Reverberations

The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise

Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, Paul Hegarty, Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, Paul Hegarty

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441130174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Noise permeates our highly mediated and globalised cultures. Noise as art, music, cultural or digital practice is a way of intervening so that it can be harnessed for an aesthetic expression not caught within mainstream styles or distribution. This wide-ranging book examines the concept and practices of noise, treating noise not merely as a sonic phenomenon but as an essential component of all communication and information systems. The book opens with ideas of what noise is, and then works through ideas of how noise works in contemporary media, to conclude by showing potentials within noise for a continuing cultural renovation through experimentation. Considered in this way, noise is seen as an essential yet excluded element of contemporary culture that demands a rigorous engagement. Reverberations brings together a range of perspectives, case studies, critiques and suggestions as to how noise can mobilize thought and cultural activity through a heightening of critical creativity.Written by a strong, international line-up of scholars and artists, Reverberations looks to energize this field of study and initiate debates for years to come.

PART ONE

The philosophy and aesthetics of noise

1

A chronic condition: noise and time

Paul Hegarty

Human time, clock time, work time, progressing time: all order our action and perception. With time, the amorphous duration of endless becoming is moulded, and locked away, even if never to be fully dissipated. The other time, the other times outside of ‘our’, human, time (for there are many), make up a perpetual residue, ready to swell over the bows of clock time. Noise has often been dealt with in terms of its effect on the body, or on parts of it. This means that noise is generally treated as a spatial problem or proposition. As noise is not autonomous but occurs through being perceived, defined, legislated for and against, as noise, this prominence of the physical encounter with noise has led to deep phenomenological insights about its working, but the embodied is not just ‘there’ in space, it is also ‘there’ in time.

Noise offers the hope of times improper, the prospect of unending, of non-linearity and the dream of non-death. Noise opens up the sense of what Henri Bergson identifies as ‘duration’, often in very literal form, and it is through very long, very short, and very static noise pieces that I will address the idea of noise as not just another kind of time, but noise as a questioning of time. Noise does not just disrupt clock time, it brings clock time out in its full reality. Neither does it immerse us in Bergson’s optimistic dream of a true human sense of durational being. Instead it is a time that is subtly different from ‘our’ time. Once we let noise take us through Deleuze and Guattari, and then return to Nietzsche, noise will have told us something about time, and time about noise. In an untimely fashion.

It is with the sound of a hammer falling repeatedly that Bergson begins to round up his thought on time and duration, in Time and Free Will: ‘when we hear a series of blows of a hammer, the sounds form an indivisible melody in sofar as they are pure sensation, and they also give rise to a dynamic progress’ (Bergson, 1960, 125). Two types of time are brought into being through the perception of the blows: first, the purer, truer sensation of something happening which impacts upon our senses; second, the idea of time as a sequence of events, a sequence of moments. In the first type of time, being responds through an acceptance that something is happening of which I am aware; in the second, understanding structures the something into a set of things where discrete events have their own moment and combine into a greater event. Bergson’s sloppy use of the word melody should not distract us; what he means is that the hammer blows are one entity. This one entity is perceived within ‘duration’ (the essence of being) in multiple ways, which is how time passes unequally depending on our reaction to what is going on during that time. The division of time into seconds and minutes is a homogenization of the truer time, an imagined objectivity attributed to time. While this is a betrayal of the multiplicity of duration, it is not meaningfully bad; it is more of an inevitability. It is what frames the truer duration, so that duration can truly be. This suggests that Bergson is proposing a deconstructive idea of time, and certainly that is the point of interest for writers like Deleuze who brought out this subtle, perhaps even unconscious self-reflexivity in Bergson.

The idea of ‘dynamic progress’ is essential, and it is why sound is the privileged encounter of sense and event. Sound offers the prospect of sequence – and even an isolated sound suggests a narrative to which it belongs or disrupts. Bergson’s use of the hammer is meant to indicate ‘a sound people hear’ rather than a historicized activity. The same goes for the sound of tolling bells. Here, Bergson talks about how the person hearing a bell ringing attributes a meaningful sequence to the rings, through counting them, in order to know what time it is, and more profoundly, to understand not only the meaning of the chimes, but that a sequence of humanly produced sounds has a meaning due to its being a sequence (1960, 86–7). The clock tower with its bells measures out time (or represents that measuring), gives it form, tells people that time has form, has predictable form that is always the same. It lets people know that time is as measured by humans, and constantly reminds us of how to process time as something external as opposed to being about an internal encounter with external events. Elizabeth Grosz goes further, arguing, after Bergson, that time is embodied, negotiated in processes and interactional, and the other type of time is the one we have constructed as ‘empty time’, ‘time in itself’ (Grosz, 2004, 244).

