Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

  Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. London: Athlone Press.

  Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1992), Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1987), Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Dunn, D. (1992), Liner notes to “Chaos and the Emerging Mind of the Pond”, Angels and Insects, CD, Santa Fe: What Next? Recordings.

  Emerson, R. W. (1875), “Poetry and Imagination”, Letters and Social Aims. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 9–64.

  Feisst, S. M. (2001), “Klanggeographie–Klanggeometrie. Der US-amerikanische Komponist John Luther Adams”, MusikTexte 91 (November): 4–14.

  Feisst, S. M. (n.d.), “Music as Place, Place as Music. The Sonic Geography of John Luther Adams” (unpublished manuscript).

  Goldberger, A. L., et al. (1990), “Chaos and Fractals in Human Physiology. Chaos in Bodily Functioning Signals Health–Periodic Behavior Can Foreshadow Disease”, Scientific American 262: 42–9.

  Hudson, G. H. (1918), “Concerted Flashing of Fireflies”, Science 48 (1249): 573–5.

  Ives, C. (1999), Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings, H. Boatwright (ed.). New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

  Iyer, V. (2002), “Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming”, Music Perception 19(3):387–414.

  Kermode, F. (1967), The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Leibniz, G. W. (1996), New Essays on Human Understanding, P. Remnant and J. Bennett (eds and trans.), 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  Morris, M. (1998), “Ectopian Sound or The Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism”, in P. F. Broman et al. (eds), Crosscurrents and Counterpoints. Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, 129–41.

  Murphy, T. S. (2004), “What I Hear is Thinking Too: The Deleuze Tribute Recordings”, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 159–75.

  Nabokov, V. (1969), Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill.

  Parry, R. R. (2014a), “Richard Reed Parry Turns Musicians into Metronomes”, Interview with NPR. Available online: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=330688722 (accessed September 15, 2015).

  Parry, R. R. (2014b), Liner Notes to “Music for Heart and Breath”, CD, Deutsche Grammophon.

  Raffles, H. (2010), Insectopedia. New York: Vintage Books.

  Rößler, A. (1986), Contributions to the Spiritual World of Olivier Messiaen. With Original Texts by the Composer, trans. B. Dagg and N. Poland. Duisburg: Gilles & Francke.

  Saxer, M. (2004), “Die Emanzipation von der metrischen Zeitordnung–eine Utopie? Zeitkonzeptionen in der Musik nach 1945”, in P. Primavesi and S. Mahrenholz (eds), Geteilte Zeit. Zur Kritik des Rhythmus in den Künsten. Schliengen: edition Argus, 52–70.

  Schumann, R. (1854), Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker Bd.1. Leipzig: Georg Wigand’s Verlag, 125–6.

  Shultis, C. (2011), “Written on the body, for musicians and dancers (1994)”, Experimental Music and Writings (1988–1994). American Composers Alliance, New York, n.p.

  Smith, H. M. (1935), “Synchronous Flashing of Fireflies”, Science 82(2129): 151–2.

  Szekely, M. (2003), “Becoming-Still. Perspectives on Musical Ontology after Deleuze and Guattari”, Social Semiotics 13(2): 113–28.

  Szuberla, C. (2006), quoted in Living On Earth, radio interview with A. Mayer. Available online: www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00016&segmentID=5 (accessed July 8, 2015).

  Taylor, E., et al. (1999), “Central Control of the Cardiovascular and Respiratory Systems and Their Interactions in Vertebrates”, Physiological Reviews 79(3): 855–916.

  7

  Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us

  Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin

  A day before the scheduled landing of its probe on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta recorded a mysterious signal emanating from the extraterrestrial object (O’Neill 2014). Registering a low frequency oscillating signal in the 40–50 millihertz range,1 mission scientists concluded that Comet 67P was “singing.” Accelerated 10,000 times for human audibility, this “song” has been likened to the ambient works of Sigur Rós, the absurdist pop of Bjork, or more remotely, the trilling of Hollywood’s hunter-alien Predators (Coplan 2014). Correlates aside, the electromagnetic sonority of Comet 67P registered by Rosetta poses something far weirder in its manifestation of an occulted cosmic sensibility.2 More specifically, the singing of Comet 67P not only suggests a “sonority” beyond the geospatial and temporal territories of “man,” but of an inhuman improvisation of dust, ice, and planetary bodies antithetical to the philosophical conceit that reality exists as it does for a human subject (Thacker 2011, 2015a, 2015b). As scientists have discovered, Comet 67P is not the only object “singing” against the abyss of deep space. Numerous probes including NASA’s Voyager have recorded the electromagnetic oscillations of extraterrestrial planetary objects, revealing a cosmos replete with a diversity of imperceptible inhuman sonorities. It is along this trajectory that we borrow from Murphy and Smith’s (2001) Deleuzian inflected provocation “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” for speculative ends. That is, by rejoining thought to such alien compositions as that of Comet 67P, we might become capable of relaunching sound along strange non-philosophical vectors in support of both new problems and horizons for human thought.

