Monday, April 06, 2009
"A phrase like 'wave on shrieking wave,'" Scarry says, "requires that we picture a wave, let it for a split second disappear, then bring the picture back: in effect, we make the wave image pulse" (Dreaming by the Book, p. 102). If the process we use to imagine moving images differs from the process we use to put still images into motion then we should question how it is in both cases we're talking about the same imaginative faculty rather than, at most, a constellation of various imaginative activities and skills, activities touching on or drawing from the imagination without themselves being the imagination. I'd like to explore this question from another angle.
Close your eyes. Remember being at the coast. Remember the sound of the waves. Picture the night. Your eyes are closed. In your memory your eyes are closed. You hear the pulse of the ocean. It's the sound of intimacy. It draws you in, the sound. Wave upon wave, the sound of the ocean.
Now think about what you are doing. Are you imagining a memory or an episode of imagination? Perhaps you're experiencing a moment akin to a dream. Are there several moments wrapped into one? More than one memory? More than one sound in your mind? Is the sound of the ocean one sound or many? Does the word "pulse" make it easier to imagine the sound of the ocean? Does it distract by introducing other images? Does it entail any process beyond imagination, or is it best understood as a refinement of imagination? Is flirting with metaphor one of things imagination does, or does such flirtation belong to language–as if the imaginative exercise of language could be rigorously separated from the imaginative play of fantasy; well, it's a theory that can't be totally ignored in the critique of imagination. We shape our images, give them to be shaped, we give our plasticity over to words, which theoretically means other people's words and to large measure other people's meanings and other people's images. We surrender our imaginations, even our imaginative faculties, for a time at least. We lapse into language, its powers to stir images, or steer them. This lapse, this surrender, is entirely distinct from the giving of the imagination over to fantasy, so much so that one should question whether the same faculty is involved in both instances. This doesn't seem altogether likely to me, but perhaps it helps us appreciate what Scarry is doing in demonstrating how literary techniques help us imagine more vividly than we might were we left to our own devices. Language can juice the imagination or something awfully similar to the imagination because it is itself an activity of the imagination.
I surrender to dark images, unsure of whether they belong in the same category as light images. I am enthralled by the sound of the word "pulse," its explosion of liquid sibilance, its pulse.
Language in the dark, like the imagination, becomes oceanic. From one perspective imagination begins in the moment when memory is cast adrift–the transition between waves abrupt–crashes woven into a single moment, an oceanic moment, a pulse.
Labels: imagination, Scarry, sound
Saturday, April 04, 2009
"In resonance the inexhaustible return of eternity is played–and listened to" (Jean-Luc Nancy, "How Music Listens to Itself," in Listening, p. 67). Routinely I would question "inexhaustible," "return" and "eternity," but what thoughts would turn up if I began by putting only one term into question? Can we admit that returns of eternity both exist and are exhaustible? Or can we acknowledge an inexhaustible return of the ephemeral? Aporias. The eternal's manner of coming into existence would require, to be a coming into existence, an incompatibility with the eternal, and likewise mutatis mutandis for the eternal's other.
