critical radiography of “Heidegger’s Ear.”9 But before listening to them listening, we have to recall what the practice of medical auscultation meant for its inventor, for Laënnec. In the first edition of his Treatise on Mediate Auscultation, in 1819, Laënnec pays his debts, first to Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, his professor at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris, then to the Austrian physician Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger, the inventor of the practice known as “percussion.”10 Auenbrugger, in his Inventum novum (1761), compared the sound of a percussed chest to the sound of “drums” (tympanis), “when covered with a sheet or a cloth.”11 Corvisart, translating Auenbrugger’s work from the Latin, insisted in his preface on the remarkable auditory capacity that the practitioner has to develop: When properly exercised, the senses, and touch in particular, can achieve such a degree of perfection that, even in the places where, according to the author [Auenbrugger], a fatty and fleshy mass obscures the sound, the practitioner who studied percussion in a precise and consequent manner will feel, at the tip of his fingers, a sensation equivalent for him to the sound that the ear is unable to grasp [éprouve, au bout de ses doigts, une sensation qui équivaut pour lui au son que l’oreille ne peut saisir].12

The physician, here, seems to be listening at the tip of his fingers. And this digital hearing, inherited from Auenbrugger via Corvisart, will not be “forgotten,” Laënnec insists; it will not be replaced by auscultation. On the contrary, auscultation will confer a “new importance” to percussion, by “extending its usefulness to other diseases,” by generalizing it beyond its former limits.13 Even if mediate auscultation introduces the distance of an auditory prosthesis, so to speak, between the ear and the patient’s body, something will remain of the punctual and punctuating tactility of percussion. While retaining a tactile character, auscultation, as Foucault remarked, is also a delayed or deferred vision, since it is essentially meant to “draw the dotted outline of future autopsy.”14 Indeed, Laënnec emphasizes the necessity of “verifying . . . by means of an autopsy the diagnoses established with the cylinder [i.e., the stethoscope],” in order to “convince oneself with the

F6540.indb 21

6/17/15 8:30:01 AM

22

Peter Szendy

eyes of the certainty of the signs given by hearing.”15 Auscultation, then, appears suspended between the tangible punctuation of percussion and the pending optics of necropsy.16 To grasp the singularity of medical hearing, we should consider it in this in-between status: it is not an immediate touch anymore, and not yet a knowing gaze. While dotting the surface of the body, as Foucault says, auscultation does not proceed by tapping blindly around, like percussion does: it stops at some points on the surface in order to overpunctuate them, by dividing their stigmatic unity, by listening to more than one sign in one point. Indeed, Laënnec writes, one can “hear in the same point the heartbeat, the breathing, various rattles, the gurgling in the bowels.”17 And when he describes the quivering sound of egophony, Laënnec’s overpunctuating auscultation seems almost to resemble the echolocation techniques used by certain animals, such as bats or dolphins. For he splits the punctual instant into a plurality of points distributed in space: “We hear, separately albeit in the same instant, the resounding voice and the quivering, silvery resonance, in such a way that the latter seems to be produced in a point that is situated farther or closer to the observer’s ear than the former.”18 In one point, it is a whole world of points; it is a dotted universe that pops up, with its punctiform patter, with its pointillistic clouds. In order to describe them, Laënnec admits that he has to “compare the perceptions given by the sense of hearing to those that would be given by sight”: [The mucous rattle] offers mostly the image of bubbles analogous to those produced by blowing with a straw into soapy water. The ear . . . recognizes . . . the variable volume of these bubbles. . . . The mucous rattle . . . , in the same point and in the same instant, presents the image of a liquid . . . wherein bubbles are forming, some of them having the size of a cobnut, some others the size of a cherry pit. . . . Sometimes, the space . . . seems full of bubbles touching one another; sometimes, on the contrary, we hear only a few bubbles here and there, far away from one another.19

Laënnec goes on to sketch out a real and genuine chronicle of bubbles: a dynamic or genetic description of the points that proliferate in one point, where they appear, grow, blow out, disappear, and reappear. Auscultation seems to be about points within one point, about points that inflate to the point of containing other points. Nietzsche was the first to extend the paradigm of auscultation to bodies of another nature—for example, to a text that might be considered as a sort

F6540.indb 22

6/17/15 8:30:01 AM

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

23

of corpse or corpus. He did so in the preface to The Twilight of the Idols, where he talks about a convalescence or cure (Genesung), about curing and curative power (Heilkraft). But what is it that has to be cured— or who? Let us read these famous sentences: A Transvaluation of all Values, that question mark, so black, so huge [dies Fragezeichen so schwarz, so ungeheuer] that it casts a shadow on him who sets it up,—such a doom of a task compels one every moment to run into sunshine, to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. . . . Another mode of recuperation [Genesung] . . . is to auscultate idols [Götzen aushorchen]. . . . To pose questions here for once with a hammer, and perhaps to hear as a reply that well-known hollow sound which indicates inflation of the bowels [jenen berühmten hohlen Ton hören, der von geblähten Eingeweiden redet]—what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears [der Ohren noch hinter den Ohren hat].20

What is it, then, that calls for treatment? Less the idols than the physician, the practitioner who interrogates them. What has to be treated is the weight or overweight of a punctuation sign, of a question mark, the blackness of which seems to announce illness, threatening the health of him who uses it and punctuates with it in order to achieve his great task: the transvaluation of values. Everything, in this scene, is turned upside down. Auscultation is a treatment for the one who questions, as if to diminish the egophonic volume of the suffering interrogator himself. Then, along with the inverting movement of transvaluation (Umwertung), there is another turn: the eye strikingly becomes an ear, many ears, indeed, more and more ears. The stable visual oppositions (blackness and shadows in the twilight against sunshine) are tipped over and become a series of strokes, percussions and resonances: “as regards the auscultation of idols,” Nietzsche continues, “it is no temporary idols, but eternal idols which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning-fork” (an die hier mit dem Hammer wie mit einer Stimmgabel gerührt wird).21 Everything sounds hollow and resounds, then, as we follow Nietzsche in his auditory turn, the impulse or impetus for which was given by a huge typographic sign, a monumental question mark. “To tympanize—philosophy” (tympaniser—la philosophie): these very first words of Margins, in 1972, are echoed, two pages later, by the injunction that Derrida borrows from Nietzsche’s subtitle for The Twilight of the Idols: “To philosophize with a hammer.”22

F6540.indb 23

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

24

Peter Szendy

Tympaniser, as the English translator, Alan Bass, rightly explains in a footnote, “is an archaic verb meaning to criticize, to ridicule publicly.” But it also has other meanings: to batter the ears or eardrums; and to accumulate air in the intestine, the result being what is called, in medical English, tympanites, or tympany, that is, a distension of the abdomen, responsible for the “hollow sound” Nietzsche was alluding to. To these multilayered connotations, Derrida adds still another one, by playing with the typographic homonym of the word tympan (“tympanum”) in French: “In terms of the printing press,” Derrida asks, “what is a tympan?” And before quoting at length some “treatise of typography,” he writes, “In terms of the manual printing press, then, there is not one tympan but several. Two frameworks, of different material, generally wood and iron, fit into one another. . . . One tympan in the other. . . . Between them, the sheet of paper.”23 Derrida’s point, here, is of course to emphasize plurality or multiplicity in the philosophical hearing device. More precisely, it is to introduce difference and deferral (différance) into one of the most unifying contrivances ever, into the autologous otology of thought. We will come back to that soon, when questioning, with Derrida, the essentially monaural or monophonic character of the philosopher’s ear. Nietzsche’s auditory turn was provoked or accompanied by a huge typographic sign, a question mark. And Derrida’s tympanum, in turn, his eardrum, seems to be superimposed on a typographic device, the tympan. The insistent presence of typography, in two of the most powerful discourses on the philosophical ear, could indicate that the otology of thinking, if I may say so, is concerned above all with marks and marking—and, in particular, with punctuation marks, as if auscultation, transposed from medicine to philosophy, were essentially a punctuating practice. I cannot reconstruct here Derrida’s unheard-of way of listening to punctuation, to quotation marks in particular, even when— or especially when—they are invisible, that is, only audible. Rather, I would like to show briefly how, in the wake of Nietzsche’s auscultatory turn, both Heidegger and Derrida have occasionally sounded, by means of a kind of percussion, various parts of the philosophical corpus, letting it resonate anew. If we can label these moments as turning points, it is not in the sense of the notorious Heideggerian Kehre, or the “ethical-political turn” that some of Derrida’s readers have allegedly identified in his work, after Force of Law.24 Nor do these turns amount to turning away, once and for all, from Plato’s legacy, from the visual paradigm of the idea and theoria, by turning toward the ear. In a seemingly more discreet or modest fashion,

F6540.indb 24

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

25

these are local turns; they are internal to a text, and they take place by way of a slight shift of intonation. Their power, minimal as it might seem, lies in a new way of punctuating: nothing is altered in the process, but everything can change. Had we the time, we could have followed closely Heidegger’s staging of the pivotal point around which his discourse revolves in Der Satz vom Grund (The Principle of Reason, a series of lectures delivered in 1955–56). It is in the course of the sixth lecture that Leibniz’s famous formulation—nihil est sine ratione—is auscultated, that is to say percussed, differently: “ ‘Nothing is without reason.’ The intonation (Betonung) allows us to hear (hören) a unison (Einklang) between the ‘is’ and ‘reason,’ est and ratio.”25 From this point, which is a turning point, hearing will not be alone; it will not be the only sense involved in thinking and meditating this motto. Instead, from this pivotal point onward, hearing and seeing engage in a sort of race or relay, in what Kant described as the “substitutability of the senses” (their “vicariate,” Vikariat der Sinne, as he wrote in section 22 of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View).26 Thus, after Heidegger has discarded the allegedly metaphorical character of the hearing he is talking about, he says, If our human-mortal hearing and viewing [wenn unser menschlichsterbliches Hören und Blicken] doesn’t have its genuine element [Eigentliches] in mere sense reception [this is a point that was made earlier, by referring to Beethoven’s deafness, and in order to demonstrate that the partition between the sensible and the nonsensible— between hearing proper and hearing as a purported metaphor for thinking—is really metaphysical—PSz] then it also can’t be completely unheard of [nicht völlig unerhört] that what can be heard can at the same time be brought into view [dass Hörbares zugleich erblickt werden kann], if thinking views with an ear and hears with an eye [wenn das Denken hörend blickt und blickend hört]. This sort of thing happens when, in hearing the unison of “is” and “reason” in the intonation of the principle of reason . . . , we bring something obvious into view.27

Here, Heidegger places hearing (“it can’t be completely unheard of ”) in an overhanging position with respect not only to sight but to the difference between hearing and seeing. Hearing, in other words, is endowed with the capacity of recombining hearing and sight in thinking. But, later on, at the beginning of the ninth lecture, when Heidegger quotes from one of Mozart’s famous letters, he seems to delegate to the sense of sight the task of gathering together seeing and hearing. Mozart, substituting for Heidegger, who himself substitutes sight for hearing, thus writes,

F6540.indb 25

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

26

Peter Szendy

The thing [i.e., the musical work in progress] truly becomes finished in my head, even when it is long, so that afterwards I look over it with a glance in my mind [mit einem Blick . . . im Geist übersehe] . . . , and hear it in the imagination not at all serially, as it must subsequently come about, but as though all at once [wie gleich alles zusammen]. . . . The listening to everything all at once is indeed the best [das Überhören, so alles zusammen, ist doch das Beste].28

Mozart’s vicarial sentences enable Heidegger to reaffirm that “hearing is a viewing” (das Hören ist ein Blicken). Mozart gives a supplementary authority to this renewed assertion: “This “looking over” the whole “with a glance,” and “listening to everything at once” are one and the same (dies “mit einem Blick” das Ganze “übersehen” und das “Überhören, so alles zusammen” sind eines und dasselbe).29 The ear and the eye, in their substitutive deferrals, have been reunited under the delegated authority of Mozart’s “everything at once”: under his supervision (Übersehen) and, if I may say so, under his superlistening (Überhören, used here in a rather exceptional sense, since this word usually means “to miss hearing,” not unlike the English verb to overlook). Sight and hearing are finally gathered together in what I would call, as I have elsewhere, a “panacoustical” whole, modeled on panopticism.30 Such is the happy end in the relay of the senses—in their Vikariat, at the outcome of the Heideggerian auditory turn. In Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, there is a very similar turning point: the whole lecture, which later became a book, pivots around a famous Greek sentence (O philoi, oudeis philos), that is, around “our way of listening to [it]”: According to the way the ω (o¯méga) is written in O phíloi, oudeis phílos, we are confronted with either a vocative interjection (o¯méga with smooth breathing and a circumflex accent)—this is the reading that has traditionally prevailed: “O my friends, no friends”— or the dative of a pronoun (o¯méga with rough breathing, circumflex accent and iota subscript, hoi). This reading has not been retained by the tradition: “he for whom there are friends (a plurality or multitude of friends) has no friend”; or again: “too many friends means no friend.”31

Without going into the details of Derrida’s genealogy of friendship, I would like to emphasize, as he says, that “it all comes down to less than a letter, to the difference of breathing” (tout se joue donc à moins d’une lettre, à la différence d’un esprit)—all meaning politics, or even hyperpolitics.32 Nothing less than that.

F6540.indb 26

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

27

Now, in the French edition of Politiques de l’amitié, Derrida’s long lecture on friendship—punctuated by his auditory or auscultatory turn about the Greek sentence—precedes, and not by chance, a large appendix titled “Heidegger’s Ear.” After performing a change of intonation close to the one we read in Der Satz vom Grund, Derrida undertakes a critical radiography of Heidegger’s otology. And the main target of his deconstructive questioning is what we could call logocentric listening or hearing: “At bottom logocentrism is perhaps not so much the gesture that consists in placing the lógos at the center as the interpretation of lógos as Versammlung, that is, the gathering that precisely concenters what it configures [le rassemblement qui précisément concentre ce qu’il configure].”33 At stake, then, is gathering, collecting, and unity, as seen in Der Satz vom Grund (Derrida, for his part, auscultates or percusses other critical points in Heidegger’s oeuvre). At stake is the panacoustical hearing encountered under the German name of Überhören: in its complicity with the panoptics of sight, this “super-listening” seems very remote from Nietzsche, who famously described himself, in Daybreak (section 1), as “a ‘subterranean being’ at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines,” as a “solitary mole” (Maulwurf)34—in short, the very opposite of clear-sightedness. If we were to look for other, less “panoramic” verbs designating listening in Heidegger, we could find them in his 1940 essay on Nietzsche, “European Nihilism,” where he speaks of “hearing out” (heraushorchen), or in his Principle of Reason, where he speaks of “hearing backwards” (zurückhören) in the past.35 But still, the Heideggerian ear, as Derrida has shown, seems undeniably a gathering ear, with its logocentric eardrum. This is why Derrida, after having allusively evoked the duplicity of the typographic tympan in Margins, turns to the question of binaural hearing in his appendix to Politiques de l’amitié.36 He points out that Heidegger’s otology is essentially monaural, that it entails a “passage from the plural or the dual [two ears] to the singular,” according to the same logocentric logic that allows us to distinguish the singular human hand from the “prehensile organs” of an animal.37 But, strangely enough, Derrida seems to stop here, as if seized by doubt, adding a parenthetical remark that does not appear in the earlier English version; let me just rewind and play the complete passage: Here we are dealing with the same schema that permitted distinguishing Dasein’s hand, always engaged with speaking and lógos, from the ape’s prehensile organs (with this essential difference, though: we can

F6540.indb 27

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

28

Peter Szendy

dissociate both hands, and speaking of “the” hand is not at all selfevident [ne va pas de soi], while we cannot dissociate in the same way the act of listening with respect to both ears [selon les deux oreilles]).38

What did Derrida exactly mean by this puzzling parenthesis? After his cautious reading of Heidegger’s discourse on the “inner ear” (innere Ohr), as distinguished from the “sensory or sensitive ear,” the “essential difference” that Derrida surprisingly emphasizes cannot be simply factual or empirical. It cannot consist in the fact that, usually, both ears listen together, at least as long as we do not plug one of them (or plug each of them into a different soundtrack). Why, then, does Derrida thus limit the impact of his deconstruction of Heidegger’s monaurality? It is as if Derrida stopped on the threshold of a phenomenon that should have retained his attention: echolocation. In the animal world, bats, it is said, are virtuosos of this topographic use of binaurality, which enables them to locate their prey with infinite precision, without the sense of sight. They emit short calls, they vocally punctuate or percuss their environment, in order to auscultate it by means of the echoes that are returned to their ears, with a slight interaural difference.

On this same principle, various military surveillance techniques were developed between the two world wars. Look at this monstrous listener, for example; he seems to be the illustration of Nietzsche’s exclamation in Zarathustra: “That is an ear! An ear big as a man!” (Ein Ohr, so gross wie ein

F6540.indb 28

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

29

Mensch!).39 But this prosthetic eavesdropper has two giant ears—he still lacks the famous “third” one Nietzsche called for in Beyond Good and Evil— and each of them is turned in a different direction. Can you imagine, then, what would happen if listeners such as this one were listening to each other, overhearing the other’s listening? The scene might look just like that.

Go figure—it could be Derrida trying to listen in on Heidegger’s ears. And we, gathered here as we are, we might be dreaming of dominating the scene, from above, in an overhanging or panoramic position. But, as I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, when it comes to listening in on each other, you never know who turns out to be auscultating whom.40 There is always another auditory turnabout pending.

F6540.indb 29

6/17/15 8:30:03 AM

chapter 2

“Dear Listener . . .” Music and the Invention of Subjectivity Lawrence Kramer

What Sander van Maas calls “the grand history of musical subjectivity” may now be nearly over.1 The reason is not just that music for roughly the past century has been increasingly skeptical about subjectivity— or, rather, and the point will be important for us, about a certain fetishized mode of subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is at a historical crossroads, as is the concept of the human that goes with it. At the very least, subjectivity in the forms familiar since the Renaissance is disappearing today and has been for some time. To be sure, this disappearance is not absolute. Past subjectivities survive their obsolescence in practice by becoming the possibilities of imagination, narrative, and fantasy on which they had always depended anyway. But the distinction between livable and visitable modes of subjectivity— or between subjectivity per se as livable or merely visitable—is a historical reality that cannot be wished or brushed away. Once subjectivity begins to end, it needs to be thought differently: thought on the cusp between the still and the no longer possible. Or perhaps something stronger, which brings me to a slightly displaced epigraph. This is from Derrida:

30

F6540.indb 30

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

31

A singular situation . . . The invention of the impossible is impossible, the other would say. Indeed. But it is the only possible invention: an invention has to declare itself as the invention of that which did not appear to be possible; otherwise it only makes explicit a program of possibilities within the economy of the same.2

To begin, then, I offer some inventions, three of them.

Three-Part Inventions I. Last Words. It is one of the most famous lines in English literature: “Reader, I married him.” That is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre speaking at the end of the novel that bears her name. Speaking? No, not speaking: writing, as one writes a letter, as one addresses a text to someone. This abrupt shift to direct address, at the head of the last chapter, recalls, perhaps, that the modern English novel began in the form of letters, in the eighteenthcentury epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson, Pamela and Clarissa. Or perhaps, following Derrida, we should speak not of letters but of postcards, since the letters in Richardson have been opened to be read by all and the epistolary break in Brontë is addressed to anyone who happens to see it, just as anyone who picks up a postcard becomes its addressee by virtue of the card’s exposure, failing the protection of an envelope, to just anyone’s gaze. Letters, Derrida is implying, are veiled postcards. The novel, Brontë is saying— or no, not saying but letting it go without saying—links the author and reader (a reader, the reader, any reader, every reader) in a structure of address. II. First Words. It is one of the most famous moments in musical history: “O friends, not these tones.” That is Beethoven’s baritone-avatar speaking at the turning point of the symphony so closely linked to his name that there is, though there are many, only one “Ninth Symphony.” Speaking? No, not speaking: calling (for this is not yet singing), as one calls to someone across a room or a street, as one addresses someone with a call. This abrupt shift to direct address, coming near the head of the last movement, recalls perhaps—but here the parallel breaks down. There is an act of address here, to be sure, but not a recollection. This call is not only a calling out and calling up but also a calling off. In rejecting the music of the symphony’s first three movements, the Beethovenian voice is silencing the past: silencing not only its expressive conventions and their formal conveyances but also its practices of listening. Music, this music says, is a

F6540.indb 31

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

32

Lawrence Kramer

call. To hear it is to heed it. Music in the past was an envelope. Music from now on, from this very moment on, will be an address. Not the inscription but the act: music will even be the act of address itself in material form, the vibratory link issued from one (any one) to another in the expectation of a return. But what kind of address will music be? And does the structure of address belong to an open field or a locked room? Beethoven’s call (he wrote the words as well as the music) is first exclamatory, then concessive: “O friends, not these tones! Rather let us . . . ” Is that an invitation or a command? A request for consent or an exercise of authority? And are these questions genuinely interrogatory, or are they prescribed by the very structure of address they put at stake? III. Not a Word. It is one of the most famous moments in the history of the musical avant-garde. A pianist walks on stage, addresses himself to the instrument, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds—a random interval of time that will thereafter be virtually synonymous with a name (left unwritten here in an act of mimicry)— does nothing. Nothing? No, far from it: he makes no sound but by gesture and posture divides the interval into three “movements” framing the ambient sound that music usually silences. In so doing he reiterates the founding act of music as such, which is to abolish silence. Music, while it lasts, does not fill silence but rescinds it. Even such silences as sometimes punctuate or interrupt the course of music have been abolished; to draw on Derrida again, these silences are only music differed and deferred. 4′33″ is anything but a silent piece; it is a piece in which the limit and the origin of music stand revealed as identical. No “Reader!” here; no “O friends!” Does that mean that music as call has been called back to something more primary? Has music become an envelope again? Does the impression that no one is addressed mean that the structure of address has disappeared? Does 4′33″ escape the structure of address or represent a form of address that evades the questions raised by the Ninth Symphony or constitute a protest against a coercive excess of address that, by the time this music was “composed,” had come to dominate the cultures of both classical and poplar music? Cage, to give him his name at last, also wrote aleatoric music for ensembles of radios, the instrument par excellence at the time (television was still young) of address at a distance. (If he had lived long enough, Cage would surely have devised something for cell phones.) So many questions. These first three “inventions” open them up; those that follow will seek some answers to them. And to these: Who is address-

F6540.indb 32

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

33

ing what to whom when music becomes an address to a listener? Does the historical invention of that prospect apply in retrospect? And once music has become an address, can it become something else? Can music become its own Other? What happens to the envelope (take the term as you will) when the address has been written on it? Well, what has happened? Song is an address by definition, but when did musical sound as such become a form of address? (Note that I do not ask when it was conceived as a form of address. Invention is not a metaphor but an act; through that act music becomes an address, becomes address, regardless of how it is conceived.) The representation in music of music as an address can be traced back at least to the later eighteenth century and no doubt much further. Iconic examples include the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271 (1775) (Example 1) and (crossing into the next century) the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, op. 31, no. 1 (1802) (Example 2). Both movements are in a minor key, both invoke a tragic sublimity, and both incorporate instrumental recitatives that seem to enter the music from outside and afar. The sense of address might thus seem to represent an exception,

Example 1. Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271, second movement: closing instrumental recitative

Example 2. Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2, first movement: second instrumental recitative

F6540.indb 33

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

34

Lawrence Kramer

and to some extent it does; this combination of features is unusual. But the exception becomes the rule (or reveals that it has always been the rule) virtually as soon as it appears. Once heard, the recitatives resound, not as symbolic voices intruded into a body of music without voice but as other voices cutting through the symbolic voice that (we now understand) belongs to the music at large the moment we hear it as expressive of anything. For Mozart this effect is progressive. The recitatives occur four times with increasing prominence in different voicings—ranging the possibilities: on first violins, then on piano, then divided between piano and first violins, and, to end the movement, on piano again in enhanced form. For Beethoven the effect is a fusion of symbolic distance and sensory intimacy. His two recitatives drift in pianissimo over bass arpeggios and float unaccompanied trailing a sonorous mist formed by continuous pedal. Neither ends on a chord tone; the second lingers over a piercing dissonance. The differences continue: address is not a single thing. Mozart’s recitatives engage with the music around them; Beethoven’s remain aloof. Mozart’s recitatives suggest theatrical performance; Beethoven’s seem acousmatic. But both place the listener, that is, imagine a listener, ordain a listener, in the subject position of addressee.3 That position is very difficult to relinquish for two reasons that merge at their limits into a powerful call. First, the sheer fact that the listener can hear the recitative as an address implies that such a hearing belongs immanently to the identity of the listener, that is, to anyone who listens. And, second, the immanence thus recognized is not simply musical or aesthetic but ontological. To occupy any subject position is necessarily to be the subject of address. And conversely, insofar as the human is constituted by the power and obligation of speech, insofar as we are symbolic beings, to be addressed is necessarily to occupy a subject position. (The reference to the symbolic suggests a Lacanian formulation but is by no means limited to one; as Judith Butler has argued, the basis of subjectivity is literally the condition of being spoken to, more particularly, for her, being addressed by a call to give an—impossible—account of oneself.)4 The recitatives in Mozart’s concerto and Beethoven’s sonata paradoxically unveil the necessity of address in the form of a possibility; they disclose the rule (even the law) in the form of an exception. They do so in part because of their historical position in the era that discovered the possibility of the aesthetic—here meaning simply the enjoyment of perception for its own sake, a kind of higher hedonism. From the beginning, aesthetic pleasure arose in relation to both works of nature and works of art (that is, of fine art, a category newly separated from other

F6540.indb 34

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

35

practices of making). This distinction in the object of enjoyment brought another in its wake. To enjoy objects in nature, one simply had to find them, but objects of art had to be given. The “work of art” as a vehicle of pleasurable perception is necessarily a medium of address. Implicitly recognizing as much, the musical aesthetics of the time raised the stakes of musical expression to endow aesthetic pleasure with ethical value. As J. G. Sulzer wrote in his widely read General Theory of Fine Art, “The principal, if not indeed the sole function of a perfect musical composition is the accurate expression of emotions and passions. . . . Without [expression], music is just a pleasant toy; with it, music becomes an overwhelmingly powerful language which engulfs the heart. It compels us in turn to tenderness, resolution, and courage.”5 Sulzer’s linguistic metaphor does more here than simply provide a customary excuse for affirming without explaining the intelligibility of music. It endows music with the character of a call, an address, which assumes an irresistible performative force—too irresistible, one might demur, but the key point here is not whether the call is coercive but that to hear expressive music is to be addressed by a call. Even works inherited from eras that conceived of them otherwise may sound as calls when we hear them in the course of aesthetic practice. And the possibility of that hearing means that (as with the voice proclaimed by the musical recitatives) the position of address cannot be excluded from preaesthetic works on historical grounds, whether or not it was historically recognized. For a long time, it seems fair to say, this state of affairs was itself an object of pleasure; it was not only enjoyed but also idealized, and to some extent it still is. But the transition to modernity brought with it a contrary impulse grounded in a general dislike and mistrust of subjectivity. This attitude had too many sources to tabulate here. Suffice it to say that it could comport equally well with the alienation of thought or feeling; critical suspicion of social, psychological, and ideological controls; hostility to rationality or rationalization; nostalgia for premodern modes of awareness; and the embrace of radically new modes of awareness. “Overdetermination” barely covers the case. But the very proliferation of antisubjective impulses testifies to the resilience of the subjective formation. This resilience comes not just from the continued attractiveness of the post-Enlightenment subject position as a model (however vulnerable it may be to misconception and manipulation) and not just from the obvious fact that the antisubjective enterprise depends fundamentally on its antagonist, without which it would have no reason for being. It comes from the way the subject has proven to act: not

F6540.indb 35

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

36

Lawrence Kramer

only as a template for desire and identity but also as an invitation to break the mold and to go beyond both. In a sense, the subject as template is its own antagonist—and happy to be just that. It is happy because of a prevailing confidence that the shards of the subject will always reassemble themselves after each shattering, like a film running in reverse. The real question about the structure of address is not whether breaking or circumventing its frames is possible (of course it is) but whether its confidence can be justified. I do not pretend to have the answer to that question, which in any case is not just one question. But raising the question is enough by itself to change the discourse on the subject of the subject. And the discourse needs changing. Too much of it seems confined by a model of the subject as smug and deluded, falsely secure in its sense of boundedness and self-possession. It may, of course, be all that and more. But it does not have to be. Our Mozart and Beethoven examples suggest as much, the one perplexed over the difference between expressing pain and performing it, the other stopped in its tracks by a mourning voice that the self can neither take in nor keep out. So it is important to spell out what the understanding of subjectivity as addressed and addressing does and does not involve. That comes next.

Models and Histories The positioning of music within structures of address, and therefore within formations of subjectivity, is a historical reality that extends through a series of specific cultural practices and material conditions. Within this framework, the history of music and the history of subjectivity are inseparable; to understand either, one has to understand the other.6 But when history changes course, it forces questions on us. First, is address as such, and therefore subjectivity as such, itself a contingent historical reality, or does it have ontological force and belong a fortiori to the ontology of music? Is there an ontology of music? Second, assuming that, either way, the address form has to be reckoned with in any account of music since the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries (depending on the model used),7 just how is this structure structured—arrayed, conceived, deployed, enacted? And if one addresses oneself to music from a postsubjective, asubjective, or posthuman perspective, how does that change the sense of music as subjective medium, music as address, that arose within the era of the grand history? Would not even a model of subjectivity divorced from the era’s widely criticized conception of a bounded, autonomous, self-possessed

F6540.indb 36

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

37

subject, the sovereign bourgeois I, be put out of joint, or at the very least decentered? Would one not have to conclude with van Maas that “musical subjectivity functions, so to speak, “on top” of an aural-musical event that is more radically indeterminate than any play with subject positions would allow us to acknowledge . . . before, during (!), and after the grand history of musical subjectivity?”8 The answer to that is a resounding “yes and no”: yes in the sense that to ignore the asubjective, whether before, during, or after the era of its ascendancy, would be a serious blunder, but no in the sense that a fully historical understanding of subjectivity, one not tied to the myths of sovereignty, transparency, and authority, incorporates the recognition that disruption, deconstruction, and displacement are all vicissitudes always already inherent in subjectivity. Subjectivity as historical being rather than as abstract dream includes, or is even included by, its own Other. The necessity of this mutual inclusion / mutual exclusion has implications it would be worth pursuing elsewhere. We might imagine a sphere of purely automatic or impersonal otherness with no relation to subjectivity at all: a seated mannequin leans forward, its ear turned toward a player piano. But, ironically, we can imagine this privation of subjectivity only as subjects and from the point of view of the subjectivity the privation would exclude. There is no subject without an Other, but there is also no Other without the subject. With reference to music, this mutuality means that the interlocutory model based on structures of address does not aim to protect the subjectivities it describes but to project them into a historical matrix in which they may be or may have been assembled and disassembled, produced and dismantled. The model does not involve listening or performing submissively to the dictates of the supposed “composer’s voice,” in Edward T. Cone’s still surprisingly influential formula.9 Nor does it involve the packaging of affect or edifying discourse in the form of the commodified “work” as described—satirized—by Roland Barthes.10 Or, rather, the model involves these things only as ideals or practices belonging to contingent moments in the grand history—as, for example, when Cone updates Sulzer by displacing the source of the coercive call from affective performance to musical form. As Judith Butler observes in a commentary on Louis Althusser, one can always resist the call that interpellates—an address that coerces whoever answers it to assume a subject position—for Althusser, the delivery system of ideology.11 One can refuse to turn, refuse to heed the voice of the Master-Subject. In musical terms, one can always listen without being si-

F6540.indb 37

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

38

Lawrence Kramer

lenced by the composer’s voice. But resisting the call does little more than reverse its power dynamic, and hence it remains confined within the call itself. There are many more forms of reply than mere resistance. Besides, as Butler herself acknowledges elsewhere, the logic of the call is not monochromatic.12 The structure of address may certainly be used for regulation or confinement, but it is also available as a means of engagement and concern. It is also true that one can yield to a call with a submission that has not been asked for. Even though the structure of address does not necessarily offer subjective agency only as a form of ideological puppetry, agency is never simply given; it has to be claimed. The power of reply to make the claim is not unlimited, but it should not be underestimated. There is, nonetheless, something missing from the force of reply despite the open and multiple senses of reply: answer, respond, acknowledge, counter, rebut, write back, and, with a little hyphenation, re-ply, that is, refold, reinterpret (an earlier model of the epistle, folded rather than sealed: write on the verso or the margin; refold; resend). The missing element is the asubjective agency that cuts through all structures of address and demands the understanding that subjectivity rests on, and acts at the sufferance of, its impersonal contrary. By changing the Althusserian “Yes” to a “Yes, but . . .” the subject who replies upholds its mobility and creates an open space for agency. The problem inherent in this is the problem of agency itself, which may not be under the control of the subject or even of subjectivity. Action may be done through or despite or underneath or alongside as well as by the subject; action may be done with forethought or no thought or unconscious thought. And this ever-possible impersonality of agency gives the position of the subject an asubjective turn, which in the case of music involves the ever-present possibility that music’s unbound energy may sometimes be unbindable. Music may draw the subject of address away from the field of subjectivity into an alterity for which there is no other designation than the music behind or around the one who is (no longer) addressed. In the third act of Wagner’s Parsifal, for example, the brotherhood of Grail Knights gangs up on its gravely wounded leader, Amfortas, and demands that he perform his holy office. Amfortas refuses, driven by the unbearable pain of his wound. (He has other reasons too; we will return to Amfortas.) The music for his refusal is savage, equal in excess to Amfortas’s surplus agony. Wagner, or Amfortas, pushes this outcry to the point of atonality, which in Wagner’s musical language still means sound stripped of meaning, sound as abrasive material, the correlative of pain pushed to the point of impersonality: “Pain torturing itself,” as Wallace Stevens later

F6540.indb 38

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

39

described such an extreme. “Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.”13 The music denies the audience a subjective relationship as Amfortas denies the Knights their magical bread and wine. And more: he enjoins them to kill him; he wants to deny them an interlocutor. But such voiding of subjectivity can also happen in circumstances that are anything but sublime or tragic. The intensifying repetitions of Ravel’s Bolero, which also lead to a point of collapse, invite the listener to become mesmerized by a rhythmic mechanism powered by orchestral color. Ravel himself characterized the two themes that alternate throughout as “altogether impersonal” and—also playing on the mechanism of language— described “an analogy between the alternation of these two themes riveted one to the other and the links of a chaîne (chain / assembly line).”14 Bolero may be as popular as it is precisely because it offers a release from subjectivity in an abandon of what might be called sensuous automation. Yet the subject need no more comply with such a perversely seductive machinery of abnegation than with its opposite number, the interpellative call. All one has to do after hearing Bolero is walk away at one’s own pace while whistling the bolero rhythm.15 Where, then, and how does the interlocutory model place music in the history of subjectivity, and vice versa? I propose to sketch the rudiments of an answer in a series of additional inventions composed on and around the subject (in every sense). But before turning to them a pause for further reflection is needed. Throughout these inventions there has been and will continue to be a certain free interchangeability among auditory forms and functions: voice, speech, music, singing, instrumental sound, call, reply. What makes this possible is the very form to which these auditory actions may or may not adhere: the structure of address. The structure, that is, the armature of possibility, operates regardless of what fills it out. The question before us is thus not inherently musical but appropriatively so. Music is its traditionally most idealized vehicle, the aesthetic vehicle in which the ambiguities of address yield (so we like to think) to pleasure. We can continue to ask our question of or through music, but that is best done in the awareness that the answer we thus call for needs to be sounded more broadly. The question is how closely or firmly our experience of auditory forms ties in, and ties us in, to the structure(s) of address and therefore—this should be italicized: therefore—becomes the matrix of subjectivity. For the structure of address is not something an independent subjectivity may take part in or not. On the contrary, it is the condition of possibility for subjectivity. Subjectivity is something that happens, it is that which happens,

F6540.indb 39

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

40

Lawrence Kramer

within the structure of address. Only subjects can be addressed; subjects can only address themselves to and through other subjects. And when that happens? What does it entail, and what does conceiving of it—which surely entails repeating it— commit us to? Four points: 1. The structure of address does not ratify or depend on a notion of successful interpellation but rather on the opposite. It depends on a concept of what might be called the constructive failure of interpellation. The subject does not become itself by answering the call from the position the call designates, even when that is exactly what it does. It becomes itself by making a reply: by devising, discovering, inventing an answer that is in some sense its own: by countersigning, as Derrida might say, from a position oblique to the position addressed16— oblique in principle, even when not in fact. The structure of address, involving both voice and subject, remains, but it becomes not a structure at all but a practice of detour and sidestep. It replaces interpellation with interlocution. The subject of the interlocutory model returns the call not only from but also to a displaced position. It stands between interpellation and refusal. It invents, and in doing so it releases itself from the sway or voice of an other that is really only a projection of Derrida’s “economy of the same.” In doing so the subject invents (not for the first time) both itself and the other as (both) genuinely other, at least for the moment of invention. And whoever does so occupies a position that is both subjective and asubjective depending on whether one approaches it from the front or the back, the obverse or the reverse. Every face implies the blank oval that is the back of the head—an obverse and reverse that admits of a space for both the humanist and counterhumanist modes of sentience. But the filled and the blank oval share the same ears, which draw in circulating streams of sound from all directions at once. 2. The model of address is ontological only in being historical. It does not purport to say something about music, listening, and so on that precedes historical determinations but to describe what those determinations— especially as they have been constructed and deployed in the West since the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries—have made irrevocable even in obsolescence. 3. The interlocutory model holds on to the idea of the subject, or at least the name of the subject, not to sustain any sense of a knowing punctum set over against an array of objects but to provide for the singular, sentient, and reflective locus of human agency, something that no one escapes. The subject is that which dies. Heidegger’s notion of the world as “the ever-nonobjective” permeated by concern is relevant here;17 the

F6540.indb 40

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

41

subject (not that Heidegger would approve the term) is a transient relay in the “worlding” produced by the crossing of concern(s). The world in Heidegger’s sense is neither a “mere collection” of “things that are just there” nor “a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things.” Instead “the world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home.”18 Human agency assumes historical and material definition where and wherever the intertwinings of concern give it a world to act in. The one who acts, whom I want to keep addressing as the subject, is one in whom the mechanism of relaying concern is primordially the compound of listening, calling, and replying. Music (of whatever kind) is both a mirror of that process and a means of it, an example and the thing exemplified. That is why music (of some kind) is one of the few true cultural universals. 4. Address concerns listening, not hearing: not, that is, the event of sonority but the cultural practice of appropriating it. Listening throughout its history has been accompanied by the possibility that its status as the reception of subjective address may be inverted; the subjective is neither superior nor subordinate to what we may now call asubjectivity. But it does have a certain priority, in the sense that the force of the asubjective depends on the prior institution of the structure of address as the theater of human agency. Without the structure, there is no subject for asubjectivity to envelop. In relation to language, this relationship is archaic, but as already noted here music’s entry on the stage is historically belated and dependent in part on the institution of listening to music as an independent activity. Once that occurs, however, no matter to what era one dates the event, it becomes impossible to separate music from the experience of subjectivity in and through the vicissitudes of interlocution. But this expressly does not mean “subjectivity” in the sense of the consciously self-possessed bourgeois subject, which has an existence far shakier and less idolized than conventional wisdom would have it. Subjectivity is volatile, spectral, mutable, contingent, as much unconscious as conscious, impelled to a fascination with the nonverbal by its own linguisticality. Once invented, subjectivity proliferates; it becomes more expressible by accumulating supplements, artifices, devices, prostheses, and the more expressible it becomes, the more mercurial it grows. The inventive qualities that drive subjectivity are not those of asubjectivity, which, if anything, embodies their contrary, though with no less inventiveness. The asubjective is methodical in action even when it is anarchic or “glutinous”—the term will come up—in its effect. To be sure, this distinction is permeable. Subjec-

F6540.indb 41

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

42

Lawrence Kramer

tive agency may contract into asubjective technique; asubjective technique may expand into subjective agency. But the tendencies persist. To invoke a distinction that much absorbed Ludwig Wittgenstein, the character of subjectivity can never be said, only shown. The asubjective is precisely sayable, sayable to excess—as the promised inventions will illustrate, starting now.

“Weave a Circle round Him Thrice . . .” The asubjective correlative provoked by the address form has its own long history. Nineteenth-century instances tend to dwell on monstrosity and mortality, especially in conjunction with technological supplements to the structure of address; the invention of sound recording fostered a certain domestication of the asubjective, though not without considerable ambivalence, and the subsequent development of musical modernism scaled down the affect further into the detachment of artifice or impersonality. Like all such cultural developments, however, this one was and remains uneven, so that eruptions of the asubjective remain a force, or at least a trope, of shock and disorientation. For a genealogical perspective, consider a perhaps unlikely trio of asubjects from the nineteenth century. The first is the title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” On his deathbed, Valdemar consents to be mesmerized in the interests of science—an important point, since it was as science that mesmerism flourished; many of Poe’s readers took his fantastic tale as a factual report. The unintended consequence of the mesmerism is to preserve Valdemar’s capacity to speak after his death. In particular he, or rather his tongue, answers two questions spaced seven months apart; each answer ends with a self-description that no subject can make: “I am dead.” In the heyday of poststructuralism, this sentence became something of a cause célèbre, attracting readings from Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida, all of whom in different ways regarded “I am dead” as an index of the otherness of language as such.19 But Poe’s emphasis is not on language; it is specifically on speech. “I am dead” is not impossible as language and certainly not as writing. First-person epitaphs stand at the origin of Western lyric poetry; the ancient collection known as the “Greek Anthology” contains an abundance of them, many of which utter the infamous sentence or some variant of it. Here is one example, somewhat abbreviated: “I am an Athenian woman; for that was my city; but from Athens the wasting war-god

F6540.indb 42

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

43

of the Italians plundered me long ago . . . and now that I am dead, sea-girt Cyzicus wraps my bones.”20 Epitaphs such as this almost anticipate Derrida’s claim that the ability to say “I am dead” is the condition of a true act of language.21 In any case the sentence is a perfectly good metaphor. But speech and language are not the same, and speech is another matter. “I am dead” is impossible as a speech act. It cannot be a constative because if true, it cannot be spoken; it cannot be a performative because there is nothing its speaker can do. Just how impossible it is to endure the illocutionary force of “I am dead” may be gauged from a rare disorder known as Cotard’s syndrome or Cotard’s delusion, after the French physician who first identified it in 1880. Sufferers from Cotard’s delusion sincerely believe that they are dead; they are often incapable of recognizing themselves in the mirror. The delusion is typically accompanied by intense feelings of self-loathing, in Valdemarlike response to the subject’s feeling of its own putrefaction. Cotard’s sufferers may utter words, but they cannot have real conversations. As an answer to the questions of Poe’s narrator, “I am dead” breaks the structure of address in the very act of conforming to it: making a reply. The sentence, a death sentence condemned to life, shares in the dissolution of the body through which it speaks.22 The break comes about because the voice that replies belongs to no subject or, more exactly, to the no-subject. The reply comes from no one. No one’s voice speaks, but it speaks in a voice unlike any other. Its asubjective source is neither death nor life but undeath, which exceeds them both. “I am dead,” which can be spoken only by the undead, intimates not only Derrida’s claim about the true act of language but also a claim more inclusive: that true speech has the ability to say itself from a source beyond, behind, any I. In part this ability belongs not to speech itself but to technological supplements that all too easily usurp the place of the subject. Poe’s narrator reports that Valdemar’s tongue made a “strong vibratory motion” between rigid lips and jaws. The description suggests a telegraph key, popularly known at the time as a “clattering tongue”; the sound that results seems to come “from some vast distance.” But the sound does more than clatter. The vibrating tongue is also a vibrating string, drawing sound forth from an oracular interior as if from “some deep cavern within the earth.” The “intonation” of this voice of the dead, or dead voice, is a decomposing music. It is “harsh, broken, and hollow”; worse, it is “gelatinous” and “glutinous,” no longer addressed to the ear—that is, no longer addressed at all—but

F6540.indb 43

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

44

Lawrence Kramer

imposed on touch.23 As a musical instrument, Valdemar’s tongue suggests that music, especially when removed from the naturalness of the voice, is even more than language the medium of the utterance “I am dead.” There is something to be said for the suggestion. As I have observed elsewhere, melody in particular is defined by its capacity to be played or sung by someone else without loss of its own “voice,” that is, of an expressive immediacy whose counterpart in speech is subject to immediate loss.24 Absent technological prosthesis, the expressiveness of particular speech acts cannot survive their performance. Melody makes that survival possible in the form of retrieval— of the reanimation or revival of what it nonetheless recalls as lost. Melody is the original form of sound recording. Poe’s associations of dead voice with the remote and the cavernous carry over into the second of our exemplary asubjects. This one is fully musical: it—the pronoun is exact—is Wagner’s Titurel, the founder of the grail brotherhood in Parsifal. Titurel shares with M. Valdemar the phenomenology of the undead who speak. He dwells in his coffin, kept “alive,” if that is the word, only by the administration of the grail, with due ritual, by his wounded son, Amfortas. Wagner would no doubt have hated the idea, but the grail acts here no less as a technological supplement than does the mesmerism exercised on Valdemar. And the results are no less creepy. Wagner’s treatment of Titurel is too complex for detailed treatment here.25 Suffice it to dwell on the exemplary moment when he asks the harassing question, “Mein Sohn Amfortas, bist du am Amt?” (My son Amfortas, are you at your office?). The question, like all of Titurel’s utterances, comes from a disembodied voice both distant and buried. Wagner’s stage directions call for the voice to issue from an invisible source somewhere behind Amfortas; usually this means off or beneath the stage, so that the voice seems to come, like Valdemar’s, “as from a vast distance or from some deep cavern within the earth.” As Slavoj Ž iž ek likes to emphasize, Titurel’s question is aggressive and punitive.26 It is all the more powerfully so because it appropriates the grail ritual to the preservation of Titurel’s undead state. “Titurel’s voice”—that is how Wagner’s score refers to it, Titurels Stimme— embodies oral greed in the absence of mind. Its question, we might say, is spoken and can only be spoken in the voice of the drive to undeath. As long as Amfortas remains susceptible to it, his own state of living death, the subjective version of Titurel’s asubjective vacancy, is doomed to survive. We can hear as much in the melody Wagner invents for the question, which is close to a musical equivalent of M. Valdemar’s speech. Until the laden last word “Amt,” office, the melody hews to the tones of the D♭ minor

F6540.indb 44

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

45

Example 3. Wagner, Parsifal, Act 1, Scene 2: Titurel’s Voice

triad (Example 3). But with “Amt” it becomes mortifying in the original sense of the word, rising to a close on the augmented fourth D♭ -G. The effect goes beyond the tritonal dissonance; it assumes a “glutinous” morbidity by corrupting the A♭ , the fifth scale degree, on which the key depends for its tonal life. In response or extension—it is impossible to say which— the timpani beats out a brief tattoo on E♭ that leads to a long dead silence. The addition of G to E♭ portends an E♭ -minor outburst that will come from the orchestra during Amfortas’s reply, but its immediate effect is to inhabit the tonal no-space opened by Titurel’s question. Its E♭ will come to be animated, but for the present it is neither that nor the contrary. It is only the place held by the sonority of the timpani, which, “harsh, broken, and hollow,” extends and suspends Titurel’s question in its alterity. The sound of the drum is the resonance of the sepulcher from which the question issues and the echo of M. Valdemar’s tongue “rolling violently” between the stretched skin of his lips. Parsifal is famously an opera with a message, “durch Mitleid wissen,” to know through compassion. It is a message reiterated through one of the very few leitmotifs in Wagner to echo the singing of the words. Both the words and the music are a call to assume a subject position, and what both Parsifal and Amfortas discover is that to heed the call may be more agonizing than any subject can bear. It may lead into an abyss of asubjectivity— embodied in Amfortas’s wound—that only a miracle can cure. It should be no surprise, then, that Wagner reinvented M. Valdemar as Titurel to hold a place in that abyss and to give the call an abyssal sound and shape. At one stage in his work on the opera, Wagner even considered having Titurel briefly revive—and sing— during the final grail ceremony in which Parsifal takes over Amfortas’s office. We can be glad he decided to pull the plug; the Valdemar-like moment would really have spoiled the party. What could Titurel have sung except

F6540.indb 45

6/17/15 8:30:04 AM

46

Lawrence Kramer

“I am dead”? But the idea is revealing. Within just a few years, Titurel himself was reinvented in the form of another coffin dweller of great age kept alive only by a parody of a sacred meal. Parsifal premiered in 1882; Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. Even the technological supplements supporting the undead state are similar. In the novel, the vampirehunting heroes form a grail-like brotherhood through the then-new technology of blood transfusion. And they do so to heal a wound that threatens to make subject into asubject, subject into living-dead substance: that is, to preserve the humanity of the narrative’s first victim. The effort fails, but the bond it forms is indispensable later as the group tracks down the vampire with the help of hypnotic passes—shades of M. Valdemar again— over the unconscious body of the novel’s heroine, Mina Murray. Mina has been forced to drink Dracula’s blood, producing a telepathic sympathy that enables her, when questioned, to emit clues to his whereabouts—and not just any clues: she hears what he does. The auditory communication over a vast distance gives the vacillation around subjectivity a quasi-musical force and even a kind of leitmotif as Mina repeatedly speaks, or the speech that issues from her tells, of the sound of “lapping waves and rushing water.”27 The fluidity of the sound epitomizes the dissolution of boundaries as Mina’s subjectivity and Dracula’s lack of it appropriate each other in a strange game of telephone. The emblematic series of subjective prostheses from Poe through Wagner to Stoker and, of course, beyond does not mark a break with the appeal, in every sense, of subjectivity and address. The horror of Poe’s narrator and the mixture of sacrifice and healing in both Wagner and Stoker suggest the exact opposite. But the series does urge the recognition that both subjectivity and asubjectivity depend on invention and even on the invention of the other. In the largest sense, that is the import of Derrida’s maxim that the only possible invention is the invention of the impossible, the invention that lets the other arrive. What needs to be added is that music has a prominent historical role in this call to invention. Music itself has recurrently suggested just that, as the inventions ventured here have sought, and in a moment will seek again, to show. The question that music raises, both in general and in a host of particulars, is not an either/or between subject and asubject, and certainly not a feeble both/and. It is a question of separation: of how, when, and whether to tease apart the possible and the impossible, sensibility and mechanism, the reply and the call, music as virtual feeling and music as resonant matter—and so on: the question itself is subject to endless reinvention as it moves within and between styles and genres, well beyond my smattering

F6540.indb 46

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

47

of classical samples, and within and between the cultural tropes that music shares in and helps to animate. And so . . . on.

Die dreimalige Akkord I. Reader, I . . . It is another famous moment of address, this time from English poetry (Brontë would have known it). But it is not an other: I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.”28

The speaker is (not exactly) Percy Shelley, who, however, has little presence in the text beyond the grammatical “I” that, with some irony, stands at its head. What is most resonant about this poem for present purposes is its multiplication of address. Ozymandias, King of Kings, addresses himself to the mighty via the writing on his pedestal, but his message goes awry even before it is sent, rewritten (because well read) by the sculptor whose tacitly ironic version belatedly reaches the traveler in (then from) an antique land who in turn relays the message as speech to the “I” of the poem who (both “as” Shelley and for him) transmits it to subsequent generations of readers, including, dear Reader, you, yourself, right here and right now. The voice of Ozymandias (only ever transcribed) echoes across the millennia but only in depersonalized, ironic, negated form. This voice is a lifeless thing that yet survives amid the many lost voices of “Ozymandias,” a poem that, itself, ironically replicates the monumental ruin of the colossus. The poem has voices, but it has no voice. It is full of addresses but never reaches the address to which it is sent—though it has never failed to arrive, not to this very day.

F6540.indb 47

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

48

Lawrence Kramer

Those who intercept this postcard of a poem with a musical bias might find in its imagery a recollection of a shattered colossus in the desert of Egyptian Thebes. From antiquity through the nineteenth century, the statue was popularly said to represent the mythical Ethiopian king Memnon, son of Eos, goddess of the dawn—and the subject of a song by Schubert. According to the second-century Greek geographer Pausanias, “This statue was broken in two by Cambyses, and at the present day from head to middle it is thrown down; but the rest is seated, and every day at the rising of the sun it makes a noise, and the sound one could best liken to that of a harp or lyre when a string has been broken.”29 The text of Schubert’s song, by Johann Mayrhofer, turns on another change of address: the statue’s sound is mournful but strikes mortal ears as lyrical. The song redresses—readdresses—the unwitting irony by treating it as a transformation wrought by art; the setting of the last stanza ecstatically grants the wish, the reunion with E(r)os, that the text says cannot be granted. But the rerouting does not proceed without marking the witting irony of taking subjective pleasure in asubjective “expression.” In the penultimate stanza the song brutally warps its own melodic voice to imply, as I put it elsewhere, that “the subject named Memnon is and must be absent from the scene of pleasure.”30 II. O Friends . . . This is another iconic moment of musical address, but this time with surrogate voices. Classical surrogates: the pastoral pipes that speak for and as the shepherd swain who alternately plays them and sings. The scene is the pastoral frame of the slow movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. At the start, the calls of an English horn find their distant answers in the return call, at once echo and reply, of an offstage oboe. The invocation (take the term literally) of real rather than metaphorical space turns the episode into an allegory of music as call, of an address by one sentient and sensitive being to another. (Lover to beloved here, of course, but also more; hovering behind the scene is Rousseau’s famous observation that animals have voices but only humans sing; when he hears a singing voice, he knows he is in calling distance of another sentient being like himself.31 His impulse to call to this other is that of a subject on the knife edge of asubjectivity; without the other whose song is the index of likeness, the listener would have no self to be like.) At the end of the movement the English horn call goes forth again. But this time the oboe is silent. Perhaps it has gone elsewhere or has been called away by fate or was just not listening or has changed its mind. We do not know; there is no answer. But yes, there is, only not the answer

F6540.indb 48

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

49

called for: the answer comes in the form of rumblings for four timpani, sometimes together, sometimes apart. The immediate effect is topical; the drums betoken distant thunder. The symbolism is plain, and so is the allusion to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. But there is more at stake. The drum sounds constitute the material form of the loss of address, the palpable absence of an answering voice for lack of which the call of the first voice carries into a void where it too is lost. The loss of address brings with it the loss of subjectivity; the drums, ironically replying only to each other in a travesty of calling and answering, negate the call with the mutter (not its symbol, sign, or signifier but the actual sound) of the mute, the inarticulate, the unvoiceable. If Titurel could recognize anything, he would recognize this. And? . . . And the tearing of the envelope—this is not famous at all, but perhaps it should be. Among Vivaldi’s many concertos is a brief one in E minor for cello and bassoon. Writing it was odd to begin with; in Vivaldi’s day both instruments, especially the bassoon, were primarily workhorses assigned to the bass line rather than bearers of melody. ( Vivaldi wrote other concertos for each, but dragging them up together from the basso continuo was something else again.) But the oddness continues. The first movement begins not with a ritornello but with a somber duet for the concertino. When the ritornello for strings comes, it is an intrusion. It is a violently agitated passage that interrupts the cello and bassoon as they cadence and proceeds with complete indifference to the music it has elbowed away. The movement as a whole consists of a spasmodic alternation of these two elements, the concertino evolving, the ritornello not. It is as if the ensemble were switching arbitrarily between two entirely different pieces. The result is the mirror inversion of what happens in the recitativeinflected movements by Mozart and Beethoven. The concertino does not present itself as an address, or if it does, it is an address between the instruments rather than from the duo to a listener. (The partners are unequal, so there is a subdued drama going on; the cello’s superior melodic capacity increasingly asserts itself. In the slow movement and finale it will dominate completely.) But when the ritornello blusters in, the concertino becomes an address. The ritornello’s indifference becomes a trait that provokes; its lack of either “objective” or “subjective” reference forms a disturbance reflected back on itself in the music’s agitation. Heard against this not-at-allpleasant “toy,” as Sulzer might have called it, the concertino assumes the character of an appeal. It becomes an expression that has just discovered its

F6540.indb 49

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

50

Lawrence Kramer

own expressiveness and the corresponding need to be recognized for what it is. The music discovers the possibility, and therefore the necessity, of a subject by exposing itself to bare asubjective force. In its dual singularity, this obscure jeux d’esprit stumbled on the broader collision between subjective address and asubjective cancellation that in varying proportions was subsequently to constitute—and therefore will have become what had always constituted—the art of Western music.

F6540.indb 50

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

chapter 3

Scenes of Inner Devastation Interpellation, Finite and Infinite Sander van Maas

Listening seems to leave the world intact. It leaves no marks on the objects of its address or on the subjects who perform it. There is little or no real telling if someone listens. Neither is it possible, in any direct way, to tell if an aural object has ever been listened to. Listening intervenes in and departs the world without touching it. Yet no realm is more strongly connected with experiences of devastation than the aural. Less able to destroy the external world than inner worlds, listening is a conductor of inner devastation. In this chapter I will discuss two scenes of inner devastation in reference to the debate on listening subjectivity. The chapter’s title is borrowed from the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom the philosophical meditation on devastation has been a constant in his work. For Cavell devastation belongs to the register of a therapeutic form of philosophizing associated with the later Wittgenstein. As I will argue, the inner devastation related to this method might inform an account of how subjectivity is structurally undone in the act of listening. The principal interlocutor for the first scene to be discussed is Lawrence Kramer. In his recent work

51

F6540.indb 51

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

52

Sander van Maas

Kramer argues for understanding of music in terms of subjectivity. As he writes, “Subjectivity is the medium in which music works, and through which it reveals its cultural significance.”1 His approach constellates music and subjectivity in such a way as to enable an account of how in the West musical experience has come to function as a hub for the self. The heuristic focus on musical subjectivity that Kramer argues for also highlights the ways in which listening as such may create a sense of subjective inwardness. How this approach can be made productive will be discussed on the basis of Kramer’s analysis of Jane Campion’s film version of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. As with any shift of focus Kramer’s shift toward subjectivity creates new insights, but it also marginalizes and obscures certain other areas. The continued impact of these areas on the new conceptual center of subjectivity will be the subject of the first part of this chapter. It will be registered, first, in the repositioning of the object of listening that was still in the position of the interpellative power in theories of listening that originated in musical modernism. In Kramer the musical object appears to have rendered that position under pressure of intersubjective principles. Second, the impact of the margins will be detected in the pressures exerted on subjectivity as such insofar as subjectivity in music will reveal itself to be a special case within a much wider field of artistic forms of individuation. The second scene of inner devastation to be discussed will involve the study of listening as an experience of inner devastation in the work of the Austrian composer Beat Furrer. His work for music theater Begehren, based on the myth of Orpheus and using a patchwork of both classical and modern texts, meditates on the aftermath of listening. The Orpheus portrayed by Furrer resonates with Campion’s protagonist, Isabel Archer, insofar as both are subjects of an interpellation. The former character, however, allows for a detailed account of the ways in which the process of subject formation may never be able to subtract itself from the event of listening. Listening is here shown to have left clear marks on Orpheus, the listener who is completely absorbed by it. As will become increasingly clear Begehren offers a glimpse of the creative power of inner devastation that is intimated by Isabel’s fate.

Listen for Me, Schubert I wanted to linger by the basement window—Schubert and only Schubert, I felt, was life. Only his music had the secret of keeping me alive.

F6540.indb 52

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

53

But I had a train to catch and kept walking. And I fell into my depression again. Oliver Sacks2

In the film version of The Portrait of a Lady, directed by Jane Campion (1996), it all starts with a turn. The protagonist, Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman), is standing by a rainy window of her dying uncle’s house when she hears the tinkling sounds of music coming from downstairs. She turns around in surprise and walks down the stairs to follow the direction from which the music is coming. It appears to be made by someone playing the piano in one of the rooms, the doors of which are closed. Isabel is shown to position herself by the door, her image reflected in the mirror. After a few moments of listening Isabel grabs the door knob and enters the room. She continues to walk silently toward the source of the music, which now appears to be a female pianist who is seen from the back. When the latter notices Isabel’s presence, she stops playing. Isabel praises the beauty of the music and of her playing of it. After an exchange about whether the dying uncle might have heard the music, Isabel sits down and requests the pianist to play some more, which she does. After a few measures she stops briefly to inquire about the identity of Isabel, and she introduces herself as Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey). She then resumes playing into the next scene. As Lawrence Kramer observes in his fine analysis and comments on the film, this scene is a key scene that may be said to contain the whole of the movie.3 Isabel is a young American living in the 1870s who decides that before marrying, as social convention obliges her to do, she wants to “get a general impression of life.” She is sought after by various attractive suitors but decides to decline their proposals until further notice. She wants to see life, or as she says to her dear uncle, “There’s a light that has to dawn. I can’t explain it but I know it’s there.” Kramer reads the piano-room scene as an allegory for Isabel’s desire for life and for the fate according to which, eventually, a host of factors including herself will conspire against this initial desire. As Kramer writes, Isabel is lured by the piano music because of the “refined sensibility and emotional depth” that it seems to predicate of its player.4 What she cannot know is that Madame Merle has already started to play her dubious role in what is to become Isabel’s disastrous marriage with the tyrannical art collector Osmond. The ironical contrast between Isabel’s naïve desire to see life outside of social convention and the violence of her ultimate fate is mediated, from this scene onward, by

F6540.indb 53

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

54

Sander van Maas

the persona of Schubert. Kramer argues that throughout the film Schubert assumes the role of a separate character who acts partly as a spokesman for Isabel and partly as her alter ego. After the introduction of the Schubert persona it appears again in the film when one of Schubert’s string quartets comes to represent Isabel’s tortured existence between her old desire for her cousin Ralph, who is about to die at a tragically young age, and the harsh demands of her marriage. As Kramer shows, by referencing the song “Death and the Maiden” the string quartet introduces the bottom line as well as the soundtrack of Isabel’s life. Kramer’s account of Schubert’s role in the film is important for describing general principles of musical listening. It centers around the Althusserian concept of interpellation, according to which the individual is hailed into subjectivity by an external summons. The well-known examples given by Althusser include the policeman who, by calling out to an individual in the street and making this individual turn toward the policeman in response, turns this individual into a subject of the law. Another example given by him is the religious calling of the individual by the divine voice along the lines of Moses’s calling and subjectivating turning toward Yahweh. Althusser propounds a model of subjectivation that aims to supplement the positioning of the subject in and by discourse, which could already be found in Benveniste and elsewhere, with a theory of subjectivation as an event in ideological contexts. In the event of hailing, Althusser claims, the very physical turning around is sufficient to put the individual in its place vis-à-vis the interpellating power, which he represents as the Subject. Several tropes converge in this theoretical model: the subject comes into being through a twisting movement; it coincides with the creation of a level inferior to power; and it maps the space between power and the subject. As Herman Rapaport writes, Althusser’s theory of interpellation offers a version of the concept of subject position before the latter became overdetermined by Lacanian and Foucauldian interpretations.5 The aurality of its primal scene—the calling or whistling—makes Althusser’s notion a rich resource for the analysis of musical experience. Kramer situates his discussion of interpellation with regard to Isabel in the space between Althusser and his critics. Quoting Judith Butler’s intervention he rightly points up the insufficiency of interpellation as a foundational theory of subjectivity, but he affirms, with all due precautions, the continued importance of interpellation for the study of listening. Isabel responds to her hearing the tinkling musical sounds from downstairs by turning around. “A scarcely audible tinkling at first, the music seems to summon Isabel from afar. It clarifies gradually as she turns her head,

F6540.indb 54

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

55

descends the staircase, and approaches the closed room from which the sound emanates. The piece proves to be the A-flat Impromptu of Op. 90.”6 Kramer now proceeds to fold Schubert into his account of how Isabel is hailed as a listening subject. In Henry James’s novel Isabel is said to “recognize Schubert”—whence the title of Kramer’s essay—in what Merle is playing, but she is not capable of identifying the work at hand. Despite Isabel’s relative unfamiliarity with the music Kramer claims that she is summoned by “the authoritative voice” of Schubert, who is “figuratively or incorporeally present in the music.” The imposing presence of the Schubertian Subject in the music is answered by the sheer vacation of Isabel’s individuality. “Campion’s Isabel is not merely controlled by the playing of Madame Merle; she is mesmerized by it, almost made its puppet.” In Kramer’s view this signifies that she has entered the realm of ideology. Isabel’s desire to thank the player “interprets the effect of being controlled as an expression of her autonomy.”7 That is, insofar as she experiences in the act of listening to Schubert her free subjectivity, she is mistaking coercion for freedom. Even though Kramer’s analysis has more layers than I can represent here, the foregoing account demonstrates the clear strategic choices implied by his interpretation. These include a schematization of the situation that the scene arguably allows for but that it nevertheless resists. This resistance, I would like to put forward, hints at the possibility of the very inner devastation that Isabel will actually experience over the course of the film. In contrast to what Kramer’s analysis seems to suggest Isabel’s interpellation is not one. That is, it is neither as univocal as it seems, nor is it so clearly limited in time and space. The Subject of interpellation introduced by Kramer as the proper name of Schubert cannot be related to the “scarcely audible tinkling” that makes her turn around at the very first instant of the interpellation. The name of Schubert and what it comes to represent in terms of giving coherence to the “voice” that supposedly calls her is only added at a later stage (of the scene, of the analysis) to mend the lack of identifiable addressant. But even then it is not clear that Isabel responds to music in the first place for, as Henry James suggests, rather than the music it is the thought of Ralph, her cousin whom she loves but cannot marry because of his poor health, that makes her turn toward the music.8 Schubert’s name might well stand in for Ralph’s insofar as both seem to represent the “life” (and untimely death) that Isabel has set out to discover, but only to the effect that the addressant will disperse among two irreconcilable layers. Later on in the scene the addressant becomes even more difficult to identify because, as Kramer points out, the appeal of the

F6540.indb 55

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

56

Sander van Maas

music— or is it Ralph?—is confused with the person playing the music, Madame Merle, whose gaze and voice add an element of social interpellation to the fabric. Isabel’s off-balance behavior—resorting as she does to overly formal politeness and grappling for a chair to sit down on—suggests that she is aware that it is not Merle herself who is calling her, but that fact itself does not seem to lead her straight into the arms of “Schubert.” In short, there can be no doubt about the fact that Isabel is called; but the addressant is at no point in the film fully revealed, nor is it redeemed by a substitute. Isabel’s absent gaze as she sits in the chair listening hints at her inner disorientation, which, as I intend to argue, intimates her devastation to come. This devastation would not be conceivable in the terms Kramer uses to account for the other part of the interpellative equation. The impression that Isabel is mesmerized, almost made the puppet of Merle’s playing, seems based on her visual behavior. The scene as a whole— consisting as it does of a sequence of mute point-of-view shots, only accompanied by the diegetic piano music—is rather poor in dialogue. By contrast, in Henry James’s novel, Isabel’s inner thoughts upon entering the piano room — the very moment of her apparent transformation into a puppet—reveal a much more active and perceptive, even ironical, response to the situation. The drawing-room at Gardencourt was an apartment of great distances, and, as the piano was placed at the end of it furthest removed from the door at which she entered, her arrival was not noticed by the person seated before the instrument. This person was neither Ralph nor his mother; it was a lady whom Isabel immediately saw to be a stranger to herself, though her back was presented to the door. This back—an ample and well-dressed one—Isabel viewed for some moments with surprise. The lady was of course a visitor who had arrived during her absence and who had not been mentioned by either of the servants— one of them her aunt’s maid— of whom she had had speech since her return. Isabel had already learned, however, with what treasures of reserve the function of receiving orders may be accompanied, and she was particularly conscious of having been treated with dryness by her aunt’s maid, through whose hands she had slipped perhaps a little too mistrustfully and with an effect of plumage but the more lustrous.9

In the film this moment is preceded by a brief shot showing Isabel standing next to a mirror that for the viewer, but not visible to Isabel, doubles the image of her face. Kramer takes this to mean that Isabel’s identity is split. She is caught in a narcissistic identification with Madame Merle by way

F6540.indb 56

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

57

of the voice of Schubert.10 “Schubert’s music, as the mirror at the piano room door has told us, and subsequent mirror images will tell us again, is Isabel’s alter ego. It is a character, a doppelgänger, a directly embodied subjectivity that is half Isabel’s and half Schubert’s.”11 This specular identity is crucial for Kramer’s account of the role of Schubert’s music in the film for it explains how the music— or “Schubert”— comments on, and speaks for, Isabel. Giving Isabel her own, relatively free subjectivity the specular identity—although remaining a confining mold—releases her from her immediate state of puppet or automaton. From this point in the film onward the protagonist is in a sense dispersed among herself and her musical double, which makes his repeated appearance at crucial moments in her unfolding story. Granted the originality and explanatory power of this narrative, it might be said that, understood as a result of Isabel’s interpellation, her identity formation overdetermines the events. Clearly, as Kramer has stated elsewhere, he believes subject position to be the touchstone of individuality. “No one can act outside of a subject position; the attempt to do so is one definition of delirium, psychosis, madness.”12 Yet as a listener Isabel may be said to be neither delirious nor confined to an identifiable subject position. When Kramer reads the shot by the mirror as meaning that Isabel recognizes herself in Schubert, he transfers a screen event into an aural medium that does not support such a mirror effect. What we as viewers see is a mirror image that she herself does not see; what we hear is the music that sounds, but her searching gaze and pricked-up ears do not allow us to decide that the music we hear is also the music as she hears it. In that sense the mirror image and the music both open the gap between the potential objects of looking or listening and these acts themselves. What, then, does Isabel hear? Rather than the “voice” of Schubert or, for that matter, of Ralph or Merle, calling out to her, she hears another ear that amplifies her own listening. Isabel listens to the music listening to her, even for her, as though she were saying, in a rechanneled interpellation, “listen for me.” Listen in my place, but most of all, listen for who I am. This other ear amplifies her question; it does not provide her with an answer. Instead of guiding her toward a devious finitude, such as the specular identity hinted at by Kramer, the interpellation will inscribe her listening in a movement of infinitization. For Isabel the gift of listening consists of more listening, not just in the quantitative sense but in the sense that her listening will remain inexhaustible in principle. Perhaps this calls for the notion of an ear, of a listening, that is beyond the control of Isabel as a finite listener but that is still presupposed each time she lends her ear. For her being interpellated

F6540.indb 57

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

58

Sander van Maas

means to listen with the ear of the other. I will return to this logic in the second part of the chapter. If indeed Isabel’s is a form of interpellation, one might consider making a distinction between two forms of interpellation, the first being the finite interpellation that allows Kramer to effectively demonstrate the circuit of exchange between Isabel and her doubles (specular image, alter ego, doppelgänger) and the second being an infinite interpellation that would no longer be reducible to its defining coordinates (call, interpellant, space, hierarchy, addressee, etc.). The point is that interpellation may not be as easy to locate in time and space as it may seem. If we press the issue, the beginning of Isabel’s interpellation becomes difficult to assess. Did it start at the moment when she heard the very first tinkling? Or should we rather consider that her musical interpellation must have started much earlier? For how could Madame Merle’s music have interpellated Isabel if she had not already been called, directly or indirectly, by music? Also, it seems difficult to assess the end of her interpellation. Even though it seems that there is a moment in the film when, according to Kramer, Isabel breaks her identification with Schubert, this does not at all mean that her interpellation is over. On the contrary, as Butler suggests in her account of interpellation, it may only become more intense the more elusive it gets. Hence the concept of interpellation appears to internally resist the logic of determinate representation that Kramer, despite many provisos, allows to preside over Campion’s piano-room scene and, from there, over the film as a whole. If we accept the notion that Isabel is interpellated by the ear of the other, we should be rather more attentive to the devastating testimony by Madame Merle that holds the key to this scene. In a single short sentence she avows that “there are moments in life when even Schubert has nothing to say to us.” The screenplay omits the next sentence in James, which makes her add, “We must admit, however, that they are our worst,” to which Isabel replies, “I’m not in that state now then.”13 The terrifying character of Merle’s dry remark is registered by Kramer but neutralized by shifting from individual to collective, from testimony to representation, and from listening to speaking. “As the failure of Isabel’s marriage drives her to despair, Schubert will indeed have ‘nothing to say’ to her, but will have a great deal to say for her, and about her, in her place.”14 Yet, however eloquent Schubert may speak for Isabel, The Portrait of a Lady remains the story of her inner devastation, which is not in the slightest affected by her Austrian representative. The film points up a force that slowly but steadily brings her down—not externally, as had been the case

F6540.indb 58

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

59

with her beloved cousin, but internally. Her social, worldly existence remains fully intact while she is ineluctably destroyed from the inside, and on the inside only. Kramer acknowledges the impact of this event, but only, it seems, in and as the moment when the music of Isabel’s interpellation disappears and gives way to a type of music (composed by Wojciech Kilar) that buries her devastation in musical conventionality and sentimental commonplace. For better or worse, Isabel has achieved an interiority that has become impenetrable, perhaps even to herself. No longer represented by Schubert, Isabel’s subjectivity can no longer be represented at all. It can only be funneled into a convention that associates the piano, regarded as a deep, that is, self-harmonizing, solo voice, with the heightened individuality of a romantic protagonist and supports this pianistic persona on the swelling, collective surge of orchestral strings. (This is the terrain on which Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto becomes “Tonight We Love” and Rachmaninoff ’s Second, “Full Moon and Empty Arms.”)15

As I have argued, whether on the model of the mirror or the funnel Isabel’s interiority will always have escaped such means of determinate representation. Hence it will also have escaped the attempt (by Campion, by Kramer) to suture her by means of Schubert or the piano’s solo voice of Kilar’s film score. Kramer seems aware of this, for instance when he writes that classical music may “retain the power to frighten and disturb, to speak to and for the parts of our subjectivity we cannot hope to command or master.”16 Yet his account of Isabel appears to be informed by the wish to reconnect what cannot be connected, to return to the social contract what eludes even the fine print.17 If the program is “to reconnect the listener with a community and culture of listening,” one might be led to ask to what extent Isabel, who experiences listening as her inner devastation, is reconnectable.18 Are we reconnectable—to her, to ourselves? In fact, what are the limits of reconnectability? For Kramer music is “the art of collapsing distances.”19 A key example for the idea of listening to classical music as an opportunity to reconnect is provided by Kramer in his introductory chapter to Why Classical Music Still Matters. The scene is the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In the days and weeks after these events benefit concerts with classical music were organized throughout the United States. Kramer, quoting from a newspaper article on one of these concerts, argues that at such moments music shows its power not only to soothe and calm but “to do what music is supposed to

F6540.indb 59

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

60

Sander van Maas

do, precisely that, whatever it may be: to give what is needed, give what is asked for, without qualification or stint.”20 This generosity, this contribution to whatever is needed, is particularly stimulated by the gathering of listeners who experience music collectively. Kramer adds a touch of the Kantian sublime to his description of listening to and playing music as struggle to successfully overcome adversity and create a sense of “solace in the time of crisis.” This sense, however, is won at the expense of listening, which, as he writes, is temporarily put in abeyance by the darkness of the time. The music that Kramer credits with having invented listening “seemed discredited, rendered glib and foolish by the enormity of the events” and was “impossible to bear.”21 The reconnection promised by classical music, then, appears to rely on the ideological effects similar to the ones Kramer pointed up in Isabel’s interpellation. In the final analysis neither of these two listeners will have been saved by their Schubert. On the contrary, one is led to ask if there might have been a mode of listening available to Isabel-Kramer that would have allowed them to endure their devastation without resorting to concepts of identity. Would that be possible at all: to listen through devastation to Schubert, which would probably also mean risking his own devastation in the process? If so, would such an ear have been capable of listening through 9/11 or any other cataclysm occurring in human experience? What kind of connection or reconnection would such a broken ear be capable of ? As I will argue in my discussion of the second scene of inner devastation, it would seem that it is spacing rather than the collapsing of distances that is at work in the act of listening.