  Sound does not care what you think:

  The cosmos-without-us

  For its modelization in grade school textbooks, enhanced telescopic imaging via Hubble, and through a myriad of popular science fiction television, film, and video game settings, the cosmos has long passed into general recognizability. Such familiarity might be said to occur by dint of what Thacker (2011) refers to as anthropic subversion, or rather, the territorialization of reality from a distinctly human-centric point of view. As an index of modernism’s aspiration that the Earth be refashioned for-us, anthropic subversion now extends beyond the “blue ruin” that is modernism’s horrific outcome. From the generalized reimaging of space as the new frontier for mining, to the anticipated colonization of Mars, the alien abyss of space becomes submitted to the will of human life. Such correlation is, of course, not new, having been anticipated in Medieval-Christian cosmology and its highly regulated universal ordering of things divine, terrestrial, and subterranean. Yet for the various ways in which the cosmos has been habituated to human sensibilities and rendered as a backdrop to our aesthetic preferences and desires, the electromagnetic recordings of Rosetta and Voyager confront us with something unsettling for their anonymity and impersonal character. This encounter marks the inversion of anthropic reactivity, or rather, the reversal of the human-centric presumption that both Earth and cosmos conform to a human point of view.

  The inhuman “sonority” of such objects as Comet 67P confronts us with a cosmos delinked from human will, desire, and aspiration. Instead, the unearthly elec
tromagnetic recordings of Rosetta and Voyager portend a limit of human thought through their revelation of a cosmos that reflects not in the image of man, but an inhuman indifference that bespeaks a cosmos-without-us (Thacker 2011). That is, the recordings of Saturn’s rings, of Neptune’s electromagnetic oscillations, or Uranus’s moon Miranda delink from human reference in their revelation of an ancient and alien sonority existing before man and enduring beyond the horizon of its extinction. It is here that Murphy and Smith’s (2001) provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” assumes horrific proportion in that the “singing” of such inhuman objects suggests both “thought-without-man” and further, a cosmic thought unfathomable to humans for its existence outside the perceptual interpretive range of the organism. Herein, the electromagnetic “sonority” of the inhuman recedes from the projection of a human face upon the cosmos, palpating something distinctly outside to the assuredness of transcendent metaphysics and the cosmological ordering of the universe from the vantage of human life. The song of such objects as Comet 67P reveals an occult cosmic hermeticism that abates not only from the human territorialization of the cosmos, but further, from the refrain of inevitable human ascention that is counterpart to the extension of industrial and colonial interests beyond the Earth.

  Reaching for the stars: The anthropic

  subversion of will.i.am

  As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) develop in A Thousand Plateaus, sound is intimate to the formation of territories. While not the sole means through which territories are created, sound is nevertheless integral to the process of territorializing space, or rather, of seizing upon and organizing the space of the Earth. The expressivity of birdsong, for example, functions to organize fuzzy territorial borders against would-be-intruders. The baying of wolves likewise produces territorial boundaries with other wolf packs, marking a space of the Earth against the territories of other predators. And so it goes with the territorializing function of televisions and radios, which carve from the milieu a circle, a household, a territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 311). In this way, sonority frames chaos, or better, produces from the milieu of the Earth a refrain (ritournello) that answers to the forces of chaos. Here, we might think of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) case of a child’s singing while walking home in the dark. Marshaling the forces of anti-chaos against the night, the child’s song summons a sonorous wall that territorializes space through the repetition of a melody, a speed, a mixture of rhythmic consonants and vowels that mark out a shelter (311). It is in this mode of sonorous territorialization that humans have sought to seize upon the void of space, or rather, to intersect the decoded milieu of space with an anthropic “zone of residence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 315).

  This desire to “reside” over the Earth, mobilizing the forces of anti-chaos in the process, now extends to the cosmos. Launched into space in 1977, Voyager’s Golden Records offer one example of the way in which humans have sought to carve out sonic zones of residency, stretching human territorializations into the depth of interstellar space. Intended for intelligent alien life or future human explorers, Voyager’s Golden Records contain a wide array of sounds including samples from nature (thunder claps and crashing waves), the animal calls of birds, elephants, and domesticated dogs, samples of 55 human languages, and the compositions of such musicians as Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Valya Balkanska (“The Golden Record”). While varied in content, Voyager’s Golden Records nonetheless function as an expansion of an “anthropo-acoustic” refrain into the abyss of deep space. The production of such a cosmic refrain is intimate to both the exploratory and speculative expansion of the human species beyond the Earth, which continues to unfold today. In August of 2012, for example, NASA’s Curiosity rover debuted from the surface of Mars the EDM inflected will.i.am song Reach for the Stars. From the repetition of its lyrical refrain “[w]hy they say the sky is the limit?” to the familiarly quantized beat structure, Reach for the Stars supports both a real and imaginary flight from the earth through its anthropomorphic territorialization of the cosmos. While robotic vocalizations and “space echoes” launch will.i.am’s anthemic refrain into the conceptual sphere of “space,” the recognizable builds and drops and hopeful and decidedly resolved song structure intimate to contemporary pop and electronic dance music (EDM) tether us back to Earthly familiarity. Coding the 56 million kilometer3 distance between the Earth and Mars via the metric regularity and driving refrain of EDM, Reach for the Stars works as yet another form of colonial Humanism suffused with the potentials of technological innovation.