Attack is followed by decay, to describe sound, yet in accounts of sonorous experience decay is frequently disregarded. "Sound has no hidden face," Nancy tells us (Listening, p. 13), though I'm still not so sure. He emphasizes the attack, the arrival of sound, while ignoring sound's departure. To me the departure of sound does suggest another facet of sound, a silence looming behind every sound. Of course behind the departure of sound is the arrival of sound–am I confusing conceptual faces with phenomenal faces here? I don't quite think so. I'd like to be talking about an eidos of sonorous experience, or an eidos of resonance, all the while pointing to an eidos of phenomenality in general. Sound is inside-out in relation to phenomenality, Nancy says (ibid.) This of course implies that sound does have faces. However, if what Nancy objects to is the idea of the hiddenness of any of sound's faces, then how should we interpret the disappearance of sound's departure behind phrases such as "the inexhaustible return of eternity"? Is this disappearance the sense of body that Nancy calls "soul" (p. 43)? (It is true, I'm excerpting from different essays ("Listening," "How Music Listens to Itself"); they are linked by common themes, such as resonance.) Could it be that the behind of sound is precisely animated? Perhaps only in order to be imagined. Just perhaps. So what makes it so difficult to imagine, for instance, the exhaustible return of eternity? Is it simply contradiction, or could it be de-animation, the flight of the soul which is at root an attack on the power of the imagination? To imagine the exhaustible would be far more painstaking than to live it. It would mean allowing exhaustion to resonate. Now that the idea's been put forward, can we think otherwise than that exhaustion itself is after all such a resonance of exhaustion? This is but one side of an equation. It should lead us to question whether or how the inexhaustible resonates. It is patently not clear that inexhaustion itself is the resonance of inexhaustion–but one wonders. If resonance is exhausting–in the manner it allows the eternal to come into existence, as return, or else more simply exhausting in the way it takes the air out of sound, slowly, one vibration after another–then listening to the inexhaustible can only go so far, and certainly not as far as the inexhaustible itself, whether or not it's its own resonance. But I'm puzzled. If resonance requires a distance from inexhaustion does it not also by the same token require a distance from exhaustion? Resonance is a phenomenon of distances–and passions. The sympathetic vibration clues us in to the essence of all resonance, which is not merely the antrum at the heart of the material, the chora, but the intensity of a feeling with (which points meontically to distances)–or do the antral and the distal measure the same space, a space that would exist in the absence of sympathies? Resonance would admonish us to be cautious about drawing too sharp a distinction between auditory and visual modes of phenomenality. Our responses to phenomena are imbricated with their arrivals–this defines their modality of arrival–which we perhaps never allow to occur all at once, despite what some have claimed to be true of listening, but always feel along with a feeling for or about their departures, which may be as good as having an intuition–not a pure intuition but an existential one, if you'll afford some meaning to the distinction–about the behind of sounds.
Labels: exhaustion, listening, Nancy, passions, phenomenology, resonance, sound
Friday, March 27, 2009
"Music is not the origin of language, as people have so often wanted to think, but what withdraws and sinks into it" (Listening, p. 75, No. 42). Although I've taken a great interest in the musicality of language I should want to hesitate to adopt the position Nancy criticizes. Does music come before sense? Does it come before a kind of sense that might be called linguistic? What exactly is Nancy's view? "One can say of music that it silences sound and that it interprets sounds: makes them sound and make sense no longer as the sounds of something, but in their own resonance" (p. 32). Music makes sense, but it is not the only sense to be made of the sonorous. There is antemusical sound, the sounds that have been silenced by music. Nancy quotes Wallace Stevens on the existence of an antemusical: "the self/detects the sound of a voice that doubles as its own" ("The Woman That Had More Babies than That," in Listening, p. 72, No. 21). Resonance is the stuff of bodies. Is embodiment a basis on which to deny music priority to language? I'm being crude, it's true. Let's listen to how Nancy speaks of resonance, and its relation to timbre.
Rather than speaking of timbre and listening in terms of "intentional aim," it is necessary to say that before any relationship to object, listening opens up in timbre, which resounds in it rather than for it. In truth, resonance is at once listening to to timbre and the timbre of listening, if one may put it that way. Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens. (At the same time, this resonance is not an immobile given, since timbre itself is an evolving process, and, consequently, listening evolves along with it.)
