Sonic Flux

Sound, Art, and Metaphysics

Christoph Cox

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226543208
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Art General

From Edison's invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this "sonic flux."Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.

Part I

The Sonic Flux and Sonic Materialism

1

Toward a Sonic Materialism

In April 1992 the composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher mounted a site-specific installation in four adjoining spaces of a cultural complex in the southern Japanese city of Tokushima. Titled Synaptic Island: A Psybertonal Topology, the piece was one in a series of works in which Amacher explored “structure-borne sound,” the acoustic effects generated when sound travels through the material infrastructure of buildings and is shaped by their walls, floors, and corridors. Amacher’s interest in what she called “aural architecture” extended to the architecture of the human body, particularly the anatomical structure of the inner ear, which not only passively receives sound but, when stimulated by closely spaced pure tones, mechanically generates sounds of its own—combination tones and otoacoustic emissions—that transform the ears into miniature synthesizers and amplifiers. Prior to the weeklong run of the installation, Amacher spent a month researching on-site, experimenting with electronic frequencies and textures, and precisely configuring loudspeakers in an effort to articulate crisply tactile “soundshapes” or “sound characters” felt as sculptural forms large and small in distinct regions of the space, some perceived as though miles away and others as extreme close-ups. Amacher hoped to allow visitors to apprehend sound as a physical event, “to experience what is inside the sounds—what they are as energy.”1

By all accounts, Amacher’s installations are extraordinarily intense—waves and shards of sonic pressure coursing through the space and the body, throbbing the walls, vibrating the viscera, and swirling around the head in patterns of vertiginous complexity.2 Recorded excerpts from Synaptic Island confirm these reports, revealing dense choral swarms, thunderous blasts, sweeps of granulated distortion, and passages of hallucinatory pulsation. Yet, however rich and engaging, these recordings remain mere “artifacts”—as Amacher put it, “like hearing a movie or theater script read aloud, WITHOUT ACTORS OR IMAGES”—the piece itself truly existing only as a site-specific event, bound to the material and technological conditions of its installation in Tokushima, 1992 (fig. 1.1).3

Fig. 1.1 Installation diagram for Maryanne Amacher’s multimedia work Synaptic Island: A Psybertonal Topology, Tokushima 21st Century Cultural Information Center, Tokushima, Japan, 1992. Courtesy of the Maryanne Amacher Archive.

How does one talk about such work, which has no fixed duration, is site-specific and sculptural, and is fundamentally concerned with sound as a physical, intensive force? Though unique, Amacher’s work is emblematic of a wide range of sonic practices that elude the formal analyses of traditional musicology and the primarily visual focus of art history. Moreover—and this is central to my project here—such practices are poorly served by the critical orthodoxy that has reigned in cultural theory since the “linguistic turn.” The theories of textuality, discourse, and visuality at the heart of cultural theory remain largely unresponsive to the sonic, failing to confront the powerful, asignifying materiality that characterizes so much experimental work with sound.4 In this chapter I propose an alternative theoretical framework, a materialist account that is attentive to the ontology of sound and thus is better suited to analysis of the sonic arts. I suggest, moreover, that this materialist account can provide a model for rethinking artistic production in general and for avoiding the conceptual pitfalls encountered by the prevailing theories of representation and signification.

Signification, Discourse, and Materialism

Since the late-1960s aesthetic theory has been dominated by a set of antirealist critical approaches—notably semiotics, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and deconstruction—that have come to constitute a kind of orthodoxy. Epistemologically, these theoretical programs reject naive conceptions of representation and signification that construe images and signs as picturing or designating a pre-given world. Ontologically, they reject essentialism, which construes the world as a set of conceptual or material essences to which images and signs refer. In contrast with the fixity and inflexibility of essentialism, the critical orthodoxy affirms the contingency of meaning and the multiplicity of interpretation. Culture is construed as a field or system of signs that operate within intricate relations of referral to other signs and to subjects and objects considered as effects of signification. Cultural criticism then is conceived as an interpretive enterprise that consists in tracking signs or representations (images, texts, symptoms, etc.) through the associative networks that give them meaning—networks that are always in flux, ensuring that meaning is never secure or stable.