Infinite Interpellation Perhaps at this point, as a complement to Kramer, one might listen in to Cavell, who remains deeply skeptical about connectability. In Excerpts from Memory he retraces his interest in Wittgenstein’s dealing with issues of skepticism, notably skepticism with regard to the existence of other minds, to his childhood years. The central figure in his account is his father, a tormented man whose temperament had a decisive influence on the social climate in the parental house. Cavell recounts a scene that illustrates how his own inner devastation was mediated by his father breaking a musical object. At the time Cavell was a prospective clarinet student at the University of California–Berkeley who was eventually to switch to philosophy. It is as if I knew then that I would one day find a way out of the devastation he could make of his island, and knew that such a day would never

F6540.indb 60

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

61

come for him. (Don’t tell me no man is an island.) Not of course that I escaped it entirely, but I have made headway in keeping, as it were, my knack of adopting his powers of devastation separate from my own causes for despair. I think of the clearer time, some seven or eight years later, when, in another rage, he picked up my empty clarinet case from the dining room table, tried to tear it apart, and took it to the back of the kitchen to throw it in the garbage. This was one of only two times in the sixteen years I lived with him that I recall his attempting to show remorse. He returned with the case to the dining room and laid it on the table saying, “Maybe it can be fixed.” Did I actually reply out loud, “Something in me will not be fixed”? That would not have meant, in feeling the injustice of this treatment, that I could not at the same time see his despair of finding justice for himself.22

As Cavell writes in his chef d’oeuvre The Claim of Reason, skepticism regarding the existence of other minds is what makes connections to other minds conceivable in the first place.23 It is the experience of “lostness to oneself ” that starts the process of finding escapes from the island of individual existence.24 Such escapes would each put the individual in a relation or position with regard to others. But however many positions a subject may come to occupy at a certain point in his or her life, Cavell maintains, “no set of subject positions in principle exhausts my subjectivity.”25 The broken clarinet case qua object referred him to the condition of his own subjectivity. It incited his philosophical investigation into the motive of inner devastation as found in Wittgenstein, in particular in regard to the method of language games that, according to Cavell, seems to destroy everything in the world that is important while leaving everything “as it is.”26 It should not be lost on the present discussion that Cavell’s narrative not only references but also expresses devastation. The subtle modulations of autobiographical recountings and his philosophical inflections and references to places in the philosophical corpus effectively produce a sense of bleakness in the reader that arguably contributes to the gripping quality of his account. In this respect his work performs a literary task equal to Campion’s cinematic portrayal of Isabel Archer, whose fate becomes tangible for the viewer, above and beyond its representation with images, symbols, and music. Cavell’s discourse operates between various modes of narration, but perhaps the most prominent of these is the mode of the record, such as when he describes The Claim of Reason, as “the record of one who stayed” regardless of the destructive work performed by Wittgensteinian skepticism or irony, that is, “the tumbling of our ideas of the great and the im-

F6540.indb 61

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

62

Sander van Maas

portant, as in a conversion.”27 The ensuing shift “in what we are asked to let interest us,” Cavell continues, underscores the idea that such a devastation may have the power to produce an alternative response to the situation that we found important at first. Cavell’s discourse traces and retraces such shifts and conversions—infinite interpellative turns, in my vocabulary— and instills a sense of creative devastation in the reader. This sense is what remains important, not just to any thinking that attempts to come to terms with a certain experience of modernism (to which the Investigations, according to Cavell, belong) but to understanding subjectivity, the subject and the role of listening in their formation and undoing. In order to bring this further into focus a foray into twenty-firstcentury neomodernist music theater will be helpful. The scene shifts from the nineteenth century to the times immemorial of the myth of Orpheus by way of the present. Eurydice, who may be thought to represent Isabel in her position as Death, will here emerge as a key figure expressing a life not unto death but from death, that is, from absolute devastation. In Campion’s film Isabel is progressively represented as acting from the position of death. This is apparent in scenes that portray her in landscapes dominated by symbols of death such as cypresses, gates, and snow. The film’s final sequence has her running through a snow-covered garden toward a door that turns out to be locked. If one accepts Kramer’s idea that her guide on her journey toward “life” has been Schubert, along the same line it may be inferred that he is also the one who is unable to rescue her from her fate. Seen from her perspective Schubert may be said to be in the position of Orpheus. Isabel, the interpellated listener, is called to life by the voice of Schubert but is ultimately given a destination beyond life. As a matter of fact what she receives is a life that is inwardly more akin to an anticipation of death. As Kramer reminds us, her fate is mediated by a number of turns: Isabel’s turn toward Schubert in response to her interpellation; her counterturn when the refinement she hoped to find proved to be perverted by Merle and Osmond; and finally her return to herself or, rather, to her own mirror image at the time of Ralph’s death. Isabel’s story, however, is governed not only by her own turnings but also, and in a more decisive manner, by turns made by others than herself, for which the Orphic turn will here stand as a model. Orpheus famously turned around and lost Eurydice to the powers of nothingness for the second time, but what needs to be accounted for is how her interpellation was different from her old lover’s. What could be said of Eurydice’s aurality as she listens from death? In Dialoghi con Leucò, Cesare Pavese stages a dialogue between a Bacchante and Orpheus. The subject of their conversation is the fatal turn

F6540.indb 62

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

63

that caused Eurydice to die for the second time. At one point in their conversation Orpheus attempts to explain why this event was less tragic than his interlocutor thinks. “When Eurydice died, she became something else. The Orpheus who went down into Hades was no longer either husband or widower. The grief I felt at the time was like the grief of a child—you smile when you remember it. . . . When I wept, I was no longer looking for her, but for myself. For a fate, if you like. I was listening to myself.” Orpheus goes on to explain that while facing his infernal audience when he was playing his lyre in Hades, he had come to realize that the dead are nothing at all. “I saw the shades stiffen and stare vacantly, heard the lamentation stop.” Devastated by the experience of nothingness and realizing there could never be a return to (or of ) the life he had had with Eurydice, he felt there was no other option than to break his agreement with Hades. When Orpheus and Eurydice were journeying up toward the light, Orpheus turned around in full awareness of what he was doing and saw Eurydice disappear “like a snuffed candle.” All he heard was “a faint squeal, like a mouse skittering to its hole.”28 The ascent from the underworld reconfigures the key elements of interpellation. It brings out, even more than in Isabel’s interpellation (which, as Kramer shows, subtly thematizes the back of both Isabel and Merle), the concepts of turn and return, in particular in relation to the back, the dorsal turn. Althusser stresses in his original account of interpellation the importance, even the very sufficiency, of the dorsal turn for the constitution of the subject. “The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere onehundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.”29 As David Wills has argued in his studies of dorsality, it yet remains to be thought what such an originary turn would amount to and what the meaning could be of the prominence, in this theoretical scene, of the back. As he suggests, the dorsal turn opens a space “before” communication that calls for an account in terms of its asymmetry and spectrality. “ ‘Before’ we hear the ‘Hey, you,’ we react to something as simple as its volume, but which represents the apostrophic, perhaps adrenal, surfeit of what hails out of the blue or out of the shadow, from out of dorsal inaccessibility or invisibility, shocking or surprising us into an instinctual repositioning or corporeal rectification ‘before’ it calls us.”30 According to Wills this dorsal space will always be structured according to a telecommunicational logic, and it will be susceptible to the possibility of its repetition. “The hailing takes place across a telecommunicational void, without a guaranteed response, and the 180-degree physical conversion of the response—when it comes—is consequently seen in slow motion and with double takes, with

F6540.indb 63

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

64

Sander van Maas

a perceptual sweep through the lines of sight of other potential hailings before any response is given to the law.”31 Dorsality, then, not only refers to the back as such but also brings out the (tele-)technological realm on which the process of interpellative subjectivation depends. With regard to listening these issues may be approached by studying representations of the Orphic turn in the history of opera. The fourth act of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) provides a case in point. This scene suggests first of all that Orpheus’s turn may not, or may not primarily, have been inspired by inner causes, such as an urgent desire to see Eurydice or a fear of her lagging behind. Rather, it suggests that his turn has been caused by an exterior event, one that is in fact prescribed and described by Monteverdi in his score. The indication is somewhat short and imprecise, reading, “There is a noise behind the scenes” (Qui si fa stepito dietro la tela). This noise, which in stage productions is often rendered as a loud bang or a strange chord, reaches Orpheus’s ear from behind, that is, dorsally. The situation resembles the Althusserian scene, in particular the version in which the calling out is performed by a nonvocal source, such as a whistle. The noise coming from behind appears to distract Orpheus from his commitment to Hades’s condition presumably because he cannot tell if the sound has anything to do with him. He cannot tell whether it is addressed to him or whether it is, for instance, an attempt by the Erinyes to test his determination to keep looking ahead. As Pavese’s interpretation suggests, Orpheus’s turn may not be simply explained as a spontaneous reaction to ascertain the source and meaning of the noise behind him. For even if his turn, pace Pavese, would have started as a response to an external noise, as Monteverdi wants us to believe, he may not have ended with a definite answer. Rather than canceling out the uncertainties of the situation, his turn makes him face a double loss. First, looking back he will not have identified the source of the sound. As the source remains a mystery, the noise will remain a purely acousmatic event, one that will always remain behind the scenes. The turn around, then, would be ineffective as an attempt at stabilizing the situation, for the interpellative constellation of address, turn, and response, which is necessary for this stabilization, will not have occurred. Second, Orpheus’s identity will not have been reconstituted, after his devastating loss of Eurydice, by his turn because the object of his love, that is, that essential part of his inner being called by her name, falls back into nothingness, marking her disappearance only with a mouse-like shriek. What he receives, then, is nothing if not a terrifying experience of “sacred darkness” (Blanchot).32

F6540.indb 64

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

65

This double loss, however, is productive through an excess in its very structure. The excess of the Orphic turn is closely related to the radical logic of what Jacques Derrida has called adestination or destinerrance.33 According to this logic (or law), which may be interpreted as an implied critique of the notion of performativity in Judith Butler, the listener does not preexist the music listened to but is produced by it as its effect. Derrida claims that all performative acts create both their authors and their addressees, and he claims that they do so, in the words of Hillis Miller, “unpredictably, incalculably, by chance or even by error.”34 As the example of Orfeo suggests, musical interpellation is likewise determined by a radical event that produces its listener beyond the horizon of a stabilizing connection between interpellator and interpellant. Being addressed by music we have no real notion of where it is going to bring us or who we will turn out to be after the event. In Pierre Audi’s stage production of Orfeo from the 1990s the protagonist hastily turns back after he turned toward Eurydice (it all happens in a flash, as if the sheer speed would save him from the gaze of the Erinyes), trying to make up for the effects of his dorsal turn by squaring it. Obviously, he soon comes to realize that the first turn had already turned him into someone else. The changes that take place in Orpheus and Eurydice at the moment of the dorsal turn are explored in a recent work of music theater by Beat Furrer. In the one-act Begehren (1999–2001) Furrer combines the mentioned dialogue by Pavese with the original Latin passages from Ovid and Virgil, with texts by Hermann Broch, and with a 1950 Hörspiel by Günther Eich, Geh nicht nach El Kuwehd, to form a textual fabric of shifting layers.35 These layers have been designed to allow for an archeology of the dorsal turn in the myth of Orpheus. As the synopsis describes, “Orpheus’ look back marks the turning point—this moment becomes almost frozen in several repetitions.” As the work progresses through its ten scenes, each layer sheds its light on different aspects of this frozen moment. Furrer considers the text of Pavese to be central to the work, and he amplifies its features, in particular the manner in which it tells about life, as the Dutch literary critic Piet Meeuwse phrased it, “in a detached manner—as something that has already passed: cruel and incomprehensible, but necessary and irreplaceable.”36 As regards form Begehren is a double monodrama, in which the protagonists, who are simply referred to as “he” and “she,” perform their searching roles in solitude, only occasionally suggesting that they are aware of each other’s presence. They are like ships passing in the night. Although referring to Orpheus, the archetypical singer, the male

F6540.indb 65

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

66

Sander van Maas

character only speaks and whispers. He does not sing a single note until the very end of the work, when he is lying on his back on our side of the Styx. By contrast, the female character does sing. Also, she appears to be on her way toward expression, which she finds in and as her exuberant final aria (in the tenth scene). Furrer’s work is situated in a kind of heterotopia at the borderlines where language, music, and noise, life, death, and desire are sometimes hard to tell apart. In the 2003 world-premiere production this sense of heterotopia was beautifully expressed by Zaha Hadid’s set design with moveable parts that allowed for a rendering of both the no-man’sland and the separate psychic spaces in which the protagonists dwell. The dorsal turn itself occurs right at the beginning, in the first scene, and recurs multiple times. The director, Reinhild Hoffmann, emphasized the linear aspect. The two protagonists and the shadows of Hades line up between the obscurity on the left-hand side of the stage and a faint shimmer on the right. Behind Orpheus is not just any sound but the sound of the whole musical work, which is played by the ensemble on the left. Orpheus, then, is a listener (and in a sense the listener, the audience). Eurydice too is a listener, even before Orpheus. The first thing Eurydice says when Orpheus has turned around are the words “O—r—phe—us / Hörst du.” In contrast to the Orpheus in Orfeo the “he” in Begehren turns around without any exterior distraction sounding, his turn being motivated instead by his disbelief in the possibility of life returning to what it had previously been. Even though there is no sonic situation, this voluntary action does not exclude aurality. On the contrary, the shock of interpellation arrives at him delayed, after the fact, nachträglich, through the words of Eurydice. Her question “Do you hear?” confronts him with an ear that has preceded him and that now calls for his account of himself as a listener. Eurydice, that is, produces him at the very moment when he intended to let her slip back into nothingness. She positions herself before this attempt, countering the blow of the gaze that would annihilate her by appealing to Orpheus’s ear.37 This will in turn make him listen—borrowing from Augustine’s aural topology—in her ear, the spectral ear that listens from death, from absolute devastation, so as to discover, in Cavell’s terminology, the possibility of a new shift.38 This profound resistance in Eurydice’s ear is what ultimately determines the whole of Begehren, from the first to the tenth and last scene. “Scene X—she is now alone and turns toward him as an absent counterpart. Thus the first words of the scene Do you hear? stretch like an arc across the whole work but then lead into her inner self, individual sung notes represent different levels (of consciousness). she:

F6540.indb 66

6/17/15 8:30:05 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

67

multilayered shades, fully differentiated by the choir—at the end stands an opening into uncertainty.”39 It is then suggested that the Orphic turn is not about interpellation in the finite sense. It is about dwelling in the moment of destinerrance: it is like rehearsing the coming of an individuality, a Self, that never really arrives.40 It is because it never arrives that Begehren has to go through inexact repetitions. These occur not only onstage—the repeated turn—but also in the temporality of the work. Rather than taking place as a live event, the work seems to go over past events, looking back, memorizing, recounting, as if destinerrance calls for an impossible, hence infinite, reconstruction of its own event. Absorbed by this process, the work appears to reflect the state of absorption that characterizes the two protagonists of Begehren. Wolfgang Hofer describes the work’s double (parallel, tangential) monologue as two figures, a man and a woman. Nameless protagonists. Not a couple, much more passersby in a contemporary world of passageways . . . . Two figures, then: divided/united in search of their (mutual?) lost time, history and experience. Two attempts to look behind existence. Two attempts, through memory and repetition, to discover anew forgotten utopias in the light of desire. A hope which remains unfulfilled to the last. Vain parallel actions in the shadow of isolation. (Self-)encounters do not happen. What remains is the darkness of (un)lived moments.41

The sense of absorption is mediated by persistently calling into question the structure of the protagonists’ enunciations and acts. Does anyone hear what either of them is saying? Would it ever be possible to account for what either of them is hearing? Is there a future for either of them or for them as a couple? Even though their absorption appears to have been born out of a terrifying experience of finitude— Orpheus’s experience of nothingness, Eurydice’s second experience of dying—neither of them seems to be particularly suffering from their current state. On the contrary, both characters seems to live Nietzsche’s famous phrase “was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.”42 Eurydice finds herself becoming ever stronger, transforming as she does from apparent mute passivity to self-assertive expression in her final aria of sorts.43 Orpheus, even though expelled from Hades and ultimately lying motionless on our side of the Styx, seems strangely blissful. His study of respiratory sounds in this final part suggests that his life is absorbed into as well as affirmed by the bare signs of being alive (corporeal presence, expressive breath).

F6540.indb 67

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

68

Sander van Maas

In the modernist tradition to which Begehren refers and to which it might be said to belong as a neomodernist artwork, devastation has been cultivated as an experience that is believed to open onto deeper levels of existence. As it has been discussed here, devastation is closely related to the topos of shock as it was cultivated in the early twentieth century and theorized by Walter Benjamin and others. Cavell, whose use of the term has been a key reference in this chapter, refers to the film critic Robert Warshow for the cultural meaning of devastation that is important to him. Warshow spoke of a simultaneous crisis, in modernism, of language and experience, causing an inexpressiveness or suffocation which Cavell continues to addresses in the Wittgensteinian terms quoted before.44 Still it may be asked, long after modernism, Why devastation as a starting point for reflection? Discussing the virtues of musical neomodernism, Kramer once criticized the recurrent use of such aesthetic topoi as shock and the informe in an authentic sense, arguing that sooner or later they will have fallen prey to the historical process. As a rule this process “progressively alienates and finally brackets” modernist gestures by turning them into tropes the meaning of which can only be recovered in a reconstruction of their historical context.45 Even though the historical contexts of the scenes of inner devastation discussed in this chapter ( James/Campion, Cavell, Pavese/ Furrer) span almost two centuries, they have been produced within a decade of one another. Their means of expressing devastation—their informe—may well be confined to this historical window and may hence become “just tropes,” but what has interested me in their discussion here is the continued importance of devastation as a point of access for theoretical inquiry after postmodernism and, in a sense, after neomodernism. For Begehren is an example of how this artistic style has recently mastered and incorporated into its historical fabric the logic of the well-rounded, communicative form. Over against the plea for reconnection with a certain community and culture of listening we find the skeptic’s experience of such reconnecting. Both Isabel and the two protagonists of Begehren may be said to express the latter. Their imaginary community can be understood as the community of the absorbed. What the members of this community share is their resistance to dialogue, which is more precisely a resistance within dialogue. They live the primacy of absorption over communication, sharing and exchange. As in any dialogue there is a moment in their existence when the movement to and from that characterizes exchange comes to a halt. The very moment in a dialogue when we cannot tell whether our interlocutor is not responding because she or he is listening or thinking or inwardly

F6540.indb 68

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

69

feeling or being distracted: this is the moment we experience that any continuation of—hence the very existence of— our dialogue or exchange is at peril. We might also say that in this critical moment our dialogue reaches its highest intensity and significance, for the return or nonreturn that will follow upon this pivotal moment presides over whatever will have been the meaning of our communication. Isabel and Eurydice in particular live these moments of (non)return; they are at the verge of falling out of the system of dialogue, and yet they are right at the heart of it. Their listening expresses this logical position too. Within the exchange of listenings their aurality is marked not only by an inner devastation that threatens to put an end to all circulation (unto death) but also by a power to listen creatively from devastation. Accordingly, aural absorption is to be identified as a sign of infinite interpellation in action, leaving everything in the world “as it is” (Cavell) while changing it from the inside—and on the inside only.

F6540.indb 69

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

chapter 4

Positive Feedback Listening behind Hearing David Wills Listen list- list- listen, Listen t-, Listen listen, Listen to my heartbeat —laurie anderson, “Late Show”

You listen, and you think you’re hearing her voice, only distorted. You can listen from beginning to end and retain that impression. But then you see the film, and it is clearly her violin talking for her, the words completely disembodied. Disembodied from her mouth at least, uncannily instrumentalized. She draws her bow across the instrument to produce snippets of the distorted voice. So you conclude that she is producing the vocals, only with an instrument, a hi-tech simulacrum of a violin. But then you research a little further, and it turns out the voice is sampled William Burroughs. He does a somewhat stiff pas de deux with her during the instrumental break—if we still know what that means—in the film.1 You’re not sure if it’s speaking or singing, but that’s another question. Still, you want to believe that it’s her voice. That was how you’d always heard it, from the first time Karen bootlegged a cassette tape for you late 80s early 90s. Her voice distorted by technology, slowed down and deepened, androgynized. You still want to believe that. The other choice, Burroughs aside, is that it is technology posing as her voice, having appropriated it, made a machinic simulacrum of it, perverted it out of itself. Either way, she doesn’t seem concerned. She should be more concerned by her stammering. She can’t seem to get it out, what she wants to play, say, or sing, or have Burroughs say or sing, or have her instrument say or sing. She doesn’t 70

F6540.indb 70

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

71

sound very articulate, let alone artful, let alone musical. What would once have been called music has been left to a background repetition of some tinny synthesized strings and keyboard (saxophone and guitar in the film), which takes over when she stutters into silence and fades once she tries again. It finally fades into its own stammer when she ultimately gets it out. Gets out what she has been needing to play, say, or sing, as if desperately, to prove she can do it, to prove she is still speaking or still singing. Still alive finally. “Listen, listen, lis,” someone or something is pleading. The voice is desperate for us to hear what she feels, what touches her. She wants us to hear the sound or music of her feelings. In that respect it’s like any other song, every other song, all music. Listen to what I feel, what keeps me alive, to the extent that I am alive. “Listen to my heartbeat” is what is finally uttered through the distortions. So the stammering is like a struggle against the technologization that is taking over, taking over her voice, her speaking, her song, her feelings, that desperation, a struggle to bring her own real natural authentic voice back up to the level of clear tonal articulate speech or song, to send Burroughs packing, cut up and on the floor, to find its own timbre again, to prove there is still real natural authentic life in it. Or else it is a machine that is itself progressively learning, by its own artificial intelligence, to make the sounds, to vocalize, speak, or sing, to prove that it too can be alive. We would know which it was if we could hear the heart itself, wouldn’t we? Or would we? Before Laurie Anderson, there was Aristotle. In De Anima, he insists on a certain primacy or indispensability of touch by virtue of its being the single sense common to all animals: “The primary form of sense is touch, which belongs to all animals. Just as the power of self-nutrition can be isolated from touch and sensation generally, so touch can be isolated from all other forms of sense. . . . Some classes of animals have all the senses, some only certain of them, others only one, the most indispensable, touch.”2 Touch is able to claim the primacy that Aristotle recognized in it thanks, in the first place, to an auto-affective and automotive sensibility that is held to be the movement of animal life itself: “What has soul [anima, psyche¯] in it differs from what has not in that the former displays life. . . . Living . . . may mean thinking or perception or local movement or rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth.”3 In the second place, already suggested there, touch provides for the continuation of life by means of nutrition: “touch is the sense for food.”4 However, when it came to comparing touch with the other senses, Aristotle found the idea of immediate contact to be problematic, leading him to look for its mediating organ. Though he provisionally concluded that the distinction between a touch that involves contact and the other senses that perceive over a distance is

F6540.indb 71

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

72

David Wills

“unsound, . . . for we do perceive everything through a medium,”5 he ends De Anima by asserting again that “touch takes place by direct contact with its objects. . . . All the other organs of sense, no doubt, perceive by contact, only the contact is mediate: touch alone perceives by immediate contact.”6 Aristotle thus inaugurates a question of sensorial primacy and hierarchy that will be resolved by modernity in favor of the mediated senses, hearing and sight, but that will be reposed in the twentieth century by phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.7 In discussing the question in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida argues that any “new” primacy given to touch derives no doubt from a continued allegiance to the automotive animation that defined life for Aristotle, as well as from the status of the specific form of life we call human, in particular by means of reference to the hand. Identifying Kant’s Anthropology as a key moment in that humanistic tradition, Derrida states, “what nature puts within reach of the human hand, and only the human hand; what it allows human beings to make by hand, with the hand, thanks to the hand: all that is the proper object of a pragmatic anthropology.”8 I will not seek here to resolve the question of the hierarchical status of this or that sense, even if, as I shall shortly discuss, it is probably not founded on any physiological or phenomenological certainty. What is important about it—and this is for me more interesting—is the presumption that sensorial primacy must continue to refer to (im)mediacy. That means, perhaps, that perception is a question at all only because there exists a set of differential relations among the senses based on their presumed mediacy or immediacy. Yet if those differential relations function among the senses, they can also be observed at work within a given sense. Thus hearing, from Aristotle on, would be a mediated sense, mobilizing the distance necessary also for sight—and hence for objectivity and subjectivity alike—but nevertheless involving a type of contact, for sound sets in movement “a single mass of air which is continuous from the impinging body up to the organ of hearing [which is thus] physically united with air.”9 Hearing therefore occupies something of an intermediate position between mediate and immediate sensoriality, a mobile position that gives it its own privilege in any examination of hierarchical distinctions. Listening is already, of course, not the same as hearing. But do we begin to listen only after we have first heard, or is listening rather the disposition of a subject who is mobilized in favor of hearing and in order to hear? The difference between listening and hearing would seem to apply only inasmuch as it is understood as another function of (im)mediacy. The

F6540.indb 72

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

73

hearer who listens, or the listener who puts him- or herself at the disposal of hearing would be one who has brought attentiveness or receptivity into contact with sense perception: having perception coincide with reception or become as immediate as it. The listener would be he or she who has surpassed the self-reflexivity of, say, a mind that says to itself “did you hear that?” “listen to that,” who instead has the capacity to register immediately what he or she has heard. We presume—however reductively—that such immediate, nondifferentiated hearing or listening is in operation in normal verbal discourse, bypassing phatic discursive necessities, repetitions, glosses, and so on. In a speaking situation, we listen to others to the extent that we hear; what we listen to is coextensive with what we hear. Something like overhearing would be the limit case here: when we overhear something, what we hear has caused us to listen to it; what is overheard will be received as a comprehensible “accidental” percept only to the extent that it piques our interest, which means that it will have immediately engaged us as listeners. In the case of verbal discourse, therefore, hearing is approximated to, if not equated with, understanding. Although we know that various ruptures of comprehension and any number of misunderstandings do in fact take place, it is naïvely assumed that those problems can be remedied by sufficient explanation sufficiently well heard— even if one’s understanding is reduced, at a certain point, to understanding that one cannot understand. But things are entirely different when it comes to the nonverbal in general—“what was that sound?”—and different again when it comes to music. Between perception and reception of musical sound, however it be defined, there falls, according to one’s competence, a whole sensorio-discursive gamut of recognition. At the expert or trained end of the scale, there will be an identification of sounds relative to particular instruments, identification of phrases as citations or paraphrases of other music, and confident anticipation of notes yet to come that derive from the conventions— chord progressions, melodic expectations, use of prescribed intervals, all the way to structural organization— of a given musical form. Whereas we presume that every physiologically adept listener hears the same sounds, a less “expert” listener will not necessarily recognize the forms of significance just mentioned. As a result, that hearer-perceiver will be traditionally defined as less of a musical listener.10 Now, those types of musical competence might seem once again to marry—less or more successfully—sense perception (hearing) and aesthetic reception (listening) by means of a rapprochement either cultivated

F6540.indb 73

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

74

David Wills

by intense training or endowed as innate talent; they might appear to have the production of sound lead directly to intellectual understanding, as immediately or automatically as any verbal communication. However, it is my contention here that listening necessarily takes place—however it takes place, whether incompetently, dilettantishly, or expertly—as a technology, indeed a technology that I have elsewhere described by means of the trope or logic of “dorsality.”11 According to that logic, what is heard necessarily arrives as if from behind, by surprise, from a type of absolute mediacy or inaccessibility. Listening would be the technology that transforms the sound we hear and mediates its contact with the body and, so to speak, the mind. Rather than being an intellectual processing of sound after the event of its reception, it would be an instrumental technology of the body and the mind comparable to those technologies produced by the hands—a manipulation, mediation, and processing of sound. We should understand listening as the very technologization of body and mind in the sense that the technological transformation of hearing into listening also takes place behind—that is to say before or even without— the body, not as the conscious or unconscious activity of an untrained or trained, tone deaf or talented ear or mind but as something that is always already functioning in the production and reception of sound itself. Sound arrives, is heard, by technologizing a listener. In the case of verbal discourse, the technological transformation I am describing is language itself: what would otherwise be random sounds are processed by the machine of language, but they will be received only by a listener who has attached that machine of language as a type of prosthesis to his or her own body. The machine of language functions by engaging speakers as cogs within it. An analogy could easily be drawn, it seems to me, between everyday speakers involved in verbal discourse and those listeners to music who are competent in some or all of its languages. The latter would be understood to be engaged as cogs in the machinery of musical forms in a way that is not unlike the prosthetization, via language, of speakers of that language. But it is my contention here that the technologization that produces a listener functions on a more fundamental level, within the very mechanisms of the sensory perception that is hearing, only to arrive at a particularly complex and compounded form when it comes to an expert musical listener. In order to develop further the sense of a dorsal technology of listening, we might revisit the question of (im)mediacy, identified in Aristotle, in the context of Derrida’s deconstruction of our current sensorial hierarchy in On Touching. For the sensorial competition and contamination that Derrida describes implies a restructuration or rearticulation of the body.

F6540.indb 74

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

75

If the reception of sound has long been understood as a mediated contact within a perspective that accorded sensory primacy in terms of contrast with or conformity to touching, it is because sound, as Aristotle observed, relies on a continuous mass of air that reaches the ear. Contemporary science increasingly treats sound as something that touches, categorizing it, along with touch, as a form of mechanosensation: All creatures have mechanical senses: insects hear, and, when touched, worms twitch and sea anemones contract. . . . The molecular bases of sensing odorants, hormones, neurotransmitters and other dissolved ligands (solutes) are well understood: the lock-and-key binding of each ligand to the specific binding pocket of its specific receptor on the plasma membrane. Much less is known, however, about the molecules that sense forces such as osmotic force, thirst, touch, vibration and texture. . . . Even though touch, hearing and osmosis are seemingly disparate fields of research, they all deal with a single physical parameter—force. Regardless of frequency or duration, a dyne is a dyne.12

For this scientific mechanicism, sound touches in the way I have just described, even if the precise form of molecular reaction triggered by that touch remains to be determined. And according to the same logic of touch, whether occurring on the skin or as a vibration in the ear, that is to say according to the logic of mechanosensation, there exists in scientific terms a type of sensorial indistinction, at least between hearing and touch, once it comes down to the molecular level. Both are responses to types of force; both are quantifiable by means of the same physical parameter that measures force, namely the dyne. The mechanosensorial force of waves touching the ear drum, then nerve impulses touching the brain, no doubt provides one basis for how we understand words to touch the mind or music to touch the heart or soul—not that, as sensorial beings, we readily confuse the sound of music with the feel of a hand on the shoulder, although sweet nothings whispered into the ear might well be understood as a form of touch. Rather, the strict delimitation of five senses, formalized by Aristotle and received since as an institutional truth, comes into question on a series of different fronts. The scientific assimilation of hearing and touch, medical investigation into the synesthesias of neurological disorders, and cognitive research into psychedelic experience would be three such fronts, but philosophical and conceptual questioning presents another—hence Derrida’s analysis of touch in his book on Nancy, which of course follows from the latter philosopher’s

F6540.indb 75

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

76

David Wills

own attention to the question. As Derrida writes, pointing to the failure of our thinking to interrogate seriously the number and hierarchy of the senses, But how is one to justify these “commodities” [some supposed ontophenomenological evidence of our body] in view of a science of the body said to be proper and of inanimate bodies, in view of a physiology (physics, biology, neurology, and so forth) that would demonstrate that there is nothing that one could rigorously define as “senses,” nothing that allows one to count them up to five, and above all nothing that lets one recognize in them an identity without contamination. (Touching 106 –7)

Derrida’s own examination of the philosophical problematic of touch begins therefore with a contamination of the identity of that sense in the form of a question regarding eyes that touch (“when our eyes touch, is it day or night [quand nos yeux se touchent, fait-il jour ou fait-il nuit]?”; 2). That is in order, first of all, to reinforce the interrogation of sensorial number and hierarchy cited earlier but also in order to bring to bear on touch— immediately, from the instant the inquiry is opened—the matter of mediacy: as if to touch touch immediately with sight. How should we understand that? How should we understand eye contact, which is precisely what we call it? How should we understand it as different, for example, from lip contact? “Can eyes manage to touch, first of all, to press together like lips?” (ibid.). For if our eyes touch (themselves, each other, each of us—all of which ambiguities are included in the French formulation), then touch (and, conversely, sight) is no longer immediate but is being mediated by another organ, another sense, another bodily form. This is not the only instance of sensorial contamination posited by Derrida. In a case closer to what concerns us here, he asks about sound in the form of the voice that touches from a distance, for example in the “telephonic caress” (112) or the sweet nothings I referred to earlier.13 And contamination, the mediation of one sense by another, would need to be understood as a function of a fundamental sensorial imbrication that derives from the impossibility of isolating a pure perception that is not always already mediated by representation. That would be the sense of the blindness that Derrida finds at the heart— or pencil tip— of drawing, described in Memoirs of the Blind and indeed the sense of the famous comment he made during the question-and-answer at the 1966 Baltimore conference: “Now I don’t know what perception is and I don’t believe that anything

F6540.indb 76

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

77

like perception exists. Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. . . . Whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don’t believe that there is any perception.”14 On the one hand, therefore, there is sensorial contamination because there is perceptual impurity—not just perceptual imprecision but the impossibility of a direct, unmediated perceptual present. On the other hand, though, sensorial contamination, or the calling into question of sensorial hierarchies, functions within a broader critique of anthropocentrism. Simply, what we understand and prioritize as the five senses relate only to the experience of a human animal. Not only is it the case that, beginning with quadrupeds, entire swaths of the animal kingdom rely on smell as a, if not the, primary sense, but we must also assume that paleoanthropological evolution required a series of sensorial reorderings to bring us to our current hierarchical arrangement. The most obvious reordering, as various analyses have argued, is our relegation of smell as we progressed into humanization. Freud, for example, never tired of reminding us of the complex mechanisms brought about by the diminution of the olfactory in favor of the visual sense, which meant reconfiguring our psyche to install a whole new system of values—from sensorial to moral—that turned around the relation between the malodorous and the taboo (menstruation, defecation), an evolution that can be observed in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms, in the history of the race and in the development of the individual. As Freud describes it, when sight replaces smell, it simultaneously imposes an interdiction on touching that also amounts, conversely, to a prioritizing of touch: I see more means that I smell less, which means in turn that what I smell I decline to smell, by determining that it smells bad; and I smell less also means that what smells bad must not be touched because touch now performs, in certain cases, the function of identification that previously devolved on smell. A certain synergistic overlapping, if not synesthetic contamination, therefore occurs in the passage to the human.15 But, more important still, Freud does not fail to relate this reorientation, and the anthropologization of the senses, to the upright stance, which would be a primary moment of dorsality or dorsalization, in terms of the various meanings I give to that concept.16 The moment of exposure of the genitals, with concomitant and convoluted mechanisms of shame dating back to Genesis, is also the moment of exposure of the back, with concomi-

F6540.indb 77

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

78

David Wills

tant reinvention of mechanisms of vulnerability and surprise: the bipedal hominid exposes its back very differently from a quadruped at the “same” time as it sacrifices its previous level of auditory and olfactory capacities. And if the upright stance means the liberation of the hands and the beginning of manipulation (of tools), hence a new and different externalization of corporeal technology, it is also an internal technological rearticulation: the body’s new, frontal-dorsal realignment, its different exposure, coincides with a different internal disposition, for example the skeletal reconfiguration of vertebral column, jaw, and cranium. That brings about two, seemingly paradoxical effects. First, as I have argued extensively, the body is deprived of any virgin receptivity untouched by mediative articulationality; it never existed in the world pure, intact, and self-sufficient but was always articulating.17 And that articulationality—not just its bending and straightening but every more or less mechanical movement that institutes relations among its members and down to the level of its cells— comes, more and more explicitly, to constitute it. But perhaps more important, the same articulationality also comes to be generalized as the structure of relations both internal and external to the body. Again, no more—presuming it were ever so— does anything simply arrive at a human body conceived of as an intact corporal entity, from a purely separate outside. Instead, whatever the body enters into relation with, from percept to the most sophisticated bionic prosthesis, is part of a complex relay of articulations that extend all the way inside it. Second, the body awakens to what comes to it “within it”—according to the logic just described—as though something were coming from behind it. That is to say, it is traversed, beginning at the bottom, base, or back of itself, by the very structure of technology that it presumes to situate and develop, as its own invention, out in front of itself. Such a presumption, in terms of which the human conceives of technology as future, frontal possibility, developed by that human outside of the human, reinforces the conception of touch as something that the human initiates, prolongs, or interrupts. Either there is contact between it and the world, it thinks, or there is not. The human thus presumes to control its immediate contact with the world, increasingly as it develops technological capabilities that are themselves conceived of as ways to mediate the world, as attempts to obviate the surprises and accidents that come to it out of external reality. But that presumptive framework occludes the originary articulationality that I am insisting on here, whereby every contact consists of a relay of mediations, whereby the body is always already touched by its own internal technol-

F6540.indb 78

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

79

ogy, as it were from behind, a technology of prosthetic articulationality that invents the human body well before the human body begins inventing. The living body feels itself by feeling itself moving. Such an autoaffective automobility gives the impression of direct unmediated contact taking place by means of touch. The sensation of a beating heart, or of a rising and falling chest as one breathes, guarantees animation, and of course consciousness, by means of a type of touch that Aristotle could call “the essential mark of life.”18 What is touched or felt in that way is automatically perceived as immediate, whence touch derives the animal primacy that has classically been ascribed to it. A similar “touching” will then come into effect by means of hearing oneself speak, similarly perceived as immediate and even unmediated. One hears one’s own voice as if one were speaking and hearing oneself within a single organic, otolaryngological circuit, as though, in speaking, one were hearing the vocal vibrations that one feels within the throat, as though those very waves were traveling internally to affect the ear from within the body. Again, however, as Derrida argued from his earliest analyses of Husserl, that closed auto-affective circuit comes to be “radically contradicted” by the slightest differential interruption, beginning with the acknowledgment of time itself, even a time that we might want to call instantaneous. On the one hand, when I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself at the same time that I speak. . . . The living act, the life-giving act, the Lebendigkeit, which animates the body of the signifier and transforms it into a meaningful expression, the soul of language, seems not to separate itself from itself, from its own self-presence. It does not risk death in the body of a signifier that is given over to the world. . . . Hearing oneself speak is experienced as an absolutely pure auto-affection, occurring in a self-proximity that would in fact be the absolute reduction of space in general.19

On the other hand, however, auto-affection as the exercise of the voice cannot avoid the fact that “a pure difference comes to divide self-presence. In this pure difference is rooted the possibility of everything we think we can exclude from auto-affection: space, the outside, the world, the body, etc.”20 Every auto-affection comes thus to be a hetero-affection: touching oneself becomes a matter of being touched, and hearing oneself a matter of being heard, from the outside. The added emphasis that Derrida will systematically give—in much of his work and in particular in On Touch-

F6540.indb 79

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

80

David Wills

ing—to that operation of self-externalizing self-sensing is the insistence that the differential displacement of presence into absence that thereby occurs, the rupture that takes place within the supposed intact and closed auto-affective circuit, introduces not only a displacement but also the possibility of a parasitic attachment or a prosthetic substitution: I ask whether there is any pure auto-affection of touching or touched, and therefore any pure, immediate experience of the purely proper body, the body proper that is living, purely living. Or if, on the contrary, this experience is at least not already haunted, but constitutively haunted by some hetero-affection related to spacing . . . where an intruder may come through, a guest, wished or unwished for, a spare and auxiliary other, or a parasite to be rejected. (Touching 179–80)

The list of differences cited earlier, namely space, outside, world, and body, which were presumed to be excluded from auto-affection—“all that [the] phenomenological reduction to the sphere of pure appurtenance of the ‘solipsistic’ body proper tries to keep out”— comes to be rewritten so as to include, specifically and generally, “the outside itself, the other, the inanimate, ‘material nature,’ as well as death, the nonliving, the nonpsychical in general, language, rhetoric, technics, and so forth” (Touching 180). The “inside” of sensorial contact, the nonspace of immediacy that we presume in touching and being touched, as well as in hearing ourselves being touched by our own speaking, comes thus to be hollowed out, providing entry for every form of otherness up to and including inanimate prosthetic others. Now if that argument is made with respect to an auditory sense whose model is hearing oneself speak, that is, if even in the case of a “private” auto-affective hearing there is nothing to prevent the intrusion of a heterogeneous space structured by prosthetic otherness, how much more so when it comes to hearing and listening across an explicit spatial divide, such as between two discrete speakers or between a listener and an orchestra or sound system? Yet we know that the metaphysics of immediate self-present communication does not easily cede its ground in certain versions of the latter scene of listening. For example, verbal communication remains posited on an extended but still closed circuit between one speaker and another listener; it presumes to be able still to relegate accidents and miscommunications as outside contingencies that do not harm the ultimate integrity of the system that transmits meaning among human communicators.21 And no doubt a version of that same confidence, or metaphysical assurance, holds sway when music is communicated to its listener(s), not-

F6540.indb 80

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

81

withstanding the very different levels of comprehension that I referred to earlier, those of each listener according to his or her musical competence and education. It is no doubt still presumed that the sounds make contact with the listener’s ear in the same qualitative form in which they issued from the orchestra, that the listener hears the same sounds that the musical instruments make. In insisting that that is not so, that listening takes place through a structure of dorsal articulationality or prostheticity, I am not disputing the physics of sound transmission, although it would not surprise me to be told that sound waves in fact undergo a process of transformation, or distortion, from the moment of their production or even that the production of a sound wave is itself always already a torsion and a distortion. We know, because it requires pressurization within a medium, that sound cannot travel through a vacuum, which should have us more accurately understand it as the deferred resounding, resonance, or echo whose effects Nancy has analyzed.22 However, my argument is rather that what we call listening begins when what we call hearing exposes its own heterogeneity, when hearing recognizes the rupturing force of the mediations that compose it, when it is consequently opened to unforeseen—unforeheard?— difference, and when what we call human sense comes to be enfolded by inanimate stimulation. According to that logic, “before” there is natural perception, whether sight, touch, hearing, or any other form, before there is reception by the sense organs of a percept, and acceptance “into” the body and the senses of an externally derived stimulus, there will have already been what Derrida calls the “originary intrusion, the ageless intrusion of technics, which is to say of transplantation or prosthetics” (Touching 113). Before an ear enters into a relation with anything like a musical instrument and the sounds issuing from that instrument, it will have already received the technologization that is a fact of its own internal self-differentiation, the rupture of its integrity by the structure of substitutive prosthesis or prosthetic substitutability. To return once more to our opening gambit, the differences and hierarchies among the senses, understood as a function of differences among degrees of (im)mediacy, betray in the final analysis the fact of there being no absolute immediacy but rather differing degrees of mediation. Derrida argues that the competition that arises over a possible hegemony, equality, or aristocracy of the senses is possible only because there is no circumscribable integrity of one sense or another, “but only displacements and tropical substitutions: prosthetic possibilities”: “If there were any possible accord about a sense proper—strict and circumscribable, stabilizable, irreplace-

F6540.indb 81

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

82

David Wills

able, not reducible to prosthetic substitution—you can bet that no discord could have lastingly arisen” (Touching 204). That nonpurity, nonproperness, or impropriety of the senses leads to prosthetic substitution as a fact of each of them and, by extension, to the contamination among them to which I have already referred. It calls first of all for redefining the field of sensorial experience, for redistributing the different senses within that field such that the question of (im)mediacy no longer controls the relations and differences among the five senses: “According or restoring a privilege or priority to any sense—sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell—would thus no longer come into question. . . . It would then rather be a question of reorganizing in another way this whole field of the said sense or senses” (Touching 180). But it also means, more radically, opening the whole field of “sensibility” beyond the circumscription of it imposed by senses numbering five, not just toward what might be called more intuitive forms of sensing—for example a sixth sense—which already significantly challenges our understanding of what constitutes the sensorial, but more difficult still, toward a type of inorganicism or inhumanism of sensing. Derrida explicitly differentiates this redefined sensibility from the “undifferentiated sensibility of a body without organs” (Touching 204) that Deleuze and Guattari analyze in Artaud.23 Instead, following Nancy, he argues for “another organization (natural and technical, originary inasmuch as prosthetic) of what is termed sensibility, the ‘body proper, or the ‘flesh’ ” (ibid.). Such a reorganization of the sensible would have to forgo its automatic faith in the common sense or historical culture of what is presumed to be natural, as much as in the common sense of what is presumed to be human, beginning with that which still “forces us to count the senses on the fingers of a single hand, the hand of man—man always” (ibid.). Yet the argument is finally less that sensibility requires deconstructing than that sensibility, the body, flesh are in deconstruction, particularly when one takes into account the prosthetic “extensions” to which the body, in its sensorial articulations, is increasingly subjected. Such “extensions,” from spectacles and hearing aids to mechanical reproductions and virtual realities, are possible only because sense was always already in prosthetic articulationality, as I have tried to explain. Moreover, for being “extensions,” they extend nothing in the sense of being postpositioned to it, for they were already at work in the natural origin of every sensorial impulse: “There is not one sense—nor one, two, three, four, five, or six. We are to feel and count otherwise, and besides, we are doing it—that is how it goes. And that is why the technical, that is to say prosthesis, never waits. In the end, this is what Nancy, to me, seems to mean when he speaks of a ‘techne¯ of bodies’ ” (ibid.).

F6540.indb 82

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

83

Feeling, counting, indeed hearing otherwise: that would be the tall order of the challenge that Derrida throws out, in sympathy with Nancy, in the direction of the dorsal listening I am attempting to describe here. Rather than presume that we hear what comes to us from outside because we have first listened to ourselves speaking to ourselves within ourselves, we would need to attend to the fact of our always listening outside, listening to what we hear (from) there, as it were beyond our reach, listening, in the final analysis, to what we hear out of earshot. For the logic of dorsality as prosthetic articulationality means that listening is the interruption of pure hearing and the technological transformation of it; or rather, more accurately, it is the activation of the technological structure that ruptures any pure hearing. Rather than our being surprised by what we hear, in mimicry or memory of some sensorial animal instinct, rather than pricking up our ears in that sense, we understand listening to be what surprises hearing by mobilizing the technology that constitutes it. Again, that is not to say that the listening I am here distinguishing from hearing—a listening that functions via technologies of (self-)reflection, via conscious as well as unconscious recognition, and via various forms of comprehension and appreciation, not to mention formal or informal education—is something that supersedes hearing. Hearing does not stop so that listening might begin; it is rather coextensive with it. Listening does not take over, as though sensing it differently, what was previously only heard. Listening is the mediating, prosthetizing, even inanimating technology that always already inhabited the sensorial operations of hearing. Nancy describes that in terms of a “tension” that separates, in the case of every sense, its “simple nature” from its “tense” or “attentive” state. Led by the French homonymy of entendre as both hearing and understanding, Nancy is not concerned precisely with the same prosthetic articulation of hearing and listening that I am arguing here, but he nevertheless makes clear how listening opens a supplementary structure within hearing: “to listen is to be straining [être tendu] toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible” (Listening 6). In tending one’s ear, one performs the originary bodily torsion that constitutes dorsality, akin to turning off center as one walks, correcting and upsetting one’s center of gravity with each step. And in tending one’s ear, one is rupturing the body’s self-enclosed integrality, moving it closer to the sensory stimulus it has detected by moving it outside itself. That is of course something the body always does, as it were naturally, but a fact of that “natural” movement is its entering into a relation with what exceeds it, with what falls outside of that naturality to the extent of every unnatural relation imaginable,

F6540.indb 83

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

84

David Wills

including relations with the inanimate. We can understand the tending of an ear, straining to listen, as a “correction” of the body’s originary fault or lack, its non-self-sufficiency—not that we ever presumed, did we, that we constituted our own private universe? But concomitant with that simple understanding is the fact of the body’s adjustment into the structure of prosthetic supplementation. In tending one’s ear, one is, as it were, aiding that ear in the sense of allowing for or asking for a hearing aid. Tending one’s ear means lending one’s ear, exposing it to detachability and substitutability, in short to prosthetization. Peter Szendy argues that idea in his remarkable “history of our ears,” first on the basis of the simple “mobility” of the organ, such as can be observed in many species: “To lend an ear, as they say, is of course to stretch [tendre] it; it is in a way to mimic internally the outer mobility of this organ among certain animal species. It is, even if all the while remaining motionless, to turn our attention toward what summons our listening.”24 But Szendy concludes by referring to a “plasticity” of sound reception, and indeed production, that precisely would no longer distinguish—no more than does etymology itself—between natural organ and prosthetic instrument: In this new organology of our ears, it becomes more difficult than ever to distinguish between the organ and the instrument. Thus, according to the Greek etymology of organon, the organology of which I speak is both that of our organs of listening that are most our own and closest to us— our pinnae and our ear drums—and that of all kinds of instruments, more or less mechanical or automatic, which assist our listenings. From the former to the latter, from organs to prostheses, and in their possible confusion, all of modernist thought on listening is brought into question. (Listen, 137)

And even beyond that, Nancy argues, listening to sound brings into question the self-reflexive constitution of the subject, replacing the “intentional line of sight [point de visée]” with a “resonant” or “resounding” subject that finds itself convoked by sense (Listening 21, 30).25 The prosthetic articulationality of the ear and of the sense of listening means also the instrumentalization of subjectivity in general, the deployment of a prosthetized subject that “form[s] a hollow, an echo chamber [caisse] or column [tube], a resonance chamber ( . . . long before any “specular identification”)” (ibid., 38). The tension specific to listening works most obviously through peripherality, but in a very different way from sight. Sound’s peripherality is a function of its pandirectionality: one lends an ear and turns one’s attention

F6540.indb 84

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

85

in order to listen because one is automatically off center or decentered by a sound whose focus is unclear. The spatial extension of sound is such that, as Nancy would have it, it is “all in front, in back, and outside inside . . . upside down [sens dessus-dessous] in relation to the most general logic of presence as appearing” (Listening 13). It comes from behind, as a type of Orphic gesture, as Sander van Maas convincingly points out in this volume; or else it comes from some edge, an ill-defined edge, fringe, or border of accessibility.26 It comes from there to permeate or pervade us, indeed to resonate within us, yet at the same time it passes over us on the way to extinction on another edge, resonating beyond us in a way that is very different from other percepts. In that respect, it is more comparable to an odor, for example, than to the generality of a visual percept or the privacy of a gustatory one. When we hear, and listen, we function as relay points within an operation of resonance, something that disturbs and disorients our body and our being in the way that we have just seen, but that also— the other side of the same operation—situates us only to displace us within a nonspecific field of dispersal or dissemination. Sound comes less to rest and reside in us, reaching a terminal point of reception, than to traverse us on the way to a more general resonance. The body as “resonance chamber or column of beyond-meaning [l’outre-sens]” and the subject as what “listen[s] or vibrates with listening to— or with the echo of—the beyondmeaning” (Nancy, Listening 31) introduce into listening effects of what Derrida calls “citational grafting,” which, for being a function of every utterance, indeed of every trace whatsoever, nevertheless borrows specific forms within the operations of aural sense.27 That gives the framework for Szendy’s ideas on listening, ideas that not only reach back to redefine aurality in the sense of the plastic organology just referred to, but also describe various transmissions or transferrals of what is heard, transmissions that are also transformations, new resonances and echoes beyond any given phenomenological event of listening. Listening for Szendy is a matter of having what I listen to listened to [faire écouter mes écoutes]: “listening— and not hearing or perception—begins with this legitimate desire to be signed and addressed. To others” (Listen 3). The same, perhaps impossible desire in fact produces music and enables performance, for the pianist or composer “is not content with playing words or his record player [but] also wishes, above all else, to make [his] listening listened to” (ibid. 5–6). And then, beyond the composition, performance, or interpretation of it, there develop also the various rewritings we call variations on a theme, transcriptions, arrangements, adaptations, samplings. Such rewritings open up the question of right and therefore the whole nonmusical discursive domain

F6540.indb 85

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

86

David Wills

of the law that Szendy examines, but at the same time they inscribe the supposed pure sonority of music within a nonsaturable context of proliferating forms that call seriously into question the notion of œuvre on which dominant discourses on listening to music—such as that of Adorno—have been firmly based.28 What if, asks Szendy, listening were to be mediated—in my terms “prosthetized” or “dorsalized”—by what he variously calls “distraction, lacunary listening, . . . a certain inattention, a certain wavering [flottement] of listening” (Listen 104)? What if, in a manner comparable to the requirement that reading disrupt “the temporal linearity of the stream” (ibid.) of writing, listening were to be posited on an interruption of the flow of sound? That possibility can be identified throughout the history of the ear that Szendy describes, for example in the famous case of Beethoven’s deafness, which led either to the inattention and mechanistic repetition criticized by early biographers, or to the visionary inspiration praised by Wagner (120 –21). In contemporary times, thanks to digitization, manipulating the music one listens to produces “the ability to create signifying systems in the course of the music’s flow” and transforms, finally, the listener into an author (135, 136). But Szendy is concerned less with historical contingency than with a structural possibility that precisely defines listening and imposes on it a strategic necessity: “To listen without any wandering [divagation], without ever letting oneself be distracted by the ‘noises of life,’ is that still listening? Shouldn’t listening welcome some wavering into its heart? Shouldn’t a responsible listening . . . always be wavering [flottante]?” (122). The wager of Szendy’s waver, of a listening that floats in and out of itself, involves the risk of a deafness at the heart of aurality, a deafness that may or may not imply in turn a silence. His suggestion is rather that listening is distracted by other attentions—noises of life, other notes, sounds sounding like something else—but his lacunary listening is never far from the silence that Nancy would have understood “not as a privation but as an arrangement [disposition] of resonance” (Listening 21), as the “silence of sense” to which we are enjoined to listen, to the very end of it (26). It is the silence of meaning that is both the beginning and the end of meaning, as Blanchot has magisterially shown, but it is also the silence of sensory deprivation as much as of sensory overload, the silence that serves as background for any sound whatsoever, and the silence that articulates, by punctuating and interrupting it, every musical as much as every verbal utterance. It is the silence that distinguishes, finally—although the dispute will never end as to where such a distinction falls—noise that is heard from music that is listened to.

F6540.indb 86

6/17/15 8:30:06 AM

Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

87

It is moreover a silence that brings us back into the body where hearing was presumed to begin, into that “condition of perfect silence [where] you hear your own body resonate, your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave” (Nancy, Listening, 21)—back into the body where hearing began as a form of touching, hearing, and feeling your heartbeat, indeed the regularity of its syncopation. For, as Nancy has explained extensively, the heart beats both as its own failure to beat, as offbeat and interruption of its beat, and as its own externalization, self-rupture, and exposure, even transplantation.29 In listening to our heart beat, we are listening also to our heart not beat. And we are listening to a heart that is out of reach, out of touch, out of contact, and finally out of earshot, inasmuch as we hear in its silence and its syncopation a failing and an absence. We hear there the sound of a heart that we cannot possibly hear. It is a sound we can no longer attend or even tend to, the sound that will not come to be heard until we listen but will not for all that be heard through any normal gamut of aural capability. For in every nonbeat or offbeat of the heart, in every flutter or murmur, there resides, if we listen, the irreducibly necessary possibility of stopping beating; and in every swoon or syncope, in every interruption of the pure homogeneous presence of the heart, there is heard a faint or feigned heart, a mechanical heart animated by nonrenewable energy, a heart of artifice. Once we have heard that, listening will have begun; we will have begun to be surprised hearing listening. “Listen list- list- listen, Listen t-, Listen listen, Listen to my heartbeat,” the sheburroughs sings, chants, or intones. So we listen; we wait and we listen. We want to hear it. Why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we want to listen in sympathy with her, in response to the entreaty or, perhaps, demand that we hear? We wait and we listen, ears cocked, vigilant. It’s as if she needs us to be there for her, with her at this critical time, listening. We keep vigil with her for the sound of her beating heart. As if beside a hospital bed, listening for the blips and watching the blue light of the monitor. We listen and, being there, are metonymized into that machine, attached to her body, become the electrocardiogrammatological witnesses of a technological transposition, her heartbeat transmitted and transposed as another sound, a rhythmic note, the beginning of a music, both a series of reassuring graphic peaks and the ominous threat of a flatline. If we are to hear her heart, it will be through those redirections and indirections. We never could hear the heart itself. First, because it is her heart, and we just aren’t that close. But second, because even if we were, and it were ours, her heart ours, she our heart, we would still have to hear it coming to us as a relay of vibrations, coming to us not as the thing itself but rather as its effect. The beat that makes the heart for us comes

F6540.indb 87

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

88

David Wills

away from the heart to reach us. It is not the heart itself but the displaced, mediated sound of it that reaches us. Even if it seems to do so by touching. The displaced mediated heartbeat breaks away from the heart and breaks the heart open inside us. The heart whose reassuring beat we hear—but mostly never hear—beating in our sacrosanct recesses is heard only in its interruption, in its brokenness. That is necessarily the same for her, for her hearing the sound of her own heartbeat, beating broken away, beating from a heart broken inside her. That sound from within the depths of her own interiority comes to her as if from another. The very sound of her living interrupts her existence. Her heart belongs to another deep within herself. Hence her anxiety. That is why she is stammering, and singing to herself finally. Listen, she tells herself, listen to how foreign my heartbeat sounds. A foreign, artificial heart, a heart like a machine inside me. My real heart beating beats with artificial life. It is the heart of another. We have only one heartbeat, and it is not ours. Which leaves us singing, chanting, or intoning to our self as to another: listen listen, listen, listen to my heartbeat.

F6540.indb 88

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

chapter 5

“Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains” Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler Melle Jan Kromhout

Although at the time of Friedrich Kittler’s death in October 2011 the media theorist had already published the two parts of the first volume of his planned tetralogy Musik und Mathematik, the importance of music in his work is often overlooked or neglected. Music, however, had been important in his work from his earliest publications onward. Toward the end of a 1995 essay titled “Musik als Medium,” which treated music aesthetics from Kant to Nietzsche and beyond, Kittler wrote, “an other music should be invented—a music that would no longer derive its power from alliances with the medium of language and its ‘meanings.’ ” This music, he continues, should be governed by “pure media-technology, pure control flow” from users to computers and, significantly, back.1 The “other music,” however, had already appeared much earlier in Kittler’s oeuvre: in “The God of the Ears,” an article on Pink Floyd’s song “Brain Damage” originally written in 1982, he distinguished between two types of music: one merely imitates voices and nature, “the other—to use the words of Ingeborg Bachmann—is a song from beyond humanity.” This other one, Kittler added forthrightly, will eventually triumph.2 In 2008, three years before his death, Kittler, speaking in front of an audience 89

F6540.indb 89

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

90

Melle Jan Kromhout

at London’s Tate Modern in 2008, dropped another hint about what this “other music” would sound like. Mentioning most of the usual suspects— the figures, including Richard Wagner, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Friedrich Nietzsche, that had peopled his music writings of the preceding three decades—he said, “Hopefully, you heard it: it is the same music, from Wagner to Hendrix, from Hendrix to Pink Floyd,” music, he continued, that underscores the fact that all music is “a selection out of worldwide noise.”3 Those who are familiar with Kittler’s work understand that this is a description of the music of the media age, which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, came into its own with the invention of sound recording in 1877, and was established as the increasingly dominant musical paradigm for Western music in the twentieth century. For Kittler, the music of Wagner, Hendrix, and Pink Floyd and the philosophy of Nietzsche embody important transitions in the emergence of these far-reaching changes at the very basis of Western musical culture. Successively, they worked at the points of conjuncture between the scientific analysis of sound as frequencies and the discovery of Fourier analysis, the invention of recording, the electrification of musical instruments and the invention of magnetic tape recording, hi-fi and stereo sound. From the late nineteenth century onward, these developments paved the way for the emergence of an “other music,” or media-music. Starting with the “pure dynamics and pure acoustics”4 of Wagner’s music dramas (which Kittler identifies in the Ring of the Nibelungs: from an approximate Fourier analysis at the beginning of Das Rheingold to the “pure noise” at the end of Götterdämmerung),5 the works of these exemplary artists constitute a “discourse on discourse”: not by what they “mean” but by what they are, how they sound, and how they are constructed they reveal the preconditions, rules, and schemata that underpin the emerging paradigm: the age of technical media, or what Kittler dubbed the “discourse network of 1900.”6 A close-reading analysis of Kittler’s writings on music and media prior to Musik und Mathematik provides the groundwork for a viable assessment of this musical paradigm. Its most important argument is in line with the argument of his seminal Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, originally published in 1985. At the core of this extensive analysis of the difference between the discourse networks of 1800 (roughly the nineteenth century) and 1900 (roughly the twentieth century) stands the transition from a highly ideological, hermeneutic worldview in the former period to a mathematically and physically grounded technical foundation in the latter.

F6540.indb 90

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

91

This should be regarded as a shift from the hermeneutic interpretation of true meaning in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature to the always only temporarily significant ordering of sense data in analog storage and transmission media that was conceptualized and produced in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 In the symbolically integrated world of nineteenth-century literature, words and their meanings were fixed, lucid, and knowable. The physical real of technical media, however, is not reducible to such symbolic representation.8 Instead, it stores what Jacques Lacan called “the Real,” which is exactly all that escapes the symbolic bottleneck of writing.9 In music, this becomes manifest in the transition from the medium of written music to that of sound recording. As the paradigm of written music became less and less significant, the aspect of sound itself became pivotal as the primary site to which the listener of technologically mediated music connects. “Antennas,” writes Kittler, “have long since invaded our brains” and metaphorically hooked our senses—in the case of music, our ears— directly to the sound of music, skipping any interpretative step.10 Whereas the materiality of the medium disappeared in the symbolic, and supposedly natural, connection between music and listeners prior to technological mediation, the music of the media age does not deal with such deeper meanings, interpretations of sign systems, or autonomous human souls. It deals first and foremost with physical surfaces and raw data that exist independently of the listener. This is no longer the interpretative, hermeneutic way of “understanding” the “meaning” of the music; it establishes a more physical, direct, and material connection. Instead of delineated musical possibilities and congruent meanings, there is something compulsive to the music of the media age, something that is beyond our control, which works on us and controls us instead of the other way around. When the actual sounds, voices, and noises—audible, physical, and real—are stored, symbolic meaning and human agency become increasingly unstable, superfluous, and arbitrary.11 Up to the end, Pink Floyd, Wagner, and Hendrix accompanied Kittler as prime examples of this “other music.” In the meantime, however, his work developed from the late eighties onward to deal with the consequences of the digital revolution as the next step in the development of media technology: the collapse of the traditional technical media into one overarching, symbolic medium —the computer. One can only guess what Kittler would have come up with in the planned last volume of Musik und Mathematik, which was to be called Turingzeit after computer pioneer Alan

F6540.indb 91

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

92

Melle Jan Kromhout

Turing, and what musical references would have populated this volume. It is probable, however, that the “other music” he discussed from 1982 all the way up to 2008 eventually found its fulfillment in the digital as well.12 In the following, I will trace the outlines of the “other music” throughout Kittler’s oeuvre, focusing on the question of how its emergence influenced and changed human listening strategies and explicitly extending Kittler’s argument into the domain of digital sound. First, I discuss the shift from the written music of the discourse network of 1800 toward the technologically mediated music of the discourse network of 1900, especially how the idea of a human “spirit” or “soul” became obsolete when technical reproduction and its extension of the senses became possible, a disappearance that is fundamental in Kittler’s aim to remove the privileged position of the “human” from the “humanities.”13 Second, I use the works of the musicologist Peter Wicke and the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst to specify Kittler’s notion of sound as the central concept in the relationship between music and listeners in the age of technical media. Wicke identifies sound as the intermediate plane between purely physical acoustics and symbolic musical meaning. Ernst subsequently discusses the way in which this conceptualization of sound as an intermediate plane is inseparably connected to technical media. He describes how it triggered the “autonomization” and “escalation” of the sphere of sound in music. From here, it is a small but significant step toward digital media, or what Ernst calls the fundamental mathematization of physical data.14 In the digital age, computers developed a fundamentally mathematical logic and surpassed human capacities, fulfilling the promise of the complete manipulability of all sounds. The example of the popular smartphone app Shazam shows how computers developed new and different “listening” strategies, running parallel to human ways of processing sense data. Being neither an extension of the senses in Marshall McLuhan’s sense nor their radical detachment or autonomization, digital “listening” technologies operate alongside humans. They establish what Kittler described as a feedback loop between machines and their users, in which the one feeds on the other. Indeed, as Kittler wrote in “Musik als Medium,” it is “pure media-technology” or “pure control flow.”15 This “pure control flow” points to a future, only just becoming visible in 1995, in which the constant flow of commands between humans and machines in the age of digital media change, shape, and manipulate digital data as symbolic representations of the physical world. As such, it constitutes the fulfillment, as well as the dissolution, of the traditional media

F6540.indb 92

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

93

technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is the final step in the completion of an “other music.”