For all the interesting possibilities of evolutionary development of how we, as units of humanity, process time, Bergson ignores the social construction of time: hammers and bell towers are far from neutral as they tie into labour and religion. If sound is the privileged connection of being with the world, then how those beings interact, how their culture informs their hearing, will matter. Both of Bergson’s examples belong to the world of order, discipline, productivity and moral goodness. These are good, proper sounds, in their place. At least as described by Bergson. But let us take the bell tower. This turns out to be a more complicated situation than one involving only listening and counting. Church time was connected to rural cycles of activity in times when there were very few large-scale urban environments (i.e. pre-eighteenth century). As well as shepherding Christians to their regular celebrations, the bells marked longer periods of time, in the form of religious and local festivals. Bells would be used for all manner of tasks, a pre-industrial-era mass medium. For that reason and with them under the control of the Church, the French revolutionary governments of the 1790s led a campaign to not only ban bell tolling but also to melt many of them down. They would instead be purely secular (and this would lead to the clock towers’ function as marking progress of the day as rationally divided time). In the interim, the bells become noise, the site of resistance, as they go from regular and clearly understood signals to being occasional disruption (see Corbin, 1994). So bells are neither neutral nor fixed in meaning, even if we are talking about a particular bell in a specific village. So, from sound as the driver of experience and perception, we can move to recognizing that whether or not that sound is regarded as noise is important.

Jacques Attali starts from there, in terms of music and public performance. For him, the history of noise is a history of what is not allowed, what is deemed illegal and subject to exclusion. If noise is not a ‘thing in itself’, then it must alter or come into and out of being as historical time progresses, so noise is synonymous with avant-gardeness, and what is noise now will not necessarily remain so (Attali, 1985, 5–6, 11). If we take Attali’s almost entirely cultural reading of how sound is noise or not and apply it to the types of perceptual encounter that interest Bergson, then the implication from Attali is clear: as the listener listens, things lose their noisiness, and acquire meaning or at least sense as to their purpose. This may occur in the course of hearing a particular piece of noise music, or in the course of hearing more and more and beginning to listen instead of hearing, or as certain types of noise become standardized into genres. This endless and inevitable recuperation of noise is why the sometimes misunderstood idea of noise as failure is quite common in noise writing.

To return to Bergson, we can maintain his idea of duration, but historically situated. We then need to think of the two types of time: duration and quantifiable, simple yet false time. Noise music or anything that aspires to the condition of noise can have nothing to do with the latter; and yet something that is very long can stimulate the other type of duration. Furthermore, noise music occurs in quantifiable time: on recordings, in performances. Deleuze helps Bergson out here. True duration is multiple, and part of this multiplicity is its encounter with ‘standard’ time, which is socially connected to order:

[Duration is] an internal multiplicity, one of succession, of fusion, organization, heterogeneity, discrimination as to quality or of a difference of nature, a multiplicity that is virtual and continuous, incapable of being reduced to number.

(Deleuze, 1966, 31; my translation)

This sounds like the kind of thing noise aspires to, but it is primarily about music. Both Bergson and Deleuze see music as suspending quantitative time in favour of being as duration. For Bergson, music removes us from our constructed illusion of quantitative time. Rhythm and measure interrupt it and bring us into duration, a sensation of time, being and sound as an intensity (Bergson, 1960, 12). On the face of it, this is just stupid, since rhythm and measure seem to exist to reinforce quantitative time, and we will be told by him that our attributing sequentiality to sound is the way in which our true experience is deviated into a limited conception of time and therefore of reality. The point is that the explicit structuredness of music somehow initiates sensation out of time for the listener, as opposed to the more mechanical structuredness of clock time. This too is unsatisfactory, but if we explore intensity as an idea it becomes rather more interesting, as intensity is both inside and outside of duration. On the one hand, intensity is the sense that something is entering the mind to a degree that measure is lost. On the other, intensity implies lack of intensity elsewhere and is always already quantitative. Either way, intensity is not a property of sounds, or a piece of music, but how that input is experienced. The constant movement of music fuels the multiplicity of thought and sensation, and endless becoming of duration, rather than just wallowing in the specific duration of music. This is where Deleuze subtly parts from Bergson, as the latter talks explicitly of the ‘cradling’ effect of music (Bergson; 1960, 16; trans. modified from ‘bercé’ to ‘lulled and soothed’). Deleuze and Guattari’s take on intensity, as developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), is different: intensity is the quantitative transformed into a plateau or rhizome where connections are reconfigured so as to prevent the arrival of meaning and narrative. Bergson’s multiplicity of intensity is one of transformation, Deleuze’s is of simultaneity. Where Bergson imagines music as the way of mobilizing sound so that listening beings move into duration, Deleuze looks to avant-garde music based on disruptions and atonality, as well as to literature of cut-ups or streams of consciousness. Deleuze seems to suggest a way for noise to affect time in a way that Bergson hints at but does not reach, but, even with Deleuze and Guattari, we may still be talking of an ‘intensity’ that plateaus into a safe cradling despite its formal intent and strategies, as the plateau represents a location that allows dwelling, a certain sort of settling that veers away from the more deconstructive implication of ‘the impossible’ found in Nietzsche, Bataille or Derrida.