(p. 40)
Timbre is an evolving process. If we are not to take the musical as given, and therefore simply project a received idea of timbre upon all sounds, interpreting all sounds through this musicological idea, but instead recognize its evolution, then it becomes of prime importance to investigate how one form develops from another, how listening might be said to evolve rather than merely change or manifest itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps, though, the evolutions of listening are many. The analogy with life on Earth only goes so far. Was there ever a stage in the evolution of listening when music became language? See, already this is a misleading question because listenings are indeed surely many, and we wouldn't rush to say that any one adventure of listening recapitulates *listening, or that a listening must repeat or mimic other listenings, other developmental pathways. No outcome is predetermined. And so we confront the obvious problem of separating the given from the elaborated, and, secondarily, of describing the very how of evolution, and of justifying an implied distinction between a variance and a transformation. Now, in the passage immediately above, Nancy speaks of a nonintentional (in a phenomenological sense) listening as prior to intentional listening, yet in the earlier quoted passage he says that music makes sounds nonintentional. Is nonintentional listening made or discovered by music? If we are to speak intelligibly of the evolution of listening, don't we need an answer to this question of how nonintentionality in listening is arrived at? (I'm not completely sure, though I have enough of an opinion to pose the question.)
Do we move from babble to a speaking that is already listening? How does listening develop through infancy? Can we grasp listening in the context of a transcendental murmuring, "the condition of all words and all silence" (p. 25), without confronting what could be taken for a listening that transcends babble, and therewith a speaking that is already listening, at some stage or another? (I honestly don't know enough about transcendence to say whether it is one or many, or whether it really exists at all. It could after all simply be a reality of our linguistic life that we project onto things of experience in accordance with language's power to fashion reality–the withdrawal of the musical into reality, into the plasma of the real–but I'm just tossing ideas around here.)
This profound disposition [musical listening, FtY]–arranged, in fact, according to the profundity of a reverberation chamber that is nothing other than the body from end to end–is a relationship to meaning [sens], a tension toward it: but toward it completely ahead of signification, meaning in its nascent state, in the state of return [renvoi] for which the end of this return is not given (the concept, the idea, the information), and hence to the sate of return without end, like an echo that continues on its own and that is nothing but this continuance going in a decrescendo, or even in moriendo. To be listening is to be inclined toward the opening of meaning, hence to a slash, a cut in un-sensed [in sensée] indifference at the same time as toward a reserve that is anterior and posterior to any signifying punctuation. [T]he beginning of sense . . . takes place nowhere but in a sonorous attack. . . a stridency where a weighty, murmurring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.
(p. 27, Nancy's emphasis)
Likewise, "sense consists first of all. . . not in a signifying intention, but rather in a listening" (p. 30). First of all. Hmmm.
Let's return for a second to the doubling of a voice, a voice of the self. In listening do we communicate with ourselves? "Communication is not transmission but a sharing that becomes subject" (p. 41). Perhaps we communicate with ourselves in our nascent states, but even so we should question the possibility of the frictionless voice, and, especially, frictionless doubling. How then might we describe any friction we feel in communication with our own voice? Is timbre really the bottom of it all? The musical? Now that we have discovered the musical, and brought its style of listening back from the language it'd sunk into, we can ask, paradoxically, whether there exists a voice without timbre, or any voice that isn't yet doubled, and the question may be not simply a variation on a theme of friction, but an evolution, a movement into the musical, from which we've been estranged. In timbre we hear bodies, hear that voices are voices of bodies. Are the voices of bodies bottomless? Is music? What is the bottom to listening? Is communication a condition for all doubling and all singling out? What are the primitive conditions of listening? Having an idea, perhaps? Or something that could double as a person's own idea?
Labels: babble, language, listening, music, Nancy, sound, timbre, voice
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Ong says, "Not only communication but thought itself relates in an altogether special way to sound" (Orality and Literacy, p. 7). Ong may be at odds with Cavarero in that he doesn't believe philosophy is possible except in the context of chirographic culture, and that condition may involve for him an acknowledgment and acceptance of some limitations on philosophical thought that Cavarero would rather lead us to revolt against. Broadly, we would be happier if we allowed ourselves to imagine a philosophical style of thinking that related in an altogether special way to sound, a philosophy whose departures from everyday thinking didn't do violence to this special relation to sound, which we have yet to explore, a rhythmosophy, a choreosophy, no stranger to love, in step with egalitarianism and the way things come and go. (Should philosophy make us happy?)