Emerging Music of the Media Age Up to the invention of sound recording, Western music had been determined by the written code of music notation, which Kittler describes as “a notation system that enabled the transcription of clear sounds separated from the world’s noise.”16 Music notation filters certain intervals and chords from a more complex sonic reality, delineating them by a set of mathematical ratios. With this, notation did not just provide a means to transcribe, and thereby preserve, musical ideas for future generations; it also meant that only music transcribable within the confines of this code— only music that could be written down— could be stored and reproduced.17 Crucially, music notation is based on the transcription of abstract musical values (clear pitches) that only find their physical equivalent in those usually artificially produced phenomena called sine tones or single waves.18 As a result of this symbolic “bottleneck,” stochastic and unpredictable sonic complexity was largely neglected in accounts of Western music. As Kittler argued polemically in 2008, as long as people kept interpreting words and notes from “silent printing paper,” “sound and music are already gone forever.”19 The actual physicality of sound was sidetracked in much of the musical thinking prior to the invention of sound recording, for the logic of written music is well suited for transcribing the temporal progression of sonic events but not their concrete singularity.20 Thomas Edison’s invention of sound recording in 1877 created the possibility to record, store, and transmit any sound with all its possible overtones and full contingency. The scientific and discursive changes leading up to this invention meant the end of the separation between clear sounds, notated and categorized, and unclear sounds—noises, irregular and uncontrollable.21 Perceived as frequencies, the one as recordable as the other, all sounds became equal, and music could inscribe itself directly on a storage medium. Not bothered by the interference of human symbolic representation, the entire spectrum of sound became available for musical use.22 In various books and articles, Kittler illustrates the significance of this transition with the example of the German poet Ernst von Wildenbruch, who recorded a poem especially written for the phonograph in 1897. Standing in front of the big horn that recorded his voice and words, the last

F6540.indb 93

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

94

Melle Jan Kromhout

sentence of Von Wildenbruch’s poem was “vernehmt denn aus dem Klang von diesem Spruch die Seele von Ernst von Wildenbruch” (So listen to the sound of what I declare, and Ernst von Wildenbruch’s soul will be laid bare).23 However, it is exactly this soul, as well as its unbaring, that became irrelevant in the age of sound recording. As Kittler, adapting his familiar Lacanian stance, describes, Von Wildenbruch was still immersed in the discourse network of 1800: he tried “to equate the Real (his recorded, but mortal voice) with the Symbolic (the discourse articulated in his verses), and in turn to equate the Symbolic with the Imaginary (the poetic spirit of creation within him).”24 But what Von Wildenbruch did not realize, or was not even able to understand, is that media technology is not hindered by this kind of reduction. When recorded, sounds and voices do not become anything other than sounds and voices. Sound recording deals with actual sounds instead of representations. On the basis of a purely physical approach, it was no longer necessary to merely imitate or represent real, natural sounds: one could simply reproduce them. All sounds—musical instruments and the noise of a car, voices and cries of animals, breathing, laughing, the sound of the wind— could become, and indeed became, part of music. In the decades to follow, technicians, engineers, and musicians came to understand that sound itself is the real of music.25 The music of the media age was thus constituted by its existence as physical, real, recordable, and manipulable sound. What Kittler describes as “a historical transition from intervals to frequencies, from a logic to a physics of sound,” lifted the limitations of musical transcription, which had until then been organized as a hierarchy of sounds, intervals, and chords.26 With this transition, music has changed from abstract to concrete, from temporal to spatial, from Symbolic to Real. Nietzsche, writing just nine years after Edison’s invention, already described the “other music” of the media age in Beyond Good and Evil as “a deeper, mightier, perhaps wickeder and more mysterious music.”27 In 1876, the year The Ring of the Nibelungs premiered and one year prior to Edison’s breakthrough, Nietzsche had recognized this other music in Wagner’s “total world of hearing,” in which, Kittler argues, both the orchestra (in its pit) and the actors (absent but present in their leitmotif ) disappear in favor of pure acoustics.28 A few decades after the invention of recording, stereo-sound (positioning sounds in a non-existent place between the ears) as well as hi-fidelity (technologically reproducing the entire range of human hearing) completed the experience of having the whole spectrum of audible sound transmitted directly into the listener’s ears and brain, “as if the music were originating in the brain

F6540.indb 94

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

95

itself.”29 Nowadays, every listener of pop music knows exactly what this means and just calls it “sound.”

Listening to Sound The shortest way to describe what lies at the heart of Kittler’s “other music” is just this: sound, quantifiable and physical sound, which—to play on Kittler’s assertion at the beginning of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter30—in spite or because of its simplicity, deserves a description. The concept of sound in the age of technical media cannot be reduced to the purely acoustical. As Paul Théberge writes in Any Sound You Can Imagine, sound “has taken on a peculiar material character that cannot be separated either from the ‘music’ or, more important, from the sound recording as the dominant medium of reproduction.” Instead, Théberge argues, the modern concept of sound is intrinsically determined by recording.31 Using a German vocabulary more nuanced than its English counterpart, the musicologist Peter Wicke defines Klang (phenomenal sound) in relation to similar but certainly not synonymous terms such as Ton (tone) and Schall (acoustical sound—as in Schalltrichter: megaphone). Klang, as he understands it, should not be understood in the exclusively musical sense of Zusammenklang (“harmony” or multiple “tones” sounding together) but instead primarily as acoustical Schall, which is a specific configuration of overtones and partial tones accompanying a fundamental tone. Whether simple or complex, from a purely physical perspective this configuration is all there is to it. Musically, however, such configurations operate on a meaningful level, which Wicke calls the specific “Klanggestalt” or “sound image.” This notion, he argues, operates in the realm between the purely physical sound on the one hand and its possible musical significance on a cultural level on the other. Wicke dubs this intermediate level “das Sonischen,” the sonic.32 Just like Théberge, Wicke already argues that this particular intermediate level has become of central importance with the possibility of sound recording, but the media theoretician (and longstanding collaborator of Kittler) Wolfgang Ernst further extends Wicke’s argument. With some quintessentially German wordplay, he introduces the domain of the “Sonik” as a specific category of Wicke’s “Sonischen.” Whereas the Sonischen designates the purely musical domain of the “cultural configuration of sound” that became increasingly dominant in, but is in no way limited to, the age of technical media, Ernst defines the Sonik as “the technological escalation and autonomization of this sphere.” Different from Wicke’s

F6540.indb 95

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

96

Melle Jan Kromhout

Sonischen, Ernst’s concept of the Sonik offers an alternative to the focus on “the cultural or anthropological aspects of sound.” Instead, it aims to treat sound “as bodiless, . . . mathematical . . . , in contrast to the voice and instruments.”33 Thus, Ernst explicitly defines the Sonik in opposition to anthropocentric interpretations of sound technology that focus on human voices and musical instruments. The term thereby accentuates the decisive impact of technical media on the emancipation of the sphere of sound, both inside and outside of music.34 Unlike musical instruments specifically designed for musical purposes, sound technologies are almost always byproducts of other scientific research. From Edison’s invention of sound recording, along with the inventions of hi-fi recording and stereo sound, up to analog-to-digital transmitters or the invention of the pitch-correction software Auto-Tune, sound itself formed a main component of the development of technologies, but specific musical purposes did not.35 All the way back to the conceptualization of frequencies and the invention of Fourier analysis in the nineteenth century, the purely physical or mathematical aspects of sounds as such were primary, their translation into the musical domain secondary and sometimes even accidental.36 Hence, Ernst argues, “electric sound production operates in between electronic acoustics”—physical, measurable, objective—“and emphatic music”— cultural, symbolic, subjective. Instead of musical instruments made for the sole purpose of playing music, as extensions of human musical capacities, electric media produce sound without any resonating bodies, constructing—as a synthesizers does— complex sound out of independent frequencies, creating sounds that nature and humans could not have produced. With this, the purely anthropocentric, cultural definition of music is slowly replaced by a more hybrid version, in which human capacities are always already connected with and determined by those of technical media.37 According to Kittler, physical (rather than metaphysical) sound has no relation to human speech and the voice of reason.38 In “The God of the Ears,” he describes the relationship between sound and human listeners in the age of technical media as a “single, positive circuit of feedback between sound and listeners’ ears.”39 Sound itself flows directly from records into listeners’ ears and “remains in the head.”40 Therefore, listening to music is no longer a matter of listening to some entity beyond the sound itself. What Von Wildenbruch did not understand, Kittler explains, was that a recorded voice does not express some deeper meaning hidden in the notes—where

F6540.indb 96

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

97

the “real music” is. Instead, the sound of the voice is the music itself. For Kittler, “sound is a complex of physiological data that are impossible to put into writing or to counterfeit.”41 Sound recording records these data in a meticulous, indifferent manner and, as Ernst argues, “hears” what is not audible with human ears: every single frequency of an endlessly complex sonic whole.42 This is why Kittler referred to the “other music” in “Musik als Medium” as “a music that would no longer derive its power from alliances with the medium of language and its ‘meanings.’ ”43 Recording media record, store, and play sounds, unaffected by questions of interpretative meaning. They deal only with physical data, which are recorded, stored, and played as mere information. Technical media differ from human listeners in that they are indifferent to the logic of music, to musical structures or musical meaning. Similarly, electronic instruments such as synthesizers produce sounds that no musical instrument could have produced. Their logic is not musical but physical.44 As analog recording media (whether acoustical, electrical, or electromagnetical) registered the Real of acoustic events with their “indifferent” ears, they reshaped the very nature of music by positioning acoustical sound (physical and symbolically meaningless) at the heart of the interplay between (recorded) music and listeners. With this development, the absolute difference between meaningful and meaningless sound data effectively disappears.45 Accidental, random, irregular, unconsciousness, and illogical sounds became just as relevant as deliberate, ordered, and conscious ones while listeners were turned into mere physical receivers, left to process all these sounds while attributing ever-changing but highly subjective meanings to them.46 Music based on what Kittler called “pure media technology”47 is not meaningless to humans, but it is not based on a logic that is intrinsically meaningful either. Instead, it is based on sound, fundamentally determined by its existence in and through technical media. Listeners have made a covenant with media that record, store, process, and transmit music—not necessarily as music but as mere physical sound. In the past thirty years or so, the “pure control flow” that Kittler evokes at the end of “Musik als Medium” realized a final step toward the complete fulfillment of the promise of such an “other music”—yearned for by Nietzsche, preheard by Wagner, and realized in the studios of popular musicians of the likes of Pink Floyd. As becomes clear a few sentences later, this “pure control flow” comes down to “computer algorithm music,”48 because with digital sound processing “everything that sounds is programmable.”49

F6540.indb 97

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

98

Melle Jan Kromhout

Listening to Ones and Zeros “Optical fiber networks.” The first three words of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, written in 1986, already show that Kittler was concerned not only with the transition from a hermeneutic, language-based “discourse of 1800” toward a media-based “discourse of 1900” (embodied by the three media of the book’s title) but more so with a subsequent, just as significant step. “Optical fiber networks” encompass the entire promise of the digital realm, which was only just revealing its full potential at the time the book was written: “people will be hooked to an information channel that can be used for any medium.”50 In the digital age, quantifiable sense data left their physical materiality behind once again and were installed in a new, higher symbolic order. Traditional media—although becoming increasingly better in manipulating signals— operated on the level of the physical Real and were fundamentally restricted by the laws of physics. When turned into raw digital data, however, formerly physical sense (and any other kind of ) data surpassed fundamental materiality: “under high-tech conditions frequencies are no longer materialities, but pure information.”51 The digital age closed the brackets around the relatively brief age of analog media. The opening bracket was represented by the symbolic medium of writing, the closing by another symbolic medium, binary code. In between lay the age of media that operated in the Real. The fact that sound was already perceived as sense data, already mathematically and physically quantifiable since Hermann von Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music in 1863, eventually enabled its venture into the digital realm.52 Everything that is calculable can be turned into digital data, and as Kittler said in a speech for Brian Eno in 1998, computers “provided a language for sounds, which grasps all its fractal dimensions, as well as its analytic, synthetic, elementary and constructive ones.”53 Sound, when rendered as digital data rather than frequencies, became fully manipulable and endlessly reproducible. Ernst’s concept of the Sonik describes how technical media influenced the sphere of sound. Humans still listen as humans: they are not wired to do anything else. But the logic of machines is a different one. They venture into realms where the cultural and human are of less, even marginal importance. Although the physical process of human listening and the basic assumption that humans attribute cultural and symbolic significance to musical sound seem to more or less persist as they were in the pretechnological era, the logic of machines did dramatically change what

F6540.indb 98

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

99

humans listen to, how they listen to it, and how it becomes meaningful. For both Kittler and Ernst, this marginalization of human agency, already evident with mechanical and electromechanical recording, took an even wider hold with the introduction of digital sound. When Kittler described the relationship between sound and listeners in 1982 as a “single positive feedback between sounds and the ears of listeners,” he still argued from the standpoint of analog sound reproduction. Digital technology had yet to become the dominant mode of recording, storage, and transmission. In that very same year, however, Philips and Sony introduced the CD player, which, although digital recording had been around for quite some time already, constitutes the definitive breakthrough of digital sound reproduction.54 Fourteen years later, in 1996, when the digital age had taken off and the analog circuit had turned into a digital one, Kittler described another “feedback loop” in “Thinking Colours and/or Machines.”55 This time, the loop tends “to lead from the machine to the programmer rather than the other way round.”56 There is no longer just a feedback from technically reproduced sounds to the ears and brains of listeners and back but also one between computers and programmers. The computer is not a mere tool, used by humans to serve their convenience; computers work on their programmers and users as much as the other way around, as they will only allow input in the strict and mathematical logic that they employ and not in the “fuzzy logic of [the] insights and intentions” of human beings.57 As Kittler writes in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, both people and computers are “ ‘subject to the appeal of the signifier,’ that is, they are both run by programs.”58 They operate on the same level: both people and computers process symbolic chains of data, but their tools and abilities to do so differ greatly. In 1988, Kittler wrote that “music out of binary code itself . . . is not yet in sight.”59 Nonetheless, twenty-five years later, digital processing is all pervasive in musical practices. Contemporary audio-production software can analyze and synthesize any sound imaginable: Auto-Tune finds and corrects pitch,60 Melodyne analyzes entire frequency ranges to break down chords into their individual parts, only to reconstruct them differently at will,61 and humanizers add random elements to rhythms or sounds to simulate erratic human behavior.62 These are just a few examples. Indeed, as Kittler explained in 2005, these and many other applications have enabled musicians to create previously unimaginable sounds and sonic spheres, free from “what physics and acoustics prescribe.”63 No less than they have affected the production of music, these applications have influenced the way that people listen to and process music.64

F6540.indb 99

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

100

Melle Jan Kromhout

As computers are not designed to take semantics into account, they only deal with data as such. Meanwhile, human listening practices have become inseparably entangled with the cold, indifferent, algorithmic, superaccurate listening habits of digital media. Popular smartphone applications such as Shazam are good examples of the crucial differences between these fundamentally mathematical ways of rendering sound data and human listening practices.65 These applications are designed to “recognize” the songs that users expose their device to by pointing the built-in microphone at a sound source. In an article from 2003, Shazam’s cofounder Avery Li-Chun Wang described how its software uses sophisticated algorithms “able to recognize a short audio sample of music that had been broadcast, mixed with heavy ambient noise, subject to reverb and other processing, captured by a little cellphone microphone, subjected to voice codec compression, and network dropouts.”66 In order to do this, Shazam “fingerprints” both the sample the user takes and all items in an extensive music database. Finding a match between the fingerprint of the sample and a track in the database takes about “5 to 500 milliseconds” for a “database of about twenty thousand tracks.”67 The fingerprinting uses a spectral analysis of each sample. In the case of Shazam, this is narrowed down to analyses of the “peak intensities” of a track: the moments that sonically stand out. To the resulting time map of “peak intensities,” Shazam adds the position of each of these relative to the beginning of the track. With these two sets of data (spectral specificity of peak intensities and their position in time), Shazam is able to make an accurate match in almost all instances—provided the original track is contained in its database.68 Shazam is faster, more accurate, and more reliable than any human in identifying songs. As Wang writes, “the algorithm can pick the correct [one of different versions of a song] even if they are virtually indistinguishable by the human ear.”69 The proposition that digital audio media have surpassed human hearing, then, is not only theoretical but is experienced every day and by millions of users. Rather than relying on their own hearing and memory, they use the storage, analysis, and search capacities of Shazam or similar services to engage with the music they hear. Cleverly, while recording and sending data, the interface of Shazam tells the user it is “listening” to the music.70 At this level, however, there is no human listening involved. Shazam does not “hear” or listen to any music in the sense that we associate with these human activities but analyzes data that are fed back (via computer hardware and interface software) to the user. Turned into binary data, any sound is a set of coded information that can be ana-

F6540.indb 100

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

101

lyzed, synthesized, and resynthesized like any other data set, without being dependent on any meaning beyond the logic of numbers and algorithms. Computers, Ernst writes, deal with an ersatz acoustic that is not addressed to human ears at all.71 Analog recording media registered the Real of acoustic events with their “indifferent” ears and stored every acoustical sound in all its spectral detail, leaving humans as nerve switch boards for acoustical data, only to become temporarily meaningful on the level of Wicke’s Sonischen. Computers do not operate on the level of the Real. They use listening strategies that are no longer an extension of listening and fall increasingly beyond the domain of human affairs. They process data (spectral analyses of peak intensities, exact temporal maps) that humans cannot and will never be able to process. Their processing is an ersatz listening, as the computer listens for us: it listens in our place and might even enhance or amplify our own listening by returning to us a more detailed, more precise, maybe even richer listening.72 But, in the end, they do not listen at all: they calculate and compute data. They do not deal with sound but numbers—two numbers, to be precise: 1 and 0. In many instances, this logic becomes dominant, prompting Ernst to conclude that “humans are no longer necessarily in the center of the sonosphere.”73 Within this closed, rigid, mathematical, and binary world, the “listening” strategy of computers surpasses human hearing in speed, accuracy, and detail. No music and no musical parameters are part of Shazam’s “listening”: it handles physical sound waves, recorded by a microphone, turned into digital data, sent to a computer, reduced to ones and zeros, compared with samples in a database, and returned to the user as an artist’s name and a song title. Only at this very last step, when the result of Shazam’s data processing returns to the user, are the initial sound waves reinstalled in the cultural domain of musical sense.74 At this very moment, the data (re)gain their contextual, cultural meaning as sound. This is the feedback between sounds and the ears of listeners, between users and computers: from machines to users, from data to information to cultural meaning and back again: a network of humans and machines feeding (off ) each other.

Music Theory in the Computer Age In 2008, just like in 1982, Kittler heralded Wagner, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors as primary examples of the “other music” that technical media made possible. By 2008, however, the digital revolution had engulfed music production, transmission, and recording; and although the music of Wagner, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors can be con-

F6540.indb 101

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

102

Melle Jan Kromhout

verted into the digital like all other sounds and music, they also belong to a different age. If, as Kittler argues on multiple occasions, Wagner was the first example of the “other music” and the sixties witnessed its coming to fruition in the recording studios of rock music, his historical logic follows that the “pure control flow” of the digital revolution is its final phase. After 1945, when the invention of the magnetic tape, hi-fi recording, and stereo sound had unleashed the sonic imaginations of pop musicians on the world, the sound of music such as that of Pink Floyd “sticks in one’s head, simply because people no longer need to be reminded, simply because machines themselves are the mind.”75 Hence, Kittler continues, “it also becomes possible to store—beyond words and melodies—the colorations of instruments, sonic spaces, and indeed, even abyssal stochastic noise.”76 Hi-fi stereo sets, installed in every living room, decreased the distance between musical sounds and listeners dramatically. What Kittler calls sonic “tricks,” “gadgets,” and “special effect” (such as echo, vocal dubbing, positive feedback, and cut-and-paste) overwhelmed the aural sense of music lovers.77 In the age of analog sound reproduction, “antennas invaded the brain,” plugging sounds directly into our ears. Through music technology, sound was emancipated, becoming a fundamental aspect of musical affect: an intermediate plane between physical acoustics and meaningful music. This return to the physicality and materiality of sound paved the way for the possibility of its digitization. In the digital age, machines did away with brains and ears altogether and exist separately next to human listening. Crucially and fundamentally, computers listen to what we are not able to hear and, as an extension and autonomization of our own, physical ears, have therefore changed the way we listen ourselves. In the essay “Number and Numeral,” originally written in 2003, Kittler forcefully proposes that “media studies . . . only make sense when media make sense.”78 Just as well, in our days, we might say that studying music only makes sense when digital processing makes sense. After all, not only are most of the ways that music is made and distributed inseparably entangled with digital technology, but so are almost all the ways that many of us listen to music. So, if we want to understand the ways in which we listen to, and deal with, sound and music in our current age, we will have to confront the radically different listening and processing strategies of these technologies, both on a material and physical and on a conceptual and theoretical level. We will have to confront the radical changes caused by the shift, first, from written music to recorded music and, second, from analog to digital music. Possibilities such as those of a deceptively straightforward application such as Shazam show how digital technology has fundamentally

F6540.indb 102

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler

103

changed our ways of relating to music. Although, at first sight, the application appears to be merely a practical tool, aimed at helping us navigate the expanding database of music, Kittler indeed reminds us that computers are never merely tools at our disposal but media that work on the user just as much as the user works on them.79 They change the way we interact with the world. It is not just we humans who feed the machines with data, with questions and queries: their logic returns to us and changes us just as well. For one thing, this is because digital technology only accepts its own discrete language, and we—as users—have to modify our interactions with it to fit that mold. But, even more, it is because its discrete and mathematical grasp on the world increasingly becomes our grasp of the world. The ersatz listening of Shazam becomes an extension of our own listening, as we no longer necessarily identify a piece of music by using our own, “fuzzy,” musical memory. Instead, we apply an outsourced spectral analysis to its sonic material. Between our listening ear on the one end and the sounding music on the other, Shazam replaces listening with spectral analysis, data transference, and search optimization. It cares neither for the meaning of the music it “listens” to nor even for such formal elements as melody, harmony, or rhythm. Computers reduce any music to its frequency spectrum, however simple or complex. By now, almost every sound engineer carries a spectral analysis application on his or her smartphone, replacing the fine ear of the expert with the flawless analysis of the computer. Also, amateurs and music lovers are confronted with spectrograms on a regular basis, with the popular online streaming music service SoundCloud for instance, which shows the listener a fairly detailed waveform of the music that is playing—the like of which have already been omnipresent in all audio-processing software for several decades.80 These new visual representations, effortlessly rendered back into sound by computers, are steadily replacing age-old music notation as the primary way music looks to mass users. It thereby changes our perception of how music unfolds in time. This is music theory for the computer age, which is no music theory at all but digital sound processing. If it is indeed true that, as Kittler writes, “media determine our situation,” this must have always been the case.81 In the end, listeners and listening strategies have always been as much a product of their media as the other way around. As media work on us just as much as we work with and on them, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz write in their introduction to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, “they no doubt also determine, and hence configure, our intellectual operations.”82 The mathemati-

F6540.indb 103

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

104

Melle Jan Kromhout

zation of music—music turned into algorithmically processed numbers— amounts to an ersatz acoustic and perhaps even turns listeners into ersatz listeners. We are no longer interpretatively listening to any deeper sense or meaning, as was the case in the discourse network of 1800, determined by the medium of written music. But we have also, at least partly, surpassed the feedback between physical sounds and our ears and brains that shaped the discourse network of 1900, the age of technical media. The feedback between computers and humans feeds the logic of the computer— disguised by interfaces, as when Shazam tells us it is “listening”—back to its users. We have indeed changed again, from listeners to the sound of music to users of the data of sounds. A century and a half ago, Nietzsche dreamed of “a deeper, mightier, perhaps wickeder and more mysterious music.” For him, this “other music” started in the second half of the nineteenth century with the sonic experiments of Wagner and other late-Romantic composers. More than a century later, it fulfilled its promise in the spectrum of endlessly manipulable, meaningless data that can be shaped and reshaped into ever-changing but never fully stable and meaningful constellations. Music is no more than a temporary, and from the viewpoint of computers arbitrary, selection out of endless possible combinations. Meaning is something the human listener, never able to process pure data as such, attributes to the output of these machines but is in no way logically connected either to the source or to the data itself. Thus, music has finally left the nineteenth century behind, becoming medium instead of art, information instead of meaning, and sound instead of music.

F6540.indb 104

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

chapter 6

Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance Jason Freeman With the aid of electronic computers, the composer becomes a sort of pilot: he presses the buttons, introduces coordinates, and supervises the controls of a cosmic vessel sailing in the space of sound, across sonic constellations and galaxies that he could formerly glimpse only as a distant dream. —iannis xenakis1

[Interactive sound installations] allow users to call forth very complex sound patterns, sometimes allied with visual patterns as well, merely by moving through a space with sensors and deploying an electronic glove or handheld signaling device. . . . Their work eliminates distinctions between composers, performers, and listeners. The user of an interactive installation is all three at once— or none of the above. —richard taruskin2

Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another? —john cage3

Sam Hayden’s music for 3d music,4 written for the London Sinfonietta, has never been performed in concert, and it is not available on recording. To hear the music, listeners must visit an interactive website and navigate through a series of three-dimensional worlds that resemble a puzzleoriented video game. As they manipulate objects and discover portals among the worlds, the website plays—and occasionally layers—musical clips recorded by the orchestra. Listening to 3d music necessitates becoming a pilot (though the pilot’s controls differ substantially from those in Xenakis’s quote in the epigraph). Without a listener’s continued movement through the virtual environment,

105

F6540.indb 105

6/17/15 8:30:07 AM

106

Jason Freeman

the music stagnates and even stops. As listeners move through the spaces to keep the music going, they must make decisions that significantly affect what they hear. Each listener therefore experiences a different version of the music by traversing the space uniquely. The composer (Hayden) and performer (London Sinfonietta) have each given up some degree of control over the music, and these elements of control have been transferred over to each listener and become inseparable from the act of listening. Physical, virtual, and metaphorical movement through space has long served as an organizational technique for composers and sound artists. Xenakis described his stochastic composition techniques as piloting through space; Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI5 asked performers to explore the space of the printed score sheet; and Max Neuhaus led audiences on guided walks through New York City to listen to the environmental sounds around them.6 This chapter, taking its cue from projects such as 3d music, considers movement through space in connection with the act of listening, rather than composition or performance. In particular, I focus on the ways in which this paradigm infuses listening with aspects of performance and composition, turning the often private act of listening into a potentially public, creative, and collective experience. I also consider the role of technology in enabling and expanding artistic practice within this paradigm. I explore the idea of listening via movement within three distinct contexts: the physical and virtual spaces in which we change our relationship to a multitude of sound sources; the spaces defined by a musical score or abstract musical structure where composers, performers, and listeners mingle; and the environmental spaces in which the acts of recording and manipulating the sounds around us serve to heighten awareness of the sonic environments we encounter each day. My interest in these questions arises primarily from my own experiences as a composer. Accordingly, my discussion uses specific musical examples—both from my own recent work and that of others—as a guide to this exploration.

Moving among the Sources of Sound When we go to an orchestra concert, we carefully choose our seats. Orchestras know this, of course: they usually provide seating maps of the hall to help us decide, and they usually charge different prices to sit in different locations. It is not just a question of the sight line to the stage; it is also a matter of acoustics. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter write, “Just as the

F6540.indb 106

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

107

location of an observer determines the observer’s visual perspective, the location of a listener determines the listener’s aural perspective. Although we speak of a concert hall as a single space, more accurately, it is multiple coupled subspaces with similar but subtly different acoustics.”7 Gustavo Matamoros’s Audience Piece calls attention to this phenomenon: in the Fluxus-inspired work, audience members are handed a folding chair and a sheet of paper as they enter the concert venue. The paper instructs them to place their chair in the “best spot,” to “evaluate [their] position,” and then to select the next “best spot.” The process continues until the “perfect” spot is found or “until it is time to leave [the concert].”8 Matamoros’s work represents an important departure from the traditional concert-hall seating paradigm: seat selection no longer happens before the performance but rather unfolds during the concert. Instead of listeners making a discrete decision about location, they now continuously decide on the “best spot” as influenced by the visual and aural experience of the musical performance in the space. By moving during the performance, listeners superimpose their own acoustic structure on that of the concert’s music, a trajectory of changing aural perspectives that follows their path through the hall. While these trajectories may be individual, they are not private; listeners’ movements are seen by other audience members and likely influence the movement decisions of others. Of course, the degree to which a listener’s location influences the aural experience of a musical performance varies dramatically, depending on the space and the musical work. At a rock concert in a large arena, for instance, location may only minimally alter aural perspective, since most sounds are amplified through a monstrous sound system designed to deliver consistent results throughout the space. In contrast, Janet Cardiff ’s sound installation The Forty Part Motet uses a speaker system to create an environment in which the sound changes dramatically based on a listener’s location in the space. Forty speakers are placed in a circle, and each plays a recording of a different voice from a work by Thomas Tallis. Together, the forty speakers re-create a performance of the piece by a choir of the same size. Cardiff describes the work’s motivations: While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be

F6540.indb 107

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

108

Jason Freeman

intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.9

The work resembles Audience Piece in its invitation to listeners to continuously change their location within the space, but here, Cardiff uses technology to make the exploratory space that of the choir itself—the stage instead of the seating area. By shifting the listener’s location, movement becomes less about interacting with the space’s acoustics. It is more concerned with transforming one’s relationship to the multitude of independent, spatially disjunct sound sources. John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD similarly focuses on movement within an environment of spatially disjunct sound sources, but the sources themselves are far more heterogeneous, and far more spread out, than in the Cardiff work. In HPSCHD, Cage, Hiller, Ronald Nameth, and Calvin Sumison focused on the theme of abundance and used the technology available to them to create it: the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois in Urbana was filled with seven harpsichord players, fifty-two speakers playing pregenerated parts, twelve movie projectors, and eighty-four slide projectors. Over the course of the four-hour evening, approximately seven thousand audience members moved freely through the space.10 With the abundance of stimuli in the space, the only sounds listeners could distinguish with clarity were those in their immediate vicinity; thus their movement radically influenced the music they heard. Chadabe notes that “the audience for HPSCHD is inside the performance, moving through it, walking past the harpsichord players on their individual platforms positioned throughout the space, listening to the individual solos, sometimes looking over players’ shoulders at the scores [ . . . ] And wherever one walks through the space of the performance, the experience of sound and image is different.”11 As with The Forty Part Motet, movement through the HPSCHD performance venue transforms the listener’s relationship to the sound sources: which musical elements are foregrounded, which are backgrounded, and which are indistinguishable as independent elements at all. It is up to each audience member to discover his or her own meaning in the evening’s performance, and charting a unique path through the space is an important mechanism through which to do that. Cage notably tried to capture this element of the work in the commercial LP release of the music, asking listeners to adjust the volume and balance controls on their record players as

F6540.indb 108

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

109

the record played,12 thus simulating a subset of the aural effects of moving through space through direct control of the record’s playback. In the Cardiff and Cage examples, technology provided a means to create a multitude of sound sources in a physical space to be explored via the movement of listeners. Technology, of course, is not a prerequisite to creating such works. But if the spaces that listeners explore become augmented or replaced by virtual spaces, then technology can also play new roles. As Blesser and Salter note, “Initially, as an alternative embodiment of a physical entity, a virtual object shares the same properties as the concrete object that it replaces, but eventually, new freedoms allow a virtual object to acquire its own properties.”13 Moving through space no longer needs to be limited to an exploration of sound-source proximity or acoustics; movement can be mapped to the audio output in almost any conceivable way. New possibilities emerge for listeners to take on aspects of the roles of composers and performers as well, either by sharing a representation of their movement through space with others or by modifying the space and its musical contents. Mark Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit demonstrates the role of technology in bridging physical and virtual space and introducing interactivity and sharing to listening.14 As listeners walk through a physical space, they use a mobile device and headphones to listen to a virtual “sound garden”: a spatialized mix of recorded sounds tagged with locations proximate to their current position. This experience parallels those of the Cardiff and Cage works: as listeners move through space, their relationship to the disparate sound sources within it changes, modifying the mix that they hear. In this case, the sounds are virtual: they emanate from headphones, and the objects’ locations are simulated through spatial mixing. There are no speakers in the physical environment. By transplanting the sounds to a virtual overlay of physical space, Shepard is also able to introduce interactive elements into the sound gardens. As listeners explore the space, they may “plant” additional sounds by selecting a recording from a library and tagging it with their current location. They may also “prune” sounds planted by others by modifying their playback parameters, deleting them, and sending a text message to the original planter. In Shepard’s work, creating and modifying the sound sources in the space is a continuous process, intertwined with the experience of listening, as participants collectively create and enjoy a garden over a period of days, weeks, or months. Listening spaces may also completely depart the physical world, inhabiting a virtual space in which sound sources can behave differently than

F6540.indb 109

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

110

Jason Freeman

Figure 1. Listeners in Flou navigate a spaceship to collect loops and effects that orbit around the ship to create the music they hear.

their real-world counterparts. In 2007, the students in my Networked Music graduate course at Georgia Tech were attracted to this idea, and so over the course of a semester, we together developed an online environment, Flou. Like 3d music, Flou’s interface (Figure 1) resembles a 3D gaming environment, in this case a spaceship game. As listeners navigate their spaceship through 3D space, they encounter objects that represent looping audio clips or audio effects such as reverb or distortion. As listeners approach a sound object in space, they begin to hear it, just as they would in a physical environment. But if they fly through it, the object begins to orbit their spaceship and continues to sound as an ongoing, looping layer in the mix. (It eventually fades out and disappears to make way for new layers.) As listeners approach an effects object, that effect is applied to all the other sounds in the mix, and again, if they fly through it, the effect persists and orbits around the ship. By these methods, objects in Flou can behave as they do not in the physical world: they can persist in listeners’ ears even when they are far away, and they can radically transform

F6540.indb 110

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

111

other sounds in the environment irrespective of any acoustic relationship. These extended techniques expand the aural effects of moving through the space, and they magnify the impact of the decisions that listeners make, especially when they fly through objects. In this mode of engagement, Flou problematizes the traditional distinctions between composition, performance, and listening. In order to hear anything, listeners must move the spaceship, and in doing so, they must make creative decisions about the sound clips and audio effects they hear by determining which should persist and which should rapidly fade away. Listening is only possible through game play, and game play necessarily creates a unique arrangement and combination of the environment’s musical elements over time. In other words, listening requires remixing. Beyond this primary mode of interaction, our design of Flou encouraged further activities by listeners that conventionally fall within the realm of composers or performers. Like Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit, Flou integrates the ability to modify the objects within the environment. At any time, listeners can quickly shift to an editing mode in which objects can be added, moved, or removed from the space, and the changes can be saved and shared with other listeners. By deliberately changing the objects in the virtual environment, Flou listeners can influence their own listening experiences as well as those of others, since the musical possibilities of the environment are governed both by the actual objects present and by the proximities of those objects to each other. Because this editing mode can be accessed immediately during game play, within the environment, it also encourages listeners to approach environment exploration and environment editing as an integrated experience rather than as discrete activities. Users need not first create an environment before exploring it; they can rapidly shift back and forth as they iteratively make changes and immediately experience the musical ramifications of those changes. At the end of a session, they can then share the environment they created with others. At an extreme, these integrated activities of environment editing, environment exploration, and environment sharing can be conducted collaboratively, in real time, as a concert performance. My students and I presented live performances with Flou in which two performer/listeners navigated ships through the space as a third simultaneously modified the objects within it. We always conceived of these performances as an ancillary activity to the project; the core focus remained on the online environment and its individual use outside the context of live performance. But these live concerts do illustrate how our initial focus on bringing elements

F6540.indb 111

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

112

Jason Freeman

of composition and performance to listening through a game-like environment, taken to their logical conclusion, turned those listeners into concert performers themselves. As the spaces through which listeners move become increasingly virtual, they no longer need a basis in a physical space or even the physics of the world. In Flou, this virtualization enabled new modes of sonic interaction—the persistence of looping audio clips and the representation of sound objects as signal-processing unit generators—and it also facilitated the inclusion of compositional (environment editing) and collaborative (environment sharing) modes of interaction. As spaces become increasingly virtual, they also have the potential to become increasingly abstract. If we now consider a musical work itself as a space to be explored— either the actual musical score or some other abstract representation of its content or structure—then spaces can become places where composers, performers, and listeners meet to share their experiences.

Moving through the Structure of Music Music theorists from Hugo Riemann to Fred Lerdahl to Dmitri Tymoczko have long used spatial representations of musical structure—and paths through these spaces—to understand specific musical works and to illustrate broader theories of structure and cognition.15 Many composers have also relied on spaces as part of their compositional process, whether the tuning lattices of just-intonation composers or the timbral spaces in interactive systems.16 Some composers have used these compositional spaces not only as organizational constructs but also as the basis for the printed musical score. Unconventional notation techniques turn the page into a space to be explored by performers rather than a series of staves to be followed linearly from start to finish. Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI is a classic example: this short piano work consists of a set of small musical fragments, and the performer is to play them in whatever order his or her wandering eyes encounter them on the page.17 Stockhausen’s piece, in a sense, replicates the concept of approaching sound sources in physical or virtual space. But here, it is up to the performer to consider a symbolic representation of the music and to interpret it in the context of the current performance and path through the score, rendering it as sound in performance. In this way, the exploration is done by the performer rather than by listeners. Listeners may not even know it is happening.

F6540.indb 112

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

113

Earle Brown, another pioneering composer of the open-form score, made the idea of exploring space more explicit—and more physical—in his Calder Piece.18 The four percussionists who perform the work use the movements of Calder’s mobile (created specifically for the performance) to guide their playing, using the positions of elements within the mobile to determine the order in which musical sections on the printed page are played. They also at times play the mobile itself as a musical instrument.19 Here, the mobile serves as a structural mechanism through which composer and performers meet: its construction defines, in part, the musical space of the work, and its movements in performance guide the musicians in how to navigate that space. In Brown’s work, movement is not governed by the performers or the listeners but rather by natural forces such as wind that move the mobile. But like the Stockhausen example, listeners to Calder Piece are unlikely to understand the musical ramifications of the movement. To me, these open musical scores present a powerful opportunity to combine the process of listening with elements of composition and performance. When listening becomes intertwined with movement through such a score, it becomes a creative and potentially collaborative act. Harmonic Driving, an interactive element of Tod Machover’s Brain Opera, is just such an example.20 Like 3d music and Flou, the project presents listeners with a game-like navigation environment, but the format—a driving game—leads to a more structured movement through an algorithmically defined musical space. The authors describe: “Branches in the road—signaled by blue and orange barber poles— cause the music to become ‘cooler’ or ‘hotter,’ and the player’s micro-steering—whether rhythmic and precise or sinuous and meandering—makes the music become sharp-edged or atmospheric. Both path and music are updated on the fly as the player makes choices.”21 Here, the spatial representation of the music— or rather of algorithmic parameters generating the music—takes the form of a tree data structure. All listeners begin at a common root node and branch off to different child nodes as they make “cool” and “hot” decisions. With each new navigation decision, the possible versions of the music, and the corresponding different paths through the space, double. The listener’s steering style makes more subtle stylistic changes within the context of the particular structural path. Listening is still a process of exploring space, but here the exploration is carefully constrained by the musical structure of the work, limited to navigational decisions at predefined points in the space. And the space is always traversed in a single direction, beginning with the root node and ending with a child in the last generation.

F6540.indb 113

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

114

Jason Freeman

Figure 2. An excerpt of the score for Graph Theory.

Graph Theory, a recent work of mine for solo violin, uses an open-form score itself as a platform for online listening through exploration of the score’s space.22 By logging the decisions listeners make as they navigate the score, visualizing them to other listeners, and using them to create composite performance scores, it also makes listening part of a process of collective creativity and ultimately concert performance. The open-form score for Graph Theory (Figure 2) includes sixty-one short musical fragments for solo violin. On the score, each fragment is depicted as a node on a graph, and the nodes are connected by undirected edges to indicate possible paths of traversal. Any graph traversal constitutes a potential version of the piece; in any given version, each node may be visited multiple times or may not be visited at all. Unlike Harmonic Driv-

F6540.indb 114

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

115

ing, the data structure is neither hierarchical nor linear, and there are no defined root nodes or ending points. Broad, self-imposed constraints guided my composition of the pitch material and the ways in which fragments on the graph are connected. These constraints by extension influence the aural journeys of listeners through the graph. The open-form score for Graph Theory forms the basis of the web interface (Figure 3) for listening. When the site loads, an initial, randomly selected fragment begins playing continuously in a loop. Listeners are presented with three or four choices of which fragment to visit next, both as piano-roll-style visual representations of the fragments at the top of the screen and as colored nodes on the graph structure itself. (Colored borders around each fragment display the relative popularity of each choice with other listeners.) When the listener makes a choice by clicking on the piano-roll representation or the node on the graph, the music smoothly transitions to the newly chosen fragment, and it plays in a loop until the next choice is made. If listeners are unhappy with the choice, they can step backward in the traversal to undo the decision. The decisions listeners make as they explore the space of the score are shared. Each decision they make is logged to a server database. Each day, the server uses this data to regenerate a downloadable score file for use in future acoustic concert performances by a violinist. The score-generation algorithm creates a linear path through the composition, favoring traveling over graph edges that are most popular with listeners. It also indicates a suggested number of repetitions for each fragment on the basis of the averages across all listeners. In both of these computations, more recent listening activity is prioritized. The latest score, a collective composition representing a composite of listening activities, is made available as a downloadable file through the website. In each seven- to ten-minute concert performance, the violinist performs one of these generated scores, exercising interpretive freedom to modify dynamics, timbre, and tempo, to insert pauses, and to vary fragment repetitions, musically shaping groups of fragments into larger-scale musical phrases. The resulting performances sound markedly different than the web interface, in which audio recordings of each fragment are identical each time they are played. There is an important distinction in Graph Theory between the individual, private, and anonymous online listening experience and the col-

F6540.indb 115

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

116

Jason Freeman

Figure 3. The online interface through which listeners navigate the Graph Theory score.

lectively created live performance. Online, listeners appropriate elements of composition and performance in creating their own path to traverse the graph as they listen to the music; when they are finished, they may review their individual path by listening to it from start to finish. But while these listening activities do directly influence the composite score used in

F6540.indb 116

6/17/15 8:30:08 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

117

performance, the connection between the two lies at the boundary of consciousness (or beyond) for most listeners. As the algorithm considers the activities of many listeners in creating a single composite score, the decisions of each individual listener ultimately function as votes that influence the algorithm. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that a listener would be able to identify a particular passage in a performance as his or her own specific contribution. So while listeners possess a significant stake in their individual, anonymous listening experiences online, their only credit in the collective performance scores is through a note indicating the number of (anonymous) users influencing the score and the time period during which their participation took place. (In a related work of mine, Piano Etudes, listeners do share their own individual traversals, each of which is considered separately for concert performance, and through a Creative Commons share-alike license as well as score and audio-file metadata, ownership is shared equally between myself and the listener.) The paradigm offered by Graph Theory excites me for two reasons. First, it lets me challenge listeners to take ownership of their experience, making conscious, creative decisions that shape the music they hear. Through this process, I hope to move beyond the background listening experiences that dominate most of our lives, pushing listeners to focus all their attention on listening by requiring their active engagement for the music to continue. I build this experience around an open-form score to strike a careful balance between autonomy and consistency. I want to give listeners meaningful control but also retain the work’s identity; and I want to invite them to be creative but also want to incorporate that creativity within the natural flow of listening to the music. Equally important, with Graph Theory I am able to make listening a networked, collective process that does not end with each individual listener but rather feeds through him or her back into the composition and its performance. Each concert performance considers how the work has been listened to, challenges the live violinist to make musical sense of the composite listening path, and then invites the concert audience to begin the process anew by going back to the website and charting new listening directions.

Moving through the Music of the World The listening contexts I have discussed thus far—moving among sound sources or through abstract musical structures to explore and help cre-

F6540.indb 117

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

118

Jason Freeman

ate the music we hear—are mostly specialized experiences connected to specific artistic works. In our daily lives, however, we constantly shape our listening through our movements. Our everyday activities continuously change our relationship with the sounds around us. But we rarely notice this. Artistic and aesthetic practices have long drawn attention to our everyday aural environments, often using the idea of movement through the environment as an organizing principle. R. Murray Schafer coined the term “macrocosmic composition” as a key idea in his conception of acoustic ecology, and the practice of soundscape composition can be seen as an effort to draw attention to a particular subset of and context within that macrocosmic composition.23 In particular, movement through an environment is often used as an organizing principle in soundscape composition.24 Two components of the practice of soundscape composition use technology to shape listening. During field recording, the microphone not only captures sounds from the environment for later use in the soundscape composition; it is a powerful explorative process itself. Field recording, as practiced by the soundscape composer, changes the experience of listening.25 After field recording, soundscape composers use technology to organize the recorded sounds through editing, mixing, and (sometimes) signal processing. It is through these techniques that the composer turns the usually private experience of field recording into a public expression, and it is through them that the aural content and structure of the space mingles with the composer’s own aesthetics and musical ideas. Unlike many previous examples in this chapter, the composer’s work is rooted in the exploration of an existing space rather than focused on the creation of a new one. As an artist, I approach soundscape composition from the same perspective I approach open-form musical scores: with a desire to share the experience of exploring the space with listeners. It is not enough for me to merely share the results of field recording and soundscape composition with listeners; I want to share the process itself. I feel that engaging listeners directly in these experiences is the most promising way to push them to heighten their awareness of their everyday aural environments and of their power to control their perception of those environments through their movements. In collaboration with two faculty colleagues at Georgia Tech— Carl DiSalvo and Michael Nitsche—and numerous students, I have developed UrbanRemix, a platform for facilitating collaborative field recording, sound exploration, and soundscape creation.26 Participants use mobile-phone

F6540.indb 118

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

119

Figure 4. UrbanRemix’s iOS application invites listeners to record and upload the sounds around them.

software to record and share geotagged sounds and images captured from their environment. Web-based tools enable anyone to browse, remix, and share the sounds through an intuitive map-based interface. Musicians and DJs can also export audio content to other software environments to create electroacoustic compositions, live performances, and installations. UrbanRemix is organized around public events in specific urban neighborhoods. These events combine outreach workshops and open invitations for field recording with live performances by local musicians who remix the contributed sounds in the spaces in which they were captured. To date, we have produced UrbanRemix events in midtown Atlanta and along Atlanta’s Beltline, in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, in Times Square in New York, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and on the Georgia Tech campus, among other places. UrbanRemix’s free applications for Android and iOS mobile devices (Figure 4) make it simple for anyone to do field recording. Participants record short audio clips. Each is automatically tagged with the geolocation at which it was recorded, the time it was recorded, and the user who recorded it. Users may also add their own descriptive tags to files. The sounds and metadata are then uploaded to the project’s server. We hold outreach workshops to introduce community members to the project, to loan them mobile phones if needed, to have them record sounds in their neighborhood, and to reconvene to reflect on their experiences. We also invite anyone to record at their leisure by downloading the application to their own device. The UrbanRemix website enables users to browse and explore the content that has been uploaded from the mobile devices. Users can view and

F6540.indb 119

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

120

Jason Freeman

search audio content in list format or on a map. In the map view, individual sounds and images are displayed as geolocated markers; clicking on a marker displays (and plays) its content. Transplanting these sounds from the physical space and time in which they were recorded into this virtual space turns the personal experience of field recording into an expressive, collective activity. Recording is no longer only an intense, mediated act of listening to the environment. It is also a creative process of selecting the sounds of a space to share. The virtual map also makes aspects of the exploratory process accessible to those who are dislocated across geographic space and time; anyone can discover a selection of sounds from the particular location and time frame through the web. The UrbanRemix website’s map view (Figure 5) is not only an exploration mechanism; it is also an intuitive interface that enables anyone to cre-

Figure 5. The map view on the UrbanRemix website enables listeners to explore recorded sounds and create their own soundscapes by mixing them together.

F6540.indb 120

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

121

ate soundscapes by traversing virtual paths. On the map, paths become a means to mix audio content into spatialized soundscapes. Users can draw paths directly on the map or compute directions between two locations to generate a path. The path is then rendered as an audio soundscape, mixing together the sounds closest to the path and changing their amplitude, panning, and filtering over time to reflect movement along the virtual path. On the map, listening not only moves from physical to virtual space, but it also more explicitly adopts paradigms of composition. Drawing a path is a necessary prerequisite to listening but also a form of graphical notation. Listeners typically follow an iterative process as they interact with the map, following the approach of many algorithmic composers.27 They draw a path; listen to the resulting sound; modify the path, the search criteria (such as author or tag), and the algorithmic parameters (such as sound density); listen to the new result; and iterate until they are satisfied with the soundscape they have created. They then share that final version with others through our website or on social networks, a step akin to performing a final musical score or disseminating a recording of an electroacoustic composition. Our mobile-phone software offers a similar soundscape-creation tool, generating material based on the listener’s real location and movement through the physical world. Using the listener’s current location and chosen configuration parameters, the software generates a continuously evolving mix of sounds near that location. Besides bringing interaction back to the physical world, this interface also aligns more closely with previous work such as Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit. But the compositional elements remain a strong part of listening. Listeners continue to iteratively modify the soundscape they hear by changing their physical location, search criteria, and algorithmic parameters. When they are satisfied, they share an excerpt of the continuous mix in a manner appropriate for the mobile-phone context: as a new ringtone for their phone. Ultimately, one of our goals with UrbanRemix was to provide a multiplicity of ways in which to engage with the sounds of an urban space: field recording, exploration, and soundscape creation in both physical and virtual spaces, at both novice and professional levels, and at all points between. But with each of these modes of interaction, the goals remain the same: to heighten awareness of environmental sounds and of our role in shaping our aural experience of space as we move through it; and to instill these acts of listening with elements of creativity, composition, and collaboration.

F6540.indb 121

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

122

Jason Freeman

Final Thoughts In this chapter, I have focused on artistic works that invite or sometimes even require listeners to explore a space as they listen and that push listening toward a creative and potentially public and collaborative activity through their use of space. As a result, the act of listening may incorporate aspects of composition and performance. Technology, in turn, enables the creation of augmented physical spaces and completely virtual ones with unique opportunities for listener interaction not readily possible otherwise. It is important to note, however, that a composer’s or artist’s design of a listening space is not necessarily a prerequisite for a particular approach to listening. Specific works may push listeners toward a particular approach, but listeners may also adopt similar strategies on their own. Listeners do not need John Cage’s instructions for HPSCHD to manipulate the balance and volume controls of their record players; they can do so with any record they choose. They do not need UrbanRemix’s mobile-phone software to record the sounds around them and share them online; they can use any mobile recorder and post the results to their own website or blog. And listeners do not need Graph Theory’s web interface to chart their own path through a series of musical fragments; they can use standard musicsoftware tools to cut up any music into fragments and rearrange them. What these and the other works in this chapter offer, then, is twofold. First, by integrating these unique approaches to listening into the conception and design of the works themselves, they make such exploratory listening more accessible and more casual. Listeners to Graph Theory, for example, need only know how to launch a website and use a mouse; they do not need specialized technical knowledge to cut up and rearrange audio files or specialized musical knowledge to decide which cuts and connections might be musically coherent and compelling. Even if they do possess such knowledge, Graph Theory integrates the work and listening experience together in a manner that keeps listening as the core activity. It seeks to make exploratory listening as seamless as attending a concert or listening to a recording. Second, these works serve as catalysts that introduce interesting and exciting modes of listening to audiences. Without these novel listening interfaces, most people would never try these listening techniques at all, but after doing so, they may be encouraged to bring them into other musical contexts. After using UrbanRemix, for example, project participants have

F6540.indb 122

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

The Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

123

told us that they pay closer attention to their everyday aural environment even when they are not actively field recording or remixing. By focusing on exploratory listening in these ways, these works necessarily problematize many of the conventional roles we define in the creation and consumption of music. Listeners make creative decisions normally left to composers or performers. The musical products that arise from these experiences often lack clear authorship, and some of the creative contributors may remain, either by choice or by design, anonymous. (In some cases, they may not even be aware they are contributing to a collective product.) My own designation as a composer seems increasingly problematic, as it implies my sole, or at least primary, role in certain creative processes when that may not be the case. And the multiplicity of modes through which these works are created, reimagined, performed, and experienced places them at the uncomfortable intersections of compositions and improvisations, of live concerts and recordings, of open-ended artistic tools and structured works. Even as I grapple with problematic nomenclature and anachronistic classifications, and the ramifications of blurring such distinctions, I derive tremendous creative energy and satisfaction from the ability to do so. My artistic practice has come to focus on designing musical experiences at this abstract level: the constituents, the connections among them, and the musical and technological structures to enable those connections. This excites me not only because it enables me to reflect on and effect change in the ways we engage with music in our lives but also because it can lead to music that inspires and moves me in ways I could not have imagined otherwise. As a musician, I bring two primary goals to all my work. I want to make active, exploratory modes of listening accessible to my audiences, giving them unique ways in which to experience, influence, and share the musical works and frameworks I create. I also want these experiences to act as springboards, spurring reflection and experimentation that spreads beyond the confines of these works. I want to encourage listeners to do more than just listen; I want them to move through all the musical spaces of their lives with a spirit of creativity and discovery, of joy and wonder.

Acknowledgments Flou (http://turbulence.org/ Works/flou /) is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established

F6540.indb 123

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

124

Jason Freeman

by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. I created Flou with my students Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan. Graph Theory (http://turbulence.org/ Works/graphtheory) is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Greenwall Foundation. Patricia Reed did the graphic design for the website, and Maja Cerar recorded the violin clips. UrbanRemix (http://urbanremix.gatech.edu) is supported by a Google Research Award, Turner Broadcasting, the Intel Foundation, the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and the Georgia Tech Foundation. Besides myself, Carl DiSalvo, and Michael Nitsche, additional project contributors are Meghashyam Adoni, Aaron Albin, Thomas Barnwell, Andrew Beck, Andrew Colella, Samuel Defilipp, Stephen Garrett, Gilberto Gaxiola, Matt Gilbert, Oliver Jan, David Jimison, Trishul Mallikarjuna, Vamsi Mynampati, Harikrishna Narayanan, Ryan Nikolaidis, Andrew Roberts, Avinash Sastry, Sertan Senturk, Jenifer Vandagriff, Akito Van Troyer, Anirudh Venkataramanan, Andrew Willingham, and Stephanie Yang.

F6540.indb 124

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

chapter 7

The Biopolitics of Noise Kafka’s “Der Bau” Anthony Curtis Adler

Besides this, a certain lack of urbanity (Urbanität) is associated with music, since, above all through the composition of its instruments, it spreads its influence further than one requires of it (to the neighborhood), and thus imposes itself, and hence infringes upon the freedom of others outside of the musical society.1

This well-known remark from the fifty-fourth section of the Critique of Judgment seems to say only what is obvious to anyone who has lived by others: music becomes, for those dwelling nearby—and precisely because of a forceful, imposing quality intimately bound up with its pleasures—a nuisance, noxious and obnoxious, noise. It is not just a matter of personal irritation, though. Music lacks and, through this lack, seems to threaten urbanity: a certain way of being with others; a basic form of political existence.2 Moreover, the sense in which music disturbs this way of being with others is political through and through. For Kant seems to suggest that music, often regarded as giving expression to our inner life, becomes noise when it crosses a threshold: the walls that seal off interior from exterior, giving structure to urban life by creating an artificial world of silence. 125

F6540.indb 125

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

126

Anthony Curtis Adler

Noise thus involves the violation of the barriers that constitute the relation between public and private—barriers that were themselves erected in an anticipatory defense against the threat of a noise that itself comes into existence through their violation. In this way, the problem of music and noise is, for Kant, intimately bound up with an urban rather than a rural form of existence. A question thus becomes audible that, from the nineteenth century up to our own (with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Hitler’s radio addresses, Muzak, rock ‘n’ roll, personal music players), has become ever more unnerving: what is the political sense of noise, the sense of noise for politics? Does the sense of and for noise give us a sense for another kind of politics, a different sense in which the political might be understood? The aim of this essay, more modest than this immodest question would suggest, is only to open up this question, to give it sense—and perhaps only a first sense. To this end, I engage in a reading of Kafka’s unfinished story “The Burrow” (Der Bau), a text in which the political sense of noise presents itself in a particularly striking aspect: as interruption and, indeed, as an interruption of a “classical” political discourse based on the spatial, architectural management of the antagonistic interplay between two fluidly constituted forms of sonic community: the community of those who constitute themselves through shared sounds, and the community of those who seek to exclude noise (including the community of solitude: a communing with one’s one thoughts, feelings, inner life). The groundlessness of this “classical” discourse is exposed through the Wühlarbeit (mining, undermining, and hence subversive activity) of the text even before noise presents itself as the decisive problem. The main body of this essay, like the text that it addresses, falls into two parts: the first relatively silent, the second noisy, with a middle section marking the transition from silence to noise. My method belongs at the intersection of a phenomenological approach (such as that taken by Don Ihde) and the political question, addressed with extraordinary breadth and insight by Jacques Attali, of how noise becomes organized through political power and thus presents itself as the ground of power.3 The phenomenology of noise, the exposition of the essential structure of the sense of and for noise, as a particular liminal modality of listening and acoustic experience, can be best approached through the question of politics. And conversely, the political dimension of noise must be more explicitly understood in terms of the historicity of the political—its historically changing constitutive (a priori, transcendental) structures— developed in the thought of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt,

F6540.indb 126

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

127

The Biopolitics of Noise

Leo Strauss, Michel Foucault, and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. The “metahistorical” thematic of biopolitics—by calling attention to the decisive significance of the relation of the political to a mere or bare life shared between human beings and other living creatures and characterized above all by the biological, life sustaining and reproducing, functions of the body—suggests a way of developing the implications of, and perhaps complicating, Attali’s invocation of a “political economy” of noise. The guiding insight of this essay is that the sense of and for noise discloses a sense of space that is constitutive for a political existence and that, moreover, at issue in the structure of this space (its particular mode of spatiality) is the relation to this biological strata of mere life. Hence, the politics of noise is always already the biopolitics of noise.

Entrances “The Burrow” stands out even among the writings of an author whose every work opened up a literary terra incognita. Written as a first-person narrative, and indeed a monologue, the putative objectivity of third-person narration has been abandoned, together with the rhetorical conceit of the scientific report used in Kafka’s other Bauwerk, “At the Building of the Great Wall of China.” Yet it is also not exactly a stream of consciousness: there are no “broken off phrases, unfinished sentences, incoherent terms, and helter-skelter associations,” nor is there a single “sentence that fails to reach its grammatical aim.”4 The first person, moreover, is not really a person at all but an unnamed, unidentified, mole-like creature, combining animal and human traits. This creature speaks, seemingly only to himself, of his lifework, the Bau (“burrow,” “construction”) that he has just finished and that seems to have turned out well, and of the anxieties attending to its construction and his life within. These anxieties are poignantly quotidian: they concern the defense of his life and his possessions. In one long passage, the creature wonders whether, rather than having a single central “castle keep” (Burgplatz) where all his food is stored, he should have organized the burrow around several different castle keeps, so that his food would not be exposed to a single attack.5 And in another passage, following an expedition into open air, he struggles to think of a safe way of returning back into his burrow: there is no way to avoid a certain risk of exposure during the moment of reentry, and yet to remain outside also involves risks.6 In these deliberations, the creature confronts the impossibility of achieving a perfect technical solution to the danger of life. The source of this impossibility is not the limits of his technical skills but the nature of

F6540.indb 127

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

128

Anthony Curtis Adler

the technical problem itself: the problem of defense. The perfect defense of life is impossible since life involves a necessary relation to the “outside” environment and to a perishable, unpredictable material reality. Life is always exposed in living. For Heidegger, the creature’s anxiety would lack relation to “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit). It is irretrievably distracted by the things of the world.7 Yet perhaps, precisely by refusing to allow anxiety to rescue itself from this distraction, Kafka calls attention to a political aspect of anxiety that Heidegger, despite his understanding of Dasein as being with others in a world, obscures.8 It is a commonplace, indeed, that the privileged subject of the modern (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century) novel is the newly emerged middle class. “The Burrow,” like most of Kafka’s writings, can also be situated within this tradition, yet it treats the middle-class subject with striking philosophical radicalness. Kafka’s creature is neither the bourgeois of the popular imagination nor a sociological construct, characterized by a combination of inherited class values and individual personality traits. Nor is it an exemplification of a Marxist “scientific” concept of the bourgeois, defined principally by a certain relation to the means of production. Recalling the analyses of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Kafka presents the basic mode of existence of the bourgeois, who, living in a constant fear of violent death, responds to this fear by accumulating property through various species of labor—building, accumulating, and maintaining.9 This is not to deny that the creature of “The Burrow” is also just an animal. The activities that I have identified as bourgeois are indeed common to many animals, and, moreover, this animal’s specific form of life closely resembles that of the European mole. Indeed, it is as just an animal that Kafka’s creature represents the bourgeois: whereas Aristotle would insist that man is political through the possession of language and reason—that which distinguishes him from other animals—the privileged subject of modern political thought is political in and through its animality: specifically political relations emerge from out of mere, animal life. The striking role of solitude in “The Burrow” suggests the power of this analysis. The creature has no family, friends, lovers, or known neighbors. He has no one to talk to but himself. The Other appears in the text only as nameless and faceless enemies and prey: the Kleinzeug (small fry) that he himself must consume to live; the larger enemies that might devour him or seize his stocks of food; or a similar burrowing creature that would wish to claim his burrow for its own. Solitude is perhaps not quite the right word for the creature’s condition: true solitude presupposes a relation to the possibility of friends, lovers, family, and neighbors. Only thus can their lack

F6540.indb 128

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

The Biopolitics of Noise

129

be felt and even embraced. Yet while the creature is surrounded, and even threatened from within, by others, these are present to him only in the horizon of the struggle to survive in a world of limited resources. He lacks the very conception of an Other whose relation to him would be mediated through values and purposes (such as those of politics, religion, or erotic love) that somehow transcend, or even merely interrupt, the fear of death. The impossibility of friendship in the world of “The Burrow” appears with particular clarity when the creature tries to think of how he might safely descend into his burrow. “If only,” he thinks, “I had someone whom I could trust, whom I could place on my observation post, then I could indeed be consoled as I descend.” He continues: I would come to the agreement with him, whom I trust, that he precisely observes the situation while I descend and for a long time afterwards, and, in the case of dangerous signs, knocks on the moss cover. . . . That way, all the loose ends above me would be tied up, no remnant would remain, at most my confidant [Vertrauungsmann].

Yet his confidence in his imagined confidant quickly dissolves. The confidant will, after all, demand some sort of reciprocation. He will want to see the burrow, at the very least. Yet to allow someone into the burrow would be extremely embarrassing; it was built only for himself, not for visitors. And so the creature concludes, “I believe I will not let him in; even if it makes it possible for me to enter into the burrow, I would not let him in.”10 Friendship, in this most minimal form, promises a way out of the creature’s impossible situation. But even this minimal friendship is impossible. This impossibility challenges every attempt, starting from Hobbes, to conceive of the political union in terms of a contract or covenant through which the contracting parties can depart from the state of nature. Lacking is the minimal condition of entering into a contract: the ability to conceive of a reciprocal exchange. This is because his burrow can only exist for him as something radically private—as private as the innermost reaches of the body. No gaze could penetrate his burrow without compromising it essentially: every envisioning of the burrow is an invasion.11 Moreover, exchange itself requires the expropriation of one’s property. But the creature’s property is such that this expropriation is impossible: it can only be horded and perhaps enjoyed. All this suggests a subtle, if implicit rather than explicit, engagement with the history of Western political thought. The transition from classical political thought to the postclassical tradition initiated by Hobbes

F6540.indb 129

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

130

Anthony Curtis Adler

involves a basic shift in the understanding of the kind of friendship constitutive of political relations. Within the classical tradition, political friendship involves the common commitment to values that transcend mere living (zoe¯). It does not involve the pursuit of mere pleasure or utility but of the “good”—something that is accessible only to human beings as rational animals, as animals having language.12 The postclassical tradition starts out from the realization of the political frailty of such friendships. Such friendships are certainly possible, and yet, as becomes evident in times of sectarian strife, they cannot possibly provide even the minimal basis for a flourishing political life. Postclassical political thought replaces a rich, value-driven friendship with a minimal friendship motivated only by the fear of death. This minimal friendship is, as it were, an unnatural alliance grounded in our strictly natural condition. “The Burrow,” however, suggests that even this minimal form of friendship is impossible. The privacy of property is such as to allow no friendship whatsoever— or at least no friendship with others. Property, of course, represents one of the most foundational concepts for all political life. Regardless of the specific form that it assumes, property can be understood as the most basic structure mediating between the members of a group and the group as a whole. We might think of this mediation in terms of a correlation between the nature of property and the topology of the political: the shape of space structuring political theory and practice. The continuous, divisible space of classical political thought—I use this term to designate the Greek tradition of political philosophy consolidated in the writings of Plato and Aristotle—is a space that can be divided up, parceled out, and separated off into separate regions, each of which can become the property of an individual or group. Not all property takes the form of land, of course; and yet land, in its divisibility, provides an operative metaphor for all property within the classical tradition. All properties are things that can be divided up, distributed. Those things that do not allow division and distribution—that cannot be coherently “projected” into this continuous, divisible space—stand at the limit of the sphere of the political, and hence the political itself comes to be determined through the limit that defines what is proper to it. It might seem to contradict this claim that Plato’s Republic, the preeminent work of classical political philosophy, conceives of the idea of the Good as something that, like the sun, all can participate in without it becoming divided into pieces. I propose, however, that classical property needs precisely such a superproperty, itself situated beyond the sphere of the political in the strict sense, to supplement and ground the system of fi-

F6540.indb 130

6/17/15 8:30:09 AM

The Biopolitics of Noise

131

nite property. The transcendent principle of the Good supports the particular system of divisions, such that, in the end, while each of us has our own property, our own piece of the whole, we also all share in the justice that joins all together into a unity through the distribution of goods. Classical property and classical space, moreover, are opposed not only to a superproperty—that which is absolutely itself and never otherwise than itself (the idea of the Good that grounds all finite goods) but also to a subproperty.13 This subproperty involves the biological and natural life on which property depends: the unappropriatable, and hence always “improper,” basis of property. Refusing boundaries, limits, determinations, it is in constant flux and cannot become property. The postclassical tradition of political thought consists in the attempt not only, as noted, to base politics in a minimal friendship but also to hold on to classical space and the classical sense of property, despite the fact that, so long as rich, value-directed forms of friendship—friendships involving shared virtue and the pursuit of the Good—are excluded from the realm of politics, the classical space has lost its anchor in the transcendent principle (the superproperty that all can partake in without division) around which the community of friends is assembled and which indeed only becomes an efficacious reality through this community of friends.14 Politics is thus conceived of as something artificial—man is no longer a political animal by nature: the artificial construction of a classical political space. And hence human reason assumes a new and decisive function: it is the very capacity of constituting classical space ab nihilo. It is not surprising that Kant, trying to make sense of the British empiricism descended from Hobbes, would realize that the intuition of a continuous spatial manifold belonged a priori to specifically finite (we could say political), and hence human, reason. Kafka’s “Burrow” should be conceived, first of all, in its relation to the classical theory of space and property and the concepts, such as labor, involved in it. The labor of the burrowing creature is the labor of making originary property: of turning a space that belongs to all and none into his own space. This labor must be understood in terms of the two spaces that it brings into relation: the chthonic space below the surface and the space of the surface. The space of the surface is principally nomadic—it is a space that one can move across and only move across. It is a space that has not yet become settled, that does not yet allow demarcations of property. The space below the surface, in contrast, can be claimed as property by burrowing into it. Whereas the former is undetermined and indeed indeterminable as property, the latter is overdetermined. The burrowing

F6540.indb 131

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

132

Anthony Curtis Adler

creature occupies a space within this space and implicitly lays claim to a region of space surrounding him. But the different spaces to which different creatures lay claim overlap and intersect. They cannot be organized into a coherent system of space, in which each creature could claim its space and recognize the space claimed by other creatures. There are boundaries, but these constitute the singular space of a single creature. They do not function as borders in the classical sense, dividing up a single space into discrete parts, private property. The act of burrowing itself consists in the labor of mediating between nomadic and chthonic space. The burrow that the burrowing creature constructs as his lifework is a system of extensive space, the possibility of a certain degree of free movement, within chthonic space. Burrowing itself, the creature reminds us again and again, involves long, hard labor, but the result of this labor is not only to constitute the property of the burrow but to free up the space within which a carefree, joyous movement might become possible. This construction of property, nevertheless, is rather different from the property of, and in, classical space. Classical property is defined at the surface between the chthonic and the air: this surface is divided up—hence geometry, the measurement of the earth—and distributed. Classical property and classical politics only become possible when, as in Plato’s Republic, we leave our chthonic dwelling and emerge into the open land illuminated by the sun. The protomathematical concept of extension allows for a stable, lasting order of divisions. “The Burrow” takes its departure from the impossibility of such classical property.15 Property is no longer created through geometric divisions, through circles drawn in the dust with a minimal inscription into the depths, but through rhizomatic structures that fold space around one’s life and labor.16 Nor can it ever achieve the closure that would first allow for a stable, enduring order of property to arise. The burrowing creature lives in the anxious apprehension of the impossibility that labor could ever produce a property that was absolutely secure and truly his own: And it is not only the external enemies that threaten me. There are also such enemies in the interior of the earth. I have not yet seen them, yet the Legends tell of them and I believe firmly in them. They are beings of the inner earth; not even Legend can describe them. Even the one who has become their victim has hardly seen them; they come, one hears the scratching of their claws just below oneself in the earth, which is their element, and one is already lost. Here it is no longer the case that one is in one’s own house. Rather, one is in their house.17

F6540.indb 132

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

133

The Biopolitics of Noise

The space that the burrowing creature burrows into, and that Kafka’s story claims for its own, is a biological space, a nonclassical space of subproperty, in which geometric property divisions lose all sense. The habitat of one animal does not exclude, but rather includes, other animals and other habitats and indeed only exists through this inclusion. One cannot speak anymore of a single space but only of different interwoven and mutually implicating spatialities.18 What is my house to me is the house of another to another. The parasite presents an extreme example of this phenomenon, and, at the same time, evolutionary biology and ecology suggest that the essential structure of life is parasitic, that all life is nothing else than the living off other life.19

Sound (and Vision) If classical property is property that can be surveyed, taken in with the eyes either directly or through representations such as maps and globes, this other property never consolidates into a stable form that could be mapped out. Without clear limits, it offers nothing that could be— clearly or obscurely—seen. The experience of property is no longer visual and positive. It no longer involves the synoptic presentation of what one owns, with this appearing before us, as our property, in a single comprehensive vision. Rather, it is acoustic and negative. Whereas the boundaries of classical property become obscure in the nighttime, silence is the basis of the biopolitical experience of property. When property is fundamentally overdetermined and folded into itself, silence (which is always a relative silence, since the ear tunes out accustomed sounds and noises) affirms an absence of intruders and disturbances, of external and internal enemies. It does not present a specific, limited region that is exclusively ours, but it gives us to feel that our space, though it may be traversed by the spaces of many others, is at least for the time being more or less in our control, more or less our own. The creature explains, The most beautiful thing about my burrow is its stillness [Stille]. Granted, this is deceptive. Suddenly it can be interrupted and all will be over. Yet, for the time being, it still exists. For hours I can crawl through my passages and hear nothing but the occasional rustling of some small animal, which I then immediately bring to rest between my teeth, or the trickling of the earth, indicating the necessity of some sort of improvement; otherwise it is still.20

F6540.indb 133

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

134

Anthony Curtis Adler

Here we find, in nuce, an analysis of silence as a way that property happens.21 Starting with Plato, beauty has involved a limit experience of classical property space. Beauty allows what is wholly beyond the senses— goodness and wisdom —to appear to the senses and, principally, the sense of vision.22 Beauty presents as classical property (in finite form) the absolute superproperty on which all other properties, and all other property, depend. The passage just quoted turns Platonic beauty on its head: most beautiful is no longer the excess of light but the absence of noise. Silence thus takes over as the guarantor of property. Yet it no longer operates through transcendence. The beauty of vision and light (as in Plato’s Phaedrus) comes from beyond this world: the beauty of silence, in contrast, comes from within, since it is nothing more than the absence of the sounds emanating from the depths of the earth. And whereas the beauty of vision indicates something secure and permanent, the beauty of silence is always deceptive. It can always, at any moment, be interrupted “suddenly.” The temporality of silence involves only the present, yet a present never really present to itself, never fully and adequately given in self-presence—a present pierced through with the threat of sudden interruption, always already interrupted by its own anxiety about being interrupted.23 While the burrowing creature seems from the beginning to desire silence above all else, he remains beholden to the desire for a synoptic vision of all that is his own: “it is stupid but true that self-consciousness suffers when one does not see all one’s stock gathered together and thus, with one single glance, knows what one possesses.”24 Kant’s critical philosophy, I suggested earlier, attempts to ground the classical political space, which the postclassical tradition had tried to preserve at all cost, in the active, constitutive powers of human reason. The homogeneous, divisible space of classical property becomes a priori intuition. Yet for the experience of things in space and time to be possible, what is experienced must be held together in the unity of consciousness, and thus, ultimately, this unity of consciousness must itself be present to itself. The ultimate foundation of property thus becomes, in the postclassical tradition, self-consciousness.25 Yet the passage quoted earlier, read in the context of what follows, suggests that just this self-consciousness, the “stupid” ground of “truth,” might be impossible, threatening with incoherence the postclassical reconstruction of a classical political space. The burrowing creature leaves his burrow in the hope, above all, of achieving this self-consciousness. Yet he comes to realize the futility of this endeavor:

F6540.indb 134

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

The Biopolitics of Noise

135

What sort of protection [Sicherung] is it that I observe here? Is it then at all possible to judge the danger in which I am in inside the burrow according to the experiences that I have here on the outside? Do my enemies even pick up my scent correctly when I am not in the burrow? They certainly pick up something of my scent, but not my full scent. For is it not often the case that the existence of the full scent is the presupposition of the normal danger? The experiments that I employ here go only a quarter or a tenth of the way: they are suited to reassure me and put me in the greatest danger through false reassurances.26

While it might be possible to observe the burrow from the outside—from the perspective of a space in which things could be surveyed and taken in at one glance—the sense of security that such observations yield is utterly deceptive. The dangers of the burrow are such that they can only be grasped from within, only when, through the scent that one gives off, one is exposed to these dangers. Yet the moment one is within the burrow, exposed to real dangers, one is no longer able to observe the dangers to which one is exposed. We can never take in what we are synoptically, through apperception, since what we are is a scent and the sensing of this scent. Both the scent and its sensing belong to a realm of materiality that escapes visual order. This futility has another aspect: one can never observe oneself sleeping. The creature continues: “No, I do not observe, as I believed I did, my sleep. Rather, I am the one who sleeps while the destroyer [Verderber] stays awake and keeps watch.”27 If it is in stillness and quiet that we appropriate our life— our merely biological existence—then deep sleep, rather than the fullest wakefulness in the light of the truth, would be the experience on which all property rests. If the burrowing creature leaves his burrow, the cave of an inverted Platonism, to venture into the light, it is in search of a supplement to the logic of quiet and the new kind of property space that it implies. The observation of sleeping is the promise of a metaphysical supplement to silence. Silence can never hear itself—all we can hear is a minimum of noise, and perhaps, as Jean-Luc Nancy would argue, silence must be understood not as privation but as an “arrangement of resonance” such as of the resonating sounds of the body.28 But perhaps it can see itself. Precisely this hope proves illusory. And so the burrowing creature descends. With his descent, he leaves metaphysical dreams, and the remnant of the classical metaphysical political space and the classical concept of property, behind him. He enters, fully, into the realm of silence.