The idea of intensity is implied in all noise: noise is the too much, the unwanted, the excess – in terms of volume, performance practice, simple duration, difficulty. But perhaps too much of this intensity has already been identified as problematic by Bergson: it suggests that something is more intense than something else, (i.e. it is quantitative and therefore removes the intensity as something felt, perceived, sensed or suffered). If intensity is an aim in noise, can it be maintained? Let us look at this literally: intensity in noise consists of volume, duration, unpredictability, loss of reference points. Noise often claims to be intensity, an excess that is always more, and therefore capable of inducing an ecstatic reception of the sounds encountered that goes beyond listening. To get even more literal, noise music aspires to be a seemingly permanent condition, and needs time to be noise and music, rather than just a pile of noises; thus this results in long performances or recordings, unrelenting sequences of moves that go against music (arguably in the name of a higher, but I would say lower, musicality). Neither sound nor auditor is to be allowed to settle. This is the reason for Japanese noise artist Merzbow’s prolific output – the endless proliferation of merz sound takes away the possibility of mastery. On individual albums there may be track divisions, but there is very little in the way of let-up or release. Where there is calm, it is only to act as an undertow of anticipation of noise to come – like being bound and awaiting blows that bring pleasurable pain but not release. Some of his albums sprawl over several CDs, and there have been playbacks of the entire 50-CD Merzbox (1999). The endless proliferation of his releases (usually double figures every year) creates both a sense of pre-emptive fatigue and the possibility of continual surprise, as well as the impossibility of keeping up with everything and controlling the Merzbow oeuvre. But – is more always more? I would argue that actually noise music’s attempts to always be more are precisely an attempt to always be less – less than meaning, less than an object of contemplation. In so doing, the excess, the ‘more’, becomes low rather than something spiritual and consciousness-raising like Pauline Oliveros’ idea of deep listening (‘the result of the practice [of deep listening] cultivates appreciation of sounds on a heightened level, expanding the potential for connection and interaction’ [Oliveros, mission statement, deeplistening.org]). But we do settle, at least after some initial shocks, and the sheer range of sounds on offer at any one time leads to the sort of duration an untempered Bergson suggests for us – one where organized sounds stand in place of the distractions of everyday life and open up a sense of our own being as duration. The task for noise is to not let this happen (even if noise music occurs in the awareness, it is always going to have to fight for this).

Two examples: Hijokaidan’s Romance (1990) and Vomir’s Proanomie (2009), both single-track full-length CDs (77 and 76 minutes respectively), and very different in terms of how they structure and destructure time around them. Romance is a constantly changing mess of howling feedback, residue overpowering the possibility of a musical centre to fix upon. Moments cannot fall into a narrative (except of fragmentation), and permanent suspense replaces the ebb and flow of noise and not-noise or different types of noise. In this work, we catch a glimpse of the broken time of noise, which occurs at both individual (this piece) and historical scales (the history of noise) – making them interact. Following Bergson, we can see history as something external that imposes the quantification of events, but we still do not get the sense of the permanent revolution through what is judged to be noise by Attali. Where we do find this is in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Here, he writes that ‘where we perceive a chain of events, he [angelus novus] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’ (Benjamin, 1992, 249). The angel is an idealized observer, not a moralizer, whose act of observing structures time differently from humans, and may be seen in earthly historical terms as history being made up of disruptions, with historical continuity only the residue. In a way that recalls Bergson, Benjamin goes on to argue that ‘the concept of historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time’ (1992, 252). For noise, we can see this working at the level of a history of noise, or of the movement of a piece, or the reaction and reception to either one piece or to a genre.

Romance holds us in an unsettled version of duration, where we are exposed to what Benjamin calls ‘jetztzeit’ – now-time – a time removed from linear chronological progression, and is precisely not homogeneous. In addition, though removed from the most ordered time, its removal is still in relation to standard time – it is specifically ‘duration that is removed from time’, not autonomously other. If we go to the other extreme, though, we again encounter a removal from time – as with the case of Vomir’s Proanomie. This album, like the vast majority of Vomir’s pieces, is entirely white noise. Or something not-quite-white. It comes across as a mass of shifting layers, seeping into one another and in and out of perception. It is as full as possible, but also dramatically empty. Its radical stasis, while being ostensibly noise, is a purposeful rejection of the time that music and organized sound (or sounds recognized as organized – hammers, clocks, bells) structure for us. Non-moving music is often a goal of ‘spiritual’ music, to create trance-like states, or to reveal an essence of the emptiness of time, as in American minimalisms ranging from Morton Feldman to La M...