Rejecting realism, which claims access to extradiscursive reality, the dominant modalities of cultural theory maintain that experience and perception are always mediated by the symbolic field. Indeed, all the theoretical approaches that constitute this orthodoxy share a deep suspicion of the extrasymbolic, extratextual, or extradiscursive, insisting on the absence, infinite deferral, or fiction of what Jacques Derrida has called the “transcendental signified,” that is, a fundamental reality that could arrest or ground the proliferation of discourse, signification, and interpretation.5 Thus, for example, Ferdinand de Saussure banishes from semiotics the physical stuff of sound. Jacques Lacan casts aside culture’s material substrate, which “resists all symbolization absolutely,” declaring that “there’s no such thing as a prediscursive reality” because “every reality is founded and defined by a discourse,” and, even more sharply, that “it is the world of words that creates the world of things.” Derrida’s notorious claim that “there is nothing outside of the text” offers another expression of this idea, as does Roland Barthes’s remark that, apropos the domain of discourse, “there is nothing beneath,” and Stuart Hall’s assertion that “nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse.” Finally, Slavoj Žižek, the most prominent current exemplar of this tradition, concludes that “the pre-synthetic Real . . . is, stricto sensu, impossible: a level that must be retroactively presupposed, but can never actually be encountered.”6

These theories are philosophically rich and have proven to be powerful tools for cultural analysis. They rightly reject essentialism and insist on the contingency and indeterminacy of meaning and being. Yet the price of antirealism has been an epistemological and ontological insularity that the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has aptly termed “correlationism”: the position according to which “the real” is inextricably correlated with our mode of apprehending it, such that what exists can only ever be what exists for thought or discourse.7 For the correlationist, nature is either cast aside as “in-significant” or deemed a social construction. Moreover, despite its avowed antihumanism, orthodox cultural theory often falls prey to a provincial and chauvinistic anthropocentrism, treating symbolic interaction as evidence of human uniqueness and superiority. It thus accords with the deep-seated metaphysical and theological tradition it claims to challenge, a tradition according to which, by virtue of some special endowment (soul, spirit, mind, reason, language, etc.), human beings occupy a privileged ontological position elevated above the natural world. The Kantian or “correlationist” epistemology and ontology of cultural theory is apparent in its dualistic division of the world into two domains, a phenomenal domain of symbolic discourse that marks the limits of the knowable, and a noumenal domain of nature and materiality that excludes knowledge and intelligibility.8

These presuppositions and conclusions are evident in one of the most sustained theoretical examinations of sound art and kindred musical forms, Seth Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear.9 Kim-Cohen attributes the absence of a rich theoretical discourse on the sonic arts to the tendency of composers such as John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer, and sound artists such as Francisco López and Christina Kubisch, to treat sound as a material substance external to signification and discursivity. In an effort to raise the level of discourse on sound art to that on the visual arts and literature, Kim-Cohen adopts the textualist, correlationist paradigm of those fields. On his account, realist claims concerning the materiality of sound can only be essentialist, since they posit a domain outside discourse and a substance the existence and nature of which is not determined by the field of signification. Such a substance and domain, Kim-Cohen concludes, is meaningless at best and nonexistent at worst. “Since being human is a state inexorably tied to language,” he remarks, “linguisticity is the order that obtains.”

The suggestion of an unadulterated, untainted purity of experience prior to linguistic capture seeks a return to a never-present, Romanticized, pre-Enlightenment darkness. . . . If some stimuli actually convey an experiential effect that precedes linguistic processing, what are we to do with such experiences? . . . If there is such a strata [sic] of experience, we must accept it mutely. It finds no voice in thought or discourse. Since there is nothing we can do with it, it seems wise to put it aside and concern ourselves with that of which we can speak.10

Drawing the sonic arts within the purview of orthodox cultural theory, Kim-Cohen accepts the presuppositions of textualism and discursivity, affirming a distinction between phenomena and noumena rendered as the distinctions between language and the extralinguistic, culture and nature, text and matter. The limits of discourse are the limits of meaning and being. If the sonic arts are to be meaningfully examined, Kim-Cohen concludes, we will need to conceive them within the realm of representation and signification.