F6540.indb 135

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

136

Anthony Curtis Adler

In words that resonate uncannily with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the creature greets his burrow again in its Stummheit and Leere, its dumb, unspeaking emptiness: For your sake, you passages and spaces [Plätze], and you above all castle keep [Burgplatz], I have come, holding my life for naught, after having long been so stupid as to tremble for its sake and postpone the return to you. What do I care about danger now that I am with you. You belong to me, I to you, we are bound together. What can happen to us? Even if the people [Volk] above throng to get in, and the snout is ready that will break through the moss. And with its unspeaking silence [Stummheit] and emptiness, the burrow now also welcomes me, and confirms what I say.29

The biopolitical space announcing itself in “The Burrow” does not simply overturn the classical property space that the postclassical tradition seeks to recover through a detour through subjectivity. Rather, biopolitical space necessarily contains classical space, which maintains its structural coherence and yet is also folded into this other space, becoming dependent on, and even compromised through, it. Silence indeed first allows the disclosure and constitution of a classical space by suppressing the sensory noise of a purely biological existence: the noises produced from within our bodies and from the life surrounding us. Classical political space, the space of meaningful, purposeful activity and value-laden properties, is above all else the space in which signals can appear above the noise. Burrowing, I suggested earlier, constructs a mediating space between chthonic and nomadic space. What this means should now be clearer: the burrow, in its silence, is a sort of limit space between the nonclassical space of the earth and the nomadic open space above. And thus constructing the burrow resembles the hidden labors of the body— of making our bodies and living in our bodies.30 Silence first exposes us to noise, but it is noise that reveals the sense of silence, which is nothing else than the opening up of space. The creature’s return to the burrow, we saw earlier, is a rejection of security as the highest value. He returns to danger. To live in the element of life, rather than seeking to transcend life, is to live dangerously, to live in danger. This danger, I propose, is the danger that comes with being exposed to sense. This, above all, indicates the fundamental shift in the sense of property entailed in the rejection of classical politics. The sense of property is no longer its permanence, security, and absolute self-presence but the risk of danger. The moment that the creature embraces danger, he can also say,

F6540.indb 136

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

137

The Biopolitics of Noise

“You belong [gehört] to me, I to you, we are bound together, what can happen to us.” Property now becomes a question of gehören.31 To have property is not to see and understand that something is mine by taking in its limits and the marks that make it unique, distinguishing it from other things in the world, and hence uniquely my own. It is, rather, to dwell in the silence that involves, above all, the always preliminary, never final accomplishment of a sphere of regularity and order, in which unusual events, disturbances, and disruptions of the normal order are kept to a minimum. Property, so understood, is not what grants legal recognition, backed up by the force of the law, to what we would otherwise possess in a merely transient way but is the exposure to the risk of first having something to lose. In this way, moreover, the concept of property also involves a self-referential, medial structure. What is our property not only belongs to us; we belong to it.

Noise The creature’s return into the burrow marks the midpoint in the text. With his descent, he abandons the metaphysical dream of observing his burrow from the outside—the hope that the biopolitical space and property of the burrow could be incorporated within, and secured through, the classical, primarily visual space of extension. As long as the visual maintains its privilege as the “organizing sense”— the sense through which all senses are organized into a single sensorium — noise is not able to threaten us completely. Visual boundaries do not eliminate noise, but they neutralize the danger it conveys by reassuring us that we belong to a different space, that the noise is outside and we are inside, and that, while the noise may annoy, it cannot threaten. Even as sound becomes noise when it crosses the boundary from outside to inside, our visual sense suppresses its danger by reassuring us that, while inside, we remain safe from the source of the noise. Indeed, the very localizability of noise—which alone allows a distinction between noise (as mere sign) and the source of noise—is the accomplishment of a visual-spatial sense. As soon as the creature abandons the world outside and the dream of living in the outside of his inside—as soon as he abandons the distinction between inside and outside—then, in his newfound silence, he becomes exposed without reserve to noise in all its danger. Having just found his way back into his burrow, the burrowing creature falls into a deep, long sleep, and yet he is then awakened from the last, shallow remnant of his sleep by a hardly audible hissing (Zischen).32 The rest of the story is devoted to his futile, increasingly desperate, attempts to cope.

F6540.indb 137

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

138

Anthony Curtis Adler

His first response to the noise is to think he understands it. The small fry, which he supervised (beaufsichtigt) far too little and treated far too gently, have, in his absence, bored another path somewhere. This new path collided with the old, and the air, caught in the intersection, is responsible for the hissing noise. Still thinking in terms of a visual, classical space, he insists on locating the noise in a “somewhere”—a not yet determinate yet determinable space—and thus sets out to localize the noise and remove it.33 Like a scientist or engineer, he starts out from a hypothesis based on preliminary observations and then proceeds to test this observation through experimentation and further observations. While also driven by the need for silence (“es soll still sein in meinen Gängen”), it is first of all the “technical problem” that preoccupies him.34 This first investigation leads nowhere. He makes some observations: the noise is not constant but intermittent and wavers between a hissing and a more musical, song-like squeaking.35 Not only is he unable to locate the source, but he finds, contradicting his first hypothesis, that it remains everywhere the same.36 Still refusing to abandon the assumption that the noise can be localized in a classical space, he supposes that the noise emanates from two centers: approaching one center, he moves away from the other, and the noise’s total intensity remains the same. In confirmation of this hypothesis, he almost seems able to detect small differences in the noise as he moves about. Yet he is also aware that such observations are unreliable. Because listening is at once passive and active (hören and horchen), involving both practice and mental attention, the boundary between the subjective and objective, inner and outer, becomes hopelessly blurred. Moreover, noise confuses the understanding and hence the very ability to listen attentively.37 The scientific method already begins to seem more questionable. Proceeding with his investigations, he discovers, to his distress, that the noise has even penetrated into the “castle keep.”38 He now regrets that he was never able to carry out a plan dreamt up in his youth, separating the “castle keep” off from the surrounding earth with a thick empty space. This empty space, “the most beautiful place to stay,” would have allowed him not only to frolic about—hanging from above, pulling himself up, sliding down, flipping himself around, and coming to rest again with the ground beneath his feet—“on the body of the castle keep, but not in its actual space,” but to watch over the castle keep while enjoying a state of complete silence.39 This dream of his youth, one could say, represents the failed attempt at a synthesis of classical and biopolitical space. In a silence undistracted by noise, it would be possible not only to listen to but literally

F6540.indb 138

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

The Biopolitics of Noise

139

to envision silence. Empty space, indeed, would become a vision of silence, allowing the enjoyment of silence, in the space opened up, through exuberant gymnastic movements no longer pursuing any worldly purpose. Forced again to abandon his hypothesis, the creature makes, and rejects, new conjectures. Could it be the sound of small fry at work? No: the essence of the small fry is never to be heard at work. He would otherwise have never tolerated them but would have exterminated them, even if it meant starving to death.40 An animal he does not yet know? A large herd of nomadic animals slightly larger than the small fry? Innumerable tiny little animals?41 Brought to despair by these speculations, he strikes on a new strategy. He will build a single, straight tunnel, burrowing until “independent from all theories,” he “finds the real cause of the noise.”42 He will remove the disturbance if it lies in his power to do so, and, if not, at least he will have certainty. All that he did before now seems overhasty, absurd. His mind still too clouded by the cares of the world above, he wished not so much to actually find something as to do something corresponding to his inner unrest. And thus he almost became like the small fry: laboring completely without purpose.43 Yet if the new strategy is motivated by the need to insist on purposeful, rational action, it ultimately exposes the irrationality that underlies scientific rationality: certainty of knowledge emerges as an end in itself, eclipsing all pragmatic considerations. Sensing this, he admits he has no confidence in his new plan, postponing its implementation and setting about first to repair the damages caused by his Wühlarbeit: the labor of digging that is, at the same time, a “subversive activity”—at once a construction and an undermining.44 Yet he is too distracted even for this work.45 It is at this point that the creature comes to the critical realization that his entire strategy of construction, up to this point, has been misguided. One leaps back from the wall, one seeks with one glance to take into view [übersehen] all the possibilities that this discovery will have as a consequence. One feels as if one had never actually organized the burrow for defense against an attack. One had the intention, but, contrary to all life experience, the danger of an attack, and hence defensive arrangements, seemed too distant— or not distant (how would that be possible) but ranked far below the arrangements for a peaceful life that were everywhere privileged in the construction of the burrow.46

The creature’s sudden dissatisfaction with the arrangement or organization of the burrow that, in the first sentence, he had declared a success suggests nothing less than a final, decisive rejection of the classical political tradition. The exemplary construction of classical politics is the defensive wall.47 The

F6540.indb 139

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

140

Anthony Curtis Adler

wall defends the city from the outside, but, at the same time, it creates an inside, opposed to the outside. This inside is not only defended, but it is defended against defense: it becomes a region of peace and tranquility, in which a life can unfold that transcends the exigencies of defense. The laws of the city, in turn, are a metaphoric extension of its walls.48 They give definition to the normal order of things. Even though the creature’s construction, as I have argued, is already built in a chthonic, biopolitical space, it nevertheless follows a classical organizational conceit, insofar as he sought to organize it in terms of more inner and more external spaces, so as to guard against an attack from the outside that could be localized in space. When he realizes that the noise has penetrated the innermost sanctuary of his construction, the castle keep, he sees the futility of such an approach. If the enemy penetrates everywhere, if the enemy is no longer an external enemy—if the very localization of the enemy within classical space is impossible—then every single part of the construction must be constructed around the exigency of defense. No place within the construction can be devoted to peace, but every part of it must be built in anticipation of an attack that could happen at any time and anywhere. The constant state of emergency becomes the order of the day. Suggestive, in this regard, is the creature’s observation, when, at the moss covering of the entrance to the burrow, he hears a complete silence, that a complete reversal has taken place: the entrance, once a place of danger, is the place of security, whereas the castle keep, previously a place of security, has been torn away into the noise of the world.49 Danger can no longer be localized in the places that open out to the outside. And precisely because safety can no longer be localized, the silence of the opening is itself deceptive: “Even worse, here too there is, in reality, no peace.”50 The creature will abandon the quest for knowledge that at first consumed him. He no longer seeks discoveries but only to still his inner conflict, and indeed he realizes that his desire for knowledge was secretly determined by his will. If he did not previously conclude that a single large animal—an animal much like himself—is approaching him, circling around him in execution of an incomprehensible plan, it is not because it was implausible but because it was too plausible yet also too dangerous and hard to accept.51 Before, it was a question of a population (Volk) of small, insignificant creatures, which could threaten him only by creating disturbances and interrupting his silence and, at worst, stealing his food. Now, however, the danger that surrounds him seems to have taken on the concrete form of a single enemy. When the creature imagines a possible confrontation with “the one who approaches,” he returns us to the Hobbesian primal scene: the war of all

F6540.indb 140

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

The Biopolitics of Noise

141

against all. Yet this does not lead to a postclassical restoration of a classical politics. While he may dream of reaching an understanding, he knows that he and the other creature, in the moment in which they first see each other or even have a mere premonition of the other in the vicinity, will go at each other (gegeneinander auftun) with claws and teeth, mindlessly and “with a new, different hunger.”52 If there is no longer the possibility of a moment of understanding that would interrupt the war of all against all—if the Hobbesian premise has been cut off from the Hobbesian conclusion—it is because the body that would confront another body possessing equal force is not the original, integral body of the individual human being but a body that has been constructed through the ongoing labor of living. The body and the burrow, this is to say, have become one, such that it becomes impossible, with respect to what is most essential—the question of defense—to draw the limit where the body ends and the construction, the product of the body, begins. The sensitivity of the burrow, the creature observes, has made him sensitive, and its injuries injure him as if they were his own. For just this reason, he should have thought of not only his own defense but the defense of the burrow.53 The postclassical tradition takes its departure from the individual body. Yet the individual body, to the extent that it allows for reciprocal understanding and hence political relations to emerge, is already inscribed into, and described through, a classical political space. Only because the body of the individual is set against the world that surrounds him, with a difference existing between the body itself and the goods and possessions to which the body can lay claim through its powers, would it be possible to negotiate and enter into political relations. If the body were folded out into its properties and its construction, then every infringement on these would be a matter of life and death, and no understanding could ever be possible. Precisely this is the situation of the burrowing creature. The burrow has become an extension not only of his powers but of his affectivity. This sensitivity is above all an aural sensitivity, and it is precisely this aural sensitivity that precludes the social contract, making it impossible to construct a politics around the burrowing creature’s solitary construction: “Even if it were so strange an animal that its burrow would tolerate a neighbor, my burrow does not tolerate that; at least not an audible neighbor.”54 Within the biopolitical space of aurality, no sound from the vicinity, no audible neighbor, can be tolerated (vertragen). Noise leaves no room for negotiation (vertragen). The burrowing creature finally comes to the decisive point: if and what the other creature knows about him. Perhaps, he thinks, the creature could

F6540.indb 141

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

142

Anthony Curtis Adler

have heard of him, but it cannot be hearing him. How can he be sure? Because if the other creature heard him as he returned into the burrow and started digging to investigate the noise that he himself heard, then the other creature would have stopped working, at times, in order to listen; and yet he did not hear this. The last, strange words before the narrative breaks off are, “But everything remained unchanged.”55

Conclusion The burrowing creature’s descent, in the second half of “The Burrow,” begins with the dream of a silence that could listen to itself, that could take pleasure in its silence. It ends with his terror before a noise that cannot listen. Whereas the first half of “The Burrow” suggests the failure of classical and postclassical concepts of politics based on a principally visual construction of space, the second half, after the noise, suggests the failure to conceive of politics within the biopolitical space given, in silence, with noise. Yet this failure issues from his insistence on “coping” (in German, zurechtkommen) with noise in the first place. Perhaps a positive biopolitics would only be possible when we cease to treat noise as that which must be located and removed or set right. Kafka’s “The Burrow” hints at how another relation to noise might be possible: at one point, the creature observes that the hissing (Zischen) is also a whistling (Pfeifen): not just noise but almost musical. And whether it sounds like a hissing or piping, moreover, depends more on an act of interpretation than the objective qualities of the sound: it sounds “sometimes like hissing, sometimes like whistling.”56 Its sounding is a sounding “like” or “as.” The burrower, nevertheless, remains too beholden to his scientific method to abandon himself to the freedom of interpretation. Convincing himself that the sound could not have been caused by a water breach, he remarks elsewhere, “it is a hissing, and is not to be reinterpreted as a rushing.”57 Perhaps, however, the prospect of biopolitics, of living with others in mere life, depends on nothing else than the power of “hearing as.” The sense of noise for politics is the need to give sense to noise. This need is not first of all a subjective need but exists as the very urgency with which noise announces itself. Politics takes place, and constitutes its spaces, by giving sense to what emerges. It involves interpretive decisions, but not decisions that can be attributed to a single sovereign. Indeed, the voices of those who would claim to be sovereign are still also noises awaiting sense.58 Could this be the point of Kafka’s last story, his curious allegory “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-folk”?

F6540.indb 142

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

chapter 8

Torture as an Instrument of Music John T. Hamilton

When one broaches the topic of music and torture, one generally has in mind how music or sound has been and continues to be used as an instrument for inflicting pain. One perhaps thinks about the disparate claims, substantiated or not, that describe all manner of acoustic assault and torment, most recently as a nefarious tool in America’s ongoing “war on terror.” What is rarely considered, however, is the converse case, one that may be discerned at some peculiar moments within the Western tradition, namely when torture has been used as an instrument of music. I have in mind not simply the more or less conventional image of the “tortured artist” or merely the cops-and-robbers techniques that corner some poor soul to “make him sing”; rather, I am thinking about those few but highly suggestive instances, scattered across cultural history and literature, when torture and torture devices are employed to produce musical sound. What light might these singular and horrific cases shed on today’s music-torture discussion?1 Most of us are, unfortunately, by now familiar with the reported usage of musical material as a means of torture. The target may be either an individual or an entire population. News items include subjecting Guantánamo 143

F6540.indb 143

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

144

John T. Hamilton

detainees to rap music at extremely high volumes, rousing prisoners of war with deafening pop songs so as to prevent rest or sleep, and disorienting insurgents, for example on the eve of battle in Fallujah in November 2004, by employing Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) to flood the streets with heavy-metal tracks around the clock. Suzanne Cusick, who cites these and other examples, provisionally concludes that these instances of “no touch torture,” that is, practices that presumably do not leave behind a physical trace, are designed to weaken subjective will, even to the point of disintegrating one’s sense of subjectivity altogether. The intention of these “enhanced” techniques is to render enemies more vulnerable or to make victims more amenable to interrogation.2 Yet how is it that music serves as an especially effective assault weapon? A number of reasons may be adduced, without any claims of exhaustiveness. Of course, the sheer power of megadecibel amplification and the maddening effects of repetition are factors to take into account. More specifically, however, it would seem that sound’s frightening capacity to destabilize one’s subjective position depends in large measure on the nearly immaterial nature of sonic material—a crucial component of a “no touch” policy. Sound waves are invisible to the eye and can travel some distance. With the sound saturating space, the source may be difficult or even impossible to locate; one’s capacity to determine causality or to gain one’s senses is thereby severely undermined. Vibrating sounds bleed through walls and readily overtake the fragile tympanum of the inner ear, which acts as a filter for auditory perception. Sound shatters glass and may also pulverize one’s subjective grounding. Indeed, sound appears capable of invading and breaking down the strongest of fortifications, like the walls of Jericho that fell before the horn blasts of the ancient Israelites ( Joshua 6:20). Likewise, according to Freud’s topographical studies, sound is especially apt in overcoming the psychological fortress of the ego that protects one’s interiority from forces without.3 Every barrier would seem vulnerable to the immaterial material of sound. Acknowledging these phenomena is nothing new. Plato’s Socrates, for example, already recognized these effects. For him, music “penetrates the innermost recesses of the soul” and must therefore be handled with utmost caution (Republic 3.401d). In Plato’s Republic, the key consideration in maintaining the security of the ideal city is the education of its guardians, which means above all controlling what they should and should not be allowed to listen to. The guardians, in fact, must be protected from musical assault. A close reading of Plato’s language would demonstrate that music is persistently understood in these passages as a kind of weapon. Here, ancient

F6540.indb 144

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

Torture as an Instrument of Music

145

concerns well anticipate modern scenarios: the pulsating sounds of the Furies that hunt down Orestes share properties with the amplified beats of all-night raves; Apollo’s instrument, which, in the context of the Homeric epics, may serve either as a bow or a lyre, points, however casually, to the blues musician who commonly refers to his instrument as his “axe.” But there is no need to rely exclusively on popular culture. Even in the more self-styled serious, literary-philosophical traditions of the West, we find frequent reflections on the “violent power of music.” In German letters, this capacity is consistently summoned as “die Gewalt der Musik.” It is this violence that incites Immanuel Kant’s fear, in the Third Critique, that the singing of hymns in the prison nearby his home would prevent him from thinking his own thoughts.4 In this line, Heinrich von Kleist refers to the “Gewalt der Musik” in his story “Saint Cecilia,” a memorable portrayal of four brothers who are instantly struck down with insanity during the performance of a Catholic mass. This same fear is later expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche in the concluding pages of The Birth of Tragedy, where he corroborates Wagner’s concern that the Dionysian music of Tristan would surely drive all the audience members mad without the stabilizing, Apollonian element of words. All these examples arguably rest, to greater or lesser degrees, on the immaterial materiality of sound, that is, on the same premises that seem to turn music into an effective means of torture. Still, sound’s immaterial materiality cannot fully account for music’s ability to disorient or derange. Light, for example, possesses properties that are analogous to sound; thus, also in Plato’s Republic, in the famous allegory of the cave, Socrates speaks of the stupefying effects of the sun’s light. Odor, too, is invisible and can travel distances, which is why Kant is able to compare music’s effect to an offensive, strong-smelling perfume that extends its influence beyond its intended area of influence. However, Plato’s liberated protophilosopher gradually accustoms himself to the blinding daylight; and Kant’s hypersensitive citizen can come to ignore the town’s invasive smells. Could one not similarly learn to inure oneself against acoustic bombardment? What makes sonic assault different? What makes music particularly torturous? To begin to respond to these questions, I would like to turn to the curious topos, mentioned earlier, in which torture has emerged as an instrument of music. Can this alternative, converse idea inform us about music’s ability to cause suffering? Would music’s torturing function somehow be explained by torture’s musical function? Mythological accounts concerning the invention of musical instruments usually include some aspect of gross violence. The Homeric Hymn

F6540.indb 145

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

146

John T. Hamilton

to Hermes is quite explicit in describing how the god created the first kithara by eviscerating a tortoise. He justifies this dreadful act by claiming that the animal’s mortality may thereby be transformed into deathless song. The catgut strings of the lyre and the cowhide stretched across a drum’s frame offer the same intimations of immortality. By modifying flesh or viscera into resonant material, the inventor of musical instruments achieves a kind of dematerialization, a sublimation that permits sounds to detach from their corporeal source. In Greek mythology, pain or suffering is therefore almost always present in stories concerning the invention of musical instruments. According to Pindar, Athena constructs the first reed pipe or aulos in order to re-create the terrifying cries of the Gorgons as Medusa is decapitated by Perseus (Pythian 12.6 –12). Later, once the goddess spies her reflection in a pond and sees how the aulos hideously contorts her face, she tosses the instrument into the bushes. The satyr Marsyas retrieves it and, upon challenging Apollo to the famous musical contest, is punished by being nailed to a tree and flayed alive. If we follow Titian’s painting of the myth, we see how Marsyas is in fact turned into an Apollonian viola. The wounds of the satyr’s abdomen shockingly remind us of the shape of f-holes. The scalpel is drawn directly across, gliding past the exposed “tendons,” taking the place of a bow. The gesture would seem to rest on an allusion to Ovid’s account of the Marsyas story, in which the poet emphasizes the word for “tendons,” or nerva—the term commonly used to denote the gut strings of a lyre (Metamorphoses 6.382– 400). In other words, Apollo’s vivisection turns Marsyas’s body into a stringed instrument—his cruelty thereby rehearses the same movement that allows death to resound musically. The scene of torture is converted into a scene of musical performance. Pain is channeled into melody. Suffering is sublimated into art. This program readily translates into a Christian idiom. Medieval allegories frequently liken Christ’s crucifixion to a harp. As in the case of Marsyas, the nerva (the tendons and/or strings) have been stretched on a wooden frame—an instrument that sounds out the joyous strains of the soul’s salvation. Among the typological castings found in fourteenthcentury versions of the popular Speculum humanae salvationis, the Crucifixion bears directly on the origin of music. In the Hebrew Bible, Jubal— “the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes” (Gen. 4:21)—is provocatively introduced immediately after the story of Abel’s murder; and in one particular exegetical tradition, it was Jubal who first invented the harp in Pythagorean fashion by listening to his brother blacksmith beat on an anvil—an accomplishment that is said to prefigure the hammering of nails into Christ’s hands and feet.5 In a Speculum from Darmstadt, Jubal

F6540.indb 146

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

Torture as an Instrument of Music

147

holds up his harp in a panel below a depiction of the raising of the Cross; the sound holes appear in the exact position of Christ’s wounds; the strings replicate the protruding ribs of the dying god. When we turn to the history of devotional practices, we find further instances that concentrate on the potentially redemptive or even beautiful aspects of corporeal pain. To give one especially grotesque example, I would refer to the Abbey of Unterlinden, where, in the thirteenth century, during Lent, the nuns would gather after Matins for their imitation of Christ. The abbess describes how the devotees “lacerated their bodies until shedding blood, so that the sound of whipping themselves resonates throughout the monastery, ascending to the ears of the Lord of Hosts sweeter than any melody.”6 Flagellation thus turns into a divine recital.7 Secular history is not lacking in examples of torture as an instrument of music. The early eighteenth-century composer for the French court, Marin Marais, produced a “Tableau de l’Operation de la Taille” for viola da gamba—a composition that intended to sublimate the intense pain of his recent lithotomy, a surgical removal of stones from the bladder, without the benefits of anesthesia.8 Nor is modernity deficient in cases of asceticism and mortification, in which musicians undergo acts of violence that come very close to torture. The castrato’s sacrifice for the sake of vocal beauty is self-evident, not to mention the hours of practicing trills and passaggi that these singers were invariably compelled to endure. Most musicians can testify to the various species of self-torture required to perfect their technique: the soreness, the exhaustion, the blisters on their fingers. Perhaps nothing, however, can compare with the trials of Robert Schumann, who, in order to strengthen the middle finger of his right hand, utilized a chiroplast—a rather medieval contraption endorsed by the virtuoso Frédéric Kalkbrenner. This device, which sharply and painfully held the finger backward, only further paralyzed the burgeoning pianist. In the end, Schumann desperately followed his doctor’s folk remedy, plunging his crippled hand into the warm entrails of a freshly slaughtered pig, then soaking it for hours in warm brandy, all to no avail.9 But it is antiquity that provides what is perhaps the most notorious— and, indeed, repulsive— example of torture’s contribution to inventive musical instrumentation. It concerns the court of Phalaris, the tyrant who ruled the Sicilian colony of Akragas in the mid-sixth century BC. Diodorus Siculus, who compiled his history around 44 BC, tells how the sculptor Perilaos presented Phalaris with a peculiar torture device formed in the shape of a large, hollow bull, fashioned out of bronze. According to Diodorus, the bull’s nostrils were fitted with “small sounding pipes or reeds”

F6540.indb 147

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

148

John T. Hamilton

(auliskous). Perilaos proudly explained to his master that a man could be locked inside the bull, and with a strong fire lit beneath, the victim could be slowly roasted, while the king would derive “pleasure by the groans that pass through the pipes (aulois) in the nostrils.”10 Thus, the tortured noise of suffering would be transformed into the musical pleasure of a reed concert. Agony would become melodious. The screams of a long, violent death would become the sweet sounds of an improvised air. Phalaris, whose reputation for cruelty was unsurpassed in antiquity, apparently wasted no time in enjoying his new gift. Upon persuading Perilaos to give an audition, the tyrant immediately had the sculptor locked within the bull, ordered the fire to be kindled, and listened to the extemporaneous performance on the hellish nose flutes. It should be noted that Phalaris is frequently accredited with being the first dictator of the ancient world. From his official position in the colonial treasury, he extorted funds to raise a fierce army among the enslaved workers and usurped the throne. Cicero invented the neologism Phalarismus in order to describe malicious minds motivated by dictatorial plans.11 According to the Suda, Phalaris relentlessly used the brazen bull to execute suspicious foreigners and personal enemies. He did so until his reign was overthrown by the general Telemachus, who promptly locked the cruel tyrant himself into the deadly resounding bronze beast. Thus, the despot came to suffer the same fate as the one he inflicted on the machine’s inventor. During the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily, Himilco is said to have taken the original bull back to North Africa as a war trophy. The gruesome contraption entered into Roman consciousness when Scipio Africanus, in 200 BC, restored it to Akragas. Throughout the later imperial period, there are reports of such death by roasting, including a few instances in Christian martyrology. St. Eustace is said to have been killed in a similar bull under the orders of Hadrian; and St. Antipas, the Bishop of Pergamum, is said to have suffered the same fate under the rule of Domitian. Further accounts of such orchestrated execution are chronicled throughout the medieval period, particularly in central Europe. Should the horrific story of Phalaris and the brazen bull provide anything further than a demonstration of the decadent brutality of the Akragan court? Does it exemplify anything other than the instructive moral that Diodorus himself offers, namely that those who have evil designs often fall prey to their own devices? Lucian, whose fictional account allows Phalaris to exonerate himself in the first person, concludes the episode of the brazen bull with a similarly didactic statement: “Thus did [the artist] suffer his just deserts by enjoying his own contrivance” (Phalaris 1.12). To

F6540.indb 148

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

Torture as an Instrument of Music

149

be sure, mention of this strange episode is generally made in antiquity as an illustration of this moral of just retribution for those who are bent on evil. Both Pliny the Elder, in the Naturalis historia (34.19), and Ovid, in the Tristia (3.11.29–54), cite Perilaos’s fate as a significant exemplum. Ovid again, in the Ars amatoria, writes in reference to the brazen bull, “There is no law more just than this: that artificers of death should perish by their own art” (necque enim lex aequior ulla est, quam necis artifices arte perire sua; 1.655–56). Yet the story expresses more than a demonstration of just deserts. To return to Lucian’s text, one is struck by the sustained connection between music and torture. The bull is simultaneously described as “some new form of torture” (καινήν τινα κόλασιν) and as a new musical instrument. It is presumably a suitable gift for Phalaris, who is explicitly regarded as a man who takes excessive pleasure in torturing (ὡς ἐξ ἅπαντος κολάζειν ἐπιθυμοῦντι). Yet, as Phalaris claims to the Delphic priests, this judgment is unfair— his decision to torture enemies was always made in the interest of his regime’s and therefore his state’s “security” (so¯te¯ria; 1.2). The common verb for torture, kolazein, alludes to the noun kolasis, which specifically refers to pruning a tree. As Phalaris pleads, rulers who live among enemies and conspirators are compelled to resort to such harsh policies: Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts to prune [kolazein] them from the start, and—like Iolaus—sear the wounds; only thus shall we hold on to our own. The man who has once become involved in such strife as this must play the part that he has undertaken; to show mercy would be fatal. (1.8)

The justification for merciless tactics makes an appeal to security: faced with an existential threat, one seeks allowance for overriding claims for compassion and clemency. Whatever acts of violence Phalaris exercised against the citizenry should be condoned insofar as they were committed in a state of exception. Notwithstanding, Lucian’s Phalaris asserts that he balked at Perilaos’s perverse design, which would make music—an art sacred to Apollo and the Muses— complicit in acts of torture. And throughout his account, Phalaris stresses the musicality of the evil device. According to Perilaos, the sound that would be emitted through the reed pipes is conjured as “accompanying the clearest laments and most mournful bellowing” (λιγυρώτατα καὶ ἐπαυλήσει θρηνῶδες καὶ μυκήσεται γοερώτατον; 1.11). The sculptor Perilaos is ironically named a “music master,” ironic insofar as he has the—in

F6540.indb 149

6/17/15 8:30:10 AM

150

John T. Hamilton

this case dubious—privilege of being the first to perform. Throughout this passage, Lucian suggestively links the verbs of “torture” and “musical enjoyment.” In one tightly coordinated sentence, Perilaos gleefully boasts, “Thus, on the one hand, as [the victim] is being tortured, you will, on the other hand, enjoy the strains of the pipes in the midst of it all” (ibid.). How far should we press this coupling of torture and musical performance? Lucian’s description of the taurine threnody as “most clear or shrill” (liguro¯tata) immediately recalls Homer’s portrayal of the equally shrill (ligure¯i) and equally lethal song of the bewitching Sirens (Od. 12.44). The shrillness of the Sirens’ song alludes to a simple but prevalent idea across ancient Greek culture, namely that music must be purchased with great pain and suffering. Hesiod suggests as much, when he names “sorrow and grief ” as the occasion for all song in the opening passage of the Theogony (98–103). Scholars of ancient poetics have long recognized how sacrifice serves as the original occasion for song—an etiology that is maintained by the myths concerning the invention of musical instruments alluded to earlier. This notion concurs with a recent thesis put forward by Jacques Attali, who, on the basis of disparate anthropological evidence, defines “noise” as “a weapon” and “music” as “primordially . . . the formation, domestication, and ritualization of that weapon as a simulacrum of ritual murder.”12 The myth of Orpheus is especially instructive. The legendary singer sings—at least in Vergil’s and Ovid’s accounts—from a feeling of grave deprivation and sacrifice. The lyre of Orpheus eventually receives an apotheosis, taking its place as a constellation in the heavens, providing a cosmological orientation for the art of song but only after the singer’s body has been clubbed to death, only after his flesh has been torn apart by the raving Maenads. Orpheus, the paradigmatic singer, is, of course, also the exemplary hero, the man who once traveled alive into the realm of death, making his way along the torturous paths of the Underworld. And perhaps it would not be too far off the mark, at least in certain respects, to understand this descent into hell itself as a metaphor for the tortured origins of music’s efflorescence, a confrontation with death as the condition of the possibility of song. Since my focus has been on the episode of the brazen bull, I feel justified in mentioning one of the most memorable poetic treatments of infernal descents. I am referring to book 6 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas follows the Sibyl into the Underworld in order to converse with his father and learn his fate. What interests me is not the descent per se but rather the frame story that Vergil employs. The book, as most of us may recall, opens

F6540.indb 150

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Torture as an Instrument of Music

151

with Aeneas’s landing on the Cumaean shore. Upon entering the Sibyl’s cave, which will lead him to the gates of the Netherworld, Aeneas regards the relief sculptures produced by Daedalus, who once found refuge in this spot, after fleeing Crete and losing his beloved son, Icarus. Among the represented scenes, Aeneas focuses on the central panel, which depicts the Minoan queen, Pasiphae, as she lies within a wooden cow in order to seduce the bull, for whom she has conceived a monstrous lust. Why does Vergil choose to introduce the story of infernal descent with the myth of Pasiphae and the Minotaur? One could offer some speculation. It was Daedalus who constructed the wooden cow at the queen’s bidding: a work of art, clearly reminiscent of the brazen bull at the court of Phalaris, a work of art, moreover, that was designed to contain a living being within. Although Daedalus’s cow is no torture device, it does indeed have its counterpart in Phalaris’s bull, insofar as both constructions deal with an origin of song. The song I have in mind is the Aeneid’s sixth book itself, for the image of a living woman enclosed within the lifeless shell of art provocatively corresponds to the image of Aeneas, alive yet wandering through the labyrinthine land of death. The scene of the wooden cow announces the theme of life shut within or coming into contact with lifelessness, which is the principal theme of the descent myth. As Pasiphae reclines within the bovine enclosure, she not only conjures the image of the Trojan horse, which leads to the fall of Troy but also sets the surviving Trojans onto the path toward the future of Rome, she not only reenacts Europa’s rape by Zeus, disguised as a bull—a founding myth of the West in every sense— but she also serves as a figure for all art, which transmits life by subsuming life. It is the violent lesson that courses through much of the poetic tradition—a lesson that the sculptor Perilaos frightfully exploits in order to indulge in his own sadistic ends. Life shut within or coming into contact with lifelessness is a fair way to describe the experience of torture: an experience that brings life dreadfully close to, but without accomplishing, death, an experience that can surely be characterized as a “season in hell.” Perilaos’s brazen bull would appear to be a sick parody of Pasiphae’s bestial desires. In both cases, the offspring is monstrous—be it the Minotaur or the reed concert pouring out from the bull’s nostrils. However, if the scene of life shut within lifeless art is a foreshadowing of the journey through hell toward the promised glory of Rome, or if it is a ritual reenactment of the rape of Europa and the founding of the West, then these mythic episodes may resonate with the stories of musical creation as modes of civilizing. To be sure, such offspring may also be construed as equally monstrous. The point is that, in these particular cases, the transformation

F6540.indb 151

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

152

John T. Hamilton

of pain into music at least partially has to do with the painful demolition of old worlds and the ordered establishment of the new—hence Elaine Scarry’s primary thesis in her seminal work on torture: “The torturer dramatizes the disintegration of the world, the obliteration of consciousness that is happening within the prisoner himself,”13 a necessary first stage to the making of a new world in the wake of a shattered one. In this sense, torture is less an uncivilized practice and more a decivilizing practice, one that is desperately at pains to establish a civilization at the explicit expense of another. How, then, can torture’s role in the production of music relate to the use of music in acts of torture? In the end, there can only be somewhat wild conjecture, resting on associations that are quite free and without proof, intended more as a provocation than as definitive interpretation. The idea of torture as an instrument of music— exemplified by the brazen bull, by mythic accounts of the origin of music, and by the Christian beatification of pain— obliquely opens onto notions of sublimation and the creation of new worlds, be it a dictatorial regime, an eternal empire, or a new divine dispensation. Could this be a factor in explaining why certain music has been recently used by American service members and agents for inflicting psychological pain? The specific musical examples must be regarded from the perspective of the target. The sexual explicitness of Christina Aguilera, the demonic chromaticism of Metallica, the blatant force of hardcore rap—are these not ideal means for obliterating one world and imposing another?—a scene that is inevitably disorienting and deranging, dissolving a detainee’s subjective will, revealing to the victim that the ground on which he stands has dematerialized into sounds controlled by another, that he is now subject to a world in which he does not belong, that he is now at the mercy of a world where the cessation of pain may be promised but only on the condition that he divulge information on suspected terrorists, that he alert authorities to future threats. The torment will end, in other words, only on the condition that the prisoner begins to sing.

F6540.indb 152

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

chapter 9

Stop It, I Like It! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure Robert Sholl

The Irrigation of the Ear In a perfectly matured body, which has grown without great emotional disturbances, movements tend gradually to conform to the mechanical requirements of the surrounding world. The nervous system has evolved under the influence of these laws and is fitted to them. However, in our society we do, by the promise of great reward or intense punishment, so distort the even development of the system, that many acts become excluded or restricted. The result is that we have to provide special conditions for further adult maturation of many arrested functions. Mosche Feldenkrais1

For the somatic educationalist Mosche Feldenkrais (1904 –84), the violence that is embodied in the chiastic dialogue of “great reward” (pleasure) and “intense punishment” (pain) is essential to our being. The embodiment of this dialogue, he maintains, derives unconsciously from our birth and our growth, which is itself formed in an infinitely subtle struggle with gravity.2 153

F6540.indb 153

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

154

Robert Sholl

Feldenkrais perceives the implications of this problem as a “parasitic” or contradictory set of embodied impulses; the desire to do or stop doing something is colored by other habitual activities that, although they seem essential and pleasurable, may inhibit the clarity of a movement.3 The resistance to arresting parasitic action(s), even when listening to music, is very strong, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed: When I imagine a piece of music, as I often do every day, I always, so I believe, grind my upper and lower teeth together rhythmically. I have noticed this before though I usually do it quite unconsciously. What’s more, it’s as though the notes I am imagining are produced by this movement. I believe this may be a very common way of imagining music internally. Of course, I can imagine without moving my teeth too, but in that case the notes are much ghostlier, more blurred and less pronounced.4

Wittgenstein clearly recognized how the pleasure of his habit was also a form of necessary pain. For Feldenkrais, creativity and spontaneity blossom from a maturity that is a diremptive escape route from this impasse of compulsion.5 If the internalized experience of listening to music is not free from such compulsion, does the understanding (the disciplining) through the narratives created about music (seemingly ineffable and disembodied) entail the same impasse of pleasure and pain? Are the stories we tell about music to understand it, parasitically, merely another form of subverting spontaneous listening? Throughout this study, I investigate three narratives of listening in terms of masochism and embodiment. In a succinct explanation of Gilles Deleuze’s work on masochism, Amber Musser underlines its parasitic core: Masochism, as Deleuze explores it, is entirely separate from sadism. Deleuze’s masochist is a subject, most often male, who disavows the Law of the Father, and attempts to recreate the pre-oedipal world by enlisting a cold, cruel woman to dominate. In Deleuze’s analysis, the masochist oscillates between submission and domination, rendering reality (and binaries) absurd in favor of fantasy. The masochist uses his/her powerlessness through the contract [a written agreement between dominant and submissive that delimits the nature and degradation proper to their relationship—RS], which simulates, but cannot replace the law [an ethical, hierarchical norm or convention—RS]. The fantasy of a relation of absolute submission is approximated by the fetishistic reiteration of objects that symbolize domination (such as fur, high heels, and whips) and disavowal of his or her agency. The

F6540.indb 154

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

155

masochist receives pleasure from the material symbols of submission, while continually producing desire for the impossible—absolute submission.6

The parasitic and compulsive nature of dependence (between dominant and submissive) underlies three crucial elements in this description of masochism: the oscillation or reversibility of role play, the dissolution of narrative into fantasy, and the desire for but absence of fulfillment or synthesis. The last two elements are also pernicious figures in modernity’s utopian fantasy narrative of the “new,” and they can be detected in many of the dominating narratives of twentieth-century music. Masochism is crucial to the disciplining rhetoric, the unveiling of repressed sources and origins, the fantasy of knowledge as power in the “authentic performance” movement,7 the fantasy of capturing the meaning of art and literature at the bottom of a critical anthropological well (humanities research),8 the performer’s fantasy of experiencing the original flame of creation, an urexperience that impels the compulsive rerecording of the classics, the desire for greater intimacy in recordings, and the desire in some recordings for an unrealistically proximate listening experience.9 These fantasies embrace a subtle compulsion to possess sound at the inception of thought, inviting further speculation on the origins of this thought. Such an intimate listening experience approaches an embodiment of music, in which the listener can imagine the fulfillment of a fantasy to climb into sound itself and to be overwhelmed, possessed, or desubjectified as an act of engagement and submission. This telos and “anxiety to touch” informs what Jean-Luc Nancy has described as “the principle of Western (un)reason.”10 Music is, therefore, active not only as metaphor, or as a subject for agency or mimesis, but as a locus of being and becoming. To be consumed, taken, transfigured is far from passive. Despite George Steiner’s cautionary remark that “the bush burned brighter because its interpreter was not allowed too near,” for the listener to twentieth-century music, there remains the enticement to poke or fan the flames, to touch or even become the fire itself: to hear into the essence of art.11 To tarry with death but live, to be singed by the fire would be a pleasurable act of communion and life-enhancing embodiment, a possession rather than mere surrogacy or spectatorship, commensurate with what Nancy calls an “incarnation, where Spirit infuses the body.”12 Such a liminal listening entails a listening to the immanence of the self that, following Feldenkrais’s thinking, would not only provide conditions for maturation, for creativity and spontaneity, but it would also provide

F6540.indb 155

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

156

Robert Sholl

an irrigation of the ear, in which an awareness of the aporias of listening become commensurate with the aporias of our being. It is therefore important to reestablish sensitivity to an authentic listening to music that is aware of the tipping point between pain and pleasure and its creative diremption into fantasy. Fantasy, understood from a masochist perspective, is not just utopian but contractual and, in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs (1870), a controlled and increasingly hermetic dilation of transgression toward an (absent) final dissolution.13 This essay therefore seeks to understand the way in which narratives of listening become fantasy and the way the self-reflective realization of this diremption is a traumatic, even cathartic moment of maturity. The three studies here use the negotiation of the body as a locus narrative; in each case, its narrative presence precedes a traumatic absence (death). The first study examines the background implications of the mimesis that informs Theodor W. Adorno’s narrative of listening to the death of the élue (the chosen one) at the end of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1912–13).14 It explores Adorno’s masochistic narrative of listener participation in her death. Through Adorno’s reading of Odysseus and the Sirens, I show the way Adorno’s narrative can be “oscillated” or reversed, to reveal that both parties (the élue and the listener) can simulate a contract of dominance and submission that remains unfulfilled.15 The second study explores the narrative of St. Francis’s spiritual development and death in Olivier Messiaen’s opera St François d’Assise (1975– 83). It examines Messiaen’s narrative of Christian enlightenment as a masochist drama in which Francis chooses to acquiesce to God’s domination, which precipitates his own death (disembodiment). Finally, a third study addresses the negotiation of the self through the voice, embodied as Cathy Berberian. It shows the way her disembodiment in Luciano Berio’s tape piece Visages (1961) is also a traumatic narrative of her being and virtual death.

Le Sacre du Printemps: Listening to the Promise of Death It is first the body itself that speaks. Jacques Rivière16

In the lecture “Philosophy of the Dance” (1936), Paul Valéry somewhat presciently enquires, “might one not . . . consider the dance as a kind of inner life, allowing that psychological term a new meaning in which physiology is dominant?” Valéry continues: “An inner life, indeed, but one

F6540.indb 156

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

157

consisting entirely in sensations of time and energy which respond to one another and form a kind of closed circle of resonance. This resonance, like any other, is communicated: a part of our pleasure as spectators consists in feeling ourselves possessed by the rhythms so that we ourselves are virtually dancing.”17 In recent years, the discovery of mirror neurons in the brain has confirmed the neurological basis of such mimesis: actions, emotions, sensations,18 and even the aesthetic response to art.19 Valéry’s “virtual” experience has blossomed into an embodied or body-centered awareness of the world in which it has been shown that external bodily gestures are represented in the brain. These findings have been investigated through a multiauthored study of dancers, in which it was shown that the ability to mirror dance actions is found in experts and, to a lesser degree, in nonexpert dancers but that the degree to which this happened “depended on the observer’s specific motor expertise.”20 Put another way, their ability to absorb or understand external movement kinaesthetically was linked to their own ability to negotiate the immanence of their own self-image. In a less empirical vein, Feldenkrais was concerned with the ways in which the masochistic compulsion to achieve formed the self-image, whether constructed by society, culture, or the individual.21 This compulsion and masochistic pressure has been suggested as a cause of injury and breakdown in performing musicians.22 The compulsion to achieve, through the masochist subjugation of the self to a perceived higher goal, has also been documented in a number of studies of dancers and injury, which demonstrate that balletic movement walks a tightrope between elegance and a hidden physical torment.23 If, following the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese’s thought, this spectacle is partly a participation in action for the viewer, observation is also a vicarious embodiment of kinaesthetic pleasure despite or even dependent on the potential of disastrous physical injury or performance failure. To hold one’s breath while viewing a performance or any tightrope spectacle discloses what Feldenkrais diagnoses as “parasitic” motivation, a subtle unnecessary effort or action that becomes part of a larger function.24 For Feldenkrais, breath holding is not just a mimetic and involuntary physical response to anxiety; it is “worked out” or learned: “To combat the onset of fright (to control the onset of nausea, of swooning, of losing consciousness, of choking, of palpitation—in a word, anxiety), we all work out our own ways of holding our breath, of tensing our abdominal walls, of tilting our heads, or stiffening our pelvic joints.”25 According to Feldenkrais, these habitual responses result from a threat to our self-image (identity) in “the

F6540.indb 157

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

158

Robert Sholl

dependence period” that, to differing degrees, may be improved or concealed by adult maturation.26 Feldenkrais expands his analogy to encompass society: “Just like the person who adopts a crippling use of her body when confronted with a task for which her previous experience has not equipped her, so does humanity as a whole adopt crippling methods for achieving security. Both show the infantile compulsive behavior of arrested development.”27 Does music embody another “crippling method,” or does it merely provide an illusion of an escape from this paradigm? Is listening to music—which in Nancy’s terms returns the self to itself, as an ideal of the self as contingent, as continually negotiating its own awareness of being—a means of becoming aware of this issue?28 In music’s promise of perfection, freedom, and liberation, whether physical, psychological, ontological, political, or spiritual, it provides a utopian vision of what we are not, which creates an expectation that, when unfulfilled, is disturbing. Performing musicians, like dancers, are models of peak human activity that impart a quasi-kinaesthetic image of freedom for the listener/viewer.29 Their activities attempt to inhabit (and even dominate) the audience’s identity and impart an illusion of their self-image and security as a paradigm of the possibility of perfection, while balancing on the tightrope of performance. The threat of destabilization embodied in performance unveils a “crippling method,” an image that is an inherently uncertain means of pursuing perfection. This illusion is essential to the viewer’s expectation and the performative tightrope drama of music and to a listening that is therefore traumatic and pleasurable.30 The threat of destabilization was implicit in the riot that greeted the first performance of Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps on May 29, 1913. The succès de scandale of Le Sacre was a cathartic moment in modernism that “destabilized” society’s “self-image.” For an audience of “non-expert dancers,”31 a narcissistic society of “actorobservers,”32 the idealized narrative of gentility and ordered discourse customarily mirrored from traditional ballet had been dramatically subverted, leaving them, as stated earlier, to negotiate the immanence of their own self-image.33 At the root of the musical work’s destabilizing danger is the aural sense of a controlled instability, facilitated by a multivalent hybridization of structuring, rhythmic, and harmonic systems.34 This experience is heightened by the ongoing illusion that the musical language itself will transgress this control. To listen to Le Sacre is, therefore, to listen on a knife edge. This has been exacerbated to some extent through the historical disembodiment of the ballet (supported by Stravinsky) into a tone poem that displaced the traumatic visual elements of the ballet into abso-

F6540.indb 158

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

159

lute music and the imagination.35 If as Richard Taruskin and Robert Fink suggest, Stravinsky’s return to the piece as composer (in numerous alterations), his place as a chronicler and fabulist of the genesis and meaning of the work, and his refashioning of both the score and the sound of the work as conductor (1929, 1940, and 1960)36 all reveal his own insecurity about the work, then this is also commensurate with what Feldenkrais describes as a search for a fixed and stable identity for Le Sacre as a response to its faulty “dependence period.”37 The detonation of the first performance of Le Sacre and the fallout were inestimable.38 Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky absorbs and amplifies the resonance of this shock though his understanding of the suspense and the danger of the work and its threat to the self-identity of the listener. In elaborating a theory that “the annihilation of the subject [the listener] through shock is transfigured in the aesthetic complexion of the music as the triumph of the subject,” Adorno imputes a mimetic identification with and then a quasi-heroic diremption of the listener.39 He goes on to connect “the uncontested, immediate identification” of the dance with the tribe and to deplore this “conformity with a blindly integrated society” as a “trampling of individuation” by identifying this objectification with the listener.40 Pleasure taken in the subjectless condition of the music is sadomasochistic. If the viewer does not simply enjoy the liquidation of the young girl, he empathizes with the collective and, himself its potential victim, thereby imagines participating in the collective force in magical regression. The sadomasochistic trait accompanies Stravinsky’s music in all its phases.41

As I interpret this passage, Adorno’s reading recognizes not just a complicity (and prurience) of the listener, a recognition of the élue’s being and fate, but a repression or, in a more truly masochist vain, an occlusion through pleasure, of culpability.42 For Adorno, this is heard as a repressed narrative, but the future significance of this ritual act of destruction is rooted in the musical language.43 The death of “the chosen one” is objectified for the listener through a static, nondevelopmental, reified musical language, whose claim to historical truth is its desubjectification of the human, akin to what Max Weber called “disenchantment.”44 Mechanization of the body, for Adorno, is akin to the industrialization and commodification of resources, thence extended to human resources, that led in literal and historical terms, using Adorno’s teleology, to the gas chambers.45 For Adorno, Stravinsky’s musical language was, therefore, not merely an agent of (masochistic)

F6540.indb 159

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

160

Robert Sholl

domination or subversion of the listener,46 but what Deleuze (via Musser) construes as the dissolution of narrative and an absence of synthesis has, for Adorno, prophetic ontological and political implications of finitude.47 However, Adorno’s thought goes beyond mere listener complicity and sociological mimesis.48 When Adorno, perhaps echoing an early review of Le Sacre by Émile Vuillermoz, states, “The effect that Stravinsky’s music intends is certainly not the identification of the public with the psychic agitations allegedly expressed in the dance; rather, it is an electrification equal to what seizes the dancers,” he advocates a listening that is a collective assimilation of the music.49 Listeners are not mimetic “mere centers of reaction” or “monads of conditioned reflexes.”50 This is not, as the musicologist Tamara Levitz has recently claimed of Adorno (and Taruskin), a metaphoric extension of structural hearing at the expense of dance.51 For Adorno, the dance is already sedimented in the music, so to listen to Le Sacre is to become it and to live in the aftershock. In this sense, the end of Le Sacre is an unimagined leap from Isolde’s Verklärung at the end of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1857). Isolde dies into the sound of the orchestra, which has become synonymous with sexual excitement. Her autoerotic death has pathos but is not sacrificial or pathological, nor does it necessarily encourage any sense of listener complicity: she appears to will her own extinction.52 Stravinsky and Roerich’s élue, however, has not the solipsistic luxury of “transfiguration,” much less the possibility of redemption. In Nijinsky’s choreography for the 1913 performance of part 2 of Le Sacre, two concentric circles on the stage provide a visual means for other dancers to encircle and close in on “the chosen one.”53 Having been chosen (in the stopped sforzando horn parts at one bar before fig. 101), she is finally corralled into the center of the inner circle (in the 11/4 bar at two bars after fig. 103): the moment when she is rendered sacred, set “apart from the profane” and therefore consecrated.54 Her objectification, synonymous with a desexualization, is, in a masochist sense, a precondition of the suspense that will lead to an imaginary resexualization unfulfilled at the end of the ballet that resonates into the work’s legacy.55 Alfred Hitchcock once defined suspense as the way in which a viewer sees a bomb ticking underneath a chair while two people converse. Knowing about the bomb changes the viewer’s appreciation of the conversation.56 From the start of part 2, “the chosen one” is like a bomb. At first hidden in the crowd, she is singled out by fate alone. She is mesmerized by the sound of the orchestra (the ticking clock); the atrophy of the musical motives (suspended over a “dominant” pedal in the last pages of Le Sa-

F6540.indb 160

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

161

cre, from fig. 186) contributes to this temporal psychopathology. Her only possibility of escaping gravity and her fate is through a pathetic jumping. Ironically, therefore, she is lifted up into the air at the end of the ballet and offered but not taken. The exchange, a life for the life of the community, a premise of sacrifice, remains unfulfilled (even as the work’s legacy).57 There is no death, even offstage as in Greek tragedy. The listener sees the timer stop just before “0” on the detonator’s clock, holds his or her breath as a “parasitic action” (Feldenkrais) during the heart-stopping silence in the penultimate bar, but hears the detonation in the final orchestral chord of the work. This final transgressive and irreducible moment (like the sound of a guillotine), which Stravinsky called a “noise,” functions like an expulsion of air from the dancers’ and the listener’s bodies.58 The absence of the death is a cinematic trompe l’oeil. Both the death and the carnage caused by the explosion of the bomb (to follow Hitchcock’s logic) occur in the imagination, as the resonance of Stravinsky’s “noise.” Adorno’s quasi-Freudian diagnosis of Stravinsky subsumes the Dionysian vitalist entelechy (a teleological force toward a projected fulfillment) of the Danse sacrale somewhat by placing an ethical judgment on the entropy of the élue; she becomes (for the listener) an agent of a “sadomasochistic” psychosis.59 In his desire to show the destruction or idealization of the élue, to follow Deleuze’s thought, Adorno undermines a masochist reading in which death is suspended and ultimately disavowed “in order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy.”60 In a masochist interpretation of the end of Le Sacre, “pleasure is postponed for as long as possible and is thus disavowed.”61 The degree to which pagan and sadistic (Dionysian) sensuality is repressed, or rather disciplined and controlled by the music and choreography, is essential to the “formal and dramatic” permissiveness and provocativeness of the sacrifice, which, unfulfilled, resonates and validates the shock of Le Sacre.62 This kind of controlled masochistic repression is essential to Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s reading, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), of Homer’s telling of the myth of Odysseus and the Sirens (from The Odyssey).63 Their concern is with the way Odysseus economizes his desire through being bound to the mast (his pain), in order to become a good consumer and to attain pleasure.64 Odysseus’s liminal listening can be understood as a masochist allegory of ecstatic listening: a desire to experience the traumatic pleasure of music. That Odysseus, for Adorno and Horkheimer, “has found an escape clause in the contract, which enables him to fulfill it while eluding it,” listening to “the song of pleasure” and thwarting it “as he seeks to thwart death,” is not only a recognition of his

F6540.indb 161

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

162

Robert Sholl

masochist power (even as the victim) to confer power on the sirens65 but also evidence of the power of the enlightened subject to rationalize or subvert a contract in order to embrace what is too dreadful to be heard (the overwhelming power of music).66 Amnesia is an essential ingredient to this narrative of listening. Odysseus must forget or discard Circe’s warning about the Sirens that could only have been an encouragement: knowing the cost of his actions fans the flames of his desire.67 Odysseus is, following Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideal of listening, dystopically “straining to end in sense.”68 Through his contract that controls his access to pleasure (which would also be pain), Odysseus becomes a contingent being, continually negotiating his own awareness through a sound that Maurice Blanchot describes as “so unearthly that it forced those who heard it to realize the inhumanness of all human singing.”69 Yet this is not just “awakening hope and desire for a sublime elsewhere,” as Blanchot puts it.70 Like Stravinsky’s élue, Odysseus is forced to forget himself in the music. While this may allow a renewed desubjectified understanding of his own being, his desire creates an internal auditory blindness that paradoxically forbids him from achieving self-revelation or awareness. As the masochist subject, his “suffering,” as Deleuze puts it (following Theodore Reik), “is not the cause of his pleasure itself but the necessary precondition for achieving it.”71 His “resonance of being” or “being as resonance,” as Nancy puts it, or, in Feldenkrais’s terms, his “crippling methods for achieving security” is his means of becoming enlightened.72 Odysseus, therefore, like the élue, is a negotiated being, who requires this blindness as an essential ingredient in a contractual listening. Odysseus of course is a willing submissive, but ironically, the role of mistress and slave can also be inverted: by living through the Sirens’ song, Odysseus comes to have dominance over them.73 Likewise, in Stravinsky’s Danse sacrale, both the listener and the élue can both simulate dominant and submissive roles without any need to fulfill their respective contracts. The suspense of the end of the work is predicated on this mutual disavowal of the élue’s death, an economization of desire awaiting transduction into fantasy.74 Both are hypnotized by the suspense and possibility of autoerotic fulfillment.75 The ruse of the chosen one’s death and the idea of regeneration and rebirth—the “Rite” itself—is the “Law” (an assumed convention and outcome of the sacrifice) that becomes a necessary fiction for the purposes of art.76 This “law” only occurs in the imagination, in the utopian promise of modernity that has animated and irradiated the kudos, the mythology, and the attempt to discipline Le Sacre through analysis and performance since its premiere.77

F6540.indb 162

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

163

Such disciplining creates the illusion that the chosen one is wholly knowable: her choice and her sacrifice. But in giving herself for sacrifice, her identity is also effaced; that she has no name is a necessary disavowal that elevates her beyond death to mythic proportions.78 This difference between the given and what is imagined of her is a fantasy of a liminal listening, but the pleasure of knowing, despite the wish for it to be otherwise, is denied. In fact, the élue is placed at the end of the ballet like an idol, no more knowable than a dancer on a music box.79 She is a “gift” who, embroiled in an attempted exchange, nevertheless remains emancipated from the giver or any implied receiver (Adorno’s listener), wrapped in submissive immanence and contingency.80 As such, her near impervious hermeticism, her pagan heroism and cold chthonic spirituality (typical of the dominant),81 makes her an apogee of the sublime that, like Wanda in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, both derides the listener’s illusion of dominance even as it entrances him and acts a means of reinforcing her (patriarchal) dominance.82 The listener as masochist submits to her authority (obeying the “law of the father”) to obtain a forbidden pleasure.83 To listen to the promise of her death and the punishment of its absence in Stravinsky’s castrating (guillotine-like) “noise,” rather than empowering “a new and independent virility,” as Deleuze puts it, marks both a triumph of a fantasy and a rude moment of awakening, an irrigation of the ear, a “rebirth” replete with a rush of implications.84 These implications (construed as political and inhumane rather than merely contingent) are the “end” that animates Adorno’s narrative. For Adorno, the élue’s sublimity (although he does not use this term) is evoked through a pleasure of an imaginary knowledge of her, which attempts to obviate (but in fact exacerbates) the pain of being unable to come to terms with the sacrificial ideal of the élue. Adorno’s ideological critique focuses on the Freudian resonances of Stravinsky’s musical language as a semantic indicator and conveyor of narrative trauma, but in the Danse sacrale, this is a foil that diverts attention from an inability to invade the sublime, to access her “self.” Instead, Adorno’s reading is forced to invent her submissive character to encapsulate her and to define her sacrifice “within the horizon of the other,” the listener who neither refuses nor disdains her sacrifice.85 Would a liminal listening therefore be able to hear the resonance within the élue’s body, what Valéry calls “the invisible wall of a sphere of energy within the living being”?86 Would this be an aural invasion of her sublimity: an imaginary possession of her body that has passed into a diegesis of her soul? Conversely, if the listener were excluded from the narrative of her body, would this itself be another traumatic narrative of Le Sacre? Would

F6540.indb 163

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

164

Robert Sholl

a liminal listening, an irrigation of the ear, hear and expose her deficiency (or her abnegation) of identity and meaning as her power? That such invasions of her “inner life . . . as a closed circle of resonance” (Valéry) are not possible in Adorno’s reading (his own domination signals but also endorses the destruction of her identity) forces her reification into a narrative pantomime to reinforce an epistemological illusion of security; reducing her to a “law” suppresses a mature listening that is spontaneous and creative.87 Adorno, rather, endorses the myth of Le Sacre—the reasons for its claim to totality, its gestures, metaphors, and symbols.88 In effect, Adorno’s own fatigued criticism validates his perception of Stravinsky’s ahistorical heresy—its originality— only to instantiate his own redemptive, transcendent exorcism of Stravinsky’s “tricks”: the simulation of guilelessness, and despair freighted as affirmation (truth and authenticity).89 Adorno stands like Aaron, as Cecil B. DeMille imagines him in his film The Ten Commandments (1956), at the bottom of Mt. Sinai, reluctantly participating in and yet resisting a graven idol, without any promise of Moses’s arrival.90 Despite this ideological and narrative dancing around the golden calf (the élue), was there anything to hear inside her body? A mature listening to Le Sacre might acknowledge and listen to the narrative of her body as an illusion of security (without any ethical or sentimental imperatives), as much as to the phantasmagorical in Le Sacre as an axiom of modernist music. Modernist music is like a corpse that will not die but is periodically insufflated by utopian ideology only to die again. Stravinsky’s élue, likewise, cannot die (dead bodies make no sound). Instead, a liminal listening to her body and music history as a self-reflexive form of listening and awareness would be a type of maturation in which the listener assumes the role of a doctor listening to the corpse and rejoicing in any signs of life.