Labels: Cavarero, eudaimonia, noesis, Ong, sound
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Simha Arom agrees with Jean Molino's definition of the musical: "Whenever sound is shaped and recognised by a culture, it is musical" (quoted in African Polyphony and Polyrhythm, p. 147). By this definition we could, though it would run counter to the task Arom has appointed to himself, hear language as musical. We would stumble into trouble on a few points, for instance on the question of differentiating language from culture, which might also call into question the differentiation of language from music and with that the whole project of differentiation, perhaps especially as it is conducted in tandem with a project of thinking by analogy, or amidst analogy.
Sometimes every word is troubling. I probe into words and wonder about the transmiguration of forms and also their persistence (and also the and also), and I do so, in part, because words are tools I think with, and perhaps that gives me trouble. I am troubled by thinking with. What does it mean to think with, or to think by? Thinking about thinking with, in a wee hour, a bout of psychasthenia welcomes another inhabitant of the horizon of thinking. Is this the figure of a muse? Trouble itself? A list of troubles: music, culture, recognoscence, shape, sound.
The musical. You could hardly be blamed for objecting to the personification of thought's other, or, whether or not it means the same thing, its with. (Before we cast ourselves as the feminine of thought, a distinct alternative, we should settle the matter of personification.) We don't yet know what a sonus is, so perhaps it's premature to think of carrying it through, though we may yet find ourselves doing something like that, carrying a sound through to music, or possibly by music. (The interchangeability of by and with?)
Does music call forth sound? Sound may have its own raisons d'être, but what are its reasons for being musical, for being shaped and recognized by a culture as such? Does music dramatize? Does it have its theatre of the labyrinthine and its masks, for perhaps resonance is the destination of sonance and also its journey and its origination, a calling forth. Music's calling forth of sound would be less spectacular than Dionysian, we can imagine, but nevertheless it plays in the same amphitheatre as spectacle and also chorus, the double theatre, the labyrinth of threads and dancers. Its purpose obscure, its dramaturgy amounts to this: a calling forth to airs. The singer's mask, the resonance with listeners and listening, what Nancy refers to as the whole articulatory cinema of the voice (which we insist on calling its theatre, sung and staged before it is cut up and framed, but, here Nancy is most insightful, drawing the face), which is not around the face like an atmosphere, but labyrinthine, that is to say connected to the hip bone, to the knee bone, to the ankle bone to the ball of the big toe, grounded in poises: airs. A ball of airs: entrée, adagio, variations, coda. The disco of words (poussette of the breath) never ceases to astonish, to vary forms that defy pronunciation and at the same time rasp true: larynx (λάρυγξ), diaphragm (δια- + φράγμα), a form which invites us to anatomize the ancient, phrenes (φρένες), and hence phrenasthenia, a weakness of frenzy, of the Dionysian, or of Mynde, a coming unpoised, disequipoise—how quickly the figures recompose themselves.
Culture (adagio). The truth of culture is that it is not a person. To even call it an it is deceptive. Were we to conceive of culture as an it, as a neutral person, we would recognize a defining characteristic: it takes its time. What we affectionately think of as ancient Greek civilization is still becoming civilization, still becoming Greek, still becoming ancient. It takes its time. It veritably drawls. We speak of cult-ure (Kult-ur, though we might have to reclaim a meaning) to call attention to, rather than an instance of caring, an activity of care, an activity that extends even beyond the seasonal, though we can use the seasonal to remind us of the time it takes, to get a foothold on what it means to take time, what it means to till. To think by culture is to become a witness to the intermarriage of the fast and the slow, and to let things into and out of our hands. Culture is not nurturing. It has no womb, no matrix, no biomechanical integuments of its own. It is precisely nurtural. It is in our hands, and, alternatively, out of our hands, or so to speak. It can't be dissociated from passage. That is, it takes its time.