The musicologist Benjamin Piekut goes further. Drawing from Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, Piekut criticizes Cage for endorsing the characteristically “modern” division between culture and nature and then attempting, as far as possible, to shake off the constraints of culture so as to compose in accordance with nature.11 Such a strategy, argues Piekut, is nonsensical, both because culture, subjectivity, and politics can never be subtracted from the epistemological frame, and because “nature” is a cultural construction. Piekut’s correlationist alternative is to eliminate the opposition between nature and culture by subsuming the former under the latter. “There has never been a separate, non-political realm of nature,” he writes, endorsing the actor-network theorist Annemarie Mol’s assertion that “reality does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it.”12

And yet surely reality, nature, and sound far precede our arrival and cultural production, we latecomers in the history of the universe; and surely human history and culture are a part of that natural history rather than miraculous exceptions to it. The dominant strains of cultural theory have either ignored this fact or maintained, in strict correlationist fashion, that all history is human history, that any account of what precedes human culture is itself a cultural construction or projection.13 Such accounts create an untenable divide between the claims of cultural theory and those of natural science, prompting the need for an alternative to the orthodox position. The materialist theory I propose here maintains that the prevailing critiques of representation and humanism are not thoroughgoing enough. A rigorous critique of representation would altogether eliminate the dual planes of culture/nature, human/nonhuman, sign/world, text/matter—not in the manner of Hegel, toward an idealism that would construe all existence as mental or spiritual, but in the manner of Nietzsche and Deleuze, toward a rigorous materialism that construes human symbolic life as a particular instance of transformative processes evident throughout the natural world—from the chemical reactions of inorganic matter to the rarefied domain of textual interpretation—processes Nietzsche called by various names, among them “becoming,” “interpretation,” and “will to power.”14

Representation and the Sonic Arts

Undoubtedly, musical composition and sound installation are historically situated and socially embedded practices that are culturally meaningful. Yet music has long been acknowledged to stand apart from the mimetic or representational arts, and not to refer to the world in the manner of images or signs.15 That music eludes analysis in terms of representation and signification has led a prominent tradition in the philosophy of music to conceive it as purely formal, abstract, and autonomous—“self-contained and in no need of content from outside itself,” to quote Eduard Hanslick, who inaugurated this tradition in the mid-nineteenth century.16 However, the most significant sound-art work of the past half century—for example, the work of Max Neuhaus, Maryanne Amacher, Alvin Lucier, Christina Kubisch, Carsten Nicolai, Francisco López, and Toshiya Tsunoda—has explored the materiality of sound: its texture and temporal flow, its palpable effect on and affection by the materials through and against which it is transmitted. What these works reveal, I think, is that the sonic arts are not more abstract than the visual, but rather more concrete, and that they require not a formalist analysis, but a materialist one.

Historically, music’s nonrepresentational status has led it to be construed in two opposing ways. The composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer traces these to the two Greek myths concerning the origin of music.17 Pindar’s twelfth Pythian Ode, writes Schafer, locates the origin of music in Athena’s invention of aulos playing to honor the wailing sisters of the beheaded Medusa. An alternative account is evident in the Homeric hymn to Hermes, which traces music’s origins to Hermes’ discovery that a tortoise shell could be used to form the resonant chamber for a lyre. The first myth celebrates music as the subjective expression of raw emotion, while the second describes it as revealing the objective sonic properties of the universe. Music is thus conceived to be either subrepresentational, a primitive eruption of desire and emotion (hence its suppression by moral conservatives from Plato to the mullahs of radical Islam), or superrepresentational, pure mathematics. This is how Descartes could write of music that “its aim is to please and to arouse various emotions in us,” while Leibniz could claim that the beauty of music “consists only in the harmonies of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out.”18

Schopenhauer: Below Representation

Two important nineteenth-century theories of art—those of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—richly combine these two poles in ways that are helpful for building a materialist theory of the sonic arts. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is explicitly Kantia...