Masochism and Spirituality You did not choose me but I chose you and I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. John 15:16 There is a kind of mysticism in perversion: the greater the renunciation, the greater and the more secure the gains.91

Liminal musical expression is axiomatic to Olivier Messiaen’s religiousmodernist music. Messiaen’s eschatological and ecstatic art is a paradigm of

F6540.indb 164

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

165

musical ellipses, where “ . . . ” represents what is sensed or believed, a faith unsayable except in art. In Messiaen’s music, there are many liminal experiences that make unusual demands on the listener’s kinaesthetic imagination. These include the following: the qualitative change of metabolism required to listen to the extreme lenteur of Le Banquet Céleste (1928); the anxiety provoked in the listener observing the violinist struggling to maintain a barely audible tone (ppp) in its uppermost register at the conclusion of the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941); the extreme physicality of the virtuoso piano writing in nos. X and XI of the Vingt Regards sur l’EnfantJésus (1944); the representation of the beating heart of Christ within the Virgin in the eleventh piece of Première Communion de la Vierge; the overwhelming saturation of resonance of the tam-tam crescendos in the third movement of Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (1964); and the horstempo avian heterophony of the Grandes Concerts d’Oiseaux (at fig. 118) in tableau 6 of Messiaen’s opera St François d’Assise (1975–83).92 While such moments evoke a human (kinaesthetic) response to the heights and depths of Messiaen’s Christian faith, the extreme events of the Christian faith— the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ—are surprisingly rarely depicted in his music.93 It seems that representing such extremes is not as important to Messiaen as embodying the awe of his faith and exhorting the listener to participate in it. Messiaen realized early on that he could only point to the truths of the Christian faith: language and faith were insufficient.94 To evangelize and imprint his faith, he needed a more direct, naïve, but subtle means to “bend the ear” of secular humanity than surrealist metaphors or musical choreography.95 As a synaesthete, Messiaen theorized this listener participation in his ideal of sound-color dazzlement (éblouissement).96 For Messiaen, the extreme and changing levels of dissonance in his harmonies were to be experienced as an embodiment of color in his music. To experience this color was, for Messiaen, to experience God. He therefore remade the negative modernist associations of dissonance into an experience in which the ego and the self are saturated and subverted to God’s radiance. Like the person who looks at a stained-glass window, Messiaen wanted his music (light) to draw the listener out through the window to be reconstituted in the white light of the divine. Messiaen did not merely desire communication with or experience of the divine, or even necessarily the annihilation of the individual by God, but he actually desired a music that transfigured the individual, so that he or she can become a glorified body—“divine.”97 For the listener to be incorporated into this ontological fantasy requires a listening that is not just processing information or witnessing but a kin-

F6540.indb 165

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

166

Robert Sholl

aesthetic submission to the composer’s vision. Listening to the promise of death in Le Sacre becomes a listening to the promise of a new (Christian) life in Messiaen’s opera. But is Francis really listening? Or is he, as God’s “chosen one,” depicted in Giotto’s and Fra Angelico’s frescoes of St. Francis’s reception of the stigmata, subjected to the auditory blindness of God’s revelation that promotes a necessary amnesia to his own transformation and the narrative of the opera?98 Three crucial moments of transformation in Messiaen’s St François d’Assise provide exemplars of this function of éblouissement that are subtly different from Messiaen’s own ideal of this concept.99 While the transformation of the leper, the stigmata, and Francis’s death, discussed later, are all precipitated in dissonance, the resonance of this dissonance returns itself to Francis in transformations realized in silence.100 Messiaen’s opera therefore explores the diegetical nature of Francis’s transformation; the audience is enabled to hear the shaping of the contingent and negotiated aspect of his selfhood not just through dramaturgical narrative but through constructed musical absences. Francis’s first cathartic incision occurs in tableau 3. Francis’s horror at the leper is represented in a cluster of brass and tam-tams (at two bars before fig. 18 and at fig. 21). Dissonance then becomes both an agent of Francis’s internal state (shown through the use of his leitmotif at figs. 76, 80, 84, and 86) and also indicative of Christ’s (the chorus’s) burgeoning transformative presence and power in both Francis’s and the leper’s souls (figs. 42, 51, 53, 55, 57, 75, 79, 83).101 Dissonance acts as a window onto their ontological and spiritual states and precedes Francis’s embrace of the leper in silence. While the embrace is a metaphor for the central act of forgiveness in the Christian faith, the silence supplies an absence, a spiritual aperture for (self-)revelation in dialogue with kenotic (self-emptying) release. A short passage in C major follows at fig. 90 (another transformation of Francis’s theme as Francis hears and becomes identified with the self-reflexivity of grace), but it is in the silence immediately after this that Messiaen tells us in his narrative directions that “Francis glows [s’écarte]. The leper stands up, healed, his arms lifted, completely transformed.”102 The second instance of transformation that I wish to refer to occurs at the reception of the stigmata in tableau 7. The first four wounds are inflicted in the silence before fig. 54, to music that is reminiscent of the angel knocking at the monastery door at fig. 39 in tableau 4 and that, ironically, as a musical medium of becoming, distantly recalls the 11/4 bar of Le Sacre in which the élue is “positioned” for her sacrificial dance. The fifth wound (to Francis’s side) also occurs in silence. Repeated emphatic disso-

F6540.indb 166

6/17/15 8:30:11 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

167

nant cluster chords are conjoined with the chorus aphasically stab-singing “A” and “O” (perhaps symbolic of Alpha and Omega) at fig. 55. The negative modernist associations of dissonance—suffering, chaos, death—are inverted, or rather reconfigured as color in Messiaen’s aesthetics, to become the means of Christian transformation. Dissonance in this context acts as an affirmative agency of God’s power to overcome Francis’s subjectivity as much as Francis’s own “crippling method for achieving security” or holiness.103 God’s domination makes Christ’s wounds become literally visible on Francis: he becomes a second host, a surrogate for Christ, and the symbol of eternal life. The final important moment of transformation to be discussed appears in the eighth and final tableau, in which the audience hears Francis, in a moment reminiscent of Isolde in her Verklärung, being willed to death by the chorus (here representing Christ). What for Wagner was an erotic lovedeath becomes a Christian death brought on by the love of Christ, somewhat perversely troped in painful dissonance. From fig. 97, a rising tide of increasingly chromatically and registerally saturated dissonant music that once again recalls the angel’s knocking and that of the stigmata alternates with Francis’s predominantly tonally orientated music. The power of God, signaled through this dissonance, continues and increases even after his death (in silence just before fig. 113), through to another silence before fig. 119. St. Francis’s spiritual journey toward enlightenment in these exemplars can be understood as a masochist search for greater pleasure through pain. Chosen by God, he must disavow his own human agency and reconfigure his own suffering as a “necessary precondition for achieving” the pleasure of enlightenment.104 In his subjection to the divine dominance, Francis is subordinated by power (dissonance) and by “the process of becoming a subject” that desires coherence (knowledge of the divine), that braves the possibility of his annihilation.105 His burgeoning faith and holiness make him aware of his own distance from the “holy” itself, and his death only consummates his fantasy of bridging this ecstatic gap.106 Francis’s transformation empowers Francis to be powerless, and the ultimate act of powerlessness occurs in his death, in which he loses his physical presence and disappears into the ether of Messiaen’s ecstatic and violent music. The progression of saintly embodiment—the embrace of the leper and the stigmata—turns to one of physical disembodiment, as a redemption from Francis’s autoerotic will to die. His glorification (or the becomingglorified of his body) is a transgression and a jouissance chosen by Francis (submitter) and God (dominator) is a telos essential to Francis’s “contract” with the divine.107

F6540.indb 167

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

168

Robert Sholl

The three transformative moments described earlier, in which Francis becomes a saint, becomes a second host, and is finally resurrected, are excisions of his former life that distance him from the people around him in a way that is consistent with medieval spiritual asceticism.108 Francis’s risk of faith is inscribed in the rhetoric of Messiaen’s musical language of éblouissement. The repetition of the dissonance is symptomatic not only of the “breakthrough” that Sander van Maas ascribes to éblouissement but of a character on a tightrope, teetering on the brink of breakdown through desire and dissolution, searching for that which will confirm his (true Christian) identity. Éblouissement occurs through the mediation of a dissonance that represents a struggle between God and human autonomy. Increasing the power of each dose of éblouissement and the regularity of the injections is vital for the required reconfiguration of Francis’s humanity (more negatively, a renunciation of selfhood) and the possibility of transformation.109 Francis’s new embodiment occurs offstage. In Le Sacre, the resonance of the “death” occurs in the imagination of the listener, but in Messiaen’s opera, the realization of the contract of faith (Francis’s resurrection) is amplified in Messiaen’s increasingly ecstatic music until the concluding white light of C major becomes a glorification of his and God’s abiding absence. Messiaen as agent of the resurrection is therefore the agent of God; he therefore both becomes the dominator in a masochistic contract with humanity and, as the arch-dramaturge of the opera, comes to dominate his own God. To listen to éblouissement is, surprisingly perhaps, to participate in a masochist relationship between the human and the divine, but it is one in which, in an ultimately perverse depiction of faith, Francis and Messiaen provoke a fantasy of overcoming or dominating the divine. If God is present in Francis’s intact selfhood (present in sound hermetically as “return and encounter,” to evoke Nancy’s thought again),110 then the religious fabula of his spiritual life is only contrived to be subverted. To listen to Messiaen’s opera liminally is to hear the trauma of an embodied death of God in which the neutralization of religion is wrapped in a dogmatically correct picture of the human-divine relationship. In an interview with Claude Samuel, Messiaen comments, “The grandeur of God is precisely that, being eternally happy, he so loved the world that he wished to participate in its suffering.”111 Messiaen’s comments reflect an axiom of Christian belief, that the incarnation (God made man in Christ) allowed not only that God redeem the sins of humanity through his death (and this is the allegorical nature of Messiaen’s opera promoted through Francis’s perverse evocation and renunciation of heroism) but that

F6540.indb 168

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

169

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

through this death, humanity is able to envision and eventually participate in this divine telos.112 The crucifixion (and Francis’s death), therefore, from a masochist perspective, is an act that instantiates a contract (a faith) that must necessarily remain unfulfilled. Listening to Messiaen’s opera is traumatic because it poses a rhetorical question of how to live in the (secular) irresolvable aftermath of the constructed absence created by the crucifixion, which marked the first moment in which Christ (God) as the giver of forgiveness and the promise of eternal life (in the resurrection) began to disappear through a kenosis that would instantiate his gift.113 Messiaen’s own narrative assumes the listener’s “reciprocity” of faith,114 which is, somewhat perversely, a promise of a “great reward” that capitalizes on (if not renounces) the freedom of the original gift.115 The “special conditions for further adult maturation,” as Feldenkrais puts it,116 is therefore located in a creative and traumatic listening to Messiaen’s opera that might release the listener from the mutual infection of faith that flows through the arteries of both God and man (without an origin in either), that, like a pleasurable potion swallowed simultaneously, leaves both enthralled, waiting to see who dies first.

The Avant-Garde and Embodiment I believe that we can endow daily vocal behaviors with musical sense, just as everyday motions of the body can be developed choreographically. Luciano Berio117 I feel a blissful and utterly eternal interplay in me and around me, and amid the to-and-fro there is nothing into which I cannot merge. Then it is as if my body consisted entirely of coded messages revealing everything to me. . . . But when this strange bewitchment stops, . . . I can no more express in rational language what made up this harmony permeating me and the entire world. Hugo von Hofmannsthal118

Philipp, Lord Chandos’s “letter” documents a search for (and an inability to find) a utopian language that could overcome the historical and linguistic break of modernism. Chandos’s “language of which I know not one word” and Moses’s lament “O word that I lack” at the end of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera Moses und Aron (1930 –32) resonate in the corpse of modernity where there would be a soul.119 To insufflate the body, to make it speak and

F6540.indb 169

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

170

Robert Sholl

hear, became the linguistic quest of the twentieth century: a search for a stable identity. The “zero hour” in music was a point of autonomy and purity, in works such as Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), in the articulate destruction of musical motive in Pierre Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (1946) and Structures 1a (1951), or in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1951), works in which the “organic and unstable reciprocity” of musical elements, as Luciano Berio puts it, was marginalized, dethroned, or (more positively) reconfigured.120 These works form a logical apogee of musical language and history but also embody the hubris of a nihilistic disengagement from any historicized sense of progress. The hieratic defiance or renunciation that marked this hubris was an illusion of progress, an amnesia that was only a diaphanous meniscus barely concealing the modernist alienation below the surface. That compositional research, as part of this illusion, superseded inspiration (or derived from it) enabled a moment when the corpse of twentieth-century music could hear itself: a historical moment of “return and encounter.”121 The musical works of the mid-twentieth-century European avant-garde (including those listed in the following paragraphs) instantiated a masochist relationship, in which this illusion of power (knowledge and research) became a justification of music, an excuse as much as a raison d’être for the domination of language (as discourse) over the listener.122 Timbre, density and intensity of sound, attack, duration, and register (organized to usurp melody and harmony) created a musical fantasy that only exacerbated the insecurity essential to the dominating thin rhetorical ideological lacquer of the “new.” For the listener, however, such fantasy was a positive spin on the shattering of the logic and telos of line and voice leading. This represented part of a broken contract with the listener that had two principal facets. What Schoenberg called the “emancipation of the dissonance” meant that sense had been reconfigured, if not annihilated, for the listener, and as a background correlation, there was a difference between the hidden (structural) coherence of the language of music and the way in which it was articulated.123 This is already evident in Danse sacrale of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, in which, from fig. 186, the somatic dissemblance of the élue is prefigured in the way that the motive, rhythm, and harmony centrifugally defer from the stability that the bass (pedal) might ordinarily impart or, equally, in the ways in which the sense of the Passacaglia in Nacht is obfuscated in the eighth song of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) as a means of its own development. Stravinsky and Schoenberg therefore control the degree of stability that is aurally conceivable. Their work illustrates both

F6540.indb 170

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

171

a tension with tradition and also the illusory promise of liberation from stability and identity that would perhaps be a true erotics of music. In this vein, the bewilderment, the surrealist dépaysement, for the listener to Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître (1953–55) reincarnates another form of utopian idealism in which a hidden grammar serves expression. This is a kind of musical eroticism in which the hand of the dominator is explicit but veiled; yet it perpetrates itself on the listener to shock, overwhelm, and possess, to penetrate and resonate in the skull. Bodily resonance is most intimately felt through the voice. So it was ironic that so many avant-garde composers—Boulez in Le marteau; Stockhausen in Gesang der Jünglinge (1956); Mauricio Kagel in Anagrama (1955– 58); Luigi Nono in Il canto sospeso (1956); Luciano Berio in a number of works including Thema-omaggio a Joyce (1958), Circles (1960), Epifanie (1959–61), and Passaggio (1961–62); and finally György Ligeti in Aventures (1962) and Nouvelles Aventures (1963–65)—would turn to the voice, the most subjective medium, to complexify or confront cathartically the relationship between the musical surface and its structural depth. Writing in the early 1970s, Roland Barthes identified what he called the “grain of the voice,” which points toward a physiological focal point in the throat, a materiality of the body that emerges from an enunciation of being.124 To listen to this “grain” is to listen to an embodiment in sound: an exteriorization of interiority.125 The turn to language, however, in these avant-garde works seems to objectify a “parasitic” uncertainty about this interiority and exteriorizes a semantic confusion that embodies what Feldenkrais calls a crippling method for achieving security.126 This is evidenced through the spectrum of critical opinion on what kinds of organization (if any) should control the sound of self-identity and being, a false attempt at promoting security that was a discourse on the broken material body of modernism.127 The turn to the voice therefore acted to affirm the subversion and even obliteration of “the human” in modernist music. If Barthes’s “grain” acts as a synecdoche of the body, it also sets in relief the absence of the mind, the soul, and even the individual.128 It is this constructed absence that resonates beyond the primal violence and the threat to human and self-identity in Berio’s Visages (1961), in which Cathy Berberian’s voice was cut up and reassembled on tape.129 In Visages, the listener is drawn into Berberian’s bodily space and a full spectrum of her bodily experiences, from torture and childbirth to orgasm and rape, which must have contributed to the RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana, the intended initial recipients of the work) proscribing its radio diffusion as “obscene.”130 Richard Causton’s observation of Visages that “the extreme

F6540.indb 171

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

172

Robert Sholl

and carefully calculated tension between the great accuracy of semantic specificity and the total lack of semantic specificity forces the mind of the listener into creative activity” points to the ways in which intimations of sense created in the work (allusions to language, gesture, rhetoric, and the preconscious) create a semantic hall of mirrors designed ineluctably to draw the listener into Berberian’s world.131 This hall of mirrors enables a tension in the work between phantasmagorical atomization of Berberian’s identity and Berio’s “choreographic” masochistic struggle to form a new identity for her beyond an acousmatic existence.132 The listener witnesses not just, as Berberian states of Berio’s Sequenza III (1965), “an X-ray of a woman’s inner life” but a dissection and a musical molestation of an electronic simulacrum of her.133 Her presence is brought into tension with what cannot be exposed. The materiality of Berberian, the “grain” or “phonic metal” of her voice, to apply Barthes’s analogy, is given, mechanically eviscerated by what Barthes calls “an erotic mixture of timbre and language” reassembled for the listener.134 To listen to Visages is a deeply uncomfortable and theatrical experience because the “grain” of the singer confronts and even dominates the listener. Berio subjects the listener to Berberian’s dépaysement, so that the listener hears her hearing herself from within and experiences her destabilizing interaction with the electronic sounds from within: “a dialogue of specific presences and absences” that both observe and renew themselves.135 The threat to self-identity reaches its logical outcome when, near the end of the work, Berberian’s voice disintegrates into the electronic ether: a cybernetic assimilation that is a manifestation of Adorno’s fear of human objectification in what has become known as the “posthuman.” But there is no body to mourn; neither is there a score of the work, only a recording as a memorial to what Adorno calls “the rationalization process.”136 Berberian, like Stravinsky’s élue, remains an idol of the sublime, unknowable and traumatic as a constructed absence.137 Any attempt to resurrect or reconstitute her from the sometimes violent semantic promiscuity that attempts to escape in vain from her “grain,” sublimely sealed in a decontaminated and impervious recorded vial, only produces a fantasy of her identity. Adorno states in his prophetic essay “Vers une musique informelle,” Musique Informelle would be music in which the ear can hear live from the material what has become of it. Because what it has become includes and culminates in the rationalization process, this process is preserved. At the same time, however, it is deprived of the element of violence it contained, thanks to the non-arbitrary nature of the subjec-

F6540.indb 172

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

173

tive reaction. If the subject was the embodiment of rationality, it is now both negated and salvaged. It renounces its surplus over the composition. It does not cease to mold the material, nor does it furnish it with arbitrary intentions. But the acts in terms of which all this takes place remain those of spontaneous listening. This would be the threshold of an informal music, marking it off from a thing-like alienated music, as well as from so-called communication.138

Adorno could almost have been writing about Visages. While he points toward a music that would heal the broken contract between hidden organization and comprehensibility described earlier, more presciently, his critique invokes a music that refers to or hears itself, as Jean-Luc Nancy might say, but defers its resonance and sense to the listener’s productive imagination. Berio himself described his own utopian vision of musical integration: The action—just the presence of the interpreter who sings or plays— will be completely assimilated in this enlargement of the musical experience. Listeners will less than ever before be put in the position of having to close their eyes to abandon themselves to musical dreams; they will be invited by the situation itself to consciously participate in the action. For the sense to become intelligible, they will have to follow the transformations and the unpredictable proliferation of vocal and instrumental sounds through various modes of practical expression. All the while, they will have to take into consideration the more or less effective presence of a visible action on the part of the performer. This dense fabric of relations will unceasingly stimulate conscious reactions in composers and performers alike. And as it energizes an ever more participating public, it will definitively purge our musical customs of any residual duality.139

The vision that Adorno and Berio share does not merely point toward a listening that is experiential or that responds mimetically to musical action (like a ballet dancer or a puppet) or that is even mediated by the body but points to a listening that is creative and embodied (physically or virtually). The implication is one of a composed or improvised music of the body or a music that conjoins the body with an instrument (physically, virtually, or digitally) or a music that results from the body hearing itself, perhaps even from its own precognitive thought or from the soul: a new Gesamtkunstwerk that rejoins meaning and sensation, poiesis and aisthesis.140 To reattach music to the soul through the body is a fantasy of liminal listening. It would be a locus of stability and maturation in which being

F6540.indb 173

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

174

Robert Sholl

had overcome the hermeneutic. Stravinsky, Messiaen, and Berio express the dramatization of the negation of existence in different languages. Noise music, as an apogee of musical violence and a genre of antimusic (not just of musical saturation and excess), exemplifies a repression of the body’s ability to hear. However, in its destruction of identity, noise music also points to a stable locus of being. While its linguistic violence transgresses the normative, it also controls chaos.141 The illusion of death as a liminal space in this music arises as an endgame of the kinaestheticization of music in the twentieth century. Death itself remains what can only be thought. A liminal listening therefore hears this eschatological space, measures its span, but does not bridge it. It would exhort the listener to possess this space and be possessed by it. To relinquish control and to abandon oneself to this liminal arena enables a maturation of modernity’s horizon of possibilities, a therapy but also a telos audible only in extreme listening.

F6540.indb 174

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

chapter 10

Sounds of Belonging Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight Liedeke Plate

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy uses the term “accent” to designate the films made by exiled or otherwise displaced filmmakers in the West.1 Offering a survey of the themes, style, and modes of production of exilic and diasporic films, Naficy calls them “accented” in comparison to Hollywood cinema. In this essay, I propose to inquire into the question of listening in /to literature by transposing the concept of the “accent” as a marker of linguistic and cultural difference to the register of writing, flexing it to encompass both the linguistic and the musical accent. The notion of an accented writing is certainly not unproblematic. Particularly in its suggestion of a deviation from some (implicitly neutral) linguistic norm, it raises questions as to which kind of (literary) writing counts as marked or unmarked. As I propose to demonstrate in my reading of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) as an accented text, however, “accent” is useful in that it enables us to speak of Rhys’s postcolonial and female-authored novel in terms of its linguistic and cultural differences, of its way of articulating, literally and literarily, “a dislocation that is linguistic, geographic, and cultural,” as Edvige Giunta puts it in her study of Italian American women writers, Writing with an Accent.2 175

F6540.indb 175

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

176

Liedeke Plate

Accent is a theme in Rhys’s biography. Born in Roseau, Dominica, Jean Rhys was a Caribbean-voiced white Creole of mixed descent, her father a Welsh doctor and her mother a Dominican Creole of Scottish ancestry. Rhys “would never lose her West Indian accent”; “its lilting rhythms and French patois appealed to her more than the clipped English correctedness.”3 Yet her accent was also a source of anguish for Rhys, as when her career as an actress was cut short because of it or when people would mock her voice: it was “of a most unfortunate timbre, something between a high-pitched pipe and a nasal whine peculiar to certain transatlantic regions,” as one former lover puts it.4 Accent is, of course, a matter of aurality. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition), it is formed by tone, pitch, intonation, and pronunciation, and it is marked by rhythm and stress: Accent. The mode of utterance peculiar to an individual, locality, or nation, as “he has a slight accent, a strong provincial accent, an indisputably Irish, Scotch, American, French, or German accent.” This utterance consists mainly in a prevailing quality of tone, or in a peculiar alteration of pitch, but may include mispronunciation of vowels or consonants, misplacing of stress, and misinflection of a sentence. The locality of a speaker is generally clearly marked by this kind of accent.

Though accent can be reduced to “pronunciation,” the social meanings attached to “the way in which anything is said,” as the subsequent entry for the term in the Oxford English Dictionary reads, are anything but indifferent. Thought of in terms of deviation from some neutral, unmarked, and unaccented speech, accent generally serves to designate a person’s social and/or cultural difference from what is perceived as the standard way of speaking. As the “mis-” prefix in the definition just quoted suggests, there is a stigma attached to accent, which hinges on an improper use of voice, sound, and pitch. Linking a speaker to social and geographical place, accent is a marker of belonging. In the speaker’s desire to speak the dominant or prestigious language “without an accent,” accent speaks as much of longing “to have a proper place,” as my Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (second edition) defines “to belong,” as of actually belonging to it. In its signals of longing and of belonging, accent is a sound of the self that can be played up or down. On the one hand, speakers can attempt to lose their accent and assimilate to the socially desirable speech, as Rhys attempted to mask hers by whispering.5 On the other hand, they can opt to invest the differences signaled by accent with social value and so accent their speech; in the terms

F6540.indb 176

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

177

of the OED, “to mark emphatically or distinctly; to heighten, sharpen or intensify; to make conspicuous.” In this essay, I propose to use the term accent as a sound of be/longing, the sound of the self as it articulates its relationship to place, to inquire into listening as an activity integral to the reading of literature. Accented writing, I propose, may be invested with all kinds of intentions on the part of the writer, speakers, and narrators; in the end, however, it all depends on what the listener hears. It is this relationship between narrative voice and the auditory modes of textual attention that I wish in particular to explore, sounding as it were the inflected aurality of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight by paying attention to the aural dimensions of the text as a performance of the self that takes place and is articulated in space. “Accent” is a linguistic feature that inscribes parole with individual be/longing, drawing attention to the aural features of the word, to the tempi and rhythms of language, and to stresses and pitches, as well as to social and cultural inflections. As such, “accent” can be viewed to function as the signature of the authorial self that inflects language, much like, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of discursive individuation, the way a speaker “populates [a word] with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.”6 Good Morning, Midnight evokes the experience of displacement above all through its soundscape. In particular, the novel represents a sense of being displaced through its multilingualism and intertextuality, which compose a rich orchestration of languages and voices, especially through the inclusion of many allusions to music and popular songs besides references to literature. Also important are its rhythms, both of its prose and as invoked within the narrative. To read Good Morning, Midnight as an accented text, I submit, is to read the novel as much with the eye as with the ear. It is to attend to its marks of displacement and emplacement, its traces of travel and residence, its signs of longing and belonging as they echo through the text’s themes, style, intertextual references, and autographic inscriptions of the self. Such a reading constitutes a form of attention that invites one to see and hear the textual differences of Rhys’s fiction, to shift the focus from sight to sound. As Naficy puts it, “Stressing musical and oral accents redirects our attention from the hegemony of the visual and of modernity toward the acousticity of exile.”7 In the following pages, I will first sound the terrain of intermediated listening, discussing the ways the novel uses space to define its protagonist’s dislocation and explicating how it connects space and sound. The text’s capacity for pulling the reader’s auditory attention toward its sonic dimensions is then looked at in closer detail by attending

F6540.indb 177

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

178

Liedeke Plate

to its many references to music, sound, and accent, as well as by listening to the sounds of the self as they are inscribed in the text’s signatures and autographs. As I argue, to read Rhys’s novel as an accented text is to situate it within the context of a critique of modernism’s dominant discourse of the city that is necessarily historical, inevitably attentive to gender, class, territory, ethnicity. For this, I refer to Michel de Certeau’s metaphor of walking as a speech act. In his essay “Walking in the City,” Certeau defines walking as “a space of enunciation,” explaining, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language.”8 Certeau’s metaphor of a pedestrian speech act that “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’ ”—indeed, his notion of “a rhetoric of walking”9—underpins my reading of Good Morning, Midnight as an accented text. It provides me with the analytic tools to show Rhys’s novel to be a text “of cultural and temporal difference” that literarily articulates the urban script with what Ian Chambers has termed “a new inflection, an unexpected accent,”10 revealing its gendered spatialization of the city to be marked as syncopated in the demeanor, the step, the occupation of space.

Mapping the Terrain, Sounding the Space Jean Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight is set in Paris on the eve of the Second World War.11 It centers on the experience of its narrator, Sasha Jansen, as she returns to and wanders through a city that had been witness to her past happiness and unhappiness, and it articulates this experience verbally in a narrative that recurrently emphasizes its sonic dimensions. The story can be reconstructed as follows: In the 1920s, Sasha first came to Paris as the young bride of Enno, an impecunious chansonnier who regularly deserted her, on occasion returning with the spoils of some shady deal. Living in hotel rooms, more often than not with little or no money, and frequently left to her own devices, Sasha finds employment in a variety of short-term jobs. The marriage eventually fails, and Sasha moves back to London, where she receives a small allowance of “two-pound-ten a week and a room just off the Gray Inn’s Road” (38). Now, in “late October, 1937” (76), she has come back to Paris for a brief stay, ostensibly to “get away” for a while, from her dreary drunken life in London. For as her friend Sidonie, who lends her the money for the trip and arranges for her room, sees it, “You need a change. Why don’t you go back to Paris for a bit? . . . You could get yourself some new clothes—you certainly need them” (11).

F6540.indb 178

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

179

Like a tourist, then, Sasha is in Paris briefly to escape from her daily life. But as she visits places, meets people, eats out in restaurants, hangs out in cafés and bars, goes to the movies, and shops for a new hat, scent, and stockings, it is not only dépaysement that she finds but rather what might be termed repaysement. For Sasha, the streets, bars, and hotel rooms all exist in a present overlaid with memories of the past. This is an experience familiar to anyone who returns to a city in which he or she used to live: “to be made sharply aware of the passage of time,” as Elizabeth Wilson writes in her essay “Looking Backwards: Nostalgia and the City.”12 Yet in Sasha’s case, these places literally appear to speak to her, continually reminding her of her life there and then. For her, Paris is a “theatre of memory,” a stage for the performance of memory, the remembering and recalling of which she conceives as a sonic recording of the past: “The gramophone is going strong in my head: ‘Here this happened, here that happened’ ” (15). Throughout the novel, places function as chronotopes of Sasha’s personal history, as the nodes where her biographical time materializes in geographical and narrative space. Articulating her sense of who she is and where she belongs, these transitional sites of encounter also are the chronotopes of a dislocated modernity. Sasha’s temporality, it is worth observing, is synchronous neither with the world of the Anglo-American “community” whose locales she nonetheless haunts13 nor with that of the French center whose privileged sites she treads. Circulating in a world of exiles, émigrés, and otherwise displaced subjects in the transnational world of Paris in 1937, Sasha instead crosses paths with a host of figures whose experiences of exclusion and dispossession she both shares and does not share—a crossing of paths that turns her trajectory into both a metaphor for displacement and a metonym for its correlate, homelessness. The terrain of Sasha’s wanderings is Paris’s Rive Gauche, where she spatially sounds the self by sounding space, navigating a complex memoryscape whose landmarks have been immortalized in the writings of the English and American expatriates who took up residence there in the first decades of the twentieth century: Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, and so on. Although there is, of course, a whole French tradition of writings about the Left Bank, because Rhys writes in English and publishes in England and the United States, her novel is to be read—indeed, listened to—within the Anglo-American context of production, reception, and address. Thus, to “place” her novel is already to listen to (use of ) language speaking of be/longing. It is also to recognize how the evocations of these landmarks

F6540.indb 179

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

180

Liedeke Plate

in her narrative serve to situate her as an outsider. From her hotel in (or around the corner of ) the Rue Victor Cousin,14 she sets out on walks that take her to the quartier of Montparnasse, down the Boulevard St. Michel to the Place St. Michel with “the fountain with the beautiful prancing horses” (39). She arranges to meet at the Dôme (41) and drinks Pernods on its terrace (60), has brandies at the Closerie des Lilas (61) and more brandiesand-soda at the Deux Magots (128), sits in the Luxembourg Gardens near “the pond where the children sail their boats” (46), “wander[s] about the narrow streets near the Panthéon” (7), goes to the Place de l’Odéon (60) and to the Cinéma Danton (89). These are the Left Bank’s touristy spots, then and now; they are also the sites of expatriate English and American writing—the sites written about and from: “not ‘Paris’ at all,” Jean Rhys wrote in the 1960s, responding to representations of Paris by writers such as Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, but “ ‘America in Paris’ or ‘England in Paris.’ ”15 As Sasha retraces her former routes through the locales abandoned by the Anglo-American expatriate community, called home in the wake of the Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression, her walks rearticulate the myth of Paris in the 1920s, her experiences of dislocation stressing the difference of what Henry James termed “the great literary workshop of Paris” and Ezra Pound called “the laboratory of ideas in the arts” for those who had no home to return to.16 Take, for instance, Hemingway’s fond remembrances in A Moveable Feast—“how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy”—and Sasha’s memories of those same years.17 About the concentration of cafés on the Boulevard Montparnasse that would be called the “heart and nervous system of the . . . literary colony,”18 Hemingway recalls, some time in 1923, “Coming back from The Select, . . . I passed the collection of inmates at the Rotonde and, scorning vice and the collective instinct, crossed the boulevard to the Dôme.”19 In contrast, Sasha means to “avoid the damned Dôme,” for, as she puts it, “I have always disliked the place, except right at the start, when the plush wasn’t so resplendent and everybody spat on the floor” (60), and upon her arrival in Paris, waiting for the first time for Enno to come back with money, she remembers sitting in the very Rotonde that Hemingway scornfully shuns (103– 4). Sasha’s “spatial practice,” to use Certeau’s term, differs markedly from Hemingway’s.20 She experiences the city differently and spatializes it according to a set of movements, sounds, and rhythms of her own, for instance, in her sitting in the other café on the Boulevard Montparnasse, in her “habit of walking with [her] head down” (72) and “in cheap shoes with

F6540.indb 180

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

181

very high heels” (129), or in her being accosted in the very place that Hemingway claimed as his “home café” (70) and where he saw it as his right to sit and write undisturbed.21 As Sasha’s rhetorical question “By myself, where can I go?” (60) and the many scenes in which she is approached by men make clear, these differences are in part informed by gender: women do not occupy public spaces in the same way as men do.22 These differences are also sonic differences, as her reference to the sounds of high heels evidences: “And she walked so straight and quick on her high-heeled shoes. Tap, tap, tap, her heels” (103). As the perambulations of a flâneuse and an étrangère,23 Sasha’s itineraries can be viewed as the “illegitimate or eccentric routes into this male arena” forming the literature of modernity in Janet Wolff ’s account.24 Providing a corrective to such mythical accounts of expatriate life in Paris as Hemingway’s, they also articulate a vision of the city not as something that “stays with you” “wherever you go” and that can thus be taken home, as Hemingway has it,25 but as the tangible remains of what is past and gone, a space literally preoccupied by absence and forming rather a memorial echo chamber.

The AcoustiCity of Memory Sound plays an important role in Sasha’s memoryscape. Remembering the past, trailing along familiar paths, Sasha performs a 1920s archive as she sees what is no longer there and listens to “the gramophone record . . . going strong in [her] head: ‘Here this happened, here that happened’ ” (15). Literally out of step as she walks to the rhythms of her private past, Sasha maps her personal journey onto a geographically and historically situated city. As Sasha listens to her memory speak, her narrative draws attention to the acoustics of the past as it reverberates through the urban and mental spaces. Sasha is nostalgic for a mythical Paris resonant with the promise of happiness. “Tuned up to top pitch,” as she puts it, Sasha rehearses Enno’s phrase in an emphatic echo: “And when we get to Paris; when—we—get— to—Paris” (98)—remembering how the wheels of the train that took them there repeated, “Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris” (103), in a recurrent rhythm that kept her going, hopeful. Endlessly repeated, the name of her destination is also endlessly deferred, with each “Paris” different from the next, and the mythical one never reached, for it lies in the past: on her wedding night, Enno confesses to “just this nostalgia” for “certain houses, certain streets” (98). The Paris that Sasha finds in “late October, 1937” (76) is a Paris saturated not only with memories but also with tourists, flocked to the City of

F6540.indb 181

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

182

Liedeke Plate

Lights to visit the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, as the full title of the world exhibition of 1937 ran.26 For Sasha, the copresence of her past (in the form of memories) and of tourists heightens her sense of nonbelonging. On the one hand, and though her memories tell her differently, anchoring her in the place, she is repeatedly identified as a foreigner, an Englishwoman, and a tourist, as a person who does not belong there, who is only there temporarily, in transit—de passage—yet unable to pass, her body language as accented as her tongue. “It shouts ‘Anglaise,’ my hat” (14), she realizes, seeing herself as if through the eyes of others: “an English tourist” (30). On the other hand, and though she speaks of “We English” (37), Sasha cannot (or will not) identify with the English: on the hotel form, she does not give English as her nationality (13; we are not told what she filled in instead), and throughout the narrative, Englishness is associated with hypocrisy.27 Sasha’s rejection from the ranks of the French and her inability to align herself with the English, her double sense of nonbelonging, leads her to despond: “I have no pride—no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere” (38). The phrase echoes Virginia Woolf ’s words, in Three Guineas, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world”—words she inflects with her own perspective as an outsider and rewrites contrapuntally, thus intertextually underscoring nonbelonging.28 As Sasha feels neither French nor English, her condition is one of in-betweenness, of travel and translation.29 This is reflected in her language, wherein French and English words mingle to produce the idiosyncratic, “accented” speech typical of the expatriate: “speaking sometimes in French, sometimes in English,” as one character puts it (80).30 It is produced spatially in her identification of the hotel room as her place. As she—appropriately, appropriatingly—says on her return to the dark, red-curtained room on the fourth floor of the hotel she later calls “de l’Espérance” (147), “Here I belong and here I’ll stay” (34). A “transitional and transnational” space,31 “a place you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary,”32 the hotel is the site of inbetweenness. As James Clifford suggestively writes, “Everyone more or less in transit . . . Not so much ‘Where are you from?’ as ‘Where are you between?’ ”33 The hotel chronotope, which Clifford invokes so powerfully in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century as a “way into complex histories of traveling cultures (and cultures of travel) in the late twentieth century,”34 is the organizing image, the rallying point in Rhys’s narrative. This is not surprising: Clifford’s imagining “rewriting Paris of the twenties and thirties as travel encounters—including New World de-

F6540.indb 182

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

183

tours through the old—a place of departures, arrivals, transits,”35 paves the way for understanding it as the locus of a displaced modernity, even if he arrives to this insight through the detour not of the expatriate but of the Surrealists: “the Parisian hotels, homes away from home for the Surrealists, launching points for strange and wonderful urban voyages: Nadja, Paysan de Paris. . . . ‘L’Hôtel des Grands Hommes.’ ”36 As Clifford realizes, the hotel as ambivalent space of transience is “seriously problematic, in several major ways involving class, gender, race, cultural/historical location and privilege.”37 Sasha’s being told she “could have someone up [in her room] every hour” (126), indeed, invokes the hotel as a place of prostitution, the site of a sexual practice that is based on male motility across the division of space into private and public. Evoking “an older form of gentlemanly occidental travel, when home and abroad, city and country, East and West, metropole and antipodes, were more clearly fixed” (Clifford),38 the hotel chronotope becomes all the more fraught when we remember that “hotels have served as places of residence for the urban poor and homeless populations in Europe and North America, as well as for well-to-do cosmopolitan exiles and transnationals” (Naficy).39 The hotel as the chronotope of displacement and travel plays a structuring role in Good Morning, Midnight. The novel opens with the hotel as point of return, welcoming Sasha back from her wanderings through the city: “ ‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’ ” (9). As the room literally speaks to Sasha, who has been in Paris for five days, its evocation of “old times” superimposes images of the hotel as place of residence onto Sasha’s present short stay, imposing a sense of permanence onto the transient. For Sasha, the room that welcomes her back is “saturated with the past”: “It’s all the rooms I’ve ever slept in, all the streets I’ve walked in” (91). Though she has scaled the full ladder of hotel rooms—from the simplest room “up to the dizzy heights of the suite” and back—“A beautiful room with bath. A room with bath. A nice room. A room . . . ” (29)—she knows that, as the habitat of the culturally displaced, “all rooms are the same” (33): “Always the same stairs, always the same room” (120). What Rhys knew long before Marc Augé is that the hotel room is, like the street, both a place and a non-place, a space wherein history, culture, and identity disappear: “This is the Hotel Without-a-Name in the Street Without-a-Name, and the clients have no names, no faces,” Rhys writes (120). Augé explains, “The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations, only solitude, and similitude.”40 Mobility, in Sasha’s perspective, is predicated on capital: as “money circulates” (108), rooms follow one upon another according to the “swing high, swing low, swing to and

F6540.indb 183

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

184

Liedeke Plate

fro” (26, 118) of the wheel of fortune. Yet, to the extent that the movement from room to room is one from non-place to non-place, to long for a “better,” nicer room and believe one can escape to “a different plane” by moving to “a light room” (32) only more permanently installs one in the space of non-place, which could be anywhere and is, therefore, nowhere. Sasha warns, “But never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the whole social system. All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all any room is” (33). Compounding Sasha’s sense of nonbelonging and emphasizing the fleeting, anonymous character of the encounters that the nonspace occasions is the fact that, as she puts it drunkenly (and parodically), “Nobody else knows me but the street knows me” (89). Unlike the human beings who people the public spaces of Paris, the streets, her hotel room, the mirrors in the lavatories of restaurants—all seem to recognize her, their anthropomorphized sneers, leers, and grins reinforcing her being not welcome: If you have money and friends, houses are just houses. . . . If you are quite secure and your roots are well struck in, they know. They stand back respectfully, waiting for the poor devil without any friends and without any money. Then they step forward, the waiting houses, to frown and crush. . . . And they know who to frown at. They know as well as the policeman on the corner, and don’t you worry. (28)

This, of course, is paranoia: an imagined or unjustified feeling of persecution, of being hated, ill treated. “One of the diseases of exilic existence that can distort vision,” as Naficy points out, paranoia is also a structure of feeling that produces a cognitive restlessness and a spatial unsettling that manifest themselves aurally, as the sounds of a self displaced.41 Generating a dystopian, phantasmagorical relationship to place and space, it speaks of the city as a theater for a performance of memory in which the body responds to the sounds of the past as they have been registered and are now being replayed, with memory itself being little more than its material possibility, its echoing chamber.

Sight and Sound: The Exposition Internationale “L’Europe s’est déplacée pour voir des marchandises,” Hippolyte Taine famously wrote in 1885 apropos of the first French Exposition Univer-

F6540.indb 184

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

185

selle.42 Attracting some five million visitors, the 1855 World Fair created what seems but a small displacement of people, compared to the thirtyfour million visitors who came to Paris between May and November 1937 to see that year’s Exposition Internationale de Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Offering the world on show and for sale to a global clientele of tourists who came to watch displays of artisanship and industrial prowess, to sample food, and to purchase souvenirs, the Exposition inevitably marked life in Paris during those months.43 In Good Morning, Midnight, the Exposition Internationale is not a mere backdrop but recurs as a theme throughout the novel, from Sasha’s dream —nightmare, really— of being in a station of the London Underground, where signs everywhere point “This Way to the Exhibition,” whereas all she wants is “the way out” (12), to her memory of an American Express client who wanted first “to be taken to the exhibition of Loie Fuller materials” and then “to a certain exhibition of pictures” (27), to her obsessive concern not to make a scene, not to make an exhibition of herself. For Rhys’s biographers, this is the meaning of all those exhibitions: Sasha making an exhibition of herself and, with that, Jean Rhys making an exhibition of Sasha.44 In the light of Sasha’s sounding of the self through the “spectacular” city, the “exhibitionary complex” (to use Tony Bennett’s expression) that Paris has become since the rise of consumer culture in the nineteenth century,45 the Exposition Internationale holds additional meanings: representing identity as bound up with competing nationalisms and commercialism, symbolizing the mounting political tensions in Europe, the first World Fair that was universal neither in name nor in spirit had indeed much to say about people’s sense of place in the world. Let us remember, then, that the Exposition Internationale staged fierce contests of nationalism, notoriously in the monumental confrontation of Albert Speer’s neoclassical pavilion for Germany, topped by a National Socialist eagle atop a swastika, and the Soviet Union pavilion, dominated by Vera Mukhina’s gigantic Worker and Collective Farm Woman. Articulating a particular understanding of the meaning of “international,” the Exposition Internationale with its competing national pavilions did not encompass the whole world. As James Herbert compellingly argues in his Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, because of the Exposition’s “distinct emphasis upon all things commercial, . . . all that which fell beyond the sphere of contemporary commerce had to take up residence elsewhere”: the Palais de Chaillot, just outside the fairgrounds, housed two museums that extended the Exposition’s “temporal and geographic horizons,” one that displayed

F6540.indb 185

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

186

Liedeke Plate

medieval casts and the other showing what was thought of as “primitive” artifacts.46 Two art exhibitions further supplemented these presentations of societies distant in time and space, the Chefs-d’Oeuvre de l’Art Français, which offered a survey of two thousand years of French art in the Palais de Tokio on the periphery of the Exhibition, and the Maîtres de l’Art Indépendant, which presented recent art originating in Paris in the Petit Palais. Finally, in the months of January and February 1938, the Galerie Beaux-Arts in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré hosted the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition that proffered its own way of articulating the “international.”47 Indeed, in contrast to the contest of nationalities staged by the Exposition Internationale, and in response to the chauvinistic displays of global aspirations in the exhibits of French art, the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme documented its international character by juxtaposing, on its checklist, two lists presenting, in alphabetical order, first the “Artistes Exposants” (exhibiting artists) and, below, the “Pays Représentés” (countries represented). As Herbert observes, That which the dual list will not do, however, is articulate a clear relation between these two registers. Which artists belong under which countries? If these are the nations to be represented in the exhibition, then specifically each by whom? The various texts accompanying the installation never get around to addressing, much less resolving, the ambivalence first formulated here.48

It is tempting to regard Sasha’s exhibitions of herself in the light of this series of expositions, as yet one more installation that exposes an excess— that which was forgotten and omitted and for which there was no place. Met with dismay, Sasha’s exhibitions of herself are spectacles in excess of proper feminine behavior and of woman as object of the gaze that engage the same symbolic material as the main attraction of the Exposition Internationale Surréaliste: its installation “Les plus belles rues de Paris” (“The most beautiful girls of Paris,” with a pun on rue [street] and grue [slang for tart]) featuring a set of beautiful mannequins (sur)realized by Arp, Dalí, Duchamp, Ernst, Masson, Miró, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy, among others.49 Received as improper public behavior, Sasha’s first emotional outburst in the text occurs right at the beginning, as she remembers what seems like a failed suicide attempt, drowning in the Seine. This happens after she hears the notoriously sad, so-called suicide song “Gloomy Sunday”—a 1933 Hungarian song made available to English-speaking audiences in late

F6540.indb 186

6/17/15 8:30:12 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

187

1936, the compelling despair of which allegedly led many people to end their lives. The attempted erasure of her self, as a human surplus in excess of humanity, is echoed in a scene, halfway through the novel, when she again remembers the drowning and the rescue, this time to the sounds of the Martinique biguine “Maladie d’amour,” which the “gramophone is grinding out” (77). Daydreaming—as if remembering—that she is in a tropical setting, Sasha bursts into tears, a scene to which her host, the Russian painter Serge Rubin, responds by telling her of a desperate Martinique woman he once found on his landing while living in London. As Sasha recognizes herself in this drunken, crying woman—“Exactly like me,” she says; “I cried, and I asked for a drink”—the painter replies, “No . . . Not like you at all. . . . She wasn’t a white woman. She was half-negro—a mulatto” (79). Sasha’s mirroring in the Martinique woman whom the painter describes as “something that was no longer quite human, no longer quite alive” (80) haunts the text. It is a moment that emphasizes Sasha’s own liminal status: the doubling of the spectral figure evokes her own zombie-like character as a heavily sedated postsuicide. Taking place in an artist’s studio “with masks on the walls”—“West African masks . . . straight from the Congo” yet made by Serge Rubin himself (76)—it is also a scene that occurs exactly at the middle of the book and thus constitutes its actual center, the point to which the text moves and whence it starts folding back on itself. As the heart of the narrative, the scene ironically stages Sasha’s moment of passing at the very instant it enacts the “primitivist,” colonial haunting of contemporary art in a way reminiscent of the juxtaposition of art from the French colonies with works by artists such as Cézanne and Gauguin in the Musée des colonies that was the permanent legacy, to the city of Paris, of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale.50 In this evocation of the preceding Paris World Fair, the Exposition Coloniale Internationale emerges as the Exposition Internationale’s archive, a palimpsestic layer that is topographically eccentric, literally on the periphery—indeed, beyond the périphérique— of Paris. This layering is literally underscored by the evocation of the creole song “Maladie d’amour,” in all likelihood Léona Gabriel’s recording: the Martinique-born singer (1891–1971) is a popular figure in the 1930s nightlife of Montparnasse, where she sings in the cabarets, producing many gramophone records in those years.51 More important, she sang with Alexandre Stellio and his orchestra at the Exposition Coloniale. Her voice and music would thus awaken memories of those events, contributing to the creation of a transnational space of dislocation that is also an aural memoryscape.

F6540.indb 187

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

188

Liedeke Plate

Writing Paris with an Accent To the world, the Eiffel Tower is Paris; as its “universal symbol,” it is “the major sign of a people and of a place: it belongs to the universal language of travel,” Roland Barthes writes in his essay “The Eiffel Tower.”52 Featuring prominently on the posters and brochures advertising the Exposition Internationale of 1937, it continues to symbolize Parisian modernity even as it represents the 1889 World Fair for which it was built. Radio equipment was installed on the tower at the beginning of the twentieth century, serving to strengthen the ties of empire. As Elisabeth de Gramont has the tower say in her contemporary Mémoires de la Tour Eiffel (1937), “N’avais-je pas déjà relié Paris aux différentes villes des Colonies? Je fus la première à converser avec Dakar et Bamako, je suis peut-être la seule tête de France connaissant en détail l’Empire colonial français” (Had I not already linked Paris with the various cities of the Colonies? I was the first to talk with Dakar and Bamako, I am perhaps the only head of France with a detailed knowledge of the French colonial empire).53 Unlike the “old iron lady” (as the tower is sometimes disrespectfully referred to), Sasha can only long to belong to Paris. For as she realizes, “And when the Exhibition is pulled down and the tourists have departed, where shall I be? In the other room, of course—the one just off the Gray’s Inn Road, as usual trying to drink myself to death” (30). Standing symbol for a displaced, international Paris that is the remains of tourism, Sasha is the remainder not only of a commodified world but of a mode of existence that is always also elsewhere and that is generalized by the increasingly efficient means of transportation on show at the Exhibition.54 Sasha, indeed, circulates in a transnational world on the periphery of the World Fair, a world where tourists rub shoulders with émigrés, where languages mingle while issues of identity, of nationality, and of accent recur. People “stop under a lamp-post to guess nationalities” (39), speak “French very well” (43) or “slowly and ponderously” (54). René, who introduces himself as “French-Canadian” (62) and claims to be in need of a passport so he can go to London, “speaks English with a very slight accent” (60) yet will express himself “with a very strong accent” later in the text: “I have wounds,” he tells Sasha, “pronouncing ‘wounds’ so oddly that [she does not] understand what he means” (145). In fact, Sasha landed herself jobless in the 1920s when she did not know what was asked of her when told to take an envelop to the “kise”—a word that turned out to be a mispronunciation of caisse (cashier’s desk; 22–24). Drawing attention to the multilingual and multiaccented character of Paris in 1937, the emphasis on accents and the characters’ code-switching

F6540.indb 188

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

189

suggest a world that is multicultural and multinational. Yet multilingualism in Good Morning, Midnight is not only mimetic; it also troubles nationalism and the idea of national purity. The text indeed seems obsessed with nationality, as Sasha meets not only French and English but also Arab, American, Chinese, Dutch, and Russian people, eats Javanese in a Dutchowned restaurant, has Chinese food in another, remembers feeling ill in an Algerian place, recalls a meal of raviolis in an Italian one, recollects “a box of Turkish delight” (114), and talks about “negro music” as she drinks port out of a saké cup: “ ‘Japanese,’ I say intelligently” (77–78). Anticipating on the world of global consumption that came to define postcapitalism, Good Morning, Midnight seems to propose a definition of the term international that, though it reproduces the World Fair’s commodification of the globe, nevertheless denies its clear-cut national(ist) demarcations in its staging of a world wherein indeterminacy reigns and identity remains uncertain: the narrator-protagonist, who changed her name Sophia into the Russiansounding Sasha,55 is probably English; her surname, wavering between two spellings—she is sometimes referred to as “Mrs. Jansen” and on other occasions as “Sasha Jensen”—is in all probability that of her presumably Dutch ex-husband, Enno. Englishness itself, in fact, is something that can be performed: Sasha defeats expectations by failing “to do the Anglaise stuff ” when fed horse steak (113); and the Russian Jew Serge Rubin once “looked quite an Englishman from the neck down” as he wore “a fine suit” (79). However stereotypical and recognizable Englishness may be, it is also unstable, subject to many differentiations. As Rhys writes elsewhere, “An English person? English, what sort of English? To which of the seven divisions, sixty-nine subdivisions, and thousand-and-three sub-subdivisions do you belong?”56 Sasha’s preoccupation with place, with (national) identity, and with a world of commodities on show and for sale, no less than her encounters with diasporic Jews—all suggest concerns that were are the heart of the late 1930s zeitgeist, as Hitler’s National Socialist Party rose to power across the Rhine. In this historical context, Sasha’s paranoid feelings are also very real concerns, the look she gets one she shares with all the “wretched of the earth”: “That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici la vieille?’ . . . Who are you, anyway? . . . Are you one of us?” (76 –77). Yet if Rhys’s novel thus articulates a writing that can be said to be “accented” in its treatment of the themes of displacement and deterritorialization and in its linguistic strategies, it is through its nostalgia for a Caribbean that appears to have no direct bearing on the text except as an autobiographical inscription that it is most characteristically inflected.

F6540.indb 189

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

190

Liedeke Plate

As I have already suggested, the Caribbean haunts the text—through the sounds of Creole music to which Sasha listens as she watches Serge dance the biguine holding an “African” mask in front of his face, and through the Martinique woman who mirrors her own self. It returns to the text in Sasha’s vision of life as a series of returns to a chain of hotels, wherein “Martinique” comes to supplement “the Universe,” signifying its complementary yet mutually exclusive other: “Eat. Drink. Walk. March. Back to the hotel. To the hotel of Arrival, the Hotel of Departure, the Hotel of the Future, the Hotel of Martinique and the Universe” (120). For Jean Rhys, Martinique seems to hold a particular significance as (to borrow Salman Rushdie’s expression) an “imaginary homeland”: born on its sister island Dominica in the West Indies, Rhys invests the French colony with an aura of “home,” projecting onto it feelings of nostalgia but also appropriating it as the signifier of a place that politically no less than symbolically belongs to Paris.57 As Helen Carr suggests, “It is possible Frenchness did for Rhys represent some kind of fragmentary and oblique association with a homeland tradition. Dominica had been a French colony until 1805: the black Dominicans spoke French patois.”58 In Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys can be heard to appropriate and autograph Martinique as the place to which she belongs in her (autobiographical) reference to the room “in the Rue Lamartine” (104)—a place where she lived when she first came to Paris with her Dutch husband, Jean Lenglet, in 1919 and to which she returned in 1922.59 Astride languages, spoken with two tongues, the Caribbean island emerges as the syncretization of self and place in Rhys’s attachment of herself in Dutch to the name of the French poet: Lamartine-ik, la Martinique. Inscribing the authorial self into her text, the autobiographical signature is a strategy Rhys employs on several occasions, always exploiting the possibilities of multilingualism. Through Sasha’s references to herself as l’Anglaise, Rhys homophonically names her Lenglet’s, acoustically evoking herself as the feminine of and wife to Jean Lenglet by playing with the sound of names just as her homographic pen name ( Jean [Rhys]–Jean [Lenglet]) played with their sight.60 In the same way, her choice of the Dutch surname Jansen, meaning “son of John, belonging to Jan and/or Jean” in Dutch, is a signature through which Rhys accents her text, introducing a temporality into her narrative that further inflects and dislocates it by evoking distant places. Rhys’s oblique introduction of an autobiographical narrative into the novel through its aurality allows us to hear its concern with self and place resonate with personal anxieties. It also allows us to read it as engaging with issues of modes and conditions of literary production. Written in

F6540.indb 190

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

191

London in 1938, Good Morning, Midnight is not only set in Paris in “late October, 1937,” but was also researched there at about the same time. As Angier explains, Rhys had a room of her own to write in London, yet this room in Paulton’s Square oppressed and incapacitated her. “Finally, in November 1937, [her then husband] Leslie got the money (perhaps from his sister) for the usual solution: Jean went to Paris.”61 Reproduced in Sasha’s return to Paris and to the hotel room, Rhys’s need of Paris as a condition for creative, literary production generates an equivalence between displacement and narrative, between Sasha’s wanderings through the city and Rhys’s commitment of them to writing. As the displaced repetition of Rhys’s room in Paulton’s Square, Sasha’s room just off the Gray Inn’s Road, and Woolf ’s room of one’s own, the Parisian hotel room is the locus of a dislocated creativity: the place from which the text of the journey sets out and to which it returns as the journey of narrative. A space of in-betweenness, then, it is also a space of liminal aurality, resounding with sounds from elsewhere— other texts, other places, other media. The recognition of the accented nature of the text invites a mode of reading attentive to its sonic dimensions: an intermediated listening attuned to the sounds of longing and of belonging that it inscribes. As my reading of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight illustrates, such an auditory reading connects sound and space, moving into a cartography of listening, a geography of sound. The exilic condition as dislocation emanates specific vibrations, sending as it were waves of pressure fluctuations through its spatial environment. Accent is a useful concept for becoming attuned to the acousticity of exile, learning to sound literary space for its aurality, and finding a vocabulary to speak of what the listener hears.

F6540.indb 191

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

chapter 11

Back to the Beat Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Are we still living the age of distraction? In 1939, Walter Benjamin diagnosed distraction as a condition of the city in the late nineteenth century: “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis).”1 Stimuli and information consume attention. Lots of stimuli and information at the same time divide and scatter attention. If consciousness just becomes a shield against such stimuli, what is left of more absorbed kinds of experience? Nowadays we are living with the technologies of distraction that only seem to intensify the urban logic of the senses described by Benjamin. Digital technologies, it is claimed, have evolved absorption into “continuous partial attention.”2 We are told that we can no longer disentangle ourselves from the endless distractions of digital connectivity. Yet, since 1999, the technology of distraction has reared a strange new art of absorption. This is the verbal-visual-sonic art of Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI). The art of YHCHI is an art of words 192

F6540.indb 192

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

193

Figure 1. Still from Warning: Reading This May or May Not Change Your Life (2012) by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

presented as an art of scored images. This is an art of screenwriting that permits between one and seven words per screen (in large Monaco font; more on this later), mostly black on white, each text cleared before the next appears. The words flash by fast— often too fast— on the upbeat tempo of jazz by Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Duke Ellington, Duke Jordan, Thelonious Monk, or original scores. As a reader, you do not have a choice but to read as fast as possible or to give up entirely. The screen animation is Flash encoded, so that you have as little control during the whole experience as you have in the cinema. You are subjected—to temporality. Being subjected to temporality, I explain here, means becoming a listener. That will be the point of this chapter: how reading becomes like listening in the art of YHCHI—how, that is, listening becomes liminal when it forces on reading the memory of an oral art.

YHCHI: Remediation YHCHI consists of two writers/artists, Young-Hae Chang, a Korean artist and translator, and Marc Voge, an American poet: YHCHANG.com, with

F6540.indb 193

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

194

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Young-Hae Chang as CEO and Marc Voge as CIO, both based in Seoul, South Korea. Crucially, however, YHCHI is without a specific origin in cultural space. Its voice is anonymous and homeless or purports to be so, with no fixed address except for a URL, where its work is transported onto the electronic highway through open access: http://www.yhchang .com /. YHCHI has been steadily expanding its oeuvre—always Flash based, sparse with the black-on-white letters (sometimes red on white, sometimes white on black) in large Monaco font synced to music—since 1999.3 Voge and Chang have presented their work around the world (Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, SFMoMa, the Whitney Museum, the Venice Biennale, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the São Paulo Biennale), and most scholars agree that the secret of their success is their purposive resistance to that old religion of the digital age: interactivity. Indeed, Jessica Pressman has argued in one of the founding scholarly articles on YHCHI, in its defiance to interactivity—the new mode of reading electronically since the 1990s—YHCHI challenges “the status quo of electronic literature and our assumptions about it.”4 She rubrics this challenge under the strategy of “digital modernism”: a “subset of electronic literature” that advocates a return to narrative, reading, and textuality and a move away from navigation and interactivity.5 Pressman focuses on an early work of YHCHI, DAK0TA (2002) because it is a digital rewrite of Cantos 1 and 2 by Ezra Pound (and thus in turn a rewrite of Homer’s Odyssey). Pound, of course, was the quintessential modernist. DAK0TA overwrites and compresses Pound and Homer, transposing their themes to the twentieth century, with a couple of lost souls traversing South Dakota in a convertible. For the opening lines of Pound’s Canto 1, And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess,6

YHCHI substitutes, FUCKING—WALTZED—ØUT— TØ THE /CAR,—LEANED/ IN—AND / TURNED ØN— THE /IGNITIØN,—READY TØ

F6540.indb 194

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

195

/ HIT THE /RØAD,—WE RØLLED/BACK THE / TØP,— DØWN THE / WINDØWS,—PUT BEER / CASES IN/HER TRUNK,—ØUR BUTTS / ØN HER / UPHØLSTERY,— WHØØPIN’—’N—HØLLERIN’,— THE SUN—HIGH— ABØVE—PØURING—DØWN—ØN ØUR—HEADS—AND— THE—HØT—HØØD,— CINDY’S BRØTHER’S—“LØANER,” / HERE,— THE / KNØCKERS / ØN HER.7

A car for a ship, a road in South Dakota for a sea, beer for sheep, Cindy for Circe, a motel for an island. Further down the road, Homer’s Elpinor will be replaced with a dead guy “from the old gang” called Elie who is whining, as a ghost, that his friends did not take good care of him when they dumped his body at Cindy’s. The older texts echo through the new, so that an act of listening is here implied in the act of reading/looking. The Odyssey and the Cantos are as it were recorded within the electronic text of YHCHI, the lines of the latter sounding out from the grooves of the former. DAK0TA is thus propelled by resonance, but this resonance is always a trope that is visualized as such. For Pressman, “works like DAK0TA resist the alignment of electronic literature with hypertext . . . and favor the foregrounding text and typography, narrative complexity, and an aesthetic of difficulty.”8 With their minimalist aesthetic, such works import modernism into the digital age. Other critics such as Philip Klobucar acknowledge this import in DAK0TA but also point to the ways in which it “engages many of the same metatextual historical conflicts found in the modernist epic’s relationship to previous translations of Homer’s original song.”9 That is to say, DAK0TA materially interrogates the Cantos and the Odyssey, translating the epic mode into the digital age, with its overflow of information epitomized in the speed of the mind-blowing screens. Klobucar makes the interesting point that Pound’s Cantos are selfreflexively located in print history, as Pound makes the famous, explicit reference to the Andreas Divus translation of the Odyssey printed in 1538 by Christian Wechel: “We are no longer being sung to, but instead find ourselves in situ within a specific print history, the details of which suggest that the canto’s primary ‘odyssey’ may be that of the text itself as it is materially.”10 Thus, the Odyssey already features in the Cantos as a “particular artifact, significant of Western Europe’s earliest reintroduction to classical culture.”11 We are no longer being sung to. At least, we are not in Pound’s modernist adaptation of the Odyssey, which foregrounds a print materiality and its journey in history. But what about YHCHI?

F6540.indb 195

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

196

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Just as Pound was concerned with the intrusion of print in oral culture in his rewriting of the Odyssey, so DAK0TA marks the transition from one screen culture to another: from cinematic/televisual to the digital, now converged into one continuum. Oral and print, cinematic/televisual and digital: these different media technologies represent (once) disparate modes of cultural production, and in DAK0TA their juxtaposition signals “both continuity and rupture in the moving image.”12 That is to say, DAK0TA illustrates the refashioning of old media in the new, and new media in accordance with the modes of representation of the old, that David Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation.13 The virtual cinematic countdown opening the works of YHCHI is an obvious instance of such remediation—and of the hypermediacy characteristic of remediation, making us acutely aware of the medium of presentation. Significantly, though, critical emphasis on this explicit interrogation of the screen in DAK0TA has led attention away from a remarkable aspect of this electronic literary-visual work: it is, I think, a piece of quasi-performance poetry with a distinctly aural dimension. Indeed, I suggest, DAK0TA remediates orality (as a written, mediated orality) into a visual orality that, by taking control of the time axis, alters viewing along the lines of listening. What kind of listening is this? As I will show, it is a liminal listening, a listening mediated by the screen, and a listening that we can only begin to understand here with recourse to the practice of performance poetry and the specific kind of attention that DAK0TA elicits from us. We are, indeed, being sung to again, well after Pound, but it is a mute singing—a singing for the eyes. In the next sections, I analyze DAK0TA in the light of performance poetry, jazz poetry, orality, “aural” attention and absorption, and liminal listening to reassess it as a work of silent orality in the digital age: a secondary, digital aurality that is textually based.

Word Performance: DAK0TA as Jazz Poetry It is often said that performance poetry does not work on the page.14 The immediate presence of the poet, the sound of his or her voice, the rhythm of his or her speaking, and the relation between poet and audience—all this helps to frame the poetic experience in the setting of a performance piece. It is a singular experience, just as the performance of a musical piece is a singular experience. Or at least, it is staged as a singular experience. In performance poetry, all the senses are addressed in a specific moment in a communal space, in contrast to the private experience of reading poetry between the covers of a book. Performance poetry refers to a multiplicity of staged, often multimedial poetic modes. According to Paul Beasly, the

F6540.indb 196

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

197

concept of performance poetry “admits a huge variety of culturally specific and sub-genres—from jazz to choreo-poetry, from cabaret to soundpoetry.”15 As electronic poetry, or web art, as YHCHI itself call its products, the work of YHCHI may not immediately, or completely, fall into this category of performance art: There is no direct, physical presence of the poets here. No one is seen or heard speaking. There is no communion, no singular moment of performance. And yet. One typical feature of performance poetry is that its language is colloquial. Markedly, DAK0TA taps into the vernacular of oral culture in its rehearsal of the Cantos and the Odyssey. It uses the fast and vulgar language of the “streets”: “Fucking / waltzed / out / to the car, Leaned in / and turned on / the ignition, / ready to hit the road.” The language of DAK0TA comes across as a colloquial, spoken language—it does not appear to want to be a “literate” work, even though its dense allusions to the Cantos and the Odyssey render it excessively literate and learned. In performance poetry, this use of the vernacular is often overtly political, an act of defiance to the legitimate language. DAK0TA, however, takes recourse to contemporary colloquial language as part of its strategy of rewriting— of rewriting canonical texts as an ongoing part of popular culture rather than archiving them “as they are,” as museum pieces to be revered and revisited. Rewriting, Liedeke Plate has argued recently, is a form of cultural memory: of reworking the past within the frameworks of the present.16 The use of the vernacular as a strategy of rewriting thus stands in the service of a particular mode of “remembering” here, a remembering that transmediates the past (of orality, of writing and print) into the present. Another important feature of performance poetry that surfaces in DAK0TA is that it is heavily rhythmical.17 Indeed, DAK0TA easily manifests itself as jazz poetry, if we understand jazz poetry as poetry read to the accompaniment of jazz music, written like jazz music, and/or referring to it.18 DAK0TA reworks the foregrounded connection between language and music in jazz poetry in terms of what George Dillon calls dynamic textmontage: words synced to a beat and a(n) (e)motion so rapidly that it stretches our ability to read to the extreme—yet commands us to stay tuned.19 Let me explore this idea of dynamic textmontage in relation to the drumming in DAK0TA in more detail before moving on to the way in which the poem references the music textually. DAK0TA mimics the jazz music it is set to insofar as its words flash by “in time,” exactly to the rhythm of Art Blakey’s drum solo. These words render visible musical movement: this is music translated into moving images. We listen through reading, and this makes our listening a perfect

F6540.indb 197

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

198

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

instance of liminal aurality: a listening that straddles the borders between reading, viewing, and listening. So far, criticism of DAK0TA has taken Blakey’s performance for granted, giving at best a superficial description of its particular sound and thrust. However, the drumming is crucial to our understanding of the text, not only because the music makes the movement, because the music itself tells a story about a journey, inexorably forward moving, but also because this music reflects the kind of cross-cultural montage that YHCHI performs. In good operatic and cinematic tradition, the music informs us about the motifs in the text and its makeup. I will presently return to this issue, but first more about Blakey and “Tobi Ilu.” “Tobi Ilu” is from the album African Beat (1962), performed by Blakey with African drummers, which presents a blend of jazz and West African music. In 1947, Art (Arthur) Blakey traveled on a ship to Nigeria and stayed in Africa until 1949. He explored Islam and changed his name to Abudullah Ibn Buhaina. For the most part, Blakey stayed in Accra, Ghana, where he probably was exposed to Ewe and Awa drumming traditions. Blakey studied the drumming practices of the Ijaw in Nigeria while he was there, and works such as “Tobi Ilu” suggest that Blakey adopted African techniques in his drumming.20 Such techniques included “rapping on the side of the drum and using his elbow on the tom-tom to alter the pitch.”21 Indeed, Blakey’s performance in “Tobi Ilu” closely resembles the role of the master drummer in West African music. As Jason John Squinobal has observed in a dissertation on Blakey and West African music, his frequent use of the low toms and bass drum marks him out as a master drummer (as representative of the Ewe, Akan, and Ga people in Ghana): the drummer who plays the (traditional) rhythms of a specific musical type and/ or the rhythms providing choreographic directions to dancers.22 Indeed, Squinobal continues, when we consider the song’s time line (which Blakey performs on his hi-hat, combined with the two supporting drums), “Tobi Ilu” alludes to the Ewe Hatsiastia style that literally means “in-between drum (or dance) styles” as it is performed “in between dance and drumming songs.”23 The master drummer sets the pace of a piece and thus determines its character. What even an amateur listener such as myself perceives while listening to “Tobi Ilu,” and feeling its pace, is an unstoppable movement. The drumming sets in after a brief pause that separates it from the preceding solo mbira introduction.24 Once the high drum starts, relentless and repetitive, and the second drum produces its constant flow of notes, one has the sense of being thrust ahead, rapt in a rhythm without interrup-

F6540.indb 198

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

199

tion. This is undoubtedly due to Blakey’s ability to stay “on the front edge of the beat, without rushing,” so that a pervasive sense of time passing is created.25 The music announces what we are about to find out as we start reading DAK0TA: there is no way out. There is only fast forward. The drumming thus makes heard the very movement of the passage of Odysseus, twice compressed (first in the Cantos, then in DAK0TA), that we will view and read on screen. As we watch the lines flash by on screen after the cinematic countdown that opens most of YHCHI’s work, we witness a new form of “tribal” storytelling in front of the “flickering” screen (evoking the memory of a flickering fire), accompanied by the African drums of Blakey and his musicians.26 We move through the bulk of the journey, filled with figures and images of popular culture, when Art Blakey is suddenly explicitly addressed, just as Robert Browning is invoked in Pound’s Cantos.

The reference is to Blakey’s stunning drumming technique (and his Islamic name, Buhaina), members of the Jazz Messengers (Donald Byrd, Sabu Martinez), and pictures of the album Holiday for Skins (1958)—a double ekphrastic evocation, since the pounding words perform the music as they describe the visual archive of another recording: ‘HØLIDAY/ FØR SKINS’—(BN/4005/ V.2)—‘RØUND / MIDNIGHT—SEEMS ART / RECØRDED—BETWEEN / 11 P.M.— AND 5 / A.M.-——AND FRØM / THE PHØTØS—ØF THE / SESSIØN,—WØRE A / WHITE / SHIRT—WITH/ RØLLED-UP / SLEEVES—AND A TIE / THRØUGH- / ØUT)

F6540.indb 199

6/17/15 8:30:13 AM

200

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Such explicit musical allusions are common in jazz poetry. This is yet another reason to suspect that DAK0TA belongs to the class of performance poetry,27 even while it parodies the very idea of performance as a live event in its screening out of presence and in turning the “free” act of reading/looking into an automatized, predetermined process. The “jazz” in jazz poetry, however, is here not limited to musical quotation or musical mimicry alone. As the poet Sterling Plumpp once observed, “Jazz as poetry constantly begs improvisation, re-definitions in terms of moods and rhythms.”28 Redefinition is “reinvention,” as Jeffrey Allen has commented on this passage, so that the term jazz hinges most of all on this possibility of extemporaneous re-creation.29 In DAK0TA, reinvention is present throughout in the tight, colloquial rewriting of the Cantos and the Odyssey, but it actually surfaces as remediated musical improvisation toward the end: NØT IN / DETRØIT—ØR IN A / RECØRDING / STUDIØ—IN NEW / JERSEY—BUT—RIGHT— HERE!—I—MEAN—HØNESTLY,—IN PALPAN- / DØNG!—WHERE—NØ—ØNE,—ABSØLUTELY—NØ— ØNE,—HAS—EVER—BEAT—ØUT—FØUR—DIFFERENT—RHTHMS—AT—ØNCE—WITH—HIS— TWØ— HANDS—AND— TWØ—FEET.—SØ—WE—BLARE— THE— TUNES— TØ—RØUSE—NØ—ØNE—BUT—ØURSELVES.— IT’S—WØNDERFULLY—STRANGE!

In this passage, two cultures “meet.” The quintessential American art of jazz is relocated in Korea, as the sounds of Blakey’s drum and Donald’s trumpet “blare” in Palpan-Dong. Whereas “Tobi Ilu” merges jazz with African drumming, DAK0TA reinvents the recorded sounds of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in Asia: “ØUR—ØWN—‘HØLIDAY / FØR SKINS’—” in Seoul. The suggestion of musical improvisation continues into the very last passage, in a textual “ad lib” that departs from the grooves of the older texts, focusing instead on the present, on a stream of cars chauffeuring Korean businessmen and their Korean geishas.30 The passage digresses and disintegrates still further as it zooms in on “LATE- / NIGHT / DRIVERS—ØF MØTER / SCØØTERS / DELIVERING—WINTER / HEATING / ØIL—IN JERRY / CANS” and take-away food. This textual equivalent of the trope of musical improvisation challenges us to read differently: we must learn to read here as if we were listening to “jazz.” In a sense, this is a nonlinear reading (despite the rigid linearity of the electronic text) insofar as it is a reading without direction or

F6540.indb 200

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

201

development. The text wanders off, reinvents itself, readjusts its themes, and stops then and there, as abruptly as Blakey’s drumming. This reading experience is paratactically ordered, and this paratactic order relates back to both Pound and jazz poetry: like DAK0TA, which invokes a string of images and events without transition, the poetry of Pound is built on the juxtaposition of images, just as the jazz poetry of, say, Langston Hughes revolves around montage, cutting in-between images so that the reader rather than the text must make the connections (cf. Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred [1951]).31 DAK0TA radicalizes this process. It transforms the act of reading as a continuous, cognitive act into a series of rapid perceptual changes that warrant readers to double the text and themselves take on the task of improvisation.32 Yet, we will see, the paradox of DAK0TA is that it seeks to render this task impossible.