Recognoscence. You know the dilemma. You recognize it. To know is already to know with, already and also again. Turn it on itself again: to recognize is already and also again to recognize by culture. How will you recognize the muse?
Shape. Would a departure here be on a theme of variations? Depart we must. The thought must occur that plasticity itself is a metaphor—feel free to worry about which way the action flows, about what it means to shape by culture. Let's leave form aside for a moment and pla-y with shape. To shape is to skop, and it is skopping (the activity of skops, commonly misspelt as scops) that nurtures its meaning. (Is skopping an end in itself? Wait, please.) Perhaps to nurture is to blur a line between helping along and allowing to be; perhaps it strikes a balance. The skop steps out of the synkairotic, skip skop, and so gives passage to it. The skop becomes, through donation, all about passage, passage through and through. The skop is all over that thing, a virtuoso of passages.
Sound is how we know the world has depths—or, rather, before we can know what a world might be, sound is how we know depths. It would be stupid to consign sound to surfaces, though it would be equally stupid to deny the surfaces their due. Sound unravels the how of depths. The howl is the sound of sounds on the slow, the slow tongue. The slow tongue calls forth the drawl, the ripple of the howl. Does the howl have a bottom? What is the nurture of our inquiry? To hear the howl of existence in a ripple, to know disturbance at its reaches: to sound sound as a double resonance, without priors, a true rap. It was already and also again called forth by passage, the door held open by the figure of the skop, and maybe in that double theatre the figure was doubled too, and you could feel the vibration of trouble itself. Sound.
Labels: Arom, labyrinths, Molino, music, Nancy, shape, sound, Terpsichore, vibration
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Cavarero quotes Hans Jonas: "what sound immediately reveals is not an object but a dynamic event in the place of an object" (from The Phenomenon of Life, quoted in For More than One Voice, p. 37; I've ordered some books by Hans Jonas with the intention of blogging about him; in the meantime, I'll just look at Cavarero's riff on Jonas.) We hear the barking and not the dog, Cavarero says. Is it true that one does not immediately hear the dog, that the dog can only be inferred? In my mind barking is already semantically +dog. If we didn't hear the dog in the barking, it would not be barking but some (other) kind of noise. Perhaps this example of the barking dog is merely a poor illustration of an idea. "What characterizes sound is not being but becoming," Cavarero says. If that were true, though, it should be evident in the phenomenon of the barking dog.
The larger task here for Cavarero is to critique a metaphysics of presence based on analogy with the visual, a "strange history of the devocalization of the logos" (p. 40).
The entire philosophical lexicon in fact finds its base in the objectivity and presence of things, which is guaranteed by this detached gaze. This starts above all with Plato, who uses the term theoria to mean "the contemplation of real, lasting, immobile things" whose truth lies in being visible, in being ideas. The decisive element is, of course, presence. This presence refers both to the spatial dimension that is typical of the object that lies in front of the onlooker, and to the temporal dimension of a simultaneous "now" that is eternalized by the contemplator. The only reason that hearing does not occupy a more fundamental place in this conceptual structure is that sounds are perceived in succession rather than simultaneously: "sounds exist in a sequence where each 'now' disappears into the past as soon as it happens."
(p. 38)
My neighbor's dog has quit barking. I'm not sure that I've ever seen that particular dog. There are many dogs in the neighborhood. But I know that dog's bark. I don't particularly question the dog's permanence even though I can't hear it at the moment. On what basis do I assign the permanence that belongs to being a dog to the event of a dog's barking? I can't quite believe that the history of metaphysics is misleading me on this point. On the contrary, I'm inclined to believe that we do in fact hear objects, and that these are immediate facts of experience.
Labels: Cavarero, experience, Jonas, sound