  That the song was broadcast from the surface of Mars is undoubtedly significant. Beyond technological demonstration, the rover transmission posits the cosmos as a reflection of our own tastes, desires, and preferences. Supplanting the unfathomability of the cosmos with the echo of human life, the rover transmission redoubles the Kantian conjecture that man usurps God through substitution, where the voice of the heavens becomes analogous to our own. That is, the rover transmission found a cosmic refrain in which the “beyond” is no longer an impersonal void without humans, but rather, one recognizable for its acoustic reflection of human voice and expressive style. Warding off the forces of chaos, the infantile and quasi-motivational message of Reach for the Stars henceforth produces a “happy refrain” that extends the ambit of bourgeoisie human desire into the impersonal bleakness of space, which thus territorialized, supports a mode of colonial expansionism that has historically functioned by submitting the sonorous expression of others to the standardized metrics of the West.4 Herein, Murphy and Smith’s (2001) provocation that “what I hear is thinking too” is subverted through the projection of an anthropocentric refrain upon an inhuman cosmos, circumventing an encounter that might otherwise produce new conditions for thinking by shoring up the correlationist presumption that the cosmos exists to the extent that we think it, or rather, that the cosmos exists as it exists for us (Meillassoux 2008; Thacker 2011).

  The misanthropic subtraction of Miranda

  While the acoustic territorialization of space might be thought as a way of managing the uncertainty of an incognizable cosmos, such a process is nevertheless imbricated with an anthropocentric philosophical legacy intimate to contemporary thought. Quentin Meillassoux (2008) articulates this legacy in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, in which he outlines the problem of correlationism, or rather, the idea that access to the world is only ever access to the correlation between thought and its object. As Meillassoux writes, the thesis of correlationism asserts “the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content … [a]ll we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself” (Meillassoux 2008: 36). The problem of correlationism hence pertains to a presupposed philosophy of access that assumes things cannot exist without their a priori givenness to thought, or rather, the presumption that reality exists only to the extent that we—humans—think it. This correlationist legacy thus contributes to the overarching anthropocentric conceit that reality is as it is for us (Thacker 2011).

  Yet, as the example of Comet 67P reveals, amidst the anthropic subversion of reality to human thought, something far more horrific can emerge by dint of what Thacker (2011) dubs misanthropic subtraction, or rather, the revelation of a universe-without-us. Another example, existing beyond the happy refrain of Reach for the Stars, is the desolate and impersonal electromagnetic “song” of Uranus’s moon Miranda. Recorded during the Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986, the eldritch electromagnetic “singing” of Miranda diverges from resemblance to terrestrial referent or refrain. Rather, the Voyager 2 recording captures an inhuman and unearthly drone that might defy reconciliation within human categories and taxonomies of registration. In this vein, Miranda’s “song” proposes a detachment from the ambit of human desire or the anthropomorphic reflection of human interests, becoming instead a harbinger of cosmic ambivalence toward human life. That is, Miranda’s bleak electro
magnetic lamentation signals a metaphysical contortion in which human life is confronted by the thought of a cosmos without humans, and further, of occult cosmic entities that recede from our ability to think them. The desolate intonation of such impersonal and inhuman cosmic objects as Miranda break the conceit of correlationism by confronting human life with an occulted cosmos delinked from its dependency on human existence and withdrawn from the presumption of its givenness to human thought and meaning.

  To rejoin here with Murphy and Smith’s provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” is therefore to palpate the horror of misanthropic subtraction. Receding from both human sense and the submission of reality to human meaning, such inhuman cosmic objects as Miranda actualize the thought of human extinction in that they recede from the presumption that their existence and expression depends on human registration and categorization. Miranda’s “song” places us in the presence of something primordially anterior to human cognition and in this way, situates us at the limit of thought (Thacker 2015a). Herein, the thinking that one might hear in Miranda’s singing is far more negative than the familiar science fiction scenario in which alien life attempts to communicate with us. For opposed to the distinctly anthropocentric idea that things are given for us, Miranda’s song suggests the impersonal in-itself of the inhuman neither for or with human life (Thacker 2011: 17). At 2.6 billion kilometers from the earth, we might speculate that the inhuman song of Miranda perseveres without regard for the imagined order and purpose of the universe given by humans, and thus our existence as a species, and our potential extinction, is inconsequential to these cosmic sonorous expressions.