Silent Orality: Reading as Listening We have seen in the preceding section how DAK0TA relates to the Cantos in its very textual materiality. Just as DAK0TA cannot be seen apart from the transition from cinematic/televisual to digital screen technology, so the Cantos are conversant about the divide between oral and print culture. We are no longer being sung to. Yet we have just seen how DAK0TA can be approached as performance poetry, somehow displaying a remembrance of things oral. In this section, I analyze this particular orality as a silent orality that features a dumb and commanding voice. This voice, I show, requires us to listen in the sense that Althusser has linked listening to interpellation: the calling into being of the subject.33 In DAK0TA, I argue, such calling comes in the form of shock: a bang, another, and another. Who calls in this instance, what kind of voice, and how does this voice sing to us? To start, we need to address orality as a silent or secondary orality. Secondary orality was part of Walter Ong’s conceptual apparatus to analyze the “end” of print culture and the beginning of a new, electric age that would remediate a primary mode of oral communication allegedly anterior to writing.34 Orality for Ong was a mode of expression, and indeed a mode of thinking, that contrasted fundamentally with the technologies of literacy: “One can . . . speak of a specifically oral mindset” that was typified by contextualized modes of information, ritualized modes of knowledge transfer, selective uses of the past and its preservation for the present, and a “warmth of personal relationships” as words were “intimately” tied to their speaker.35 Secondary orality is not quite primary orality, since it is posterior to writing. Secondary orality is a mode of communication that is

F6540.indb 201

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

202

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

oral yet embedded within the technologies of literacy. This is ultimately to say that secondary orality is embedded within a culture that is visual, even though the communication networks of secondary orality are audible (radio) and electric. Literacy, after all, is a culture of the eye as it has evolved out of alphabetic writing. Now, orality in Western culture is no doubt a mythology produced by writing. We have known since Derrida that there is no pure oral presence beyond writing. Beyond writing, there is more writing.36 Yet as P. Christopher Smith has shown in a brilliant analysis of Derrida’s reading of Plato, there are different kinds of writing at stake in Plato’s distinction between orality and writing as a “replacement” of the oral.37 Smith here refers to a difference between the writing of the soul, something that the soul has once seen—that is to say, has intuited intellectually—and an oral writing, a writing that records speech, something that has been heard. When Plato attacks writing, Smith proposes, he is in effect attacking writing as an “oral application”: the writing under attack here is “the one that represents oral speech and thereby aggravates the weakness of the latter.”38 I want to suggest that DAK0TA presents this writing as an oral application and in this way performs a secondary orality. In DAK0TA, this kind of writing revolves around the transformation of the audible (linked to orality) into the visual (linked to writing): as a radically linear medium, the visual here assumes the function of the oral. Indeed, the technology that brings forth this visualization—Flash—precisely allows one crucial feature of orality to reinscribe itself here: the control of the time axis. Oral discourse, Christian Vandendorpe emphasizes, “takes place in an irreversible temporal linear flow.”39 Because of this flow, the listener “cannot move from one section of a discourse to another, cannot fast-forward through it. . . . Even with modern recording technology, oral language is still essentially a prisoner of the temporal thread, placing the listener in a position of dependency on it.”40 This could have been a perfect description of the readers and language of DAK0TA. Vandendorpe diagnoses the very difficulty for these readers, namely, the inability to control the reading material and reading process. This is why I have referred to the reader of DAK0TA as a listener: not only because the sequential appearance of the words on screen mimics a speaking voice but also because “reading” DAK0TA is an experience of dependency and obedience. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has already closely linked dependency and obedience to listening in his essays on the sublime. In The Inhuman, he dissects, with a nod to Heidegger, the German gehorsam sein: to be obedient or, literally translated, to be able or tending

F6540.indb 202

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

203

to hear. “To obey,” Lyotard argues, “is gehorchen. Gehören is not far, to pertain to, to depend on an agency, to fall into a domain, under an authority, a dominus. And zuhören, to lend one’s ear.” There is, he continues, “an inexhaustible network linking listening to belonging.”41 Belonging here refers to the sense of place that is characteristic of the experience of the sublime as Lyotard approaches it in the work of the abstract expressionists and that of Barnett Newman in particular. To experience a sense of place in Newman is an experience of being called to, of being addressed by the question of time that the picture is, its sheer presence.42 Such an experience is characterized by a sense of obligation. It is as if Newman’s paintings are saying Look at me or, rather, Lyotard suggests, “Listen to me. For obligation is a modality of time, rather than of space and its organ is the ear rather than the eye.”43 These paintings enforce attention. But they do so in a strange, contrary fashion: what they enforce is a Zen-like openness in which the mind hinges between passivity and activity, clearing itself to allow for something unexpected to arise. In DAK0TA, this openness— or passibility, as Lyotard calls it44—seems less prominent and significant. To be sure, DAK0TA’s opening screen, primed in different shades, is just as flat and empty as Newman’s paintings almost are. Indeed, it could be proposed that the appearance and disappearance of the words on screen only works to emphasize the flatness and emptiness of the screen, rather than just bombarding the senses with a flickering overload. However, the presence of speed in DAK0TA ultimately obstructs and interferes with the passibility that Lyotard ties to obedience and obligation. There is no time to be passible. There is just the obligation to answer to the sheer force of a flow of words— or to remain completely passive: either active or passive, not in between. This is why, for DAK0TA, we need to couple Lyotard’s notion of obedience and obligation to the particular dynamic of Althusserian interpellation: an enforced response-ability rather than a call of belonging that suspends the mind. Hey, you! I call you and you become thus—I call you to your position in a particular ideology. In DAK0TA, interpellation works to call us into a “new” position as reader-listeners: “new” insofar as this is a position that must do without the interactivity of print. As we have seen, we are here given over to the speed of a temporal thread that, on the one hand, continues the linearity of writing but, on the other hand, blocks the controlled, temporizing engagement with texts that writing likewise facilitates. To temporize here means to pause: the space allowed to pause, to return, to halt the rhythm of progression. In the past two decades, interactivity has been familiarly and almost exclusively associated with hypertext: texts that

F6540.indb 203

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

204

Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

are to be coproduced and actively traversed by a reader. By interpellating the reader as listener, however, DAK0TA makes us aware of interactivity as a “lost” dimension of print culture that the electric text parodies by preprogramming the very pace of reading. DAK0TA, we can conclude, is a demanding text to the extent that it precludes interactivity and creates a position of dependency for the reader. The only moment of readerly intervention is the clicking of the link to open DAK0TA. After that, the reader-viewer is given over to the text, without knowing how long it will take and without the means to halt or interrupt its progress. It is not difficult to see how this surrender to the text, mimicking the position of the listener in an oral situation, frames an experience of absorption in our “reading” of DAK0TA. To be sure, this is a precarious absorption as it is constantly subtended by the possibility of distraction: our hyperfocus on the running text easily collapses into its opposite. However, if, as Michael Fried has shown, absorption is not just about our perception of art works but also about their mode of presentation, DAK0TA readily emerges as an absorptive text. Absorption in Fried’s analysis revolves around a “perfect trance of involvement” that is brought about by artworks deliberately unaware of their viewers.45 Absorptive works do not require a viewer’s intervention or participation. They are self-enclosed; indeed, they are closed off, taking the viewer in through a calculated indifference. DAK0TA is defined by such indifference. It is focused on itself, on the words appearing as visual objects on screen, and calls in question the text as something to be read. It does not facilitate reading (although its references to the Cantos indicate that it does not not want us to read). Once it has been opened, DAK0TA does what it does, whether we are there or not. Clearly, such self-absorption contrasts with the idea of a personal, contextualized communication ascribed to Walter Ong’s lost world of orality. This is precisely why I have referred to DAK0TA in terms of a silent or mute orality: an orality that is, literally, mute to the demands, engagements, and interventions of the reader-viewer. Strangely, therefore, becoming like a listener in DAK0TA means learning to cope with a certain deafness.

Coda: Liminal Aurality DAK0TA is a fascinating work in that it points to an alternative, digital mode of reading—and nonreading—that has emerged out of video texting and subtitling. This alternative is, in the final analysis, an instance of machine reading that has become a dominant mode of reading in the past

F6540.indb 204

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

205

decade. In comparative literature, we need to take stock of works such as DAK0TA to analyze machine reading in more detail as a cultural imaginary of the present. At the same time, DAK0TA makes us aware of the intersection between reading, viewing, and listening, the one collapsing into the other. DAK0TA, we have seen, thus offers a liminal experience in which reading, like viewing, ultimately takes on the very characteristics of listening as a modality of dependency and obedience. Though we constantly hear the music playing as we view DAK0TA, aurality in DAK0TA is nevertheless a transmediated aurality here, an aurality transposed from the world of the ear to the world of the eye, sound to screen. Seen in this light, DAK0TA makes visible, indeed dramatizes, the (imaginary) transition from orality to literacy itself.

F6540.indb 205

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

chapter 12

The Discovery of Slowness in Music Alexander Rehding

Once upon a Time . . . Imagine the slowest music. Those who are trained in classical Western music might spontaneously think of Franz Schubert’s proverbial “heavenly lengths,” perhaps the Adagio from the String Quintet, or slow movements from Bruckner or Mahler symphonies; those who are more interested in contemporary compositions might think of works by Morton Feldman, Toru Takemitsu, or Henryk Górecki. Now imagine music that is much slower still. This kind of slowness is perhaps best described by one of the Grimm Brothers’ less well-known fairy tales, the “Little Shepherd Boy.” When asked by a king to explain eternity, the shepherd boy replies: “[There is a] Diamond Mountain in Lower Pomerania, and it takes an hour to climb it, an hour to go around it, and an hour to go down into it. Every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed.”1 The shepherd boy’s story relies on two aspects that characterize the exceedingly slow passing of time: an excruciating low density of events

206

F6540.indb 206

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

207

that mark time and an impossibly long duration as the summation of these events, which in this story is tantamount to eternity. This definition, to be sure, does not hold water as far as any philosophical approaches to eternity are concerned.2 But what makes the shepherd boy’s definition so ingenious—and the reason he is amply rewarded by the king—is that he gives a definition that does not merely state the obvious point, as any philosopher would have done, that eternity is infinite and that this dimension transcends the capacity of our imagination. Rather, it breaks it down into an array of the most concrete terms that allow us to grasp every element of his story, while still making it impossible to get our mind around the concept fully. Crucially, the shepherd’s explanation relies on events that mark the passing of time; it is just that the events move at such slow speed that the adjective glacial seems positively inflationary. In a word, it allows us to experience the impossibility of grasping the whole. The fact that this impossibly long period of time captures only the first second of eternity, in a process that may or may not be open-ended, is only the icing on the cake. The shepherd boy’s endeavor to convey the awe-inspiring incomprehensibility of eternity relies on the concept of the sublime. This is not surprising, since the paragon of what Kant called the “mathematical sublime” is infinity.3 It seems, though, that the shepherd boy followed Johann Sulzer, more so than the influential Kantian tradition.4 Sulzer was particularly concerned about the immediate psychological impact of the sublime— astonishment—and the most effective modes of representation: If we are told that God created the world ex nihilo, or that God rules the world by His Will, we experience nothing at all, since this lies totally beyond our comprehension. But when Moses says: “And God said, let there be light; and there was light,” we are overcome with astonishment because we can at least form some idea of such greatness; we hear to some extent words of command and feel their power; and if we are made to see instead of the mere Divine Will some empirical symbol of it: . . . We must have a yardstick by which we seek to measure the extent of the sublime, even if unsuccessfully.5

It is possible to find fault in Sulzer’s uncomplicated approach to representation, but it is worth remembering that Sulzer, unlike Kant, makes space for the sublime in art.6 In order for the sublime to be conveyed effectively, Sulzer contends, it must allow its audience to imagine the unimaginable.7 It must be given at least a brief glimpse, an “empirical symbol,” of that

F6540.indb 207

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

208

Alexander Rehding

which they cannot comprehend, and that is what the shepherd boy so admirably accomplished. In the context of postmodernism, this more theatrical approach to the sublime has made something of a comeback.8 The postmodern sublime, as Jean-François Lyotard explains it, no longer nostalgically wallows in the problem of representation but rather stages its very un(re)presentability9: The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations—not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.10

Lyotard’s approach underlines that the postmodern does not define a historical period but a mode of thinking—and of experimenting in art. For him, the postmodern and the sublime are interchangeable terms: both are characterized by the mise-en-scène of their own impossibility. This brings us back to the shepherd boy and the broader question of a slowness in music so vast that it exceeds our capacity to process it, a music moving so slowly that we can only begin to contemplate the gigantic temporal dimension that it spans. This is the kind of slowness that I am interested in. It is music so slow that we need to renegotiate its fundamental terms. The two slow pieces of music that I am going to discuss in some detail here, the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project (2001) and 9 Beet Stretch (2002), are not musical works in any ordinary sense. To be sure, they started out that way, but in the performances that I am going to discuss, they last forever, or at least it seems that way. In fact, it is not even obvious that performance is the correct term, since no performer in the ordinary sense is involved: version, adaptation, installation might be more appropriate terms to describe this situation. For simplicity’s sake, I will usually refer to them as pieces. Apart from the issues about temporality that these pieces raise, as we shall see, they also pose interesting wider questions about the ontology of the work of art. It is no coincidence that pieces of great slowness—and its constant companion, length—were created around the turn of the millennium, doubtless the most important event in the psychological history of time in our lifetime. The millennium is in principle an arbitrary marker, but since it highlights the cyclical nature of time, writ large, it invites reflections on the passage of time.11 This is perhaps most vividly reflected in the “Clock of the Long Now,” devised by Danny Hillis and first displayed

F6540.indb 208

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

209

in the Science Museum in London. Hillis explained his idea: “I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the Millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”12 The Clock of the Long Now began its work on December 31, 1999, and is supposed to run for ten thousand years. It really does not matter, as the novelist Michael Chabon has pointed out, whether the clock will really run for that amount of time or indeed whether humanity will witness the end of this long period: what matters is that it helps us conceptualize the imagined connection between us and the most distant past and future.13 As in Sulzer’s example, it is the concreteness of the material object, the “empirical symbol,” that allows us to begin to grapple with concepts that would otherwise lie beyond our comprehension. In Hillis’s description, too, we notice again the connection between extremely long duration and an exceptionally slow pace of the events marking the passing of time, not dissimilar from the shepherd boy’s narration. To be sure, both pace and duration obviously operate in the temporal dimension, and overall duration is the totality of the succession of temporal events. But beyond that, there is no inextricable connection between pace and duration, between speed and time span: there is no intrinsic reason why the clock should not tick every second over ten thousand years (315,576,000,000 times), just as there is no inescapable reason why a very slow piece of music could not also be relatively short— other than the psychologically satisfying correlation between a slow pace of events and vast expanses of time. By rarefying the pace of events marking time, we obtain a more palpable sense that time is stretched out and effectively passes more slowly. In the field of music, all these millennial projects are concerned with great lengths, and slowness is one important way of achieving temporal length, but far from the only one. Another important millennial composition, Jem Finer’s Longplayer, was begun on December 31, 1999, and is to last for exactly one thousand years (at which point it starts again from the top).14 This musical project generates its awe-inspiring length not by means of exceptional slowness but with an algorithm that calculates everchanging patterns on the basis of an original composed sequence played on a series of (computer-simulated) Tibetan singing bowls. What matters in these millennial pieces, no matter how their sublime lengths are generated, is the contemplation of the long time spans they articulate. The “Long Now” describes the imagined connection between the present and the most distant past or future. Not coincidentally, the

F6540.indb 209

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

210

Alexander Rehding

concept of the “Long Now” was coined by the composer Brian Eno.15 As a composer, Eno is aware that music, as the temporal art par excellence, has a big role to play in this discourse. A taste of Lyotard’s postmodern lurks behind this paradoxical term: as an experiential unit, the very idea of the “now” is one of the greatest challenges of the philosophy of time.16 “Now” is perhaps best understood as a forever fleeting point in time with no extension at all, impossible to capture and precisely the opposite of the long duration. Extended— or rather, distended—moments of presence, during which “duration turns limp,”17 as Lyotard shows in his late reflections on Augustine’s Confessions, are removed from everyday temporality and move the self to a different experiential realm. This is the kind of liminal aurality, the thresholds of listening, that we are concerned with here. As we shall see, it is precisely this problematic “long now” that assumes a position center stage in the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project.

The Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt, a small town in the middle of Germany, made it into the international news in 2000, when it announced the start of its rendition of John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP. (ASLSP was originally written for piano, in 1985, then revised and authorized for organ as Organ2/ASLSP, 1987.) The title of the piece is both an abbreviation of As SLow aS Possible and reminiscent of the word lsp, which is found in the final paragraph of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book that Cage greatly admired and from which he repeatedly drew inspiration.18 The score of this piece uses the symbols of conventional notation but has no time signature, bar lines, or tempo marking. Note heads indicate pitch, but rhythms are not given in the conventional manner. Instead, the distances between note stems, which are very precisely placed, indicate the relative duration of each sonority in each hand. Furthermore, beginnings and endings of individual pitches are indicated by means of a complex system of black and white note heads as well as special symbols. Different recorded performances of the work take between five and seventy minutes. Once we step outside the realm of recordings, with their own temporal limitations, noteworthy “live” performances include Diane Luchese’s 2009 organ performance in Towson (which lasted almost fifteen hours) and Joe Drew’s 2008 piano performance, which lasted a whole twenty-four hours. As an ironic aside, John Cage originally composed ASLSP as a commission for a piano competition. Needless to say, the piece could not be further removed from the flashy virtuosity of competition pieces. An element

F6540.indb 210

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

211

of randomness is built into the form of the piece, which consists of eight short sections: Cage specifies in the score that the sections can be played in any order, but one should be left out, while another one should be played twice. When Cage also authorized the adapted version of this piece for organ in 1987, it was this later adaptation that opened up completely new temporal dimensions for the performance of this piece: for the piano, the slowness of performance is relatively constrained by the mechanics of sound production on the piano with its relatively fast decay, while on the organ, the sound can in principle be sustained indefinitely. By authorizing the organ version, Cage counteracted the peculiarly ephemeral materiality of musical sounds, which writers throughout history have lamented or celebrated. The philosopher Hegel—a name not often mentioned in the same breath as Cage—probably put it most poetically when he defined the tone as “ein Daseyn, das verschwindet, indem es ist”—an existence that disappears by being.19 In the Halberstadt rendition, at any rate, the disappearance takes a long time: the piece is to last 639 years. The Halberstadt performance is widely (if only with some hedging) hailed as “the longest concert in the world.”20 The span of time is symbolic: according to the seventeenth-century music theorist and composer Michael Praetorius, the cathedral in Halberstadt housed the first organ with the semitonal keyboard arrangement that we are now used to. As the organizers of the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project proudly claim, with a good dose of hyperbole, this keyboard layout represents the cradle of modern music.21 This historic organ had been built in 1361, that is 639 years before the year 2000. To mark this important date with respect to the new millennium, this commemorative length was chosen. As the temporal durations unfold, a new organ is installed pipe by pipe. The piece began, on September 5, 2001, the composer’s birthday, with a year and a half ’s worth of rests, before the first sonority was heard.22 At this level of slowness, each sonority, each event, lasts for months or years. Each change of sonorities, timed so as always to fall on the fifth of the month, is a major event that attracts wide public attention. There is no human performer in an ordinary sense: the keys of the organ are held down by simple weights attached to them. This performance poses some interesting problems: pitches and the relative durations in this rendition are preserved with considerable accuracy—in certain analytical traditions of philosophy, these are the key traits that mark the ontology of the work of music in performance.23 And yet one could make a reasonable claim that this performance problematizes

F6540.indb 211

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

212

Alexander Rehding

the concept of the musical work, for the simple reason that it is humanly impossible to hear the piece from beginning to end. Like the shepherd boy, we can apprehend all the parts of the piece, but the totality of it exceeds the limits of the capacity of our imagination to relate the different parts to each other experientially. The organizers at Halberstadt argue, not implausibly, that John Cage would have approved of this rendition of his composition. They view this extremely slow performance as a “musical apple tree,” a “symbol of confidence in the future.”24 (The image of the apple tree alludes to a popular German aphorism usually ascribed to Martin Luther: “If I knew that the world were to end tomorrow I would plant an apple tree today.”) And similarly, in Chabon’s reflections on the “Clock of the Long Now,” these bold, longevous objects came to inspire optimism and faith in the future. We should unpack these expressions of optimism a little bit, as they seem to be getting ahead of themselves. In the philosophical traditions of the sublime,25 the concept usually contains a two-phase mechanism: the sublime is typically figured as a mixed emotion in which initial displeasure, in the face of incomprehensible magnitude, which could—figuratively or literally— crush the individual, gives way to a sense of affirmation of the self, brought about by virtue of reason’s enduring ability to withstand this sensory overload. In Chabon’s inspiring ebullience in the face of the “Long Now,” he leaps straight to the second phase, the triumphant affirmation of the self as a rational being. The clock allows him to consider this enormous time span from the outside, as it were, to contemplate its meaning without getting caught up in the durational aspects of this enormous temporal span. In musical terms, however, things are not quite so obviously rosy: while the “Long Now” allows for a conceptual bridge in the imaginary realm from the present to the most distant future, the moment-to-moment connections in music are under strain. The music has been slowed down to such an extent that the “Musical Now,”26 to borrow a category from Christopher Hasty, is under threat: the events that help us perceive the passage of time in music are so extremely stretched out that our temporal perception is given very little to go by. Paradoxically, in perceptual terms, the constantly unchanging sound is the equivalent of silence—it is marked by a lack of sonic events that would capture our attention.27 In the realm of music, it seems, the “Long Now” does not make the connections between past and future more manifest but rather complicates them. Lyotard, who takes Barnett Newman’s essay “The Sublime Is Now” as the touchstone for a reflection on the sublime and the avant-garde, cautions that the outsize proportions with which the sublime operates make

F6540.indb 212

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

213

questionable precisely the assurance ascertained in Newman’s title: is “now” the sublime? What exactly is “now” if one event can last years and months? Is it happening?28 A listener might have legitimate fear that the next event, a new marker for the “now”—the “It happens that,” as Lyotard calls it—may never occur. It is precisely this uncertainty that makes the pain and pleasure that characterizes the sublime. “What is terrifying,” Lyotard explains, “is that the It happens that does not happen, that it stops happening.”29 The sounding silence of the Organ2/ASLSP might continue indefinitely; an ever-lasting “now” loses all meaning.30 This silence may pose an aesthetic challenge— of a rather Cagean kind.31 The effect of the “sounding silence” of the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project is that it reverses in many ways our normal relationship with the musical object: the music does not move through us, but we move through the music. I mean this in a very literal sense: the spatial dimension of this performance, its situatedness inside the church, allows the listener to wander through the immutable sonorities and explore this cheerfully static music that becomes, in the absence of a perceptible temporal dimension, fulfilled in the spatial realm.32 This brings us to the central question that I am concerned with here: What kind of dimension is it where the experience of time all but breaks down? Is this dimension really spatial in any meaningful sense? There is a sense that this spatial dimension behind and beyond the temporal dimension is born out of an awkwardness, for want of a better expression. As is often pointed out, our vocabulary breaks down when it comes to describing temporality, and we invariably have to resort to spatial metaphors. The spatial realm, after all, is the dimension in which we can comprehend, where we can “get a handle” on the sublime.33 As we shall see, the spatial dimension allows a comparative perspective where we do not take in the sublime in its own right but rather compare its size to something more manageable. This possibility is always given, but it can sidestep the psychological element of the dizzying sublime by reaching for safe ground. So is our imagination not large enough to comprehend what might be found where temporality ends? One cannot help but think of Wagner’s Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit—“Here time turns into space,” which is what Gurnemanz contends at the beginning of the transformation music of act 1 of Wagner’s Parsifal. But, we should ask, is the dimension beyond temporality necessarily spatial? Hans-Jürgen Syberberg offers one answer in his justly celebrated 1982 video production of Parsifal34 that takes this conundrum seriously and manages to transplant the sense of sublimity into

F6540.indb 213

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

214

Alexander Rehding

the spatial domain: he sets act 1 in a mountainous landscape that emerges gradually as an enormous version of Wagner’s death mask, with hills and valleys being nothing but wrinkles in Wagner’s face. So vast are its dimensions that the nostrils serve as Kundry’s cave. Reference to Wagner is not coincidental here: like few other composers, Wagner’s name is associated with expanding the temporal dimension of music. The Wagnerian aesthetician Arthur Seidl makes an extended case for Wagner’s music transcending the rhythmic dimension and leaving behind music that is based on a tactus or regular pulse. Seidl, who does not distinguish very strictly between rhythm and meter, considers this “a-metric”35 quality to be the true sublime in music: “The more rhythm (in a stricter as well as in a narrower sense) retreats, indeed disappears, the sooner this ‘musically sublime’ will break through as the ultimate, innermost core of musical art.”36 Although the kind of sounds heard in the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project doubtless go far beyond what Seidl imagined in his nineteenth-century musical and philosophical framework, as we shall see, his conception of the musically sublime as something “a-metric” can be fruitfully applied to our questions here. Before we return to this question, let us turn to the second piece of slow music under consideration here.

9 Beet Stretch Leif Inge, a Norwegian “ideas-based artist,” as he calls himself, produced the 9 Beet Stretch in 2002. Using a commercial recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Inge manipulated the sound by stretching out the music so as to last a whole twenty-four hours. The pitches of the original recording are preserved; it is merely the temporal axis of the music that has been stretched to this new extent. The idea of using a CD recording of Beethoven’s Ninth to fill out the whole span of a day is not arbitrary: the length of a CD of roughly seventyfive minutes’ play time was apparently determined so as to comfortably accommodate Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which on an LP had always been fitted awkwardly onto three record sides.37 In that sense, the length of Beethoven’s Ninth is just another temporal unit that is in common usage, just as the twenty-four hours that make up a day. Moreover, the recording chosen—a readily available CD from the low-price Naxos label with the Hungarian conductor Béla Drahos and the Nikolaus Esterházy Sinfonia and Chorus dating from 199638— ensures that the association with a famous orchestra or conductor is minimized. This is not Toscanini’s or Karajan’s

F6540.indb 214

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

215

Ninth—its “workness,” the iconicity of its interpretation, is minimized. For Inge, it is merely the material on which his sound installation is based, and as such it is eminently replaceable, as he emphasizes. At the same time, while the recording might be deliberately understated and as good as anonymous, the choice of Beethoven’s Ninth is not: the symphony is generally agreed to occupy the most central position in the classical canon. Stretching its length to last twenty-four hours—to a length that exceeds our concentration span to an uncomfortable extent—is to give manifest expression in the temporal domain to the perceived magnitude, the inner greatness, or indeed the monumentality of this work. Simultaneously, it can be argued, the stretched-out version also emphatically denies this all-too-familiar piece its traditional work character and forces its listeners to encounter the piece afresh, from a changed temporal perspective. Inge has played this piece of sound art in a number of spaces, and it is also available online, as a live stream that is on permanent loop.39 It seems that, according to Inge, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony shares this canonical position with Mozart’s Requiem: he encourages the production of similarly monumental stretched-out works using other recordings, and he adds tongue-in-cheek, if no recording of Beethoven’s Ninth is ready to hand, Mozart’s Requiem should be used instead.40 What is most striking when listening to the music at this extremely slow speed— decelerated by a factor of 22.15—is the changed perspective on the music. Relatively speaking, 9 Beet Stretch is much faster than the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project, by orders of magnitude: even if we just dip into the musical stream for a short time at random, we will most likely still hear a succession of sonic events. Yet the listener is hard-pressed to recognize the original piece: it lacks meaningful rhythmic relations, phrases are no longer coherent, cadences have lost their shaping force, and melodies are barely perceptible as cogent entities. What we hear, quite literally at the limen of aurality, are sounds that are best described as ambient and that seem to have only a distant connection to the timbre of the instruments that originally produced them.41 Most strikingly, when played at this slow speed, what emerges from the recording is that the changes between sonorities are rarely clean breaks. Rather, the new and old sonorities frequently overlap, with the result that grating dissonances are produced—and sustained for several seconds— that had been all but inaudible at the regular tempo of the performance. (It would be wrong to fault the orchestra in the recording that Inge is using for this effect. Rather, in a full symphony orchestra, those minute inaccuracies, which would be all but unnoticeable at regular speed, are simply

F6540.indb 215

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

216

Alexander Rehding

inevitable.)42 There is a new level of dissonance in the piece that had lain dormant in the music until it was slowed down. The real interest in this piece lies in the music that is made in the interstices. The idea that a deceleration of events will lead to a new perspective and different focus is one that was explored in the field of literature in Sten Nadolny’s novel The Discovery of Slowness (1983), from which this essay borrows its title. The historical novel is based on the life of John Franklin (1786 –1847), a British naval officer and polar explorer. In Nadolny’s novel, and in deviation from reality, the hero’s character is marked by exceptional slowness—a quality that would increasingly come to be regarded as a handicap as the Industrial Revolution progressed. Nadolny’s John Franklin, however, quickly learns that his slowness is not necessarily detrimental: it goes hand in hand with other qualities that are lost as a consequence of Western societies turning toward acceleration. Franklin is exceptionally tenacious and thorough, and he takes the time to think through situations. This combination of slowness and tenacity that constitutes a special and unique strength is foregrounded right from the beginning of the book, describing Franklin’s childhood: John Franklin was ten years old, and he was still so slow that he couldn’t catch a ball. He held the rope for others. It reached from the lowest branch of the tree to his upraised hand. He held it as firmly as the tree, and he didn’t drop his arm until the end of the game. He was suited to be a rope holder as no other child in Spilsby, or even in all Lincolnshire. The clerk looked over from the Town Hall. His glance seemed approving. Perhaps there was no one in all of England who could stand still for more than an hour and hold a rope. He stood quietly, like a cross on a grave, towering like a statue.43

Later on in the novel, Franklin’s characteristic slowness— coupled with the concomitant ability to step back, take time, and focus on the details— becomes more prominent. It is thanks to his unique slowness, paradoxically, that Franklin is able to analyze and solve major problems, where his faster contemporaries have failed. The parallels to 9 Beet Stretch are not hard to fathom: whereas Nadolny’s novel makes the connection between slowness and attention to detail as compensatory mechanisms, Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch suggests an intimate causal link between both: as the tempo of the music slows down, the previously inaudible dissonances automatically move to the center of our attention. The liminal deceleration of the music cannot help but bring the details into focus.

F6540.indb 216

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

217

So far it seems fair to say that what we are dealing with here are two pieces that are extremely slow. Beyond this fundamental similarity, however, the commonalities seem to disappear. The two pieces are very different in many ways, and the questions that we derive from them are, apparently, different as well. The Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project challenges our attention span with its long stretches of uneventful sustained sounds, whereas in the 9 Beet Stretch, the attention shifts from the notes of the score to what happens between them in performance. What is the common ground between the two slow pieces? How are we to understand these pieces, how to listen to them? What do these extreme projects tell us about the aural world around us?

Time Axis Manipulation Like Nadolny’s novel, projects such as the Halberstadt John Cage Organ Project and 9 Beet Stretch have been read—justifiably so—as critiques of the hectic pace of modern life.44 But is the idea of extreme slowness, slowness that exceeds the level of comprehension, really a wholly new idea? In fact, it has been suggested that the notion of slowness in 9 Beet Stretch can be traced back to the figures often called the “first composers” in Western music history, Leoninus and Perotinus, the musicians associated with the Notre Dame repertoire of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.45 Within this repertoire, it is especially the extreme durations during which the tenor syllables are sustained in the long four-part organa Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes, usually linked with Perotinus’s name.46 According to some measurements, the notation of Viderunt omnes suggests that the first tenor note could theoretically be as long as fifty minutes, though it is wildly unlikely that such a slow speed was ever practiced in performance.47 Modern recordings choose a tempo that sustains the first tenor note for just under a minute. It may seem that this observation about twelfth-century music might rattle my initial hypothesis that slowness has something important to do with the turn from the second to the third millennium. Was slowness in fact invented, to put it somewhat hyperbolically, together with Western polyphonic music? As we shall see, there are some important similarities and differences between these repertoires that can help us understand better how slowness functions on the whole and what distinguishes slowness in the new millennium.48 While the tenor notes in Notre Dame organa, drawn from liturgical plainsong, are indeed stretched out to extreme lengths, they do not represent

F6540.indb 217

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

218

Alexander Rehding

a slowness that we have developed here: the upper organal voices above the plainsong move in very fast rhythms; it is these rhythms that capture the attention of listeners, not the long tenor notes themselves. If the long-sustained sounds of ASLSP at Halberstadt are effectively “silent,” that is, lacking a pulse of sonic events, then these long drawn-out tenor notes in Notre Dame organa are quite “noisy” in the context of the fast-moving organal voices above them. In other words, the underlying metric pulse that holds all the independent polyphonic parts together moves at quite a fast pace; the tenor parts are consequently better described as long but not slow. Nevertheless, it is worth considering Notre Dame organa a little longer. This repertoire is usually considered historically significant not only because it contains the earliest examples of three- and four-part polyphonic music but also because it survives in one of the earliest examples of rhythmic notation. In fact, it can be argued that the extremely long note values of the plainsong in the tenor of Notre Dame organa are predicated on a combination of these factors: First, polyphony in multiple independent parts allows the tenors of the four-part organa to be stretched out longer than any others; there is a direct correlation between number of voices and length of the tenor notes. Second, rhythmic notation fosters the complexity in which these multiple independent polyphonic voices move. And finally, a continuous metric pulse, which necessarily underlies this polyphony, ensures the coordination of the complex rhythms in all the voices. This pulse, on which the notation critically depends, becomes the beating heart of the music, holding all the parts together and allowing the tenor notes to reach for unheard-of lengths. In this interaction between length, pulse, and notation, music becomes measured, mensurata. Despite these important conceptual differences from our millennial pieces, Notre Dame slowness has drawn our interest to the question of the medium, in this case of notation. It would be wrong to insist on causality here: the expansion of temporality while still retaining coherence practiced here was probably not caused, but certainly greatly facilitated, by the institution of rhythmic notation. With this thought, I want to return from our short historical excursion and argue that an understanding of the media in which our two millennial pieces exist is also critical to understanding the particularities of their slowness. One other term, a more technical one, to express the phenomenon that we are grappling with is time axis manipulation, or TAM. The idea of time axis manipulation was explored in detail in the context of Friedrich Kittler’s media aesthetics and has been highlighted as the centerpiece of his technological thinking.49 Media are defined in this context as follows:

F6540.indb 218

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

219

Media are practices that use strategies of spatialization to enable one to manipulate the order of things that progress in time. Such means of time axis manipulation are only possible when the things that occupy a place in time and space are not only seen as singular events, but as reproducible data. Such production sites of data are “discourse networks.” Discourse networks are media in the broader sense: they form networks of technological and institutional elements.50

Kittler is very interested in the workings of language, broadly conceived, writing, and techniques of data processing, but it is easy to see how the principle of time axis manipulation is particularly important for the question of musical duration. Especially if we remember that one common working definition of music, and probably not the worst one, holds that it is the shaping of time by means of sounds, we can see how TAM provides a picture-perfect response to this approach to music. The original German term Aufschreibesysteme—“writing-down systems” —has a wonderful concreteness and directness that is missing in the more abstract English translation, “discourse networks.” Because that is precisely what an Aufschreibesystem is: it is, in the first place, a way of notating a data stream that makes it storable, reproducible, and manipulable.51 As we saw, the rhythmic notation of the twelfth century provided one such Aufschreibesystem, in a very literal sense, where the temporal dimension came to be captured on paper and became a function of the coordinated rhythmic notation. In this way of thinking, the transition from handwritten manuscripts to printed books at the turn of the sixteenth century—the emergence of the “Gutenberg galaxy”52—is not terribly relevant, since it does not change the technical capacities and limitations of the medium in any major way. Kittler is concerned much more about such events as the change from the continuous text of the scrolls of the Torah to the division of pages of the Christian Bible.53 (One might wonder whether the change from partbooks to score notation would mark a similarly decisive medial shift in the field of musical Aufschreibesysteme.) The crucial date as far as the mediality of sound is concerned is 1877, when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.54 As Kittler has argued at length, Edison’s phonograph marked a decisive step in the history of media because from then on, it was not just notes that could be stored and reproduced but sounds themselves. What was being written down and captured on record now was the sound wave itself.55 As has been pointed out repeatedly, the sonic Aufschreibesystem that was used to capture sounds

F6540.indb 219

6/17/15 8:30:14 AM

220

Alexander Rehding

is no longer decipherable by the naked eye. It can only be felt by the stylus of the gramophone player and converted back into sounds by mechanical means. At the same time, as Edison and others were eager to show, the new technology allowed new mechanisms of manipulating the data: it could be speeded up or slowed down in a way that had not been possible with “live” music.56 One technological problem, however, remained, and has remained a problem until relatively recently: the physical dimension to which our perception of pitch corresponds is based on frequency—and therefore a temporal function. Pitch and rhythm are both coded as temporal dimensions on the sound wave.57 If we slow down the speed at which the record plays, we also slow down the rate of oscillation that determines the pitch content. That is why it was impossible to manipulate the speed of a recording without affecting the pitch content at the same time. It invariably becomes fast Mickey Mouse or slow voice from beyond the grave, but never slow Mickey Mouse and fast voice from beyond the grave. Steve Reich was one of the composers who had long been fascinated by the idea of slowing down recorded sounds. He captured this idea in his composition Slow Motion Sound (1967), which merely consists of the instruction to slow down recorded sound while retaining the original pitch levels. The piece remained unperformed, partly because it was part of a movement within conceptual art in which the instruction to create the work simultaneously constituted it and partly because the technology to achieve this effect did not exist. Technically, the correlation is still impossible to cut through. But in our own digital age, computer technology has made it possible at least to simulate a division between the temporal dimension and the (apparently atemporal) pitch dimension. This is precisely what Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch is based on and the mechanism that he highlights as “temporal manipulation that does not affect pitch content.” Strictly speaking, Inge is somewhat oversimplifying the situation: a more precise description would be to call it a temporal manipulation with pitch adjustment and correction. But for all intents and purposes, the technology that Inge’s work is based on—fast Fourier transform (FFT)—has effectively severed the connection between the temporal aspect of sonic frequency and the temporality of sound duration.

Stretching Time The critical difference in the two millennial pieces with which we started —9 Beet Stretch and Organ2/ASLSP—and the examples from the previous

F6540.indb 220

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

221

millennium of music history is that the more recent pieces no longer employ a human performer. This is not just an incidental feature but gives us an opening toward understanding how these pieces work, crossing over, as they do, into a dimension where conventional listening regimes break down. On the surface, the strategies that both pieces employ seem different: one manipulates a recording, while the other piece is still performed by mechanical means. But across these differences, both pieces are no longer under the control of one human performer; they no longer rely on an individual’s sense of pulse and experiential time in human dimensions to keep the piece hanging together.58 We can quibble about whether any two individuals really hear in exactly the same way or not and, by extension, to what extent a performer’s perception of time and that of a listener really match up. But it seems safe in any case to make these generalizations in the face of the vast temporal dimensions presented here.59 It is here, in the vastness of dimensions and the disproportionality to human perception, that the question of the sublime that I invoked at various stages in this essay comes to the fore. The rise of the aesthetic prestige of music in the course of the nineteenth century among the arts, and especially as the art of the sublime, can be explained with reference to its radical temporal nature.60 Whether we base the sublime on Sulzer’s early version—as an “empirical symbol,” a “yardstick”— or on the more intricate versions of German Idealism, the idea of music unfolding over time resonates with the fundamental insight that the concept of selfhood is based in temporality. This is a point that connected even the great antagonists Hegel and Schopenhauer. In Hegel’s poetic description, “I” is in time, and time is the being of the subject itself. Now, since time and not space as such constitutes the essential element in which the tone, with respect to its musical significance, gains its existence and the time of the tone is simultaneously that of the subject, the tone itself enters into the self on this very basis, grasps the self on the basis of its simplest existence and sets the “I” in motion by means of temporal motion and its rhythm.61

The short addition “with respect to its musical significance” is critical because, we remember, Hegel saw the quick disappearance of individual tones as a problem. It is for this reason that Idealist thought latched on to the abstract musical work, of which individual performances were a representation. In a word, music became a metaphor for selfhood.

F6540.indb 221

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

222

Alexander Rehding

But what of the sublime? This is where Arthur Seidl’s Schopenhauerian perspective on the question of identity and music comes to the fore: Following its very own character, [ music] lifts up the human from the individual world of appearances, beyond the limits of earthly, merely natural existence. But it also teaches us another thing: with the tone only moving, for us, in the one-dimensional perspective of time, it reveals itself (like our “Will,” which merely touches the individual sphere in the one-dimensional perspective of time and therefore touches the “thing-in-itself ” most immediately) as so closely related to the inner core of all appearances and as so much part of the essence of things that it enables us to grasp this inner core through it [the tone] in its most immediate manifestation.62

It is not difficult to see how Seidl’s perspective is pertinent for our case. The very slow millennial pieces here are not mere representations (that is, performed instantiations of musical works, which could be contained because of their relatively short temporal span), but they become the musical object itself. Identification here no longer operates on the metaphorical level, but the subject is confronted with the realization that the music will be going on, in the case of Cage, for much longer than the life span of the subject itself. The subject is forced, true to the Idealist tradition of the sublime, to confront its own finitude and will, after a process of reflection, emerge victorious and strengthened. And as we saw earlier in Michael Chabon’s euphoric affirmation of humanity in the face of the “Clock of the Long Now,” subjects may ultimately garner fortitude from considering their own insignificance when compared with (near) infinity. The way toward this affirmation of selfhood as the result of the experience of the sublime, according to the Idealist philosophers—though not Lyotard’s postmodern sublime—must happen by employing the instruments of reason. The individual must resist the awesome magnitude of the object and extricate himself or herself from the overtaxed senses and somehow capture the object in its totality, even where its nature forcefully resists such objectification. This is where the spatial dimension steps in. Seidl continues his explanations, following on immediately from the excerpt quoted earlier: It is only in the external symmetry of rhythm (that is, of the temporal element) that this universe converges again with the spatial world [dem Plastischen], this “in-itself ” returns at least partly to the realm of external appearances—and it does so in close analogy to the way the

F6540.indb 222

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

223

perspective of time ties the primordial and all-encompassing Will, which originally and essentially exists outside of time and space, back to the laws of the intellect, that is, to the world of representations.63

As we saw before, Seidl’s aesthetics of the sublime of music is predicated on distinction of spatiality (or das Plastische—which can perhaps best be rendered as “three-dimensionality”) and temporality. Rhythmic or metric regularities, for him, will always lead back to a spatialized concept of music that is, in Seidl’s understanding, not in itself sublime.64 In order to become truly sublime, Seidl asserts, music must leave behind all spatiality—all regularity of rhythm —and become “a-metric” and purely temporal. Seidl’s distinctions can be quite useful for our purposes. The spatial dimension can in fact be used to invoke a sense of the sublime and also to extricate ourselves from it. Let us begin with the process of extrication: as we saw, it is only with these quasi-spatial categories that labels and order can be imposed on the sonic events, and the sound events can be “rationalized” (without necessarily subjugating ourselves to reason). In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard explains in greater detail how such a “rationalization” (or “surveying”) can occur: The imagination contents itself, one might say, with “surveying” the given magnitudes by progressive composition. The imagination will do this under the sole direction of understanding; it can rest assured that understanding will not ask it to grasp “in a glance” [in einem Augenblick] all the units that compose these magnitudes. Thought will thus remain confined in the recurrent mathematical synthesis of a series that can be infinite.65

What Lyotard is describing here is Kant’s mechanism that would allow the self to resist the “almost-too-great” quality of the sublime by a process of respatialization: the imagination retreats into purely measuring the quantities it is confronted with. In this way, the self effectively intellectualizes the experience and evades a direct engagement with the overwhelming sensuous totality. Such a process is always possible with both pieces in question: we can always rationalize away the unchanging sounding silence of the organ sounds in Halberstadt or the unheard-of dissonances of 9 Beet Stretch by relating them back to the compositions from which they sprang, by “surveying” them rather than engaging them directly, by thinking of them as notes rather than hearing them as sounds, but only at the cost of experiencing their dimension as temporalities.

F6540.indb 223

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

224

Alexander Rehding

And at the same time, it was the spatialization of sounds that made these sublime pieces possible in the first place: in both cases, a strict and consistent spatialization of the musical text was necessary to achieve these results. Let us first look at 9 Beet Stretch. As we have already seen, the score—in the sense of the notated material worked on and manipulated—is in this case the innocuous Naxos recording of the Beethoven. The slow version is not based any more on the durational patterns of the original score that Beethoven wrote but on the sounds conveyed in the sound wave. In other words, if a rhythm is performed inaccurately in the original recording, this inaccuracy will be blown up by a factor of 22.15 because the sounds are measured in terms of distances. A certain symbolic level remains, of course: the digital code of zeroes and ones has no dimension whatsoever, and that is the reason Kittler celebrates the digital age as the stage where his anti-Hegelian Phenomenology of Writing must end. But nonetheless, as long as we describe in words what happens here, the spatial realm is the only one available to us that provides us with terms suited to expressing the foundation of these manipulations. In the case of Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP, meanwhile, the spatial dimension has been central right from the very beginning: we remember that the time interval between two musical events is determined by the distance between two stems in the notation. The “musicking”— or “sonic processing”— of this score is therefore nothing but the temporal expression of these spatial distances. What is important about Organ2/ASLSP is that the absence of a performer is not just accidental here. Let us just assume for the moment that humans could live for 639 years and that the Halberstadt performance of Organ2/ASLSP was possible under the hands of one extremely longevous organist. It would still not be possible to represent the temporal relations of this rendition in similarly dehumanized terms. The Halberstadt performance, to put it poetically, lacks a heartbeat, and deliberately so.66 I started by tentatively suggesting that in a dimension in which temporal relations have become meaningless, music seems to take on spatial attributes again. Given the spatialization of time and the manipulation of the sound wave that is so central to TAM, it seems fair to say that in a realm that normally lies beyond the reach of our experience, these are the best terms we can hope for. Even though the Halberstadt performance, unlike 9 Beet Stretch, uses traditional mechanical means to stage this piece, it is conceptually cut from the same cloth as the digital artwork. The technical means may have been there in 1361, but it is a form of presentation that only makes sense in the “post-Edison galaxy,” the medial possibilities of

F6540.indb 224

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

The Discovery of Slowness in Music

225

our own age, defined as they are by time axis manipulation, and its possibilities of writing sound. We remember Hegel’s idea of a tone as “an existence that disappears by being.”67 What is being changed in these two pieces is no less than the philosophical definition of tone. Under the banner of time axis manipulation, the duration of the sound is completely uncoupled from its decaying sonic properties, either by mechanical means, in the case of Organ2/ASLSP, or by digital means, in the case of 9 Beet Stretch. In either case, the tone is taken as a fixed duration, and the sonic content is refilled so as not to affect its pitch properties. And it seems that this reconceived sonic parameter of this very slow millennial music opens up a “second-order” spatial dimension that allows us to access this liminal aurality, the thresholds of listening, and to explore the music in previously unimaginable ways—by wandering around the sonic spaces of Organ2/ASLSP or by inserting ourselves into the grating dissonances of 9 Beet Stretch.

F6540.indb 225

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

chapter 13

Negotiating Ecstasy Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone Andrew Shenton

Electronic dance music (EDM) is an acoustic ecology whose perceptual and cognitive attributes have, since the late 1980s, engendered new modes of listening. The ordering of sound and the construction of electronic soundscapes is in a complex interface with cultural experiences such as clubbing, dancing, and drug taking. This has led to the development of electroacoustic musicology and has had a profound impact on the way we frame the question, what is listening? EDM also pushes to the forefront the essential question, why are we listening? This essay explores these two questions by examining four principal features of the genre: (1) the unique characteristics of EDM, especially concerning its composition and performance; (2) the listening environment, particularly the institution of a “safe space” (a so-called temporary autonomous zone); (3) how chemical sensory alteration through the use of illegal drugs changes the listening experience; and (4) the reasons for participation in EDM events, in particular how listeners seek an ecstatic experience.1 Because EDM is such a diverse field, this essay moves from general remarks about characteristics of the genre to specifics of the teknival (a

226

F6540.indb 226

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

Negotiating Ecstasy

227

portmanteau of techno and festival), a form of EDM that is the epitome of a certain esoteric listening.2 Classical musicians and musicologists have until recently generally been dismissive of what they perceive to be another vacuous popular music (which has the added stigma of being associated with an illegal drug culture). In recent years, however, there has been an increase in publications on the subject, including for example a broad reception of techno in Deleuzian musicology3 and some major publications that have begun to examine EDM and the spiritual experience in different ways: Simon Reynolds has written two books that survey its historical and cultural milieu; Mark Butler has described and analyzed musical aspects of the form; a collection of essays edited by Graham St. John examines aspects of culture and religion; and a monograph by Robin Sylvan explores the spiritual and religious dimension of global rave culture in greater detail.4 Most of the contemporary literature is not written by scholars, however, but comes in the form of blogs and websites, reflecting the fast pace of change in the genre and the tech-savvy demographic that is listening to this music.5 Although EDM is often very popular, attracting thousands of participants to events such as the Berlin Love Parade, academically it had been a marginal music.6 It experienced a coming of age in 2011 and moved more into the mainstream when American producer and singer-songwriter Skrillex (born Sonny John Moore) was nominated for five Grammy Awards and won three.7 This cultural shift is an opportune time to reevaluate the listening experience of a music that has established itself as a dominant force in avant-garde techniques in both performance and appreciation. Writing about EDM is actually somewhat problematic because there is no established international musical canon. This is partly because the genre is too young, but also because there is too much of it for any dominant form to become recognized on a global basis. There is also so much variety under the umbrella term EDM that it is difficult to abstract patterns or to provide terminology that does not have multiple meanings. In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds draws an interesting historical sketch of the development of American EDM in which he acknowledges the rapidly changing scene and the profusion of terminology: In the late eighties, “house” was the all-encompassing general term for rave music; Detroit techno was originally treated as a subset of, and adjunct to, Chicago house. But by the early nineties, not only was house’s primacy challenged by “techno”—now a distinct genre with its own

F6540.indb 227

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

228

Andrew Shenton

agenda—but house itself started to splinter as a seemingly endless array of prefixes—“tribal,” “progressive,” “handbag”—interposed themselves in order to define precise stylistic strands and taste markets. What had once been a unified subculture based on a mix of music began to fragment along class, race, and regional lines, as different groups began to adapt the music to fit their particular needs and worldviews.8

Since the early 1990s the Internet has contributed to the growth and dissemination of different types of EDM, which has made sharp distinctions in style and nomenclature impossible.9 There are, however, several core characteristics of the music that influence approaches to listening. Electronic dance music is fast (typically from 130 to 160 beats per minute) and is often characterized by a pounding repetitive kick-drum pulse. Within this basic framework the music embraces an enormous sonic range filled with color, subtlety, and variation. Many features of EDM distinguish it from other forms of popular music, including electronic production and performance, extensive use of “sampling,” extremes of length, repetition of fragments of material (harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic and timbral), and constancy of key and tempo. These musical elements elicit psychoacoustic responses that may or may not be amplified through the use of certain drugs; however, EDM is constructed so that even without the influence of drugs the brain’s interpretation of these digital ecologies points to the music’s use as an aural narcotic in its own right. Most EDM is created electronically, so the physical act of sound production is largely eliminated. With the advent of digital processing, and in particular computer “sampling,” sound can be manipulated in myriad ways that render the original partly or wholly unrecognizable. The principal use of electronics for sound generation provides what Edgar Varèse described as “organized sound,” because the medium offers composers almost endless possibilities of musical expression.10 In fact, EDM composers have not abandoned the tempered system because it is still useful as a tool for articulating time, replete with melodies and cadences that mirror the effects of so-called club drugs. As early as the 1960s sampling was primarily used to “quote” music or spoken phrases in an electronic or deejayed composition, or to manipulate pitch (as demonstrated, for example, by the Mellotron in the Beatles’ 1967 hit “Strawberry Fields Forever”). Now the term sampladelic refers to what Reynolds defines as “disorienting, perception-warping music created using the sampler and other forms of digital technology.”11 This concept Pierre Schaeffer described as “acousmatic sound,” in which the listener experi-

F6540.indb 228

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

Negotiating Ecstasy

229

ences the sound from behind a “veil” of speakers and the actual source of the music is hidden from view.12 This is an important part of the EDM experience since listeners are free from engagement with a “performer” and therefore able to concentrate entirely on the experience of hearing the music and are freed from social constraint to move to the music if they wish to do so.13 As Michael Chion notes, “The acousmatic situation changes the way we hear. By isolating the sound from the ‘audiovisual complex’ to which it initially belonged, it creates favorable conditions for reduced listening which concentrates on the sound for its own sake, as sound object, independently of its causes or its meaning.”14 This notion of “reduced listening” is a key component in listening strategies for EDM and is discussed further below in relation to the use of narcotics. Starting in the late 1970s, some instruments had a profound effect on the specific sound of EDM, such as the Roland TB 303 Baseline (a bass synthesizer with built-in sequencer) and the Roland TR 606 (a programmable, analog-synthesis drum machine). Now there is a vast array of specialized equipment such as the Korg Electribe EMX-1, an all-in-one techno-producing piece of hardware that contains a drum machine and a synth/sequencer. Software for personal computers that is capable of producing professional standard music abounds.15 Because the music is created digitally, it is not codified by instrumentation, and this musical element is in any case obscured since traditional instruments are rarely employed live and, whether they are used live or recorded, their sound is greatly manipulated. It is difficult therefore to recognize subgenres through specific instrumentation and, since on a superficial level EDM has many other features that are similar (such as dynamic, tempo, and pulse), discerning the work of individual deejays can only be done at a highly specific area of detailed sound observance (i.e., at the level of “reduced listening”). For EDM the music is a “sound object” (another concept by Pierre Schaeffer) that is broadly identifiable through the musical features just listed, but as Schaeffer predicted, “the role of color or timbre [is] completely changed from being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque; it [becomes] an agent of delineation like the different colors on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form.”16 The listener does not have a classical orchestra or other ensemble as a frame of reference and communal familiarity; instead, any noise (“sound object”) is acceptable. Most EDM “sound objects” (tracks) do not rise to the level of manipulation of noise that its counterparts in digital art music do because it is useful to invoke regular rhythms for dancing and tonic-dominant hierarchies for engaging patterns of tension and resolution. However, although

F6540.indb 229

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

230

Andrew Shenton

the lay listener may not be able to distinguish different subgenres in EDM, or even different deejays, the role of the creator of the music has become refined and has now merged with the roles formerly held by the sound engineer, the producer, and the deejay and is subsumed under the latter term. Reynolds describes one of the early pioneers, Larry Levan, in the role of deejay-as-shaman, as “a techno-mystic who developed a science of total sound in order to create spiritual experiences for his followers.”17 For the hard-core EDM fan there is cult-like worship of individual deejays and a preference for certain subgenres of music that resonate with the listener on the basis of individual preference and bias and especially for the spiritual (or numinous or religious) experience he or she receives. Because computers present the possibility for infinite gradations of sound production, the deejay’s art is subtle and nuanced, even if deejays’ ingenuity is lost on many listeners at a conscious level of understanding. A large percentage of EDM listeners probably do not knowingly distinguish subtleties of mismatch and adjustment described by musicologist Robert Jourdain as part of the sound experience (see below); however, listening takes priority among the senses. Light shows may dazzle, but their primary function is to complement the music, helping listeners access a different plane within the music and to disorient them by changing the shape and color of their surroundings. Much EDM is heard in the dark of a club or outside at night or with closed eyes. Volume is also a factor in this liminal listening experience since the norm is extremely high volume, and this blocks out everything else (including some primary thought functions). Hearing everything but paying attention to only parts allows time for the brain to pay attention to ecstasy, and the repetitive structure of the music masks the long span of time spent on the dance floor. This overarching periodicity leads to a dissolution of time, and this means that as we hear the repeated structures of EDM we literally re-cognize the musical material. At a teknival such as the N.O.I.S.E. Festival on the military base in Aisne, France, in 2011, the digital music has been prepared in advance, but the presentation is spontaneous, designed by the deejay either in reaction to the mood of the participants or to directly influence the ambience.18 Unlike popular music tracks, which are usually between and three and five minutes long, EDM tracks are much longer, and seamless integration provides a continuous music event that may last for several hours. This also denotes an extreme listening event in which hierarchy of content is the provenance of the deejay and is carefully controlled to negotiate large time spans. A successful deejay makes these changes and inventions at interest-

F6540.indb 230

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

231

Negotiating Ecstasy

ing times, carefully monitoring the crowd so that he or she can both follow and manipulate the collective mood. Sylvan summarizes the role of the deejay, noting that essentially, what a DJ does is to take a number of tracks, each of which has its own distinct feeling and structural components (i.e., rhythm, tempo, melody, harmony, timbre, instrumentation, etc.), and blend them together so that the transitions are seamless and the entire set is an integrated whole. In order to accomplish this task, a DJ must utilize the similarities between the tracks, through techniques like beat matching and key matching and, at the same time, must also utilize the differences between tracks to create a sense of dynamic and forward momentum.19

Composition is often intuitive, and computer interfaces such as Ableton often require more technical knowledge than formal theoretical musical training. As the genre has developed there has been a turn toward some advanced techniques used in classical music, including musique concrète and aleatory procedures. Some of the more intellectual bands, such as Autechre, an English duo, have successfully employed mathematical algorithms or generative methods to negotiate a temporal framework.20 This has spawned an experimental genre called intelligent dance music (IDM) that includes artists such as Aphex Twin, PlatEAU, and Nosaj Thing; however, this label is now somewhat discredited since it is antithetical to what most people understand to be the true spirit of EDM.21

Listening at the Teknival Although there is a thriving club culture for EDM, the genre had its origins in environments such as the rave and the teknival. Teknival, the most current term that can be used with any authority to describe an EDM event combined with one or more other ventures, grew out of the rave scene, a term used since the 1970s to describe dance parties characterized by fast-paced electronic music, laser light shows, and an associated drug culture. The music itself includes genres such as house, trance, psytrance, dubstep, Eurodance, and jungle. Now an established global phenomenon, the teknival can be an indoor or outdoor event lasting from one evening to several days with attendance in the tens or in the tens of thousands.22 These are liminal listening spaces that perfectly fit the descriptor “temporary autonomous zone,” a term coined by Hakim Bey in his 1985 book T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Ter-

F6540.indb 231

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

232

Andrew Shenton

rorism.23 Bey’s book describes the creation of temporary spaces that elude normal control protocols. The teknival, a specialized musical experience that has at its heart EDM, redefines not only the arena in which listening happens but also the act itself because the music demands a certain type of listening. The musicologist Judith Becker uses the term “deep listening,” which she adapted from composer Pauline Oliveros, to describe “persons who are profoundly moved, perhaps even to tears, by simply listening to a piece of music.”24 Becker’s exploration of the notion of deep listening relates it particularly to global trancing, and this trance-like state is certainly a feature of EDM, though not its primary one. EDM does require a certain “deep listening”; however, a better term is esoteric listening since the music is intended for a particular group and is difficult to understand by the outsider who may be discouraged by its timbre, repetition, volume, and length. Another useful term is engrossed listening, because the whole mind and body can become engaged in the listening process to the exclusion of other activities. A large subculture is involved in this type of TAZ as both a group and a personal experience (although the genre is constantly changing and is therefore difficult to historicize). Often aided by the utilization of illicit narcotics, the zone becomes a “safe space” for divesting one of self and of negotiating a new ecstatic or rapturous state. Providing a unique double disengagement with normality, the EDM TAZ operates outside the boundaries of criminal justice, and, through music and drugs, the person operates outside normal representation of self. Engaging in group identity in a TAZ permits suppression of conventional personal identity in an environment made safe by the presence of others in a space sanctified for this particular use. Music is not incidental but rather a key feature of the EDM TAZ. It remains the principal tether to the mundane but also a significant stimulus to explore an ecstatic state and the transformation of self. The listener, freed from convention and regulation, engages in a different kind of experiential engagement with sound and with listening. Sensory alteration through narcotics and the disengagement from self and from circumstance point to the goal of participation in any TAZ: to discover the transcendent properties of music, the ways in which it can mediate one’s relationship with the divine.

F6540.indb 232

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

233

Negotiating Ecstasy

Welcome to Wonderland Melbourne, Australia, has been a center of EDM and rave culture since the late 1980s and has even given its name to a distinct dance known as the Melbourne Shuffle. Teknivals are a regular feature of the Melbourne scene. One of these outdoor dance parties is captured in a documentary titled Welcome to Wonderland, created by an independent, self-funded crew of Melbourne filmmakers led by James Short and Clara Hornley.25 The DVD is a chronological narrative of the one-night event, which includes interviews with an eclectic and articulate group of people who have come to the party to produce, deejay, or just participate. Cut in with short animations, it represents a technological stand-in for actual shared experience for readers of this essay and is, in the experience of this author, broadly representative of the genre. The Wonderland documentary begins with the setup crew selecting a location and rigging the lighting and music stations. The arrival of people, the dance party itself (which starts during the day, continues all night, and ends after dawn), and the aftermath are cut with interviews. Like the famous Burning Man Festival in the United States, the Wonderland party included artwork and sculpture, market stalls, living art, costumes, and food as a holistic approach to the TAZ. Wonderland is typical of the range of people who attend these events. Evenly distributed among the genders, it is primarily people in the twentyto-forty age group, though all are welcomed without discrimination. There is a high proportion of students, hippies, squatters, and travelers in the party, but increasingly “seekers” from all walks of life attend, intrigued by the reports of transformational experiences. Interestingly, Wonderland and the other TAZs where EDM is played are not places for sexual conquest but rather provide a much more personal and interior space. There is certainly a strong sense of community, and the drug Ecstasy itself promotes a strong sense of camaraderie and relationship; however, the primary function of an EDM event is to allow people to be alone together. An example from the Wonderland CD serves to illustrate some of the typical features of EDM and also to point out the sonic range and high level of individual creativity that the genre offers once one listens past the background to the foreground detail. EDM is universally in “common time” (four beats per measure). This even pulse is because the music is essentially dance music, which alternates feet for each pulse. “Giri Mana” by Ganga Giri is in common time at a comparatively slow pulse of around 126 beats per minute.26 The CD track is only 4:31 long because it is only

F6540.indb 233

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

234

Andrew Shenton

a sample of what happened at the event. Nonetheless, this is sufficient to show Ganga Giri’s talent and sensibilities. The following description charts what happens chronologically during the track and briefly describes the sonic content: 0:00 begins with drum beat, ambient forest sounds, followed by a cymbal pulse and a didgeridoo (this establishes both rhythm and tonality and suggests an essence of Australia with an indigenous instrument) 0:33 kick bass starts and settles into rhythmic groove with little other sound 0:59 transition to: 1:01 the real start of the piece in full effect, with wordless vocals 1:35 increase in sound varieties / different vocals 2:18 repeat of vocals from start 2:35 new sounds including birds chirping 2:50 reestablish pulse 2:58 new vocals 3:21 change of electronic sounds, more tinny regular percussion 4:00 repeat to beginning vocals / countermelody, which becomes more prominent 4:31 transition to next track (which features spoken words of the title of the new track, “Tempt to Take”) In microcosm, and on a reduced time scale, these few minutes parallel the entire EDM event. The progressive start is typical: having a period that is preparatory to the main part of the piece is analogous to the effect of the drug kicking in (the period after ingestion before it takes full effect—for Ecstasy this is around forty to sixty minutes). When the music comes up to a new level of intensity, it parallels the full effects of the drug and thereafter sustains a high but modifies the sound to keep the brain engaged. On drugs of the amphetamine type (such as Ecstasy), all senses can be heightened, but especially hearing, so the listening unwittingly becomes a more active participant. This kind of active listening allows the brain to experience more fully the numerous interruptions and subtle changes that take place in each track (part of the psychology of listening described later), including recognizable sounds such as birdsong and changes in digital sound such as the percussion. Because EDM is essentially experiential listening, created for group events with specific space and situation, recordings such as the Wonderland CD and DVD are an adjunct to the live event; however, this is a rap-

F6540.indb 234

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

235

Negotiating Ecstasy

idly expanding secondary market.27 The recorded versions of EDM differ in two major respects from a recording of a classical piece. First, although there is a market for recordings of specific events such as teknivals and for subgenres of EDM (including many Internet sites such as radio stations and video-sharing sites that broadcast or store EDM), it is not primarily a recorded genre but a hybrid of deejaying and improvisation.28 Second, because the music is created spontaneously, “composed” by a deejay in response to the unique stimulus of the occasion, repetition of the event in recorded form is usually a poor substitute for authentic experience. Although EDM is created, by definition, for group events, recordings re-create the experience in a specific type of temporary autonomous zone provided by headphones and an MP3 player in a private and personal setting. This is in contrast to classical music, which has concert halls as its public listening venue but has an established audience for private listening, or to chart pop, which, since the waning of disco, is essentially something to be listened to at home or work. Although intrinsically interesting, this is a new private liminal form of listening not discussed further in this essay, which concentrates instead on the primary live experience.

The Influence of Drugs The physical situation (outdoors or in a large and unconventional space) is one feature of the EDM TAZ; however, probably the most significant element that moves the act of listening to an extreme is the use of drugs, which have a profound effect on both the physiology and the psychology of the participant. It is an essential interpretative key to unlocking the mystery of the transformative experience achieved by many people at these events. Commonly used drugs include marijuana, ketamine, alcohol, amphetamine (speed), LSD, and magic mushrooms; however, the EDM culture is indebted in particular to one drug, Ecstasy.29 Ecstasy is now primarily a recreational drug. It acts in the brain “through three main neurochemical mechanisms: blockade of serotonin reuptake, introduction of serotonin release, and induction of dopamine release.”30 Its effects are, as its name suggest, ecstatic and may include euphoria, intense empathy with other people, enhanced sensory perception, and diminished feelings of fear and anxiety.31 There is an interactive dynamic between the drug and the music that is greater than the sum of the two. Reynolds observes that “when large numbers of people took Ecstasy together, the drug catalyzed a strange and wondrous atmosphere of collective intimacy, an electric sense of connection

F6540.indb 235

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

236

Andrew Shenton

between complete strangers,” and he notes that “even more significantly, MDMA turned out to have a uniquely synergistic/synesthetic interaction with music, especially up-tempo, repetitive electronic dance music.”32 Whether narcotics enable more capacity from the brain or whether they simply suppress inhibition and enhance feelings of well-being is hard to define with any certainty. From a purely physical standpoint it is clear that substances such as MDMA encourage the release of endorphins in the body and, when combined with music, dramatically increase pleasurable feelings to the point of ecstasy. There are currently no significant studies of the psychoacoustic response to EDM on drugs, and earwitness accounts, while revealing at an anthropological level, do not explain what is happening at a physical level.33 There are some relevant studies on aspects of listening, especially related to the exceptional or ecstatic experience, that do shed light on the EDM listening experience. For example, in 2005 psychologist Oliver Grewe and his colleagues published results from experiments they conducted to ascertain how highly charged emotional responses to music (which they describe as “chill” experiences or “goose bumps” or “shivers down the spine”) are aroused, and the researchers concluded that “they do not occur in a reflex-like manner, but as a result of attentive, experienced, and conscious musical enjoyment.”34 This points again to a “reduced listening” for EDM in which the listener learns to attend to detail. Although Grewe’s team was unable to locate a distinct chill-triggering acoustical pattern, it did conclude that “strong emotions . . . are related to structural elements” and that “important musical factors seem to be harmonic sequences, the entrance of voices, and the beginning of a new part, that is, a violation of expectancies.”35 This is related to new models of expectation and fulfillment required by this music (see below). It also raises the problem of how best to define the influence of music on emotion in the particular circumstances of a teknival.36 Robin Sylvan, developing a theoretical framework for understanding the spiritual dimensions of different types of popular music, suggests that music is “the vehicle par excellence for conveying religious experience and meaning.”37 Sylvan has summarized the effects of this numinous encounter at different levels, and his conclusions are directly applicable to EDM: At the physiological level, it affects the body and its subsystems; at the psychological level, it affects the structure of the psyche and the state of consciousness; at the sociocultural level, it affects and reflects the social order and the cultural paradigms; at the semiological level, it provides

F6540.indb 236

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

Negotiating Ecstasy

237

symbolic structures which create affective meaning systems; at the virtual level, it creates compelling temporal and spatial worlds into which one is drawn; at the ritual level, it fits into a larger set of ritual activities, with their own functions and purposes; and, finally, at the spiritual or religious level, it establishes a link to the spiritual world and the contours and dynamics of that world. Moreover, music affects people in all of these ways simultaneously, integrating all these levels into a harmonious whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.38

In the broadly encompassing book Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, Robert Jourdain surveys some of the leading issues in music and neuroscience. In the last two chapters he turns to the fundamental questions regarding the remarkable power of music: “how is it that music takes hold of us, rattles us to the core, and somehow speaks to us in a way that words cannot”?39 He defines this as an ecstatic experience, noting that “a defining trait of ecstasy is its immediacy. Ecstasy is not some splendid event, like a ravishing sunset, that happens in the external world before our eyes and ears. Ecstasy happens to our selves. It is a momentary transformation of the knower, not merely a transformation of the knower’s experience (although exceptional experience is often required to bring ecstasy on).”40 With such a huge payoff it is not surprising that frequenting EDM events may become habitual as people seek to reexperience ecstasy or at least to reanimate the original feeling. It would confirm the notion that the people who participate in EDM events have expectations of the experience that are beyond the ordinary. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes this type of extraordinary activity as one of fullness: We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more of what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving, as inspiring. Perhaps this sense of fullness is something we just catch glimpses of from far off; we have the powerful intuition of what fullness would be, were we to be in that condition, e.g., of peace or wholeness; or able to act on that level, of integrity or generosity or abandonment or self-forgetfulness. But sometimes there will be moments of experienced fullness, of joy and fulfillment, where we feel ourselves there.41

Taylor is not specifically referring to an EDM event, but his description amply covers the essential goal of attendance and is corroborated by people

F6540.indb 237

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

238

Andrew Shenton

at the Wonderland teknival. Ami, one of the interviewees in the documentary, remarks that “if the music is good, it will take you to that place” and describes Wonderland as the “entry point to another world.”42 Sally, another Wonderland participant, said she believed that people come to “embrace their freedom” and that “people draw strength from it.”43 The entire discourse in the documentary is similar, and although it may have been edited to demonstrate a point of view, there is a unity of response with other anthropological research of teknivals and dance parties.44 A sense of communion with the divine is expressed in EDM events not through a momentary illumination of the mind but through an atemporal period of ecstasy that brings the listener to the frontiers of what cannot be spoken.45 Discussing raves, a specific type of EDM TAZ heavily influenced by the consumption of Ecstasy, Sylvan identifies three specific features that are applicable to most EDM events. He suggests that they provide a form of ritual activity and communal ceremony that regularly and reliably produces such experiences through concrete practices. But it goes even further than that: Raves also provide a philosophy and worldview that makes sense of these experiences and translates them into a code for living, a map for integrating the transformative experience into concrete details of day-to-day life. And, last but not least, raves provide a sense of community, a cultural identity, and an alternative social structure that exists in the “real world” outside of the rave.46

Listening to EDM is clearly associated with ritual activity as well as with personal worldview and personal identity. Music is the cohesive element in this holistic experience: without drugs the experience may be diminished, but without music it would not exist. The question “does this music make sense only when the listener is under the influence?” is often asked by critics and by both those who partake of narcotics and those who do not. The response is obviously no, since the music can make sense on many levels, but as Reynolds suggests, “rave culture as a whole is barely conceivable without drugs, or at least without drug metaphors: by itself, the music drugs the listener.”47 Although it is not necessary to take drugs to listen to EDM, it is certainly a critical factor in understanding some of the aims of this music and some of the psychology of composition. The following therefore considers extreme listening at the limits of brain capacity that has been enhanced by drugs. Under the influence of drugs the psychology of melodic expectation and fulfillment (what the music theorist Eugene Narmour called the implication-realization model) is radically changed.48 There is a new set

F6540.indb 238

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

Negotiating Ecstasy

239

of rules. Those who do not take drugs accept the new rules as the norm, though if a listener has never experienced the music on drugs, the experience is obviously different and perhaps less complete. Once started, any piece of music sets up implications for what is to follow, and the success of the piece is dependent on how these expectations are realized. EDM generally only has small violations of expectation with deviations that prevent the brain habituating to the rhythm while at the same time providing music that has coherence. During the act of listening, especially to something as complex as EDM, the primary auditory cortex has too much information to handle, so there is a selection process, a reduction in the listening process that limits what is processed. EDM’s reliance on repetition (pulse, key, tempo) eradicates the need to keep decoding the background information and frees the mind to find another message, which communicates on a different level, a mentalese that bypasses verbal encryption at the encoding and decoding stages.49 Repetition helps the listener fall into the groove of expectation because the important information happens more at the surface level. Jourdain neatly summarizes what is in essence the same theory posited by Narmour: “Everything we do, including grasping a moment of music, commences with a kind of fleeting hypothesis that is confirmed or disconfirmed; every subtle mismatch is countered by adjustments to the next anticipation. We perceive music only as well as we can predict what’s coming, for to predict is to model the deep relations that hold music together.”50 The success of Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, the 2010 Grammy-winning EP by Skrillex, is largely predicated on these subtle mismatches and anticipations.51 It starts with a repetitive electronic tune, after which indistinguishable words are heard intercut with a vocal sample of a woman shouting, “Yes, Oh my God,” and some evocative electronic sounds. These elements are repeated sequentially but with subtle changes for each repeat and are not of equal length, so the changes are unexpected. Toward the end of the EP actual words are distinguishable, and the piece ends with a hiccupping distortion of the primary melody. Peter Burkholder has posited a simple model for associative musical meaning, which is useful for analyzing the ways people hear EDM in the way that Jourdain has described and Skrillex has put into effect.52 Burkholder suggest that there are five stages when we listen to music: 1. We recognize and focus on what is familiar in the music. 2. For each element we recognize, we carry certain [primary] associations with it, based on other occasions we have encountered it.

F6540.indb 239

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

240

Andrew Shenton

3. Once we have been reminded of other music or of some musical concept, these associations themselves are likely to carry other [secondary] associations. 4. Having recognized that which is familiar, and having experienced these two levels of association, the listener then observes how those familiar elements are manipulated or are juxtaposed with new elements in order to say something new. 5. Finally, the listener interprets all this information, including the associations aroused and the changes or new elements that are introduced.53 Successful EDM relies on the skill with which the deejay understands the effects of what he or she is composing. With EDM the frame of reference is heavily self-referential. The deejay will work within the framework of familiarity with sounds known to the average listener, so that he or she can manipulate and juxtapose common elements with new ones in a way that invokes interesting primary and secondary associations for the listener in a meaningful way. Skrillex is particularly masterful at this in a way that satisfies both the hard-core listener and the neophyte since he has an extraordinary ability to utilize pleasant sounds and to make the changes in a wholly pleasing way even within the confines of the EP format. Because of the effect of MDMA and other “nightclub drugs” on the brain, smaller musical events, phrases, and formal designs are given different emphasis in the cognitive process. Experienced EDM fans become expert at listening, and as Jourdain notes, “The expert listener does not merely perceive notes passing by, but totes along armfuls of fragments for use moments later. These memories are largely the responsibility of the frontal lobes, which act upon the auditory cortex to maintain observed relations for many seconds when they would otherwise fade away.”54 This structure is deeply connected to the music’s being primarily for dancing. It points again to a type of “reduced listening” that concentrates directly on the sound object but does not impede any physical response and is in marked contrast to passive listening to other types of music (particularly classical music), for which physical response is actively discouraged. The commentator Jimi Fritz points that “with conventional music, we listen to the form and follow the lyrics, but with rave music there is no beginning or end. The music is cyclical and continuous and acts more as a catalyst for our own personal inner journey, more a transportation system than an end in itself.”55 He concludes that “rave music is specifically designed to make you move your body.”56

F6540.indb 240

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

Negotiating Ecstasy

241

Certain primitive types of dance have developed in response to EDM. There is no choreography for this music in the same way there is for disco, for example; rather, there is a return to basic rhythmic movement with some sense of abandonment. As Reynolds suggests, “robotnik vacancy, voodoo delirium, whirling dervishes, zombiedom, marionettes, slaves to the rhythm: the metaphors that house music and ‘jacking’ irresistibly invite all contained the notion of becoming less human.”57 While the act of making EDM is disembodied, the response it elicits is deeply embodied; however, Jourdain believes that “there is no obvious evolutionary reason why the intricate patterns of sound that make up music should continuously unfold in our musculatures.”58 This suggests that drugs play an important role in changing the brain’s response to the stimulus. Listening also implies language and communication. We listen to music to experience its “meaning” and for how it makes us feel. Critics of EDM describe it as anti-intellectual, but this is a misconception resulting from the application of the wrong criteria of judgment to analysis and the role of expectation in this music.59 It is common to categorize listening by categories that describe the degree of participation and the required response of the listener: active, passive, informational, reflective, dialogic, and so on.60 The general descriptor for the activity of listening to music is appreciative listening since the primary role of the listener is to appreciate the sounds (an essentially passive response) rather than to be required to verbalize any understanding. Appreciative listening to music does not require verbal response; it frequently does not use words to relate meaning (particularly in EDM, which is largely textless), and it does not rely on human interaction at the level of identifying nonaural cues. In contrast to most other forms of popular music, which opt for consonance and thin textures in order to make the text audible, much EDM is instrumental because the chemically altered brain processes verbal communication in different ways and words are a distraction from a different kind of higher-level functioning.61 There are other reasons that this music is largely textless, including the primary use of electronically produced sound that has conventionally avoided adding the human voice either speaking or singing comprehensible text. Words and vocalization may be used but are usually manipulated to the point of incomprehensibility. Sampled text clips (from movies or famous speeches, for example) are often used as memory interrupters, functioning to shift the focus of the brain from the repetitive musical narrative and to maximize the associated meaning of text excerpts

F6540.indb 241

6/17/15 8:30:15 AM

242

Andrew Shenton

that have wide cultural impact (for example, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which is frequently used). EDM has titles that reflect the drug culture that engendered it, but they often offer little or no clue as to content. For example, for tracks on the Welcome to Wonderland CD some are private references (“Big Electric Rabbits” by Sugar), some are a mystery (“Tetrapod” by Tristan Cooke), and some acknowledge existing musical genres (“Boogie Mama” by Engage) or the general style and occasion (“Bush Dreaming” by Brett Aplin, which is a trance-/ambient-style piece). This is a useful way of reducing or eliminating expectation of the content of a piece on the basis of associations with words in a title, thereby freeing the mind to receive the music with a different kind of anticipation. Jourdain correctly posits that “the deepest pleasure in music comes with deviation from the expected: dissonances, syncopations, kinks in melodic contour, sudden booms and silences,” and he suggests that all these deviations “serve to set up an even stronger resolution,” which is even more satisfying precisely because of the deviations.62 Simply put, “banal music raises common anticipations then immediately satisfies them with obvious resolutions,” whereas “well-written music takes its good time satisfying anticipations. It teases, repeatedly instigating an anticipation and hinting at its satisfaction, sometimes swooping toward a resolution only to hold back with false cadence.”63 It is this subtlety that raises the music of Skrillex above much other EDM since his technique and innovation, combined with an uncanny ear for the unusual and an extraordinary sense of timing, encourage a certain kind of deep listening from his audience. Jourdain believes that because of the way the nervous system functions in its response to pain and pleasure, “the art in writing such music lies less in devising resolutions than in heightening anticipations to preternatural levels,” and he concludes that “the same basic mechanism applies to all pleasures, artistic or otherwise, for the simple reason that this mechanism is pleasure.”64 This is the key point to the success of EDM: the deep pleasure it engenders is predicated on a background canvas that is highly regularized through repetition of musical features. The principal musical content is all foreground material, full of deviations and heightened anticipations. Deejays are constantly devising new ways to reengage the (chemically enhanced) brain so that over extended time periods there is a satisfying mixture of anticipation and resolution. EDM must provide sufficient stimulus for appreciative listening, and this music has to be pleasing on both physical and psychological levels so that it can encourage and support a transformational experience.

F6540.indb 242

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Negotiating Ecstasy

243

Electronic dance music is endlessly fascinating as it invades and occupies, reseeding a cultural wasteland. As it mutates and expands it sweeps up the posttweens and draws the hippie back in. It provides anyone who wants to participate a way to negotiate personal space for esoteric listening that has as its goal some enduring sense of fullness. Jourdain has encapsulated exactly what it is that makes this music so extraordinary and so popular: Many people say that it is beauty alone that draws them to music. But great music brings even more. By providing the brain with an artificial environment, and forcing it through that environment in controlled ways, music imparts the means of experiencing relations far deeper than we encounter in our everyday lives. When music is written with genius, every event is carefully selected to build the substructure for exceptionally deep relations. No resource is wasted, no distractions are allowed. . . . We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems.65

Because the essential elements of EDM are basic and therefore at a fundamental level able to be understood by a large population, it has been important in establishing a cultural space and medium of identity and is therefore the music of an idealized globalization. Ultimately, EDM helps the individual reconstruct self out of “ontological anarchy” (another term from Bey, which describes a possible psychological mind-set provided by the temporary autonomous zone). Although EDM has been dismissed as facile and undistinguished, it is ultimately a pervasive popular music that invites innovation and inspiration from its creators and an esoteric and engrossed mode of perceiving sound from its listeners.

F6540.indb 243

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

F6540.indb 244

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

notes

introduction Sander van Maas 1. Andrew D. Wolvin, “Listening Leadership: Hillary Clinton’s Listening Tour,” International Journal of Listening 19, no. 1 (2005): 36. 2. Influential examples include Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Peter Szendy, Écoute: Une histoire de nos oreilles (Paris: Minuit, 2001), translated by Charlotte Mandell as Listen: A History of Our Ears (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 3. See Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime: Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 4. Robert E. Levin, Bill Clinton: The Inside Story (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992), 212. Such reports are balanced by Leon Panetta, chief of staff during Clinton’s first administration, who in an interview conducted in June 2000 said, “Even though there are moments when [President Clinton] is a good listener, when he’s engaged in conversation about a particular issue, it’s very one-sided.” ABC Nightline / PBS Frontline feature The Clinton Years, http:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton /interviews/panetta3 .html (accessed March 1, 2013). 5. James Bennet, “The Guru of Small Things,” New York Times, June 18, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com /2000/06/18/magazine/the-guru-of-small -things.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. As Clinton did not originate from New York State, according to Wolvin, the listening tour was designed to make her “visit New York in a getting-to-know-you format to best learn what New Yorkers were concerned about and to overcome that perception that she was a carpetbagger intruding where she didn’t belong.” Wolvin, “Listening Leadership,” 34. 6. Scot Lindlaw, “Clinton Embarks on Listening Tour 2.0,” Washington Post, February 23, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn /content / article/2007/02/23/AR2007022301455.html. Further examples include Republican George Allen’s listening tour of Virginia for the Senate in 2006 and President Obama’s Organizing for America Listening Tours of 2009, which

245

F6540.indb 245

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

246

Notes to pages 2–3

followed up on his 2008 presidential campaign (“We have one goal with these meetings—to listen,” the campaign’s website stated). See Barack Obama’s Organizing for America website, https://my.barackobama.com /page/ content /listeningtour (accessed March 1, 2013). See also Barbara Trish, “Organizing for America,” in The State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, ed. John Green and Daniel Coffey, 163–84 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). 7. See Judi Brownell’s textbook Listening: Attitudes, Principles, and Skills (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996). Also see such titles as Lyman Steil and Richard Bommelje, Listening Leaders: The Ten Golden Rules to Listen, Lead & Succeed (Edina, MN: Beaver’s Pond, 2004). 8. The present volume focuses on ways to think listening, in particular musical listening. Hence several musicological and philosophical sources are important as markers of the field of aural studies as the authors here collected see it. These include but are not limited to the phenomenological tradition from Augustine to Don Ihde and Joseph Smith, deconstructive thought from Jacques Derrida to Peter Szendy and Jean-Luc Nancy, media theory from Hermann von Helmholtz to Friedrich Kittler, critical theory and Marxism from Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin to Zofia Lissa, and Nietzschean and Deleuzian thinking. Writing about the historiography of listening studies in musicology, Nikolaus Bacht argues that there have been at least two (not counting Hugo Riemann’s “On Musical Listening” [1874] and “How Do We Hear Music?” [1888], published in German in Riemann, Drei Vorträge [Leipzig, 1888]) previous surges in the scholarly attention to listening: in the 1920s (Heinrich Besseler) and 1960s (Adorno, Lissa). Compared to the most recent one, however, these surges were limited in their volume and impact on their contemporary field. Listening studies from music and musicology that are important to this volume include but are not limited to those by Edward T. Cone, Jacques Attali, Rose Subotnik, Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Andrew Dell’Antonio, Joanna Demers, Eric Clarke, Judith Becker, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez. Nikolaus Bacht, introduction to “Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” special issue of Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135 (2010): 1–3. Some exponents of the current surge in aural studies have also been adopted by sound studies; see Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012). 9. Pascal Quignard, La haine de la musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 107. This topos extends to the question of whether humans are capable of hearing (music) even while being asleep, anaesthetized, or in the process of dying. 10. Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 194n18. Adorno was not the first to create a typology of listening. Heinrich Besseler,

F6540.indb 246

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 3–7

247

for one, made a similar (though less graded) effort in his 1925 “Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens,” translated by Matthew Pritchard and Irene Auerbach as “Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening,” Twentieth Century Music 8, no. 1 (2012): 49–70. Important more recent responses to Adorno include Andrew Dell’Antonio, ed., Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Types of Musical Conduct,” in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton, 1–20 (New York: Seabury, 1976). 12. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky,” in Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, 87–122 (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1988). 13. See Szendy, Listen; and idem, Sur écoute: Esthétique de l’espionnage (Paris: Minuit, 2007). See also his essay in this volume. 14. Jean-Luc Nancy, “How Music Listens to Itself,” in Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 63. 15. Wolfgang Ernst, “The Archeonautics of Sound,” lecture presented at the University of Amsterdam, November 1, 2013. 16. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 17. Roland Barthes, “Listening,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, 245–60 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). 18. Ibid., 252. 19. Ibid., 256. 20. Ibid., 257. 21. Freud, cited in ibid., 253. 22. Before Erlmann similar arguments have been made by Peter Sloterdijk, “Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik hören?,” in Weltfremdheit, 294 –325 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993); and Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 23. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 31. 24. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 25. “If the essays which follow do not compose a book, collecting resonance from one another, nothing I can say in introducing them will alter that fact.” Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), xvii.

F6540.indb 247

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

248

Notes to pages 7–14

26. Szendy mentions Douglas Kahn’s reference to Derrida’s alleged “phonophobia.” A similar tendency is discernable in Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance, whose approach is heavily indebted to Derrida while broadly arguing against the latter’s account of aurality. 27. Peter Szendy, ed., Écoute (Paris: Ircam-Harmattan, 2000); and Szendy, Listen. 28. Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 22. 29. Ibid., 12. See also Arved Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 30. David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 31. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, selected by Richard Leppert, 288–317 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 32. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 26. See also Peter Szendy’s discussion of Heidegger’s notion of hearing in Der Satz vom Grund (The Principle of Reason) in his essay in this volume. 33. Sloterdijk, “Wo sind wir?,” 52. 34. Nancy, Listening, 10; Louis Kaplan and John Paul Ricco, “Introduction: ‘Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy,’” in Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 1 (2010): 6. 35. Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon,” Revista Transcultural de Musica 10 (2006), http://www.sibetrans.com /trans/articulo/152/ music-as-torture-music-as-weapon; idem, “You Are in a Place That Is Out of the World . . . : Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘War on Terror,’ ” JAMS 2, no. 1 (2008): 1–26; Jonathan Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); idem, “Cranking Up the Volume: Music as a Tool of Torture,” Global Dialogue 12, no. 1 (Winter–Spring 2010), http://www.worlddialogue.org/ content.php?id=464; Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 36. See also John Hamilton, Musical Madness and the Unworking of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 40 – 41. 37. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 18. 1. the auditory re-turn (the point of listening) Peter Szendy A first draft of this chapter was presented as a keynote address at the conference organized by Veit Erlmann, “Thinking Hearing— The Auditory

F6540.indb 248

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 18–21

249

Turn in the Humanities,” October 2– 4, 2009, University of Texas at Austin. I thank Veit Erlmann for his invitation and his inspiring remarks. 1. This is a sequence that I analyzed closely in Monteverdi’s version, in his Orfeo. See Peter Szendy, Sur écoute: Esthétique de l’espionnage (Paris: Minuit, 2007), 93. 2. Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), was first published in French (Paris: Minuit, 2001). 3. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3– 4. 4. Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (1976; repr., Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 7, 13, 15, 43– 44, 58. 5. “Digits on the Historical Pulse: Being a Way to Think about How So Much Is Happening and Has Happened in Sound in the Arts,” a programmatic text for “Refresh! The First International Conference on the Histories of Art, Science and Technology,” 2002, http://www.mediaarthistory.org (accessed March 1, 2013). Kahn borrows the term phonophobia from Garrett Stewart, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3. 6. René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, Traité de l’auscultation médiate et des maladies des poumons et du cœur, nouvelle édition publiée par les soins du Dr. Charles-Jean-Baptiste Comet (Brussels: Librairie médicale et scientifique, 1828), 20 (my translation). 7. Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Vorrede, in Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753; repr., Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994). I have slightly altered William J. Mitchell’s English translation, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (London: Eulenburg Books, 1974), 28. 8. See my “Otographes” (with Nicolas Donin), Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines 13, no. 2 (2003): 14. 9. See Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Marges—de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), translated by Alan Bass as Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Derrida, “L’Oreille de Heidegger: Philopolémologie (Geschlecht IV),” in Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), translated by John P. Leavey Jr. as “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 163. 10. René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, De l’auscultation médiate, ou Traité du diagnostic des maladies des poumons et du cœur, fondé principalement sur ce nouveau moyen d’exploration (Paris: J.-A. Brosson et J.-S. Chaudé Libraires, 1819), xxxi, 4 (my translation). Subsequent citations of this source are made parenthetically in the text.

F6540.indb 249

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

250

Notes to pages 21–22

11. Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger, Nouvelle méthode pour reconnaître les maladies internes de la poitrine par la percussion de cette cavité, translated from the Latin and annotated by Corvisart (1808). Auenbrugger’s Latin title was Inventum novum ex percussione thoracis humani ut signo abstrusos interni pectoris morbos detegendi. I quote the edition published as an appendix to Corvisart’s Essai sur les maladies et les lésions organiques du cœur et des gros vaisseaux (Paris: Adolphe Delahays Libraire, 1855), 190. It is worth noting that Auenbrugger also wrote the libretto for Antonio Salieri’s opera Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781). 12. Auenbrugger, Nouvelle méthode, 194. 13. Laënnec, De l’auscultation médiate (1819), 13. 14. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2003), 200. 15. Laënnec, De l’auscultation médiate (1819), 14. 16. The proponents of “sound studies,” the enthusiasts of the “auditory turn,” have of course singled out some of Foucault’s formulations, which, they think, call for harsh criticism —such as these: “The sensorial triangulation indispensable to anatomo-clinical perception remains under the dominant sign of the visible: first, because this multi-sensorial perception is merely a way of anticipating the triumph of the gaze that is represented by the autopsy; and ear and hand are merely temporary, substitute organs until such time as death brings to truth the luminous presence of the visible. . . . And above all, the alterations discovered by anatomy concern . . . spatial data that belong by right of origin to the gaze. . . . [Corvisart and Laënnec] see with that gaze that secretly haunts their hearing” (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 203, my emphasis). It is, of course, this “right of origin” that aroused the wrath of those who are campaigning against oculocentrism. Jonathan Sterne goes so far as to charge Foucault with “an essentially theological argument about the origins and purposes of the senses” (Audible Past, 127). For a remarkable critique of these criticisms, see Lauri Siisiäinen, “From the Empire of the Gaze to Noisy Bodies : Foucault, Audition and Medical Power,” Theory & Event 11, no. 1 (2008). Foucault himself explicitly says that the gaze he is talking about is the gaze of “absolute visibility,” the “absolute eye of knowledge” (Birth of the Clinic, 204 –5). The idea, in other words, is what imposes the “suzerainty of the visible” (ibid.). Far from being an impenitent oculocentrist, Foucault simply acknowledges that one cannot brush aside the weight of a history that turned vision into the touchstone of knowledge, in Laënnec’s writings as elsewhere. 17. Laënnec, Traité de l’auscultation médiate (1828), 23 (my translation and emphasis). 18. Laënnec, De l’auscultation médiate (1819), 34 (my emphasis). 19. Ibid., 45 (my emphasis).

F6540.indb 250

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 23–27

251

20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 1 (translation slightly modified). 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, x, xii. 23. Ibid., xxv, xxvi. 24. In Rogues: Two Essays On Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), Derrida himself has vigorously criticized “the figure of a ‘turn,’ of a Kehre or turning”: “If a ‘turning’ turns by ‘veering’ round a curve or by forcing one, like wind in one’s sails, to ‘veer’ away or change tack, then the trope of turning turns poorly or turns bad, turns into the wrong image. For it diverts thought or turns it away from what remains to be thought” (39). 25. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 46. 26. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 51. 27. Heidegger, Principle of Reason, 48. 28. Ibid., 67. 29. Ibid. 30. See Sur écoute. 31. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso Books, 2005), 101, 209. 32. See ibid., 129, where the same logic—more is less and less is more— is at work in a reading of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political: “What would the symptom of neutralization and depoliticization [Entpolitisierung] that Schmitt learnedly denounces in our modernity reveal? In truth, an over- or hyperpoliticization. The less politics there is, the more there is, the less enemies there are, the more there are.” 33. Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear,” 187. 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1 (translation slightly modified). On “molar” listening and Kafka’s Burrow, see my Sur écoute, 73. 35. Martin Heidegger, “European Nihilism,” in Nietzsche, vol. 4, Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 29 (heraushorchen is translated as “detect”); Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 99 (zurückhören is translated as “our hearing goes back”). 36. In the meantime, there had also been a few allusions to stereophonic listening in Derrida’s “Restitutions— de la vérité en pointure,” in La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 433, and in his “La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II),” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 441n.

F6540.indb 251

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

252

Notes to pages 27–37

37. Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear,” 187–88. 38. Derrida, “L’Oreille de Heidegger,” 377–78. 39. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 109 (translation modified). 40. In Sur écoute. 2. “dear listener . . .”: music and the invention of subjectivity Lawrence Kramer 1. Personal communication. 2. Jacques Derrida, “From Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” trans. Catherine Porter, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1991), 44. 3. Another way to mark the difference within the shared sphere of address is to say that Mozart’s recitatives trace a movement between genres, whereas Beethoven’s imagine a passage (back) from genre to nature. (The pianist’s right hand moves from the top of the arpeggio to the recitative melody; the melody becomes more expressive as the sound of the chord fades, as if the virtual voice were sustaining itself on the material presence of distance.) For more on the Beethoven, see my “Primitive Encounters: Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Musical Meaning, and Enlightenment Anthropology,” in Beethoven Forum, vol. 6, ed. Glenn Stanley, 31–66 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), reprinted in my Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays, 109– 44 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); and, along with more on the Mozart concerto and other works by Mozart and J. S. Bach, my Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 106 –107. 4. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 30 – 40. 5. J. G. Sulzer, “Expression in Music,” in General Theory of Fine Art, 2nd ed. (1792), originally published in 1771; reprinted in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Peter Le Huray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 99. Translation by the editors. 6. For a fuller account, see my “The Mysteries of Animation,” Music Analysis 20 (2001): 151–76. 7. See ibid., 157–59. 8. Personal communication. 9. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 10. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, 56 –64 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

F6540.indb 252

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 37– 42

253

11. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 24 –26. For more on the question of musical interpellation, see Sander van Maas, “Scenes of Devastation,” chap. 3 in this volume. Since van Maas’s argument proceeds in part via a debate with me, I will take the liberty of making some brief observations here. First, as I use the concepts of interpellation and subject position, together with address and interlocution, they are open in both content and outcome; they represent the conditions of possibility for negotiating subjectivity, not forms or forces that determine it. Nor, as the present essay suggests, do these terms (with their close ties to the “postal principle” of Derrida) exclude the contraries of subjectivity: on the contrary. I would even suggest that interpellation “wants” to be what van Maas calls “infinite”; the coercive forms through which it was originally theorized can be sustained only with strenuous effort, at worst backed by the threat of violence. For further discussion, see my “Mysteries of Animation”; and Interpreting Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), especially the chapters “Subjectivity” (46 –62), “Meaning” (63–80, esp. 74 –75), and, on the postal principle, “Modern” (220 – 40, esp. 222–25). 12. Butler, Giving an Account, 9–22. 13. Wallace Stevens, “Esthetique du Mal” sec. 1, ll .9–10, in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1954), 314. 14. Quoted in Deborah Mawer, “Ballet and the Apotheosis of the Dance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ravel, ed. Deborah Mawer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156; translation slightly modified. 15. As Mawer (ibid.) notes, in Bolero’s original form as a ballet score titled Fandango, it accompanied a flamenco dance of seduction. One might say that the individual segments of the piece retain the character of subjective address, which is negated but pleasurably negated—with a kind of benign, perhaps slightly condescending irony—by the prevailing mechanism of repetition. 16. Jacques Derrida, “Counter-Signatures,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974 –1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, 365–71 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 17. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial), 43. 18. Ibid. 19. Lacan takes the sentence to epitomize the idea that only the Symbolic stands between the subject and the repellent morass of the Real. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar II, in The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miler, trans. Silvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 231–32. Barthes similarly contends that “the fright and terror [stem from] a gaping contradiction between Death and Language; the contrary of Life is not Death (this is a stereotype): it is Language. It is undecidable

F6540.indb 253

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

254

Notes to pages 42– 48

whether Valdemar is living or dead; what is certain is that he speaks, without it being possible to ascribe his words to Death or Life”; quoted in Allen S. Weiss, Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 41. Derrida’s view is discussed in the text and cited in note 21. 20. J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, chap. 3, epitaph 15, http://www.fullbooks.com /Select-Epigrams-from-the-Greek -Anthology3.html (accessed December 3, 2013). 21. Derrida, in a discussion transcribed in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 156. 22. The condition of undeath also bears on ordinary life insofar as the subject necessarily yields to asubjective address. For an account that links this phenomenon to both the Freudian unconscious and the force of law, see Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 23. Quotations from Poe are drawn from Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 833– 42; on the “clattering tongue,” see Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Voice, Poe’s Telegraphy,” ELH 72 (2005): 635–62. 24. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 278–79. 25. For a fuller account, see Katherine Syer, “Unseen Voices: Wagner’s Musical-Dramatic Shaping of the Grail Scene in Act I,” in A Companion to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” ed. William Kinderman and Katherine Syer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 177–214. 26. Zˇizˇek has made the point in more than half a dozen books; for representative instances, see his Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 191; and Opera’s Second Death, with Mladen Dolar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 173. See also my “The Talking Wound and the Foolish Question: Symbolization in Parsifal,” Opera Quarterly 22 (2006): 208–29. 27. The phrase and its variants occur eight times during the chase, most easily tracked in the searchable text available from Project Gutenberg, http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm (accessed August 4, 2014). 28. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 103. 29. Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones, vol. 1 (London: William Heineman, 1918), 227. 30. Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 65–66.

F6540.indb 254

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 48–57

255

31. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Language, in The First and Second Discourses and Essay on the Origin of Language, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 287. 3. scenes of inner devastation: interpellation, finite and infinite Sander van Maas 1. Lawrence Kramer, “Musicology and Meaning,” Musical Times 144, no. 1883 (Summer 2003): 7. 2. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2007), 298. 3. Lawrence Kramer, “Recognizing Schubert: Musical Subjectivity, Cultural Change, and Jane Campion’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ ” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 25–52. 4. Ibid., 30. 5. Herman Rapaport, The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 74 –89. 6. Kramer, “Recognizing Schubert,” 30. 7. Ibid., 29. 8. “Isabel was on the point of ringing to send a question to her room, when this purpose quickly yielded to an unexpected sound—the sound of low music proceeding apparently from the saloon. She knew her aunt never touched the piano, and the musician was therefore probably Ralph, who played for his own amusement. That he should have resorted to this recreation at the present time indicated apparently that his anxiety about his father had been relieved; so that the girl took her way, almost with restored cheer, toward the source of the harmony.” Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 224. 9. Ibid. 10. This suggests the influence of Laura Mulvey’s Lacanian account of movie viewing. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 836. 11. Kramer, “Recognizing Schubert,” 35. Cf. Kramer’s Bakhtinian comments on the concept of half-and-half identities in Contemporary Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23. 12. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 167. Cf. Lawrence Kramer, “Phantasiestück zur Jahrtausendwende,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 57, no. 1 (2000): 105: “So oder so ist die Subjekt-Position die Stelle, an die die Musik

F6540.indb 255

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

256

Notes to pages 57– 63

als etwas Bedeutendes gerichtet ist, und die Stelle, von der aus die Bedeutung der Musik verkündet wird.” 13. James, Portrait of a Lady, 226. 14. Kramer, “Recognizing Schubert,” 28. 15. Ibid., 45– 46. 16. Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 22. 17. Cf. ibid.: “The gift of classical music is listening itself. The music attuned itself to previously unheard and unheard-of potentialities of listening and made them available to be given” (my emphasis). 18. Ibid., 16. The concern for reconnection is an important theme in Kramer’s recent work. Music, he claims, connects us more strongly to what is important to us in life. He criticizes the Schopenhauerian notion that music’s ultimate meaning is to deliver us temporarily from our finite existence. 19. Kramer, Musical Meaning, 3. 20. Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters, 17. 21 Ibid., 18. 22. Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 19. 23. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 24. Stanley Cavell, “Epilogue: The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” in The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 381. 25. Cavell, Little Did I Know, 20. 26. Stanley Cavell, “Benjamin and Wittgenstein: Signals and Affinities,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 238. As here Cavell quotes §118 from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations throughout in his oeuvre. In some other cases he rephrases the theme in terms of inauthenticity, boredom, or suffocation (see for instance his discussions of Heidegger, Warshow’s film criticism, and elsewhere). See Stephen Mulhall, introduction to “Moral Perfectionism,” in Mulhall, Cavell Reader, 353. 27. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, xxi. 28. Cesare Pavese, “Six Dialogues with Leucò,” trans. William Arrowsmith and D.S. Carne-Ross, in Arion 2, no. 2 (Summer 1963): 89–92. 29. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation” (1970), reproduced at https://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm (accessed September 15, 2014). 30. David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 18.

F6540.indb 256

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 64 – 67

257

31. Ibid., 40. 32. Maurice Blanchot, “Orpheus’ Gaze,” in The Sirens’ Song: Selected Essays, 59–65 (Sussex, UK: Harvester, 1982). 33. For an in-depth discussion of Derrida’s concept of destinerrance see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Destinerrance,” in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 28–54. On destinerrance and interpellation, see Wills, Dorsality, 39. 34. Miller, “Derrida’s Destinerrance,” 43. 35. Beat Furrer, Begehren (DVD, KAIROS, KAI0012792, 2008). The piece had its concert premiere in 2001 and its stage premiere in 2003; both performances took place in Graz, Austria. See DVD booklet, which contains the full libretto. 36. Piet Meeuwse, “Oefeningen in Afscheid nemen [Exercises in Farewell],” Raster 93 (2001): 170. 37. This aurality is beautifully rendered by Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Orpheus and Eurydice, where she seems to whisper from behind in his ear. On interpellation as blow see John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 58. 38. The topology of listening in the ear of the other refers to Augustine’s Confessions, in which he describes himself at one point in his confession to be listening “in Thy ear” (Confessions, Book IV, 5, 10; IX, 12, 31). 39. Furrer, Begehren, synopsis. Likewise it may be argued that in Campion’s film Isabel represents an ear that will eventually hail Schubert before his voice gets a chance to call out to her. Her ear precedes the “scarcely audible tinkling” that causes her body to turn and bend toward the piano-room door downstairs. It would issue to Schubert a “Do you hear?” before he could address her. 40. Peter Szendy hints at a similar conclusion when he writes that the ear of Orpheus marks the turning point where its power is exposed “to the accident of what arrives.” Szendy, Sur écoute: Esthétique de l’espionnage (Paris: Minuit, 2007), 100. 41. Wolfgang Hofer, “Beat Furrer—Skizzen zu einem Porträt,” in CD booklet with Beat Furrer, Begehren (Kairos, 0012432KAI, 2006). 42. Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, “Sprüche und Peile,” No. 8, Projekt Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7203/pg7203 .html (accessed March 1, 2013). 43. Furrer comments on his Eurydice, “I had the idea that this figure is at first gradually brought back to life, that to begin with she’s like an ancient portrayal of Eurydice who’s gradually transformed into the figure of a woman of today” (Begehren, DVD booklet). Her aria also involves an affirmation of writing and reading, which adds a Kittlerian, media-theoretical dimen-

F6540.indb 257

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

258

Notes to pages 67–73

sion to her animation. Friedrich Kittler, “ ‘Vernehmen, was du kannst’: Über neuzeitliche Musik als akustische Täuschung,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 5 (September–October 1997): 6 –7. 44. Stanley Cavell, “After Half a Century,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 377. 45. Lawrence Kramer, “Au-delà d’une musique informelle: Nostalgia, Obsolescence, and the Avant-Garde,” in Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 308. 4. positive feedback: listening behind hearing David Wills I sincerely thank Sander van Maas both for provoking me into the current reflection and for his close reading and numerous pointers to remedy my disciplinary deficiencies. 1. Laurie Anderson, “Late Show,” Home of the Brave, CD (Warner Brothers, 1986); Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave, film (Warner Brothers, 1986). Recording available at http://soundcloud.com /chambredonan /late -show-laurie-anderson-in. Disc details available at http://www.discogs.com / Laurie-Anderson-Home-Of-The-Brave/release/2652291 (accessed March 1, 2013). 2. Aristotle, De Anima, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 557–58. 3. Ibid., 557. 4. Ibid., 559. 5. Ibid., 578. 6. Ibid., 602, my italics. 7. For discussion of how the question plays in the shift from Bruno to Descartes, as well as in the counterexample of Berkeley, see Branka Arsic´, The Passive Eye (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 8. Jacques Derrida, On Touching —Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 41– 42. Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in text as Touching. Translations will occasionally be modified (cf. Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy [Paris: Galilée, 2000]). 9. Aristotle, De Anima, 571. 10. It is of course impossible to insulate any level of “technical” competence in a given music within a given culture from the aesthetic norms—and attendant ideological presumptions—that regulate it. For recent discussion and debate concerning those questions, see Andrew Dell’Antonio, ed., Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

F6540.indb 258

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 74 – 82

259

11. Cf. David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 12. Ching Kung, “A Possible Unifying Principle for Mechanosensation,” Nature 436 (August 4, 2005): 647. 13. See my discussion of Nancy on love and Barthes on love and the telephone in “Bloodless Coup: Love in the Heart of Technology,” Inanimation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 14. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45; Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Eugenio Donato and Richard Macksey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 272. 15. See for example Freud’s long footnote in chapter 4 of Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 54 –55; and Derrida’s discussion in his “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 192–94. 16. See Wills, Dorsality, 3–11. 17. See again ibid., 3– 4; and my Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 18. Aristotle, De Anima, 603. 19. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 77, 79. In Derrida’s terms, following Husserl, hearing (oneself speak) is alone among forms of auto-affection in not having “to pass through what is outside,” such that even in the case of touch (and more so sight), “the surface of my body, as something external, must begin by being exposed in the world” (78–79). I would argue, however, that touch begins with the more internal feeling-oneself-move of life itself that I have described, something that Derrida’s later analyses, for example the discussion of Nancy I am concentrating on here, seem to allow. 20. Ibid., 82. 21. See Derrida’s classic analysis of this question in Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 22. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); and my discussion later in this chapter. Further references to this Nancy source will be cited in parenthetically in the text as Listening. Translations will occasionally be modified (cf. Nancy, À l’écoute [Paris: Galilée, 2002]). 23. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 149–66.

F6540.indb 259

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

260

Notes to pages 82–90

Nancy himself is less categorical than Derrida vis-à-vis the body without organs (see Listening 31). 24. Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 13. Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text as Listen. Translations will occasionally be modified (cf. Szendy, Écoute: Une histoire de nos oreilles [Paris: Minuit, 2001]). 25. See also, in this context, Lawrence Kramer’s important discussion of musical subjectivization in this volume. 26. Cf. Nancy: “To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in a sense of the edge and of extremity, and as if sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin” (Listening 7). 27. Cf. Derrida, Limited Inc., 12. 28. The essays in Dell’Antonio’s Beyond Structural Listening? are again relevant here, although Szendy’s sense of lacunary listening, discussed shortly, reposes their questions quite differently. 29. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Heart of Things,” trans. Brian Holmes and Rodney Trumble, in The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Nancy, “Shattered Love,” trans. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney, in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); and my “Bloodless Coup: Love in the Heart of Technology,” Inanimation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 5. “antennas have long since invaded our brains”: listening to the “other music” in friedrich kittler Melle Jan Kromhout 1. Friedrich Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” in Wahrnehmung Und Geschichte: Markierungen Zur Aisthesis Materialis, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Ernst Martin Müller (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 99. Translations from otherwise untranslated German sources are my own. 2. Friedrich Kittler, “The God of the Ears,” in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 52. 3. Friedrich Kittler, “Das Nahen der Götter Vorbereiten,” in Das Nahen Der Götter Vorbereiten (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 23. 4. Friedrich Kittler, “World-Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology,” in Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 224. 5. Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” 96.

F6540.indb 260

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

Notes to pages 90 –93

261

6. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Implosion and Intoxication: Kittler, a German Classic, and Pink Floyd,” Theory Culture Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 85. 7. This transition is the topic of two of Kittler’s most important and foundational earlier works: Discourse Network, 1800/1900, originally published in 1985, and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, from 1986. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. David Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 8. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 81. 9. Kittler, Gramophone, 4. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Kittler, “God of the Ears,” 55. 12. Friedrich Kittler, “Rockmusik: Ein Missbrauch von Heeresgerät,” in Short Cuts 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins Verlag, 2002), 28. 13. Matthew Griffin, “Literary Studies +/– Literature: Friedrich A. Kittler’s Media Histories,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 711–12. 14. Wolfgang Ernst, “Zum Begriff des Sonischen (Mit Medienarchologischem Ohr Vernommen),” PopScriptum 10 (2008), http://www2.hu-berlin.de/ fpm /popscrip/themen /pst10/pst10_ernst.htm. 15. Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” 99. 16. Kittler, Gramophone, 24. 17. Of course it should be noted that, as the historical performance movement has argued, even music that was written down could only be transcribed to the extent that the inherently limited notational system would allow, leaving out many key aspect of an actual performance. 18. Friedrich Kittler, “Echoes: Ein Prolog,” in Hörstürze: Akustik und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Nicola Gess, Florian Schreiner, and Manuela K. Schulz (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005), 17. 19. Kittler, “Das Nahen der Götter Vorbereiten,” 16. 20. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 116. 21. For a thorough description of these scientific and discursive changes, see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 22. Friedrich Kittler, “Bei Tanzmusik kommt es einem in die Beinen,” Festvortrag anläßlich der Verleihung des 01-Awards 1998 an Brian Eno im

F6540.indb 261

6/17/15 8:30:16 AM

262

Notes to pages 93–97

Rahmen des 2. Multimedia Forums, Berlin 20. November 1998, http://www .aesthetik.hu-berlin.de/medien /texte/eno.pdf (accessed March 1, 2013). 23. Von Wildenbruch, quoted in Kittler, Gramophone, 79. 24. Kittler, “God of the Ears,” 48. 25. Ibid. 26. Kittler, Gramophone, 24. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 169. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” trans. Gary Brown, in Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 289. 29. Kittler, Gramophone, 37. 30. Kittler starts the prologue to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter as follows: “Media determine our situation, which—in spite or because of it— deserves a description” (xxxix). 31. Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music / Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 191. 32. Peter Wicke, “Das Sonische in der Musik,” PopScriptum 10 (2008), http://www2.hu-berlin.de/fpm /popscrip/themen /pst10/pst10_wicke.htm. 33. Ernst, “Zum Begriff des Sonischen.” 34. To avoid confusion and to underline the distinction with the “sonic,” in English Ernst also translates the Sonik with the neologism “sonicity.” Wolfgang Ernst, “Archaeonautics of Sound: ‘Cultural Analytics’ within the Sonic Field” (lecture at Data Drive session, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, November 1, 2013). 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Kittler, Gramophone, 23. 39. Kittler, “God of the Ears,” 54. 40. Ibid. 41. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 237. 42. Ernst, “Zum Begriff des Sonischen”; Kittler, “Echoes,” 22. 43. Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” 99. 44. Keeping in mind Wicke’s and Ernst’s arguments about das Sonischen and the Sonik being intermediate levels between physical and cultural sound, it should be noted that Kittler is not arguing for any scientific reductionism that would reduce sound to a mere physical phenomenon but instead introduces sound as a particular, technologically mediated part of the sonosphere that can no longer be understood in pretechnological, primarily hermeneutic,

F6540.indb 262

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 97–100

263

terms but is also not reducible to just physical airwaves with no further significance. 45. Kittler, “Rockmusik,” 9. 46. Kittler, “God of the Ears,” 50. 47. Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” 99. 48. Ibid. Here, “computer algorithm music” (any music transposed into the binary language of computer algorithms) should not be confused with “algorithmic computer music” (compositional practices using algorithms to automatically compute musical material). 49. Kittler, “Tanzmusik.” 50. Kittler, Gramophone, 1. 51. Kittler, “Echoes,” 18. 52. Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Braunschweig, Germany: Vieweg, 1863). 53. Kittler, “Tanzmusik.” 54. For the story of the invention and introduction of the compact disc, see chapter 6 of Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History or Recorded Music (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009), 185–236. 55. Friedrich Kittler, “Thinking Colours and/or Machines,” trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young, Theory, Culture & Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 49. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Kittler, Gramophone, 17. Kittler does not cite his source. I assume the quote is Lacan’s. 59. Kittler, “Rockmusik,” 28. 60. Josh Tyrangiel, “Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect,” Time, February 5, 2009, http://www.time.com /time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,1877372,00.html. 61. Mike Senior, “Celemony Melodyne DNA Editor: Pitch & Time Processing Software for Mac & PC,” Sound on Sound, December 2009, http:// www.soundonsound.com /sos/dec09/articles/melodynedna.htm. 62. Stefan Heidenreich, “Rauschen, Filtern, Codieren—Stilbildung in Mediensystemen,” in Das Rauschen, ed. Sabine Sabio and Christian Scheib (Hofheim, Germany: Wolke Verlag, 1995), 25. 63. Kittler, “Echoes,” 26. 64. Kittler, “Das Nahen der Götter Vorbereiten,” 24. 65. Avery Li-Chun Wang, “An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm” (paper presented at 4th Symposium Conference on Music Information Retrieval, October 26, 2003), http://www.ee.columbia.edu /~dpwe/ papers/ Wang03-shazam.pdf.

F6540.indb 263

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

264

Notes to pages 100 –5

66. Ibid., 1. 67. Ibid., 7. By now, with 275 million users and 10 million queries a day, Shazam’s database is much larger. Numbers taken from Shazam Entertainment Ltd., “Shazam Key Facts,” January 2013, http://www.swpcontent.com / shazam-content /wp-content /uploads/2013/01/Shazam-Infographic-January -2013_final.jpg (accessed January 23, 2013). 68. Wang, “Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm,” 3– 4. 69. Ibid., 7. 70. Shazam Entertainment Ltd., Shazam 5.5.1 (released 2012), https:// itunes.apple.com /nl/app/shazam /id284993459?mt=8 (accessed November 2, 2012). 71. Ernst, “Zum Begriff des Sonischen.” 72. For more on the politics of this “listening for” someone, see Sander van Maas, “Scenes of Inner Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite,” chap. 3 in this volume, for his take on Lawrence Kramer, “Recognizing Schubert: Musical Subjectivity, Cultural Change, and Jane Campion’s ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ ” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 25–52. 73. Ernst, “Zum Begriff des Sonischen.” 74. Ibid. 75. Kittler, “God of the Ears,” 55. 76. Ibid., 53. 77. Friedrich Kittler, “Signal-Rausch-Abstand,” in Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Leipzig: Reklam, 1993), 174; Kittler, “Rockmusik,” 26; Kittler, “Echoes,” 27. 78. Friedrich Kittler, “Number and Numeral,” trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 55. 79. Kittler, “Number and Numeral,” 49. 80. Rob Walker, “Stealth Iconography: The Waveform,” Design Observer Group, September 8, 2011, http://observatory.designobserver.com / feature/stealth-iconography-the-waveform /30008/. 81. Kittler, Gramophone, xxxix. 82. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction,” in Kittler, Gramophone, xx. 6. movement at the boundaries of listening, composition, and performance Jason Freeman 1. Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 2001), 144. 2. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 514.

F6540.indb 264

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 105–13

265

3. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 15. 4. Teri Braun and Gabi Braun, 3d music, 2002, http://www.braunarts .com /3dmusic/ (accessed March 1, 2013). 5. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Klavierstück XI, No. 12654 LW (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1957). 6. Max Neuhaus, “Listen,” in Elusive Sources and “Like” Spaces (Turin, Italy: Galleria Giorgio Persano, 1990), http://www.max-neuhaus.info/ soundworks/vectors/walks/LISTEN/. 7. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 130. 8. Gustavo Matamoros, Audience Piece (Miami: iSAW, 1995). 9. Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet, 2001, http://www.cardiffmiller. com /artworks/inst /motet.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 10. Stephen Husarik, “John Cage and LeJaren Hiller: HPSCHD, 1969,” American Music 1, no. 2 (1983): 1–21. 11. Joel Chadabe, “A Brief Note on this Recording,” in HPSCHD (Albany: Electronic Music Foundation, 2003). 12. Bill Brooks, “HPSCHD Notes,” in HPSCHD (Albany, NY: Electronic Music Foundation, 2003). 13. Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, 129. 14. Mark Shepard, “Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit,” in ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery, SIGGRAPH ‘07, San Diego, California (New York: ACM, 2007), 219–20. 15. Richard Cohn, “Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and Their ‘Tonnetz’ Representations,” Journal of Music Theory 41, no. 1 (1997): 1–66; Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 16. Bob Gilmore, “Changing the Metaphor: Ratio Models of Musical Pitch in the Work of Harry Partch, Ben Johnston, and James Tenney,” Perspectives of New Music 33, nos. 1–2 ( January 1, 1995): 458–503; David L. Wessel, “Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure,” Computer Music Journal 3, no. 2 (1979): 45–52. 17. Stockhausen, Klavierstück XI. 18. Earle Brown, Calder Piece (Rye, NY: Earle Brown Music Foundation, 1966). 19. Edward Rothstein, “Music Noted in Brief: Calder Mobile Conducts a Work by Earle Brown,” New York Times, November 16, 1981, http://www

F6540.indb 265

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

266

Notes to pages 113–25

.nytimes.com /1981/11/16/arts/music-noted-in-brief-calder-mobile-conducts -a-work-by-earle-brown.html. 20. Joseph Paradiso, “The Brain Opera Technology: New Instruments and Gestural Sensors for Musical Interaction and Performance,” Journal of New Music Research 28, no. 2 (1999): 130 – 49. 21. Matt Gorbet, Pete Rice, and Rolf Rando, “Harmonic Driving,” 1996, http://park.org/Events/BrainOpera/text-site/onsite/harmony.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 22. Jason Freeman, “ ‘Graph Theory’: Linking Online Musical Exploration to Concert Hall Performance,” Leonardo 41, no. 1 (2008): 91–93. 23. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Random House, 1977); Hildegard Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology,” Organised Sound 7, no. 1 (2002): 51–56. 24. Barry Truax, “Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at Simon Fraser University,” Organised Sound 7 (2002): 5–14. 25. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology.” 26. Jason Freeman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael Nitsche, and Stephen Garrett, “Soundscape Composition and Field Recording as a Platform for Collaborative Creativity,” Organised Sound 16, no. 3 (2011): 272–81. 27. Bruce L. Jacob, “Algorithmic Composition as a Model of Creativity,” Organised Sound 1 (1996): 157–65. 7. the biopolitics of noise: kafka’s “der bau” Anthony Curtis Adler 1. Immanuel Kant, Werke, vol. 5, ed. Prussian Academy of Sciences (1908/1913; repr., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 330. All translations from the German are my own. 2. The German word Urbanität derives from the Latin urbanitas, which can mean both (i) city life in the general sense (an urbs is a city or walled town) and also (ii.a) the refinement or elegance of manners, courtesy, politeness appropriate to the life of the city, including (ii.b), specifically, the refinement in speech, and even wit, humor, or pleasantry (A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrew’s Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, ed. Charlton T. Lewis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879], 1934). While ii.a was the predominant sense of Urbanität in German usage at the time (Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, ed. Wolfgang Pfeifer [Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1989], 1880), Kant’s use of the terms, I would argue, in this passage and elsewhere in his writings, draws on this whole range of meanings to suggest not merely a certain mode of “behavior” narrowly conceived but a form of political community—a way of coexisting in a shared space with others. In

F6540.indb 266

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 125–27

267

the logic compiled by Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche in 1800 at Kant’s request from his lectures on logic, Kant speaks of the humaniora, a part of philology involving knowledge of the Ancients. This “fosters the unification of science with taste, smoothes away rawness, and fosters communicability and urbanity, of which humanity consists” (Kant, Werke, vol. 9, 45). The rich sense of Urbanität is, however, most evident in a passage from the Critique of Judgment, which appears just before the one cited at the beginning of this essay. Comparing the aesthetic value of the different beautiful arts, Kant explains that when one judges them according to the culture that they provide to the mind (Gemüth), taking as a measure the extension of the faculties that are brought together for the sake of cognition through the power of judgment, then music must seem to occupy the lowest rank, since it only “plays with sensations.” The pictorial arts, in contrast, will seem far superior, “for, by setting the imagination into a free play that is nevertheless appropriate to the understanding,” they bring about “a product that serves the concepts of the understanding as an enduring vehicle . . . for fostering the unification of these with sensibility, and thus, as it were, the urbanity of the higher powers of cognition” (Kant, Werke, vol. 5, 329). The full significance of this passage emerges in light of the overall project of the Critique of Judgment: urbanity comes to name the possibility that the “higher faculties of cognition” can be united with sensuality without doing violence to the latter. Urbanity, this is to say, suggests the implicit political dimension of the aesthetic and epistemological problematic of the third critique. Kant’s use of the term “urbanity,” one might say, suggests that the harmonious convergence of the “kingdom of ends,” grounded in pure reason, and the “kingdom of nature”—as the goal of human history— can only be achieved through actual life in the city, since it is only when people are forced to live together in close quarters that a culture of taste can unfold. Nevertheless, it may seem paradoxical, given the trajectory of the argument of this essay, that for Kant music is merely lacking urbanity— that he will conceive of its relation to politics in a mainly negative way. This, perhaps, suggests a limit of Kant’s political thought. Or, rather, it points toward a politics of the sublime rather than of the beautiful. For in a sense, what makes music lack urbanity is its literal sublimity, its ability to approach, and indeed cross beyond, the limit. 3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Masummi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 4. Hermann J. Weigand, “Franz Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ (‘Der Bau’): An Analytical Essay,” PMLA 87 (1972): 154. 5. Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 170 –73. Hereafter cited as KGW.

F6540.indb 267

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

268

Notes to pages 127–31

6. KGW, 179–97. 7. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 15th ed. (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), 184 –91; “Anxiety reveals in Dasein the being toward its ownmost potential-for-being, which is to say, being free for the freedom of choosing oneself and seizing hold of oneself. Anxiety brings Dasein before the ‘being free’ for . . . the authenticity of its being as the possibility that it already is” (188). 8. Eric Paul Meljac also calls attention to the Heideggerian dimension of Kafka’s “The Burrow,” emphasizing the aspect of “care.” I would argue, however, that Meljac, who takes his departure from late Heidegger, fails to recognize either the complexity of Heidegger’s account of care or the crucial distinction between Kafka and Heidegger. Eric Paul Meljac, “The Poetics of Dwelling: A Consideration of Heidegger, Kafka, and Michael K,” Journal of Modern Literature. 32, no. 1 (2008): 69–76. 9. As Allan Bloom, in his introduction to his translation of Emile, explains, “Now, who, according to Rousseau, is the bourgeois? Most simply, following Hegel’s formula, he is the man motivated by fear of violent death, the man whose primary concern is self-preservation, or, according to Locke’s correction of Hobbes, comfortable self-preservation.” Allan Bloom, introduction to Emile, or On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 5. Also significant, for this essay, is Locke’s understanding of property as derived from labor. 10. KGW, 181. 11. This imagery is, of course, “sexually charged,” and Verne Snyder is no doubt right to contrast the “womb-like” quality of the burrow with the masculine “snout” or “muzzle” of the imagined enemy. Verne P. Snyder, “Kafka’s ‘Burrow’: A Speculative Analysis,” Twentieth Century Literature 27, no. 2 (1981): 113–26. 12. As Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, “teleia d’ estin he¯ to¯n agatho¯n philia kat’ arete¯n homoio¯n [the perfected friendship is the friendship among those who are good, and who are like one another with respect to virtue” [1157a]. Ancient Greek distinguishes between bios, a specific way of life of human beings, and zoe¯, the mere “biological” life shared by all living organisms. For a recent treatment of this distinction, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 13. While the demonstration of these connections surpasses the scope of this essay, I suggest that these political categories could be aligned with tripartite distinctions that run through the history of metaphysics. Especially significant, in this regard, would be the relation of hule¯, ousia (itself related to the Greek word for property), and eidos in Aristotle. And at the

F6540.indb 268

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 131–34

269

opposite end, one could of course think of Freud’s id, ego, and superego. And indeed it is from such a “metapsychological” perspective, perhaps by way of Lacan, and not in terms of a merely “clinical” diagnosis of the creature’s monologue, that the psychoanalytic implications of “The Burrow” should be understood. 14. Consider the notion of the social contract. Were political space, in the “state of nature,” already continuous and divisible, there would be no need to conceive of the instituting of political relations as an abrupt departure from the state of nature. The “state of nature” is nothing else than the idea of a radically nonclassical political space, defined at once by an irreducible fragmentation and the contagious impossibility of boundaries. As Agamben argues, the Hobbesian state of nature involves “the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109). 15. One might also recall, in this context, the protagonist of Kafka’s The Castle: a land-surveyor— or so he claims—who is never able to get to work. 16. Gilles Deleuze explicitly identifies the rhizome with the burrow and with Kafka’s work. Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3. 17. KGW, 167 18. Lacan, as Mladen Dolar notes, uses Kafka’s “The Burrow” to describe a topology in which, in Lacan’s words, interior and exterior “pass into each other and command each other”: “The burrow is the place where one is supposed to be safe, neatly tucked inside, but the whole story shows that in the most intimate place of shelter one is thoroughly exposed; the inside is inherently fused to the outside.” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 166 –67. Yet we should be cautious of the reductive tendencies inherent in the identification of the burrow with a single simple topology; rather, I would suggest, the topology of the burrow is developed through the text and is scarcely less complex. 19. For a sustained and insightful reflection on the “parasitic” aspect of life, see Michel Serres, Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (1982; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 20. KGW, 168. 21. Of this silence, Mark Boulby writes, “Very striking is the coveting of silence, in a world which is, in reality, not silent at all. The creature likes to imagine that he dwells in a sphere of stillness, and alleges that he does not fear, or even dislike, this condition, but rather seeks it out, to possess and preserve it.” Mark Boulby, “Kafka’s End: A Reassessment of the Burrow,” German Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1982): 178. 22. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 250c–d.

F6540.indb 269

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

270

Notes to pages 134 –37

23. J. M. Coetzee argues that Kafka’s seemingly “aberrant” use of tense, and above all the shifting between an iterative and punctual present tense, suggests an understanding of time opposed to the ultimately Newtonian (but, one might add, also Aristostelian and Kantian) temporal conventions of realistic fiction. Time in “The Burrow” is a radically discontinuous now: “There is one moment and then there is another moment: between them is simply a break. . . . Any moment may mark the break between before and after. Time is thus at every moment a time of crisis. . . . Life consists in an attempt to anticipate a danger which cannot be anticipated because it comes without transition, without warning.” J. M. Coetzee, “Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow,’ ” Modern Language Notes 96, no. 3 (1981): 574 –75. 24. KGW, 171. 25. This is already evident in Kant’s theory of transcendental apperception. 26. KGW, 178–79. 27. KGW, 179. 28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 21. For Nancy, resonance suggests a way of thinking about the reflexivity of the senses that opposes an understanding of selfhood and subjectivity grounded in vision, theory, and speculation. As he explains, “Indeed, as we have known since Aristotle, sensing [sentir] (aisthesis) is always a perception [resentir], that is, a feeling-oneself-feel [se-sentir-sentir]: or, if you prefer, sensing is a subject, or it does not sense. But it is perhaps in the sonorous register that this reflected structure is most obviously manifest, and in any case offers itself as open structure, spaced and spacing (resonance chamber, acoustic space, the distancing of a repeat [renvoi]), at the same time as an intersection, mixture, covering up in the referral [renvoi] of the perceptible with the perceived as well as with the other senses” (8). 29. KGW, 187–88. 30. Heinz Politzer, in Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 224 – 46, reads “The Burrow” as a metaphor for Kafka’s experience of his own body as it was being ravaged by the disease that was to claim his life. The connection with Kafka’s tuberculosis is without doubt significant, though I would suggest we avoid allegorizing readings. Disease, precisely as a liminal state of the body, only poses, in a more emphatic way, the fundamental problem of having a body. 31. The German gehören, used impersonally with an indefinite object to indicate possession, is derived from hören (to hear). See Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm auf CD-ROM und im Internet, http://dwb .uni-trier.de (accessed March 1, 2013).

F6540.indb 270

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 137– 42

271

32. Britta Maché, noting the general critical neglect of “The Burrow,” observes that the noises that dominate the story “have not been explained satisfactorily.” Rightfully rejecting various metaphorical interpretations (“the threatening, judging true self, to which the animal does not listen,” the “inimical force, by which the self is threatened,” and the “spirit of obsession” that haunted Kafka as a writer), she interprets the noise, quite literally, as the “tubercular cough which tormented him during the last months of his life.” While this interpretation is plausible, it only makes more pressing the need for the sort of biopolitical reading that I propose. Britta Maché, “The Noise in the Burrow: Kafka’s Final Dilemma,” German Quarterly 55, no. 4 (1982): 526. Perhaps the most profound discussion of noise in “The Burrow” is found in Paul North’s A Draw Back of Thought: On the Concept of Distraction in Kafka, Heidegger, and Benjamin (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2007), 215–25. 33. KGW, 188. 34. KGW, 188. 35. KGW, 189. 36. KGW, 190. 37. KGW, 191. 38. KGW, 191. 39. KGW, 191–92. 40. KGW, 193. 41. KGW, 193–94. 42. KGW, 194 –95. 43. KGW, 195. 44. KGW, 196. 45. KGW, 197. 46. KGW, 198. 47. Even when walls as such are rejected, as in Plato’s Laws 778d–779b, we see how important they were for the classical conception of politics. 48. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 194. 49. KGW, 199–200. 50. KGW, 200. 51. KGW, 201. 52. KGW, 207. 53. KGW, 203. 54. KGW, 207. 55. KGW, 207–8. 56. KGW, 189.

F6540.indb 271

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

272

Notes to pages 142– 44

57. KGW, 200 –201. 58. Taking his departure from a Lacanian framework, Mladen Dolar addresses the question of the biopolitics of the voice, finding in the voice a “topology of extimacy, the simultaneous inclusion /exclusion, which retains the excluded at its core” (A Voice and Nothing More, 106). He adds, “For what presents a problem is not that zoe is simply presocial, the animality, the outside of the social, but that it persists, in its very exclusion /inclusion, at the heart of the social” (ibid.). Drawing on Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” he also suggests the crucial juridical function of the living voice in rituals of acclamation that serve to constitute sovereign power (107–19). The biopolitical role of acclamation is the central theme of Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Tracing the political function of acclamation and glorification back to the “theological economy” developed in early Christian theology, Agamben argues that the consensus of “consensual democracy” is rooted in acclamation. As he explains, “The people—whether real or communicational—to which in some sense the ‘government by consent’ and the oikonomia of contemporary democracies must hark back, is, in essence, acclamation and doxa” (259). I would argue, however, that the biopolitics of the voice must be understood in relation to the biopolitics of noise and indeed to the moment in which the voice is heard as a voice. This moment of “hearing as” fractures and dislocates the logic of sovereignty, forbidding the sort of totalizing and absolutizing analysis that Agamben insists on precisely by conceiving of it in terms of a paradoxical structure of inclusion /exclusion. In this sense, Kafka’s “Josephine”—Dolar treats it at length (A Voice and Nothing More, 174 –80)— might be read together with “The Burrow.” 8. torture as an instrument of music John T. Hamilton 1. The topic of music and torture has been broached by Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon,” Revista Transcultural de Musica 10 (2006), http://www.sibetrans.com /trans/a152/music-as-torture-music-as -weapon. See also Jonathan Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), especially 78–99. 2. Cusick, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon.” 3. See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 18, in which the ego is described as a “Hörkappe.”

F6540.indb 272

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 145–54

273

4. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §53, in Gesammelte Schriften, 24 vols. (Berlin: Akademie, 1999), 5:330. 5. For examples, see Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 203–8. 6. Quoted in ibid., 197. 7. This tradition is established early on in ecclesiastical history, for example, in the Sermons of Peter Chrysologus, fifth-century archbishop of Ravenna: “The cymbals and harps they will hear will be tumultuous tempests and penetrating rivers which will pierce them through their hearts.” Cited in Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 40. 8. See Joseph Kiefer, “Lithotomy Set to Music: An Historical Interlude,” Transactions of the American Association of Genito-Urinary Surgeons 55 (1963): 132–37; Marais’s piece is briefly mentioned in Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 195. 9. Details are from John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77–78. 10. Diodorus Siculus 9.19, trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), translation slightly modified. Polybius also offers a brief account of the bull in Histories 12.25. 11. See, e.g., Cicero, Letters to Atticus 7.12, where Cicero refers to Julius Caesar’s fearful “phalarism.” 12. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 24. 13. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 38. 9. stop it, i like it! embodiment, masochism, and listening for traumatic pleasure Robert Sholl 1. Mosche Feldenkrais, Higher Judo (London: Frederick Warne, 1962), 47. 2. Mosche Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation, and Learning (Berkeley, CA: Frog, 2005), 108. 3. Mosche Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion (Berkeley, CA: Frog, 1985), 25, 28. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998), 28. The philosopher and Feldenkrais practitioner Richard Shusterman discusses this quotation as evidence of the “background kinesthetic feelings [that] help us derive a greater fullness, intensity, or precision in our

F6540.indb 273

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

274

Notes to pages 154 –56

experience of art.” Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 51. 5. Feldenkrais, Potent Self, xl. 6. Amber Musser, “Masochism: A Queer Subjectivity?,” Rhizomes 11–12 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006), http://www.rhizomes.net /issue11/musser.html. Deleuze’s understanding is therefore quite different from that of Sigmund Freud, who understands sadism as dynamic (action) and masochism as passive. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), trans. James Strachey (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino, 2011), 37. 7. See Pierre Boulez’s critique of the “authentic performance” movement in “The Vestal Virgin and the Fire-Stealer: Memory, Creation and Authenticity,” Early Music 18, no. 3 (August 1990): 355–56. In a rejoinder to Boulez’s jeremiads, Richard Taruskin calls for “some countermilitancy— against authority, against utopia, against purity,” in short, against the disciplining and dogmatic rhetoric of the authentic performance movement as “the loyal child not of antiquity but of modernity.” Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 192–93. 8. In Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), George Steiner imagines a philological world in which the “thousandth article or book on the true meaning of Hamlet and the article immediately following in rebuttal, qualification, or argument” is banned (5) in order to show that endless interpretation of art mirrors art’s own historically mediated self-critique and renewal. Boulez, in a similar vein, sees an end to what he calls the “endless consultation of the cultural library”: “With the time of the avant-garde, of exploration, apparently at an end, we would approach a period of perpetual return, of amalgam and quotation. The ideal or imaginary library supplies a plethora of models, leaving us with the problem of choice and of finding the means to exploit it” (“Vestal Virgin,” 355). 9. The close recording of Yo Yo Ma’s SACD Solo (1999) is to experience such a fantasy. Ironically, the disc liner allusively displays a cello displacing the performer’s torso and identity. 10. “The anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body, and be nothing but that, forms the principle of Western (un)reason.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5. 11. George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), 22. 12. Nancy, Corpus, 17. 13. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870), in Masochism, trans. John McNeil (New York: Zone, 1989). In Sacher-Masoch’s narrative, the fulfillment of the contract proceeds through deepening levels of transgres-

F6540.indb 274

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 156 –57

275

sion and indoctrination. These become stepping stones, snapshots in SacherMasoch’s deliberately distancing prosaic reportage, in which, from a critical standpoint, the “contract” usurps the “law.” These points occur in the narrative when slavery is mooted (180), when an alternative admirer is proposed (the prince; 199), when Severin tries to end the relationship but is subverted by being renamed as Gregor (204 –5), or crucially, when Severin first calls Wanda “Madam” (205) and then “mistress” (206). Masoch’s narrative, increasingly fragmented, depicts a relationship oscillating between (normative) love and its progressive displacement by dependence, servitude, and physical and emotional violence. Oscillation in the relationship occurs in a number of places, such as when Wanda returns Severin’s affection (234), only for this to be dramatically reversed. The novel ends when Wanda leaves. Severin returns to a life of duty, only to receive a letter from Wanda (after three years) that again seems to promise her love but that also allows Severin a realization that he is “cured” (271). 14. I am only concerned here with Adorno’s 1949 critique in Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For more on Stravinsky and Adorno, see Max Paddison, “Stravinsky as Devil: Adorno’s Three Critiques,” in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192–202. 15. For more on the idea of the contract, see Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), in Masochism, 65–66. 16. Jacques Rivière, “Le Sacre du Printemps,” La Nouvelle Revue Française (November 1913), in Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps, Dossier de Presse, ed. François Lesure (Geneva: Editions Minkoff, 1980), 45. 17. Paul Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 207 (my italics). 18. For a summary of this work, see Vittorio Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia, “How the Body in Action Shapes the Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 18, nos. 7–8 (2011): 117– 43; and also Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Aesthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 197–203. 19. See Vittorio Gallese, “Seeing Art . . . beyond Vision: Liberated Embodied Simulation in Aesthetic Experience,” in Seeing with the Eyes Closed, ed. A. Abbushi, I. Franke, and I. Mommenejad (Venice: Association for Neuroesthetics Symposium at the Guggenheim Collection, 2011), 62. For a brief discussion of mirror neurons and Feldenkrais’s work, see Carl Ginsburg, The

F6540.indb 275

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

276

Notes to pages 157–58

Intelligence of Moving Bodies: A Somatic View of Life and Its Consequences (Santa Fe, NM: AWAREing, 2010), 262–66. 20. B. Calvo-Merino, D. E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R. E. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers,” Cerebral Cortex 15 (2005): 1246. 21. See Feldenkrais’s Potent Self, xxxix–xl; and Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement (London: Penguin, 1980), 15–19. 22. See Aaron Williamon and Sam Thompson, “Awareness and Incidence of Health Problems among Conservatoire Students,” Psychology of Music 34, no. 4 (2006): 411–30; and Gunter Kreutz, Jane Ginsborg, and Aaron Williamon, “Music Students’ Health Problems and Health-Promoting Behaviours,” Medical Problems of Performing Artists 23, no. 3 (September 2008): 3–11. 23. Peter Hinson and Fiona Dick, Fit to Dance? The Report of the National Inquiry into Dancers’ Health and Injury (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1996). Also see Donna Krasnow, Gretchen Kerr, and Lynda Mainwaring, “Psychology of Dealing with the Injured Dancer,” Medical Problems of Performing Artists 9, no. 1 (March 1994): 7–9; and Keryl Motta-Valencia, “Dance-Related Injury,” Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Clinic of North America 17 (2006): 697–723. 24. Feldenkrais, Potent Self, 25, 28. Paul Valéry also alludes to this phenomenon in his “Philosophy of the Dance,” 198–200. Examples of parasitic movement are found in musicians, especially conductors, who use extraneous movement as a form of quasi-heroic mimesis of music (displaying and subverting the ego) that is unnecessary to the production or direction of sound. 25. Feldenkrais, Potent Self, 57. 26. Ibid., 11. 27. Ibid., 61 (italics in original). 28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 26. Nancy’s theory invokes a consciousness that becomes self-aware through a dialogue of “return and encounter” (16), of sound as resonance and reverberation in the body, a process of “penetration” in which we are called contagiously to participate. For Nancy, the resulting ontology through sound is a state of division between sensory actuality and cognate realization (14, 21). In his critique, however, Nancy sidelines the sensation, memories, and expectations of listening and also abjures any notion of which types of music make sense or what types of sense could be configured by different music. 29. Valéry imagines that the dancer is “an unstable element, she squanders instability, she goes beyond the impossible and overdoes the improbable; and by denying the ordinary state of things, she creates in men’s minds the idea

F6540.indb 276

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 158–59

277

of another, exceptional state—a state that is all action, a permanence built up and consolidated by an incessant effort” (“Philosophy of the Dance,” 203). 30. Feldenkrais, Higher Judo, 47. 31. Calvo-Merino et al., “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills,” 1246. 32. Davinia Caddy, The Ballet Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in BelleÉpoque Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5. 33. For more on this subversion and critical reaction, see ibid., 139–54. 34. Daniel K. L. Chua shows clearly the way in which analysis (as the articulation of systematic thought) has attempted to anaesthetize Le Sacre, and he proposes a number of possible creative and diremptive strategies out of this somnolence in his “Rioting with Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of The Rite of Spring,” Music Analysis 26, nos. 1–2 (2007): 59–109. 35. Richard Taruskin claims that, while Stravinsky’s organized amnesia of the ballet was calculated to forget its traumatic birth pangs, including the eclipse of the music by the dance, it was also designed to obviate “the darker aspects of primitivism —biologism, sacrifice of the individual to the community, absence of compassion, submission to compulsion, all within a context defined by Russian or slavic national folklore.” Taruskin, “A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and ‘The Music Itself,’ ” Modernism /Modernity 2, no. 1 ( January 1995): 21. See also Robert Fink, “Rigoroso (Quaver = 126): The Rite of Spring and the Forging of a Modernist Performing Style,” JAMS 52, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 299–362. What Fink describes as Taruskin’s “devastating cruise missile” (302) of an article aimed at musicology and historiographers keen to focus on the ahistorical originality of the work is, precisely in its attempt to remind the reader of these “birth pangs,” in fact an apple that has not fallen far from Adorno’s critical tree. 36. See Nicholas Cook, “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” in Cross, Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, 176 –91. 37. Richard Taruskin, citing a letter from Stravinsky to Alexandre Benois (September 20 / October 3, 1913) believed that Stravinsky’s desire to sanitize Le Sacre as a concert piece resulted partly from the composer’s “thoughts of defeat” at the failure of the work (“Myth of the Twentieth Century,” 17). 38. In “A Myth of the Twentieth Century,” Taruskin examines the notion of this myth. See also Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 39. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 118. The spectator becomes “emancipated” in “the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body.” Jacques

F6540.indb 277

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

278

Notes to pages 159– 60

Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 19. 40. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 119. 41. Ibid. Adorno follows Freud, who states, “The sadist is always at the same time a masochist, although the active or the passive aspect of the perversion may be more strongly developed in him” (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 38). Deleuze views sadomasochism as a “semiological howler” (“Coldness and Cruelty,” 134). Deleuze associates repetition and “quantitative reiteration” with sadism, while masochism operates by “qualitative suspense” (134). However, there are a number of features that might support a discussion of sadism in Le Sacre. Firstly, for Deleuze, the sadist is apathetic to the pain caused (“Coldness and Cruelty,” 51)—the ramifications of this are important for Adorno’s historically mediated understanding of Le Sacre—and, as Deleuze states, “sadism is in every sense an active negation of the mother and an exaltation of the father who is beyond all laws” (60). 42. In Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Wanda’s stature as the dominant grows through an awareness of her pleasure in cruelty (186) and in the loss of any culpability for her actions. 43. In 1913, Stravinsky described the end of Le Sacre: “When [the élue] is on the point falling exhausted, the Ancestors recognize this, and glide toward her like rapacious monsters, so that she not touch the ground in falling; they pick her up and offer [la tendant] her toward heaven [le ciel]. The annual cycle of forces, which are born again and which fall again into the bosom of nature, is accomplished in its essential rhythms.” Igor Stravinsky, “Ce que j’ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre du Printemps,” in Lesure, Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps, Dossier de Presse, 15. 44. The “disenchantment of the world” is proposed by Max Weber in “Science as Vocation” (1917), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Mills and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155. 45. See Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 112, for his view of the Third Reich and Le Sacre. 46. In Philosophy of New Music (113), Adorno implies that the musical language becomes a dominant agent through its role in the suppression of the subject. 47. Musser, “Masochism.” 48. Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy.” 49. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 144. See Emile Vuillermoz in Revue Musicale, in Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps, Dossier de Presse, 60. 50. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 146.

F6540.indb 278

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 160 – 61

279

51. Tamara Levitz, “The Chosen One’s Choice,” in Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 70 –108. 52. See Roger Scruton’s discussion of this in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2000), 68–71. 53. Le Sacre du Printemps, artistic supervision of the reconstruction staged by Robert Joffrey, reconstructed and staged by Millicent Hodson, decor and costumes reconstructed by Kenneth Archer, in The Search for Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, BBC TV, 1989. See also Hodson’s Nijinsky’s Crime against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the Original Choreography for “Le Sacre du Printemps” (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1996). For some dissenting views of Hodson’s reconstruction, see Robert Craft, “The Rite at Seventy-Five,” in Stravinsky (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 233– 48; and Joan Acocella, Twenty Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2007), 169, 192. 54. Jean-Luc Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice,” in The Reason of the Gift, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 69. 55. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 118. 56. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (London: Paladin, 1978), 79–80. 57. See Jean-Luc Marion’s “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of the Gift,” trans. John Conley and Danielle Poe, in The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 80 –100. Also see Marion’s “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice,” 74 –75. 58. Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 147. “I was never content with this chord; it was a noise before and is now an aggregation of distinctly-voiced pitches.” 59. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 119. See Stravinsky’s own comments on Apollo and Dionysus in Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: M. and J. Steuer, 1958), 100. 60. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 32–33. 61. Ibid., 33. 62. Ibid., 52, 109. See also Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 105. 63. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, rev. D. C. H. Rieu (London: Penguin, 2003), 162. This narrative is also twice powerfully evoked in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, first where the “blackmoors” tie Severin to a bed pillar and then disappear, leaving him at Wanda’s mercy (223), and then when Wanda ties Severin to a pillar, before inviting another male rival, “the

F6540.indb 279

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

280

Notes to pages 161– 63

Greek,” to whip him (265). Sacher-Masoch here evokes the myth of Marsyas, “condemned to be flayed by Apollo” (268). 64. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), 34. 65. Ibid., 59; and Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 93. 66. See Lawrence Kramer, “ ‘Longindyingcall’: Of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens,” in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 201–2. See also Daniel K. L. Chua’s fascinating elaboration of the image of Adorno’s “message in a bottle” in “Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music,” in Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–17. 67. It is clear that Odysseus wanted to be subjected to the Sirens, to visit the “meadow piled high with the moldering skeletons of men, whose withered skin still hangs upon their bones,” and still return from the experience. Homer, Odyssey, 158. 68. Nancy, Listening, 26. 69. Maurice Blanchot, “The Siren’s Song,” in The Siren’s Song: Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 59. 70. Ibid., 60. 71. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 89. 72. Nancy, Listening, 21; Feldenkrais, Potent Self, 61 (italics in original). 73. In some versions of the myth (Gaius Julius Hyginus’s Fabulae and Lycophron’s Alexandra), the Sirens die when, or because, Odysseus evades their wiles. 74. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 32–33. 75. Ibid., 70 –72. 76. “The masochistic contract generates a type of law which leads straight into ritual” (Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 66). Deleuze describes three types of rite that occur in Masoch’s novels. The last of these is, as in Le Sacre, that of regeneration and rebirth. 77. Ibid., 94. 78. Le Sacre was originally to be called Velikaya zhertva (The Great Victim; Levitz, “The Chosen One’s Choice,” 76). For more on the philosophy of sacrifice, see Herfried Münkler, “Mythic Sacrifices and Real Corpses: Le Sacre du Printemps and the Great War,” trans. J. Bradford Robinson, in Avatar of Modernity: The Rite of Spring Reconsidered, ed. Hermann Danuser and Heidy Zimmermann, 336 –55 (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 2013). 79. In a discussion of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Deleuze states, “It is when a woman resembles a statue that she can be loved. And the maso-

F6540.indb 280

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

Notes to pages 163– 65

281

chist gives back to art all that art gives to him: it is through being painted or photographed, through catching his image in a mirror, that he experiences and comes to know himself.” Gilles Deleuze, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 1 (2004): 126. 80. Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice,” 76. 81. Deleuze, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” 127, 126. 82. Ibid., 128. 83. Ibid., 129: “The masochist puts himself at the service of the law of the father precisely in order to obtain the pleasure he forbids.” 84. Ibid., 130. 85. Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice,” 74. In Musically Sublime, Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 15–16, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth proposes an alternative to this masochist struggle, or “the narrative law of the legitimate sublime (the epic of transcendence),” to foreground a liminal listening to the aporetic elements of the sublime (what remains unknowable, infinite, and irresolvable) as musically sublime. 86. Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” 203– 4. 87. Ibid., 207. 88. For more on this, see George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute (Toronto: Anansi, 1974), 4. 89. For more on this, see Paddison, “Stravinsky as Devil,” 194 –95. 90. This part of the film is loosely based on Exodus 32. 91. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 120. 92. Birds, in particular, as the voice of God in nature (intangible, untranslatable, and ineffable), are the most liminal of musicians that we hear through Messiaen’s mediation. 93. Perhaps this is because they are omnipresent in the central message of the Christian hope of the resurrection that animates Messiaen’s musical aesthetics. Messiaen’s most direct depiction of the death and resurrection of Christ are in movements IX (les ténèbres) and X (la Résurrection du Christ) from the Livre du Saint Sacrement (1984) for organ. 94. Olivier Messiaen, “Réponses à une enquête,” Contrepoints 1, no. 3 (March–April 1946): 73. Messiaen states, “I have tried to be a Christian musician and proclaim my faith through song, but without ever succeeding. Without doubt this is because I am un-worthy of doing so (and I say this without any sense of false humility!). Pure music, secular [profane] music and, above all theological music (not mystical as my listeners believe) alternate in my production. I really do not know if I have an ‘aesthetic,’ but I can say that I prefer a music that is iridescent, subtle, even voluptuous (but not sensual,

F6540.indb 281

6/17/15 8:30:17 AM

282

Notes to pages 165– 66

of course!). Music that is tender or violent, full of love and vehemence. A music which soothes [berce] and sings, which honors melody and the melodic phrase. Music that is like new blood, a signed gesture, an unknown perfume, an unsleeping bird. Music like a stained-glass window, a whirl of complementary colors. Music that expresses the end of time, ubiquity, glorified bodies and the divine and supernatural mysteries: a ‘theological rainbow’ ” (my translation). 95. Nancy, Listening, 5. 96. Messiaen discusses éblouissement in his Conférence de Notre-Dame (Paris: Leduc, 1978), 7–13. 97. See Christian Asplund, “A Body without Organs: Three ApproachesCage, Bach and Messiaen,” Perspectives of New Music 35, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 171–87. Sander van Maas, following Jean-Luc Marion, outlines a logic of dazzlement through the idol in his “Forms of Love: Messiaen’s Aesthetics of Éblouissement,” in Messiaen Studies, ed. Robert Sholl, 78–100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a more extended treatment of éblouissement, see van Maas, The Reinvention of Religious Music (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 98. These are among Messiaen’s principal iconographical inspirations for the opera. For a discussion of Messiaen’s influences in the opera, see Robert Fallon, “Two Paths to Paradise: Reform in Messiaen’s St François d’Assise,” in Sholl, Messiaen Studies, 206 –31; and Christopher Dingle, “Frescoes and Legends: The Sources and Background of St François d’Assise,” in Oliver Messiaen: Music, Art, and Literature, ed. Christopher Dingle and Nigel Simeone, 301–22 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 99. Robert Fallon discusses “the progress of grace in St Francis’s soul,” quoting Messiaen, in “Two Paths to Paradise,” 206. 100. Nancy, Listening, 7. Éblouissement is a mechanism of what Nancy calls a “function of referral: [in which] a self is made of a relationship to self, or a presence to self ” (8). 101. For a discussion of the spiritual, narrative transformation of St. Francis’s leitmotif, see Robert Sholl, “The Shock of the Positive: Olivier Messiaen, St Francis, and Redemption through Modernity,” in Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, ed. Jeremy S. Begbie and Steve Guthrie, 162–89 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). 102. Messiaen generally does not use traditional dialectical tonality, which implies the opposition of tonal areas and the temporal mediation of a tonic through other tonal areas back to a tonic. Instead, he uses tonal (triadic) chords as a contrast to his modal or more dissonant music, and he controls or dilates the power of these chords to irradiate his music (color), often as a cipher of religious or theological meaning.

F6540.indb 282

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 167– 69

283

103. Feldenkrais, Potent Self, 61. 104. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 89. In an interview with Claude Samuel, Messiaen confirms that the suffering of St. Francis, and his likeness to Christ, was an important factor in Messiaen’s choice of subject for the opera. Claude Samuel, Permanences d’Olivier Messiaen: Dialogues et Commentaires (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1999), 355–56. In an interview with JeanChristophe Marti in January 1992, Messiaen points toward the necessity of suffering as a “precondition for achieving” a pleasurable outcome when he states, “Saint Francis suffered all his life, but this suffering was accompanied by a superhuman joy, and what glory in heaven!” St. François d’Assise: L’Avant Scène Opéra, Opera aujourd’hui (Programme du Festival Salzbourg, 1992), 15. 105. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 2, quoted in Musser, “Masochism.” 106. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 32–33. 107. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Potter (London: Routledge, 1992), 240. 108. For more on asceticism, see Richard Valantasis, The Making of the Self: Ancient and Modern Asceticism (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2008). 109. Judith Butler writes, “A vexation of desire, one that proves crucial to subjection, implies that for the subject to persist, the subject must thwart its own desire. . . . A subject turned against itself (its desire) appears, on this model, to be a condition of the persistence of the subject.” Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 9. 110. Nancy, Listening, 14. 111. Samuel, Permanences, 361. 112. See Dom Columba Marmion’s Christ in his Mysteries (London: Sands, 1924), 299. 113. Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice,” 78. 114. Ibid., 74. 115. Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” 120. 116. Feldenkrais, Higher Judo, 47. 117. Luciano Berio, Remembering the Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 68. 118. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “A Letter,” in The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 125. 119. Ibid., 127–28. Nancy elaborates the notion of resonance in the body as a hermetic object like a “hollowed column of a drum,” which creates a “cavity . . . that listens to itself . . . [that is] my body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul” (Listening, 42).

F6540.indb 283

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

284

Notes to pages 170 –71

120. Berio, Remembering the Future, 12. 121. Nancy, Listening, 16. 122. It should not be surprising, then, that musicology has found ways to instantiate its own types of masochism in response. 123. Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve Tones (I),” Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 216. 124. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, 267–277 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). See also Steven Brown, Elton Ngan, and Mario Liotti, “A Larynx Area in the Human Motor Cortex,” Cerebral Cortex 18 (April 2008): 837–84. 125. Barthes does not use the word embodiment but circumlocutes it: “The singing voice, that very specific space in which a tongue encounters a voice and permits those who know how to listen to it to hear what we call the ‘grain’—the singing voice is not the breath but indeed that materiality of the body emerging from the throat, a site where the phonic metal hardens and takes shape.” Roland Barthes, “Listening” (1976), in Responsibility of Forms, 255. 126. Feldenkrais, Potent Self, 61. 127. Ibid., 61. See Karlheinz Stockhausen in “Music and Speech,” Die Riehe, no. 6 (1960; English ed. 1964): 40 –64. Berio describes Stockhausen’s search “for an extreme, and often paradoxical, conceptual homogeneity among qualitative and quantitative sound dimensions, among time proportions, frequency, and timbre, among micro- and macrophenomena and forms, in the attempt to reach a quasi-natural, quasi-divine, total fusion of all possible qualitative and quantitative parameters” (Remembering the Future, 67). 128. This attitude is prefigured in Stravinsky’s 1913 resumé of Le Sacre, in which he implies that the opening melody develops not through a Germanicstyle “developing variation” (“the horizontal line” as he puts it) but through the accretion of instruments: “the intense dynamism of the orchestra and not the melodic line itself.” He then states, “As a consequence, I excluded this melody from the strings which are too evocative and representative of the human voice [la voix humaine], with their crescendos and decrescendos—and I foregrounded the woodwind, drier, much nicer, less rich in facile expressions, and by the same token more malleable to my will [émouvants à mon gré]” (Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps: Dossier de Press, 14). 129. For a detailed discussion of this work, see George W. Flynn, “Listening to Berio’s Music,” Musical Quarterly 61, no. 3 ( July 1975): 388– 421. 130. David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64.

F6540.indb 284

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 172–74

285

131. Richard Causton, “Berio’s ‘Visages’ and the Theatre of Electroacoustic Music,” Tempo, no. 194 (October 1995): 20. Ironically, the weakest moments of Visages and Berio’s Sequenza III (1965) for solo soprano occur when the text (narrative and meaning) threatens to be discerned. The obsession with language (syntax, phonetics, linguistics, and information theory) creates a violence to the poetry that threatens to dethrone the prelinguistic angst of this music. 132. Berio, Remembering the Future, 68: “I believe that we can endow daily vocal behaviors with musical sense, just as everyday motions of the body can be developed choreographically.” 133. Istvan Anhalt, Alternative Voices: Essays on Contemporary Vocal and Choral Composition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 40: “Berberian . . . said that Sequenza III is like an X-ray of a woman’s inner life.” There is no date or source given for this quotation. 134. Barthes, “Listening,” 255. In The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (1973; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 66, Barthes describes the grain of the voice as “an erotic mixture of timbre and language.” 135. Berio, Remembering the Future, 29, 140 – 41. 136. Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Quasi una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 319–20. 137. Berio state that Visages has “certain curious absences. The work has no memory of vocal music. . . . It lacks a reference to the complex history of reciprocal formalizations which . . . marks the relationship between music and text.” In words that resonate with Nancy’s notion of the “the listener . . . straining to end in sense” (Listening, 26), Berio then states, “These absences, I feel, are an invitation to listen afresh, and to witness the miraculous spectacle of sound becoming sense” (Remembering the Future, 70). 138. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 319–20. 139. Luciano Berio, “Poesia e musica—un esperienza,” in La musica elettronica, ed. Henri Pousseur (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976), 124 –35, quoted in Andrea Cremaschi and Franceso Giomi, “Parrole: Berio’s Words on Music Technology,” Computer Music Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 32. See also Berio, “Prefazione,” in Pousseur, La musica elettronica, quoted in Cremaschi and Giomi, “Parrole,” 27. 140. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 64. Ronald Lewis Facchinetti understands the body as the “ultimate exhibit space for an installation” (personal communication with the author). 141. In the liner notes to John Zorn’s Kristallnacht (1992), the composer states that the second movement (“Never Again”) “contains high frequency extremes at the limits of human hearing and beyond, which may cause nausea, headaches and ringing in the ears.”

F6540.indb 285

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

286

Notes to pages 175– 80

10. sounds of belonging: accented writing in jean rhys’s good morning, midnight Liedeke Plate 1. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2. Edvige Giunta, Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 4. 3. Lilian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: Norton, 2009), 58. 4. Ibid., 135. 5. Ibid. 6. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293. 7. Naficy, Accented Cinema, 25. 8. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 98, 97. 9. Ibid., 99. 10. Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), 23. 11. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969). Further references to the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text. 12. Elizabeth Wilson, “Looking Backwards: Nostalgia and the City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams, 125–36 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 128. 13. Noel Riley Fitch writes of “this community of artists in Paris,” in Walks in Hemingway’s Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveller (New York: St Martin’s, 1989), 11; Shari Benstock problematizes the use of the term community in the context of expatriate Paris writing, in Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900 –1940 (London: Virago, 1987), xx. 14. On one occasion, Rhys identifies her hotel as located around the corner from the Rue Victor Cousin (11); on another, she identifies it as the one Rimbaud lived in (33). Rimbaud stayed in the Hôtel de Cluny, 8 Rue Victor Cousin, in 1872. 15. Jean Rhys to Diana Athill, 24 May 1964, in Letters 1931–1966, ed. F. Wyndham and D. Athill (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 280. 16. James and Pound quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, “Paris in the Twenties,” in The Atlas of Literature, ed. M. Bradbury (Twickenham, UK: Tiger Books, 1998), 175. 17. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Arrow, 1994), 182.

F6540.indb 286

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 180 – 82

287

18. Malcolm Cowley, quoted in Fitch, Walks in Hemingway’s Paris, 136. 19. Hemingway, Moveable Feast, 89. 20. Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 96. 21. In a notorious scene in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway rudely summons a critic, who disturbs him in his writing at the Closerie des Lilas, to leave the place (79–81). 22. One of the most compelling accounts of the gendered division of space remains Griselda Pollock’s “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art, 50 –90 (London: Routledge, 1988). 23. See Walter Benjamin’s “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” on the flâneur and the stranger as figures of modernity, and Janet Wolff and Elizabeth Wilson for discussions of their gendered aspects. In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha repeatedly refers to herself as “l’étrangère.” Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. P. Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott, 146 –62 (New York: Schocken, 1986); Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. A. Benjamin, 141–56 (London: Routledge, 1989); Elizabeth Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (London: Sage, 2001). 24. Wolff, “Invisible Flâneuse,” 152. 25. The epigraph of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast reads: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” 26. Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne: Le guide officiel (Paris: Éditions de la société pour le développement du tourisme, 1937). 27. An example will suffice: “He makes a little speech about English hypocrisy. Preaching to the converted” (110). 28. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own / Three Guineas, ed. Michèle Barrett (London: Penguin, 1993), 234. 29. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 30. In a book that was published as this one was under review, Juliette Taylor-Batty discusses Sasha’s perspective as “translational,” arguing that Sasha’s relationship to language is emblematically that of the translator and discussing her code-switching as a multilingual mimesis that represents Sasha’s unsettled condition while “rendering language strange and unsettling.” Juliette Taylor-Batty, Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 100 –11. 31. Naficy, Accented Cinema, 5. 32. Clifford, Routes, 17.

F6540.indb 287

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

288

Notes to pages 182– 87

33. Ibid., 37. 34. Ibid., 31. 35. Ibid., 30. 36. Ibid., 18. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Ibid. 39. Naficy, Accented Cinema, 248. 40. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe (London: Verso, 1992), 103. 41. Naficy, Accented Cinema, 174. 42. “Europe is on the move to look at merchandise”; quoted by Benjamin in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 151. 43. James Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 17–18. 44. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992), 381. Pizzichini, Blue Hour, 219. 45. Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Finde-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (1988): 73–102, reprinted in The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, 59–88 (London: Routledge, 1995). 46. Herbert, Paris 1937, 3, 4. 47. The year 1937, it is worth remembering, was also the year Hitler’s Nazi Party mounted its infamous exhibition of “degenerate” art, Entartete Kunst. Opening in Munich on July 19, 1937, this exhibition of 650 works confiscated from various museums traveled through Germany and Austria until April 1941. See Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the AvantGarde in Nazi Germany (New York: Abrams, 1991). 48. Herbert, Paris 1937, 131. 49. Daniel Abadie, “L’Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris 1938,” in Paris Paris, 1937–1957, créations en France: Arts plastiques, littérature, théâtre, cinéma, vie quotidienne et environnement, archives sonores et visuelles, photographie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981), 74. Rhys’s engagement with the Surrealist movement remains to be explored. It seems clear, though, that Good Morning, Midnight is on occasion written in dialogue with the main Surrealist texts of the time: André Breton’s Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928) and the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, for instance. But see also the “surrealist” scene in which Sasha is looking at “a shop-window full of artificial limbs” (11). 50. This is now the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie.

F6540.indb 288

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 187–92

289

51. Perhaps the best known interpretation of “Maladie d’amour” is that of Léona Gabriel’s nephew, Henri Salvator (1917–2008). 52. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 3– 4. 53. Elisabeth de Gramont, Mémoires de la Tour Eiffel (Paris: Grasset, 1937), 223. 54. Cf. Arthur Chandler’s discussion of a model ferryboat from Paris to London, which “showed Paris and London as sister cities.” Arthur Chandler, “Confrontation: The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne,” World’s Fair 8, no. 1 (1988): 7. 55. Did she do this in homage to Woolf ’s Orlando? She seems to be unable to recall exactly when she changed her name to Sasha: “Was it in 1923 or 1924[?] . . . Was it in 1926 or 1927?” (11). Orlando was published in 1928. 56. Jean Rhys, “Outside the Machine,” in The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987), 192. 57. The reference is to Salman Rushdie’s titular essay in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991, 9–21 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1992). 58. Helen Carr, Jean Rhys (Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1996), 42. 59. Angier, Jean Rhys, 108, 122; Pizzichini, Blue Hour, 144, 162. 60. Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams. She called herself Ella Lenglet when married to Jean Lenglet. She took the pen name Jean Rhys in 1924, when she published her first story in Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review. For a discussion of the literary collaboration between Rhys and Lenglet, see Martien Kappers, “Andermans veren: Edouard de Nève, Jean Rhys en ‘Aan den loopenden band,’ ” Maatstaf 41, no. 8 (1993): 76 –86, translated and republished as “A Case of Borrowed Plumes: Edouard de Nève, Jean Rhys and Aan den Loopenden Band,” Jean Rhys Review 6 (1994): 2–10. 61. Angier, Jean Rhys, 363. 11. back to the beat: silent orality in young hae chang heavy industries Kiene Brillenburg Wurth 1. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, 155–200 (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 163. 2. Linda Stone, “Beyond Simple Multi-tasking: Continuous Partial Attention,” Linda Stone Blog, November 30, 2009, http://lindastone.net / 2009/11/30/beyond-simple-multi-tasking-continuous-partial-attennion /.

F6540.indb 289

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

290

Notes to pages 194 –98

3. Jessica Pressman, “The Strategy of Digital Modernism: Young Hae Chang Heavy Industry’s Dakota,” Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 2 (2008): 302–26. 4. Ibid., 303. 5. Ibid. 6. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), 3. 7. With gratitude, I am using Pressman’s transcription of DAK0TA that is attached to “Strategy of Digital Modernism.” 8. Pressman, “Strategy of Digital Modernism,” 303. 9. Philip A. Klobucar, “The ABCs of Viewing: Material Poetics and the Literary Screen,” in From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom, ed. Paul Budra and Clint Burnham, 126 –54 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 134. 10. Ibid., 135. 11. Ibid., 136. 12. Ibid., 143. 13. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 14. Gary Glazner, Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (San Francisco: Manic D., 2008). 15. Paul Beasly, “Vive la Difference! Performance Poetry,” Critical Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1996): 29. 16. Liedeke Plate, Transforming Memory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (London: Palgrave, 2011). 17. Beasly, “Vive la Difference,” 30. 18. Meta DuEwa Jones, Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 19. George L. Dillon, “Anti-Laokoön: Mixed and Merged Modes of Imagetext on the Web,” in The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s Technology: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Second International Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), ed. Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Michael Toolan, 1–22 (New York: Rodopi, 2005). 20. “Arthur ‘Art’ Blakey,” Audio-Music Dot Info, http://www.audio -music.info/htm /b/Blakey_Art.htm (accessed August 26, 2014). 21. Ibid. 22. Jason John Squinobal, West African Music in the Music of Art Blakey, Yusef Lateef, and Randy Weston (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2009), 292–93, 295. 23. Ibid., 299. 24. Ibid., 298.

F6540.indb 290

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 199–201

291

25. Stern Chip, “Art Blakey,” Modern Drummer 8, no. 9 (September 1984): 8–13, available at http://www.artblakey.com /moderndrummer.html (accessed August 26, 2014). 26. “Young Hae Change Heavy Industries” (2005), Between Man and Place exhibition website, http://m--a--p.net /7.html (accessed April 16, 2013). 27. Jazz poetry typically does not just mimic jazz music but refers to jazz music and icons of jazz: “Jazz poetry is a literary genre defined as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music—that is, poetry in which the poet responds to and writes about jazz. Jazz poetry, like the music itself, encompasses a variety of forms, rhythms, and sounds. Beginning with the birth of blues and jazz at the beginning of the twentieth century, jazz poetry can be seen as a thread that runs through the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat movement, and the Black Arts Movement—and it is still vibrant today. From early blues to free jazz to experimental music, jazz poets use their appreciation for the music as poetic inspiration.” “A Brief Guide to Jazz Poetry,” Poets.org, 2004, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text /brief-guide-jazz-poetry (accessed August 26, 2014). See also Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), xii; Jon Woodson, Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), xii; Meta DuEwa Jones, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 28. Quoted in Jeffrey Renard Allen, “Distinguished Breakage: The Jazz Poetry of Sterling D. Plumpp,” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 36, no. 3 (2005): 200. 29. Ibid. 30. As Jameson Hogan has perceptively observed in an unpublished paper on DAK0TA, this “sequence of paid adult intimacy recalls and matures the sexuality of the young road trippers from earlier while also suggesting the inevitability of growing up, the impossibility of retaining youthful rebellion in the long term, and the commoditization of intimacy.” Jameson Hogan, “Happy Paradox of a Hateful Place: Pleasurable Disorientation in ‘DAK0TA’ ” (unpublished paper, 2010), 6, http://jamesonhogan.com /wp -content /uploads/2011/05/HappyParadoxHatefulPlaceDAK0TA.pdf (accessed April 16, 2013). 31. Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (New York: Holt, 1951). 32. With reference to the jazz poetry of Sterling Plumpp, Jeffrey Renard Allan notes that Robert Creeley suggested that if a poem was to be written in the movement, it must “move quickly from perception to perception.” Plumpp, he continues, “offers such quick perceptual changes, shifting from

F6540.indb 291

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

292

Notes to pages 201–7

allusion to allusion: each allusion leads us to a new idea, takes us to a new location in the poem. As such the poem moves” (“Distinguished Breakage,” 201). 33. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ althusser/1970/ideology.htm (accessed April 16, 2013). 34. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982). 35. Thomas Schmitz, Modern Literary Theory and Ancient Texts: An Introduction (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 99, 100. 36. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967). 37. P. Christopher Smith, “Orality and Writing: Plato’s Phaedrus and Pharmakon Revisited,” in Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History, ed. Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch (New York: Continuum, 2002), 73–89. 38. Ibid., 85, 87. 39. Christian Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext: Towards the Universal Digital Library, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 13. 40. Ibid. 41. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 178. 42. See for this Jean-François Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant” and “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Inhuman, 78–107. 43. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 81. 44. Ibid., 178. 45. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 103. 12. the discovery of slowness in music Alexander Rehding With thanks to Joseph Auner, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Mike Einziger, Christopher Hasty, Branden Joseph, Brian Kane, Thomas F. Kelly, Frank Lehman, Matthew Mugmon, Susan Rankin, and Gregory Spears. 1. Jack Zipes, trans., The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 3rd ed. (New York: Bantam, 2003), 468. 2. The philosophical authorities cited most frequently in connection with the concept of eternity are Aristotle and Augustine. For them, eternity

F6540.indb 292

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 207– 8

293

describes an existence outside of time. Even the tiniest change that happens to the eternal substance threatens that fragile state, for it implies the possibility of further changes and ultimately that its existence could be finite. (One might argue, in the shepherd’s defense, that his concept is potentially openended—if we posit an infinite number of mountains, his definition could be salvageable. But this is obviously clutching at straws.) 3. The “Analytic of the Mathematical Sublime” is included in sections 125–127 of Kant’s Third Critique. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 169–84. 4. As has been widely discussed, Kant’s sublime consists in two parts: the unpleasant realization that our imagination is unable to grasp a phenomenon in its totality is followed by a triumphant affirmation of the greater power of reason. This second part is much less explicitly theorized by Sulzer. 5. Johann Sulzer, “Erhaben,” in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Peter LeHuray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 138–39. Sulzer follows biblical tradition in regarding Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. 6. This has been a problem for critics ever since. Many of them are at pains to explain that Kant could well have allowed for a sublime in art. 7. To be sure, Kant also introduces images that try to make the unimaginable approachable, such as the “starry skies above us,” but the Kantian version of the sublime has a strong sense of the unrepresentability of the sublime, epitomized in Kant’s famous reference to the sublimity of the second commandment. 8. This is not to say that interest had ever significantly ceased: a continuing line can be drawn from Kant and Schopenhauer via Nietzsche and Wagner to Adorno. Not least owing to the use of the sublime under the National Socialists, however, the sublime had become an extremely touchy subject in the postwar era. Christine Pries, in Übergänge ohne Brücken: Kants Erhabenes zwischen Kritik und Metaphysik (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995), has explored this history in Germany. 9. Lyotard explores these terms in “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, 119–28 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991). 10. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15. 11. It is surprising that there is relatively little literature on this. See, for instance, Time: Perspectives at the Millennium (The Study of Time X), ed. Marlene P. Soulsby and J. T. Fraser (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001); and Aleida Assmann, “Denkmäler in der Zeit: Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Gedenkjahre,” Schiller-Jahrbuch 44 (2000): 298–302.

F6540.indb 293

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

294

Notes to pages 209–12

12. Quoted in Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 2. 13. Michael Chabon, “The Omega Glory,” in Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (P.S.), 253–59 (New York: Harper, 2009). This essay was written under the impression of the “Clock of the Long Now.” 14. See http://longplayer.org/ (accessed May 28, 2010). 15. Brian Eno, “The Big Here and the Long Now,” Long Now Foundation, http://longnow.org/essays/big-here-long-now/ (accessed May 28, 2010). 16. William James’s psychological approach is particularly pertinent here; see his Principles of Psychology (New York: Cosimo, 2007). 17. Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 18. Lyotard explores how these languid extended moments assume a theological, sexual, and ontological dimension. 18. See John Cage, ASLSP for Piano or Organ Solo (New York: Henman, 1985). 19. Georg W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 3 vols. (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1959), 369. See Friedrich Kittler, “Real Time Analysis, Time Axis Manipulation,” in Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Leipzig: Reclam Leipzig, 1993), 182. Hegel uses a similar formulation in his Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 3:134. 20. Ulrich Stock, “Die eingefrorene Zeit,” Die Zeit, January 8, 2006. The project’s own website claimed, falsely, it to be the “slowest and longest piece of music in the world.” http://www.john-cage.halberstadt.de/new/index. php?seite=dasprojekt&l=e (accessed May 28, 2010). See also Maura Judkis, “World’s Longest Concert Will Last 639 Years,” The Style Blog, Washington Post, November 21, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com /blogs/style-blog/ post /worlds-longest-concert-will-last-639-years/2011/11/21/gIQAWrdXiN_ blog.html. 21. “Wie Langsam Ist ‘So Langsam Wie Möglich’?,” John-Cage-OrgelStiftung Halberstadt project website, http://www.aslsp.org/de/das-projekt .html (accessed March 1, 2013). 22. Stock points out that the organizers forgot to adjust for the delayed start and began the first sonority a year before its time. The performance was readjusted in 2013, to end— correctly—in 2640. Ulrich Stock, “Seiner Zeit voraus,” Die Zeit, March 31, 2005. 23. Nelson Goodman’s influential Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1969) is probably the most famous of these. 24. “Wie Langsam Ist ‘So Langsam Wie Möglich’?”

F6540.indb 294

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 212–14

295

25. This is somewhat simplified: the sublime has strands in French, British, and German philosophy, which all differ from each other. Here the tradition that matters most is the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition, which is also the one that Lyotard picks up again in the context of the postmodern. A recent summary of different strands of the sublime can be found in Philip Shaw, The Sublime (New York: Routledge, 2006). 26. Christopher Hasty, Rhythm as Meter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 76 –78. 27. Ibid., 78. 28. Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Inhuman, 89–107. 29. Ibid., 99. 30. The dates of the changes of sonorities are well known and constitute well-attended events. In some ways, it is a pity that the next sonic event is so well advertised in advance: in this way, the duration of the musical now becomes less suspenseful. 31. In fact, Cage comments on silence, in his “Lecture on Something,” a reflection on Morton Feldman’s music, in broadly corresponding terms (with a portion of Zen Buddhism thrown in, to be sure). See his Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 135. See also Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Musically Sublime: Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 130 –31. 32. It is useful to remember here the fundamental distinction of the primary senses: vision is related to the spatial domain, and hearing to the temporal, and likewise, objects-to-be-seen remain, whereas objects-to-be-heard disappear. (See also Wolfgang Welsch, in Grenzgänge der Ästhetik [Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 1996], 247, which draws attention to this fundamental distinction.) The idea of extreme slowness that we are working with here breaks down the certainties associated with these boundaries. 33. See notes 63 and 64. 34. Parsifal, directed by Hans Jürgen Syberberg, music by Richard Wagner (Gaumont /TMS Film, 1982). 35. Arthur Seidl, Vom Musikalisch-Erhabenen (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1887), 126. 36. Ibid., 123. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth has recently provided what is the most thorough reconsideration of Seidl in English; see her Musically Sublime, chaps. 3 and 4. 37. This is a slight simplification: the play time of the CD was extended a little after the first prototypes, from sixty minutes to seventy-four minutes, following a suggestion by Sony’s vice president Norio Ohga, so as to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording of Beethoven’s Ninth

F6540.indb 295

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

296

Notes to pages 214 –17

Symphony. This famous anecdote is recalled in all histories of the CD; see “The CD Laser,” DutchAudioClassics.nl, http://www.dutchaudioclassics.nl/ The_cd_laser/ (accessed March 1, 2013). 38. Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 (Naxos, 1996). 39. The beginning of the piece is daily at 8:15 p.m. local time in Vienna (i.e., Central European Time). As Inge explains, this was the time when the first performance began. 9 Beet Stretch website, http://www.expandedfield .net / (accessed March 1, 2013). 40. Unbeknown to Inge, it was not Mozart’s Requiem but rather a slowed-down version of Justin Bieber’s song “U Smile” that became an Internet sensation in the summer of 2010. http://soundcloud.com /shamantis/ j-biebz-u-smile-800-slower (accessed October 1, 2010). 41. This effect is common: the initial fluctuations during the attack are critical in the recognition of instrumental timbres. Where these initial microseconds are missing or distorted, timbral recognition is greatly impeded. 42. Moreover, these new dissonances that emerge in the slowed-down version may also be augmented by the fast Fourier transform (FFT) technology applied to “stretch” out the data stream. If a temporal unit falls on or across a change of sonorities, this moment will invariably be highlighted as one of such dissonances. 43. Sten Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness, trans. Ralph Freedman (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 3. 44. See, for instance, Ralph Kohpeiss, Sten Nadolny: Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit. Eine Interpretation (Munich: Oldenburg, 1995). 45. 9 Beet Stretch’s affinity to Pérotin was suggested by Harold Schellinx, “9 Beet Stretch,” Soundblog, May 14, 2005, http://www.harsmedia.com / SoundBlog/Archief/00550.php (accessed March 20, 2011). 46. The English theorist known as Anonymous 4 attributes these organa to Perotinus. See Fritz Reckow, ed. Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1967). For recent scholarly reflection on these questions, see Edward Roesner, “Who Made the Magnus Liber?,” Early Music History 20 (2001): 227–66; and Jürg Stenzl, “Perotinus Magnus: Und die Musikforschung erschuf den ersten Komponisten. Nach ihrem Ebenbilde erschuf sie ihn,” Musik Konzepte: Perotinus Magnus 107 (2000): 19– 49. 47. See Michael Scott Cuthbert, “Changing Musical Time at the Beginning of the Renaissance (and Today),” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Louis A. Waldman and Machtelt Israëls, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 572–580, 699. 48. For an introduction to the field of rhythmic notation in the medieval period, see Anna Maria Busse Berger, “The Evolution of Rhythmical Nota-

F6540.indb 296

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 217–21

297

tion,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen, 628–56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 49. Sibylle Krämer, “The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media,” Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2006): 93–109. 50. Ibid., 106. 51. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 52. While Kittler is at pains to set himself off from Marshall McLuhan’s ideas— especially that of media as extensions of the human body—it is hard to deny that he is not also indebted to certain of McLuhan’s ideas. 53. See Krämer, “Cultural Techniques,” 100. (As often, Kittler exaggerates his claims somewhat. The split into rolls and codices does not follow religious traditions quite as neatly as Kittler’s argument suggests. See Colin Henderson Roberts, “The Codex,” Proceedings of the British Academy 40 [1954]: 169–204. I am grateful to Thomas F. Kelly for pointing this out to me.) 54. And, as always, in such momentous events, it is only a form of shorthand to pinpoint an exact moment. Lisa Gitelman and others have vigorously criticized Kittler for his tendency to overstate his case in the search for snappy one-liners; see Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 55. For the musicological implications of this technique, see David Trippett, “Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s Erinnerung, and Satie’s Instantanéisme,” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 522–80; and Alexander Rehding, “Wax Cylinder Revolutions,” Musical Quarterly 88 (2005): 123–60. 56. The whole notion of “live” music, of course, only comes into being as soon as recorded playings are given their own status as a normal mode of existence of music. 57. I have explored this issue further in “On Sirens Old and New,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music, ed. Sumanth Gobinath and Jason Stanyek, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77–107. 58. I shall leave out here the possibility of counting the person hanging the weights on the organ keys during ASLSP as the “performer.” 59. The broader cognitive question that is being raised by all these works, albeit in different ways, is this: when do we stop perceiving a melody as a melody or a phrase as a phrase, and what purpose does it serve to go beyond these thresholds? Music perception has long been interested in questions of this nature, and different experiments have led to different results. See, for instance, Richard M. Warren, Daniel A. Gardner, Bradley S. Brubaker,

F6540.indb 297

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

298

Notes to pages 221–23

and James A. Bashford Jr., “Melodic and Nonmelodic Sequences of Tones: Effects of Duration on Perception,” Music Perception 8, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 277–90. 60. See Friedrich Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” in Wahrnehmung und Geschichte. Markierungen zur Aisthesis materialis, ed. Bernhard J. Dotzler and Ernst Martin Müller, 83–99 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995). 61. Hegel, Ästhetik, 3:156 –57. “Ich ist in der Zeit, und die Zeit ist das Sein des Subjekts selber. Da nun die Zeit und nicht die Räumlichkeit als solche das wesentliche Element abgibt, in welchem der Ton in Rücksicht auf seine musikalische Geltung Existenz gewinnt und die Zeit des Tons zugleich die des Subjekts ist, so dringt der Ton schon dieser Grundlage nach in das Selbst ein, faßt dasselbe seinem einfachsten Dasein nach und setzt das Ich durch die zeitliche Bewegung und deren Rhythmus in Bewegung.” See Kittler, “Musik als Medium,” 90. 62. Seidl, Vom Musikalisch-Erhabenen, 116 –17. “Nach ihrem eigensten Charakter hebt sie den Menschen aus der individuellen Erscheinungswelt empor, sofort über die Grenzen beschränkt irdischen, rein natürlichen Daseins hinaus. Aber auch noch ein anderes lehrt sie uns. Indem nemlich der Ton für unsere Auffassung gänzlich nur in der eindimensionalen Anschauungsform der Zeit sich bewegt, zeigt er sich (ähnlich wie unser die individuelle Sphäre auch nur mehr in der eindimensionalen Anschauungsform der Zeit streifende und dadurch das ‘Ding an sich’ am unmittelbarsten berührende ‘Wille’) dem Innern aller Erscheinung so nahe verwandt und des Wesens der Dinge in einer Weise teilhaftig, dass er uns befähigt, dasselbe durch ihn in seiner unmittelbarsten Kundgebung zu erfassen.” 63. Ibid., 117. “Erst in dem äusserlich Symmetrischen des Rhythmus (also des Zeitlichen) nähert sich—und zwar in ganz analoger Weise, wie die Anschauungsform der Zeit den ursprünglich und wesentlich raum- und zeitlosen Ur- und Allwillen wieder an die Gesetze des Intellektes, d.h. an die Vorstellungswelt knüpft—nähert sich also dieses All dem Plastischen, begibt sich dieses ‘Ansich’ wenigstens teilweise auf das Gebiet der äussern Erscheinung.” 64. Over the course of Vom Musikalisch-Erhabenen, Seidl distinguishes between the “sublime in music” and the “sublime of music”: the former indicates musical signifiers of sublimity (e.g., loud fanfares, mysterious chromatic chords, rich sonorous string textures with harp arpeggios), while the latter reveals, for Seidl, the true essence and destiny of music, which he finds best realized in Wagner. 65. Jean-François Lyotard, The Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 138. The “in a glance” makes reference to Kant’s formulation, in einem Augenblicke.

F6540.indb 298

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 224 –27

299

66. This is in fact exactly what Steve Reich complained about: manipulated recordings lacked the human element—slight inaccuracies and even minimally emotionally charged responses—that caused Reich to abandon his experiments with TAM in the late 1960s. 67. See note 19. 13. negotiating ecstasy: electronic dance music and the temporary autonomous zone Andrew Shenton 1. In this essay the term ecstatic is used to define a numinous encounter, and the terms religious and spiritual are used interchangeably and do not necessarily imply institutional religion. 2. This essay concentrates on music for dance and therefore does not deal with some of the recent developments in intellectual techno as made and (academically, philosophically) discussed by DJ Spooky, Achim Szepanski, Maffesoli, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. 3. See, for example, the essays by Greg Hainge and Drew Hemment in Deleuze and Music ed. Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 4. Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (London: Picador, 1998); Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Mark Butler, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Graham St. John, ed., Rave Culture and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Robin Sylvan, Trance Formation: The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005). 5. For example, http://www.electronicdancemusic.org/ (accessed March 1, 2013) provides “syndicated updates from top House, Trance and Electronic Dance Music sources,” and http://dj.dancecult.net / is the online site for the Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture (first edition 2009). 6. The Berlin Love Parade combined a music festival and parade. German media (Der Spiegel) reported that as many as 1.2 million people attended the 2007 Love Parade in Essen and 1.6 million the 2008 edition in Dortmund. “Duisburg-Ticker: Trauerzug durch den Tunnel—Kraft fordert indirekt Rücktritt,” Der Spiegel Online, July 28, 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/ panorama/gesellschaft /0,1518,708478,00.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 7. Nominated for Best New Artist and Best Short Form Video. Won Best Dance recording, Best Dance/Electronica Album and Best Remixed Recording (non-Classical). http://www.grammy.com /nominees. For information on the rise of EDM see, for example, http://articles.chicago

F6540.indb 299

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

300

Notes to pages 227–32

tribune.com /2012– 06-08/entertainment /ct-ae-0610-kot-electronic-music -20120608_1_electric-daisy-carnival-electronic-music-dance-music (accessed March 1, 2013). 8. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 7. 9. A useful guide can be found at Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music, v2.5, http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide (accessed March 1, 2013). 10. Edgar Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound,” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (1966): 18. 11. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 29. 12. Michel Chion, Guide to Sound Objects: Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research, trans. John Dack and Christine North, 11. Available at http://modisti .com /news/?p=14239 (accessed March 1, 2013). 13. The listener is aware of the deejay, the producer of the sound and the architect of change; however, this “performer” is also hidden in a certain sense because his or her instrument is digital. Even an engrossed and balletic deejay can only hint by gesture at description of the “sound object.” 14. Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 11. 15. Apple’s GarageBand, for example, is a digital audio workstation that now comes as a standard installation on the company’s new computers; or the professional can use immensely sophisticated software such as Logic Pro 9 or Ableton Live, which provide everything needed to create and produce EDM at an affordable price. 16. Chion, Guide to Sound Objects, 12. 17. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 35. 18. “Teknival de Laon: ‘Un bon moment musical entre amis, mais sans l’âme du truc,’ ” Le Monde Online, May 2, 2011, http://www.lemonde.fr/ culture/article/2011/05/02/teknival-de-laon-un-bon-moment-musical-entre -amis-mais-sans-l-ame-du-truc_1515558_3246.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 19. Sylvan, Trance Formation, 153. 20. See, for example, EP7 (1999) and Confield (2001), both released on Warp Records. 21. As Aphex Twin has stated, “It’s basically saying ‘this is intelligent and everything else is stupid.’ It’s really nasty to everyone else’s music . . . I don’t use names. I just say that I like something or I don’t.” “Aphex Twin: Interview by Jason Gross,” Perfect Sound Forever, September 1997, http://www .furious.com /perfect /aphextwin.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 22. Teknivals are often called free parties because they are free from both the restrictions of the club scene and because there is usually no entry fee. 23. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1985). Hakim Bey is the pseudonym name of Peter Lamborn Wilson (born 1945). T.A.Z. is composed of

F6540.indb 300

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 232–36

301

three sections: “Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” “Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy,” and “The Temporary Autonomous Zone.” The full text is available at http://hermetic.com /bey/ taz_cont.html (accessed March 1, 2013). 24. Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 2. For Oliveros’s use see her Deep Listening Institute, http://deeplistening.org. 25. Welcome to Wonderland, DVD and CD, 2006, http://www.welcome towonderland.com /. Of particular interest are the composer featurettes and extra deejay interviews, which give the musicians a chance to explain their creative processes. Brett Aplin, Sugar, Ben Last, Vegas Nerve, Kozmic Native, DJ Krusty, and others composed original music for the film, and some were deejays at the live event. 26. Welcome to Wonderland CD, track 3. 27. See, for examples, “The Beat Generation: Electronic Dance Music Emerges as the Sound of Young America,” Billboard, December 11, 2011, http://www.billboard.com /features/the-beat-generation-electronic-dance -music-1005652552.story#/features/the-beat-generation-electronic-dance -music-1005652552.story (accessed March 1, 2013). 28. EDM is played continuously on dedicated radio stations such as Techno.fm and sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo (where music videos are often uploaded replete with psychedelic graphics). 29. Ecstasy (also known as E, X, Thizz, Rolls, and XTC) is a Schedule 1 (US) / Class A (UK) narcotic, usually found in the form of small pills that are swallowed or occasionally snorted. It is a designer drug, which means that it mixes psychoactive ingredients in certain combinations in order to achieve a specialized “trip.” The primary active agent is 3, 4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), although tablets may also contain other ingredients such as speed and caffeine. Tablets are differentiated by size, shape, and color and are imprinted with a design and are thus identified by street names such as “Blue Mitsubishi” and “Purple Buddha.” 30. Jessica E. Malberg and Katherine R. Bonson, “How MDMA Works in the brain,” in Ecstasy: The Complete Guide, ed. Julie Holland (Rochester, VT: Park Street, 2001), 29–38. 31. Jerrold S. Meyer and Linda F. Quenzer, Psychopharmacology: Drugs, the Brain and Behavior (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005), 296. 32. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 83. 33. For general studies on the effects of MDMA see the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, http://www.maps.org/research/. 34. Oliver Grewe, Frederik Nagel, Reinhard Kopiez, and Eckart Altenmüller, “How Does Music Arouse ‘Chills’? Investigating Strong Emotions,

F6540.indb 301

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

302

Notes to pages 236 –39

Combining Psychological, Physiological and Psychoacoustical Methods,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1060 (2005): 446. 35. Ibid., 447. 36. For a summary of recent related theories see Alf Gabrielsson and Erik Lindström, “The Influence of Musical Structure on Emotional Expression,” in Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik Juslin and John A. Sloboda, 223– 48 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 37. Sylvan, Trance Formation, 55. 38. Robin Sylvan, Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 42. 39. Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy (New York: W. Morrow, 1998), xiii. 40. Ibid., 327. 41. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 42. Welcome to Wonderland, DVD. 43. Ibid. 44. See, for example, Graham St. John’s article “Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival” and his extensive bibliography in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1, no. 1 (2009), http://dj.dancecult.net /index .php/journal/article/view/11/35 (accessed March 1, 2013). 45. The description of the sought-after experience as “ecstatic” is true both in the sense of overpowering emotion and of being taken out of one’s self or one’s normal state. The TAZ sets the physical “safe space”; EDM enhances dissociation with the norm so that rapturous delight might enter. 46. Sylvan, Traces of the Spirit, 4. What Sylvan calls “experiences” I am suggesting are often numinous encounters. 47. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 8. 48. Narmour’s work is set out in two texts: The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity: The Implication-Realization Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 49. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker defines “mentalese” as follows: “The hypothetical ‘language of thought,’ or representation of concepts and propositions in the brain in which ideas, including the meanings of words and sentences, are couched.” Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: W. Morrow, 1994), 509. 50. Jourdain, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, 302. 51. The song reached number three on the 2012 US Billboard chart for Heatseekers. The official YouTube version had been viewed nearly eighty-

F6540.indb 302

6/17/15 8:30:18 AM

Notes to pages 239– 43

303

eight million times at the end of June 2012. The YouTube version is the one described here. 52. J. Peter Burkholder, “A Simple Model for Associative Musical Meaning,” in Approaches to Meaning in Music, ed. Byron Almé and Edward Pearsall, 76 –106 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 53. Ibid., 78. 54. Jourdain, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, 265. 55. Jimi Fritz, Rave Culture: An Insider’s View (Victoria, BC: SmallFry, 1999), 76. 56. Ibid. 57. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 29. 58. Jourdain, Music the Brain and Ecstasy, 325. 59. A review by Rich Juzwiak is typical of the type of criticism that outsiders level at EDM in general and the nonstop dance party in particular. See Juzwiak, “Dance Dance Dissolution: The Electric Daisy Carnival’s Fresh Hell,” Gawker, May 30, 2012, http://gawker.com /5913180/dance-dance -dissolution-the-electric-daisy-carnivals-fresh-hell (accessed January 2013). 60. See, for example, Andrew Wolvin and Carolyn Coakley, Listening (Madison, WI: William C. Brown, 1992). 61. The growing field of music and cognition has discovered much about the way the brain perceives music. See, for example, C. L. Krumhansl, “Music: A Link between Cognition and Emotion,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 11, no. 2 (2002): 45–50; Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music (London: Penguin Books, 2006); and Isabelle Peretz, “Music Cognition in the Brain of the Majority: Autonomy and Fractionation of the Music Recognition System,” in The Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology, ed. B. Rapp, 519– 40 (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2000). There have also been an increasing number of scientific studies on the effects of MDMA, which can be accessed via the MAPS Psychedelic Bibliography at http://www.maps.org/ sys/w3pb.pl. 62. Jourdain, Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, 319. Jourdain is not specifically writing about EDM; however, his description is apt. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 331.

F6540.indb 303

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

F6540.indb 304

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

contributors

Anthony Curtis Adler is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College in South Korea, where he has been teaching since 2006. He has published essays on Fichte, Hölderlin, Goethe, Kant, H. C. Andersen, and Agamben and is currently finishing two book projects: Labyrinthine Dances: Choreography, Economy, and the Politics of Gesture in Hölderlin’s Hyperion and Celebricities: Celebrity, the Phenomenology of Television, and Gadget-Life. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at Utrecht University and project leader of the VIDI project “Back to the Book” (2011–16), funded by the Dutch Research Council. She is the author of Musically Sublime: Infinity, Indeterminacy, Irresolvability and the editor of Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature through Cinema and Cyberspace (both with Fordham University Press). She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and volumes and is currently preparing a new monograph. Jason Freeman (http://www.jasonfreeman.net) is Associate Professor of Music in the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech. As a composer and computer musician, Freeman uses technology to create collaborative musical experiences in live concert performances and in online musical environments, utilizing his research in mobile music, dynamic music notation, and networked music to develop new interfaces for collaborative creativity. His music has been presented at major festivals and venues, including the Adrienne Arsht Center (Miami), Carnegie Hall (New York), the Lincoln Center Festival (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), and Sonar (Barcelona), and it has been covered in the New York Times, on National Public Radio, and in Wired and Billboard. Freeman received his B.A. in music from Yale University and his M.A. and D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University.

305

F6540.indb 305

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

306

Contributors

John T. Hamilton is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and has held visiting positions at the University of California– Santa Cruz, New York University, and the University of Bristol. His publications include Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition; Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language; and Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, the editor of 19th-Century Music, and a prize-winning composer whose works have been performed internationally. He is the author of eleven books on music, most recently including Why Classical Music Still Matters (2007), Interpreting Music (2010), and Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (2012). His string quartet movement “Clouds, Wind, Stars” won the 2103 Composers Concordance “Generations” Prize. Recent and forthcoming performances include Words on the Wind for voice and chamber ensemble (New York City, 2013), Pulsation for piano quartet (Ghent, Belgium, 2013), Songs and Silences to Poems by Wallace Stevens (London, 2013), and two string quartets, nos. 2 and 6 (New York City, 2013). Melle Jan Kromhout is Ph.D. Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. His research project titled “Noise Identities” focuses on the revaluation of noise in recorded sound and music. The project aims to develop noise identities as a concept for assessing the relation between recording media and musical significance. Melle presented his work at conferences around the globe and published several articles including “ ‘Over the Ruined Factory There’s a Funny Noise’: Throbbing Gristle and the Mediatized Roots of Noise in /as Music” (2011), “As Distant and Close as Can Be: Lo-Fi Recording: SiteSpecificity and (In)authenticity” (2012), and “ ‘The Exceptional Purity of Sound’: Noise Reduction Technology and the Inevitable Noise of Sound Recording” (2014). Liedeke Plate is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at the Institute for Gender Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen. Plate researches the relation between literature, gender, and cultural memory. She has published extensively on women’s rewritings of wellknown, classic or canonical texts, culminating in her book Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (2011). Most recently she coedited Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (2013). Her current project focuses on the participatory cultures of rewriting “great books”

F6540.indb 306

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

Contributors

307

across multiple media platforms, exploring the material and social “things” people do with them. Alexander Rehding is Fanny Peabody Professor of Music and recently finished a term as Department Chair of the Department of Music at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford Handbooks Online / Oxford Research References series and served as editor of Acta musicologica. His research focuses on the history of music theory and on nineteenthand twentieth-century music, with publications such as Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003) and Music and Monumentality (2009). Rehding’s interest in the encounters of tonal theory with nontonal music has found expression in a range of projects, including a collaborative exhibition (with multi-media online catalog) “Sounding China in Enlightenment Europe” (2012) and a number of articles on ancient Greek music and ancient Egyptian music. Other research interests include questions in aesthetics, media, and sound studies. In 2013–14 he ran the John E. Sawyer Seminar series on the topic “Hearing Modernity.” In 2015, he was awarded the Dent Medal. Andrew Shenton is a scholar, prize-winning author, performer, and educator. He first studied at the Royal College of Music in London and holds bachelor, master’s and doctoral degrees from London University, Yale, and Harvard, respectively. Moving freely between musicology and ethnomusicology, Shenton’s work is best subsumed under the heading “music and transcendence” and includes several major publications on Messiaen, Pärt, and others. Robert Sholl is Professor at the University of West London and teaches at the Royal Academy of Music. Robert is the editor of Messiaen Studies (2007), and with Sander van Maas, he is coeditor of Contemporary Music and Spirituality (forthcoming). He has organized four conferences at the Southbank Centre. Robert’s research interests include twentieth-century music and modernity, especially the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–92). Other areas of interest are Adorno and critical theory, contemporary music and spirituality, music and embodiment, opera and postmodernism, and research on listening, music and health, pedagogy in techniques of musical composition, and musical performance and improvisation. Sholl studied the organ with Olivier Latry (Titulaire Organiste de Notre Dame de Paris) and has played most of the organ works of Messiaen. Peter Szendy is a philosopher and musicologist affiliated with the University of Nanterres and—as maître de conférences—with the Université Paris

F6540.indb 307

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

308

Contributors

Ouest. In 2012 he was Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. In English he has recently published Listen: A History of Our Ears, Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, and Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions (all with Fordham University Press). He is also adviser for the Cité de la Musique in Paris. Sander van Maas is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and has held positions at Utrecht University (Endowed Chair of Contemporary Composed Music) and the Amsterdam Conservatory. In 2010 –2011 he was visiting Associate Professor of Musicology at Boston University and visiting scholar at Harvard. He authored The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough toward the Beyond (with Fordham University Press) and edited several volumes including Contemporary Music and Spirituality (forthcoming). He also works as a consultant for major cultural institutions around Europe. David Wills holds degrees from the University of Auckland and Université de Paris III. He is Professor of French and English at the University at Albany–SUNY and has held several international visiting positions. He is the author of Prosthesis (1995), Matchbook (2005), and Dorsality (2008); coauthor of Screen /Play: Derrida and Film Theory (1989) and Writing Pynchon (1990); editor of Godard’s Pierrot le fou; and coeditor of Deconstruction and the Visual Arts. He has translated works by Jacques Derrida (Right of Inspection, The Gift of Death, Counterpath, The Animal That Therefore I Am) and Jean-Luc Nancy (The Commerce of Thinking). Recent articles have appeared in the Oxford Literary Review, Mosaic, Journal of French Philosophy, Parrhesia, and Diacritics.

F6540.indb 308

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

index

Adler, Anthony C., 11 Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 4, 9, 14, 86, 156, 159–61, 163, 172–73, 246n8 Agamben, Giorgio, 127, 272n58 Aguilera, Christina, 152 Allen, George, 245n6 Althusser, Louis, 8, 37, 38, 54, 63–64, 201 Anderson, Laurie, 9, 70 –71 Antipas (saint), 148 Arendt, Hannah, 126 Aristotle, 71–72, 75, 79 Artaud, Antonin, 82 Ashby, Arved, 248n29 Attali, Jacques, 126 –27, 150 Audi, Pierre, 65 Auenbrugger, Joseph Leopold, 21 Augustine, 66, 257n38 Bacht, Nikolaus, 246n8 Bass, Alan, 24 Bach, C.Ph.E, 21 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 177 Barthes, Roland, 5, 37, 42, 171–72, 188, 253n19 Beasly, Paul, 196 –97 Becker, Judith, 232 van Beethoven, Ludwig, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 49, 86, 214, 224 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 68, 126, 192, 246n8 Benveniste, Émile, 54 Berberian, Cathy, 13, 156, 172 Berio, Luciano, 13, 156, 169, 170, 172–73 Berlioz, Hector, 48 Besseler, Heinrich, 246n8, 246n10

Bey, Hakim, 231 Blakey, Art, 193, 197–201 Blanchot, Maurice, 64, 86, 162 Blesser, Barry, 106, 109 Bolter, David, 196 Boulez, Pierre, 170 –71 Brillenburg Wurth, Kiene, 14 Broch, Hermann, 65 Brontë, Charlotte, 31 Brown, Earle, 113 Brownell, Judi, 246n7 Bruckner, Anton, 206 Burkholder, Peter, 239 Burroughs, William, 70 Butler, Judith, 34, 37, 38, 54, 65 Butler, Mark, 227 Cage, John, 11, 32, 105, 108–9, 122, 210 –12, 222, 224 Campion, Jane, 8, 52–61 Cardiff, Janet, 107, 109 Carr, Helen, 190 Causton, Richard, 171 Cavell, Stanley, 7, 14, 51, 60, 66, 68–69 de Certeau, Michel, 178, 180 Chabon, Michael, 209, 212, 222 Chadabe, Joel, 108 Chambers, Ian, 178 Chang, Young-Hae, 193–94 Chion, Michel, 229 Cicero, 148 Clarke, Eric, 246n8 Clifford, James, 182–83 Clinton, Bill, 2 Clinton, Hillary, 2 Coetzee, J. M., 270n23 Cone, Edward T., 37 Corvisart, Jean-Nicolas, 21

309

F6540.indb 309

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

310 Cotard, Jules, 43 Cusick, Suzanne, 12, 144 Deleuze, Gilles, 82, 154, 160 –62, 246n8 Dell’Antonio, Andrew, 246n8 Demers, Joanna, 246n8 DeMille, Cecil, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40, 42, 43, 46, 65, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81–83, 85, 202, 246n8 Descartes, René, 6, 10 Dillon, George, 197 Diodorus Siculus, 147 DiSalvo, Carl, 118 Divus, Andreas, 195 Dolar, Mladen, 269n18, 272n58 Domitian, 148 Drew, Joe, 210 Edison, Thomas, 93–94 Eich, Günther, 65 Eno, Brian, 98, 210 Erlmann, Veit, 6 Ernst, Wolfgang, 4, 92, 95–99 Esposito, Roberto, 127 Eustace (saint), 148 Feldenkrais, Mosche, 13, 153–55, 157–58, 161–62, 169 Feldman, Morton, 206 Finer, Jem, 15, 209 Fink, Robert, 159 Foucault, Michel, 21, 22, 54, 127, 250n16 Freeman, Jason, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 20, 77, 144 Fried, Michael, 15, 204 Fritz, Jimi, 240 Furrer, Beat, 9, 52, 65–66 Gabriel, Léona, 187 Gallese, Vittorio, 157 Giunta, Edvige, 175 Goodman, Steve, 12 Górecki, Henryk, 206 de Gramont, Elisabeth, 188 Grewe, Oliver, 236 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 206 –7, 270n31 Grusin, Richard, 196 Guattari, Félix, 82 Guggenheim, Charles, 1

F6540.indb 310

Index Hadid, Zaha, 66 Hadrian, 148 Hamilton, John, 12 Hasty, Christopher, 212 Hayden, Sam, 105–6 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 10, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 40, 41, 126, 128 Hendrix, Jimi, 10, 90, 101 Hegel, Georg W.F., 10, 211, 221, 225 von Helmholtz, Hermann, 98, 246n8 Hemingway, Ernest, 180 Herbert, James, 185–86 Hershey, Barbara, 53 Hesiod, 150 Hiller, Lejaren, 108 Hillis, Danny, 15, 208–9 Hitchcock, Alfred, 160 –61 Hitler, Adolf, 126 Hobbes, Thomas, 129, 140 – 41 Hofer, Wolfgang, 67 Hoffmann, Reinhild, 66 von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 169 Homer, 15, 145– 46, 150, 194 –95 Hornley, Clara, 233 Hughes, Langston, 201 Husserl, Edmund, 19, 72, 79 Ihde, Don, 19, 126, 246n8 Inge, Leif, 16, 214, 216, 220 James, Henry, 8, 52, 55, 255n8 Jourdain, Robert, 230, 237, 239, 241– 43 Joyce, James, 210 Kafka, Franz, 11, 12, 126 – 42 Kagel, Mauricio, 171 Kahn, Douglas, 19 Kalkbrenner, Frédéric, 147 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 15, 25, 72, 89, 125–26, 131, 134, 145, 207, 266n2 Kidman, Nicole, 53 Kilar, Wojciech, 59 Kittler, Friedrich, 10, 16, 89–99, 101– 4, 218–20, 224, 246n8 Klobucar, Philip, 195 Kramer, Lawrence, 7, 51–60, 62–63 Kromhout, Melle, 10 Lacan, Jacques, 42, 54, 91, 94 Laënnec, R.-Th.-H., 19, 20, 21, 22

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

311

Index Lehrdahl, Fred, 112 Leibniz, Gottfried W., 25 Lenglet, Jean, 190 Levan, Larry, 230 Levin, Robert, 2 Levitz, Tamara, 160 Ligeti, György, 171 Lissa, Zofia, 246n8 Lyotard, Jean-François, 15, 202–3, 208, 210, 212–13, 222–23 Luchese, Diane, 210 Lucian, 149–50 van Maas, Sander, 30, 37, 85, 168, 253n11 Maché, Britta, 271n32 Machover, Tod, 113 Mahler, Gustav, 206 Marais, Marin, 147 Matamoros, Gustavo, 107 Mayrhofer, Johann, 48 McClary, Susan, 246n8 McGovern, George, 1, 2 McLuhan, Marshall, 92 Meeuwse, Piet, 65 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 72 Messiaen, Olivier, 13, 156, 164 –69, 170 Miller, J. Hillis, 65 Monteverdi, Claudio, 64 Moore, Sonny J. (Skrillex), 227, 239– 40, 242 Mozart, Wolfgang A., 25, 26, 33, 34, 36, 49, 215 Musser, Amber, 154, 160 Nadolny, Sten, 216 –17 Naficy, Hamid, 175, 177, 184 Nameth, Ronald, 108 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 10, 17, 75, 81–87, 135, 155, 158, 162, 246n8 Narmour, Eugene, 238, 239 Neuhaus, Max, 106 Newman, Barnett, 203 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 67, 89, 94, 97, 104, 126, 136, 145, 246n8 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 160 Nitsche, Michael, 118 Nono, Luigi, 171 North, Paul, 271n32

F6540.indb 311

Obama, Barack, 245n6 Oliveros, Pauline, 232 Ong, Walter, 201, 204 Ovid, 65, 146, 149 Panetta, Leon, 245n4 Pausanias, 48 Pavese, Cesare, 62–65 Penn, Mark, 2 Perilaos, 147– 49, 151 Pérotin, 16, 217 Phalaris, 147– 49, 151 Pieslak, Jonathan, 12 Pindar, 146 Plate, Liedeke, 14, 197 Plato, 11, 24, 130 –31, 132, 134, 144 – 45 Pliny the Elder, 149 Plumpp, Sterling, 200 Poe, Edgar Allan, 42, 43, 44, 46 Pound, Ezra, 15, 194 –96, 201 Praetorius, Michael, 211 Pressman, Jessica, 194 –95 Quignard, Pascal, 246n9 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 59 Rapaport, Herman, 54 Ravel, Maurice, 39 Rehding, Alexander, 15 Reich, Steve, 220 Reynolds, Simon, 227–28, 230, 235, 238, 241 Rhys, Jean, 14, 175–91 Richardson, Samuel, 31 Riemann, Hugo, 112, 246n8 Rivière, Jacques, 156 Roerich, Nicolas, 158, 160 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 48, 268n9 von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, 156 Sacks, Oliver, 53 Salter, Linda-Ruth, 106, 109 Scarry, Elaine, 152 Schaeffer, Pierre, 16, 228–29 Schafer, R. Murray, 118 Schmitt, Carl, 251n32 Schoenberg, Arnold, 169–70 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 10 Schubert, Franz, 8, 48, 52, 54 –60, 62, 206 Schumann, Robert, 147

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM

312 Scipio Africanus, 148 Seidl, Arthur, 214, 222–23 Shelley, Percy, 47 Shenton, Andrew, 16 Shepard, Mark, 109 Sholl, Robert, 13 Short, James, 233 Siisiäinen, Lauri, 250n16 Sloterdijk, Peter, 10 Smith, Joseph, 246n8 Smith, P. Christopher, 202 Squinobal, Jason J., 198 Steiner, George, 155 Sterne, Jonathan, 18, 19 Stevens, Wallace, 38 St. John, Graham, 227 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 106, 112–13, 170, 171 Stoker, Bram, 46 Strauss, Leo, 127 Stravinsky, Igor, 13, 156, 158–63, 170 Subotnik, Rose, 4 Sulzer, Johann G., 35, 49, 207, 221 Sumison, Calvin, 108 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 213–14 Sylvan, Robin, 227, 231, 236, 238 Szendy, Peter, 4, 7, 84 –86, 246n8 Takemitsu, Toru, 206 Tallis, Thomas, 107 Taruskin, Richard, 105, 159–60 Taylor, Charles, 237 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr I., 59

F6540.indb 312

Index Théberge, Paul, 95 Titian, 146 Tymoczko, Dmitri, 112 Valéry, Paul, 156 –57, 163–64 Vandendorpe, Christian, 202 Varèse, Edgar, 228 Virgil, 65, 150 –51 Vivaldi, Antonio, 8, 49 Voge, Marc, 193–94 Vuillermoz, Emile, 160 Wagner, Richard, 10, 38, 44, 45, 46, 86, 90, 94, 97, 101–2, 104, 126, 145, 160, 167, 213–14 Wang, Avery Li-Chun, 100 Warshow, Robert, 68 Weber, Max, 159 Wechel, Christian, 195 Wicke, Peter, 92, 95, 101 von Wildenbruch, Ernst, 93–94, 96, 101 Wills, David, 9, 63 Wilson, Elizabeth, 179 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, 103 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 42, 51, 60 –62, 154 Wolff, Janet, 181 Wolvin, Andrew, 1 Wutz, Michael, 103 Xenakis, Iannis, 105–6 Ž iž ek, Slavoj, 44

6/17/15 8:30:19 AM