De/facializing the cosmos: Towards a
cosmic pessimism
The happy refrain of Reach for the Stars is just one example of the way in which humanistic territorial refrains are created through sonorous expression itself. The anthropic subversion enacted by the projection of will.i.am’s Earthly anthem into deep space produces a familiarization, a territory, wherein an otherwise boundless universe is subsumed under all-too human regimes of representation. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert, however, territorialization is not fixed in time and space. Their concept of territory challenges the notion of static identifications and delineations because territorialization is itself a state of constant processing; there can be no territory without territorialization and subsequent deterritorialization. Territories are continually passing into something else, all the while maintaining internal organizations and thresholds. By recognizing that territories are always open to de/re/territorializations, and thus that systems are never fully totalizing, we can see that there are always holey spaces that might offer new horizons for thinking. It is through the revelation of such holey spaces, and the dread that this holiness actualizes, that sound might work towards a cosmic pessimism that creates a break from thinking the world as it is meant to mean for us.
The sonic effect of an inhuman face
Sound is a difficult concept to define. Understood in theoretical terms, sound can be construed as a moment of passage from unformed expression (noise) to formed expression (voice/sound) that is made possible by events (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). As Deleuze (1990: 194) writes: “[w]e constantly relive in our dreams the passage from noise to voice.” It is therefore not enough to understand sound in terms of its definitions and delineations, but rather sound must be recognized in terms of the sonic effects, the territories, to which it gives rise. In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) offer an enigmatic approach to this very provocation, positing that sound is not a “form of expression,” but rather it is an “unformed material of expression, that will act on other terms” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 6). Sound is always fleeing, disappearing into difference and is thus capable of disorganizing its own form and that of content, so as to free up its own intense material of expression. Sound is, therefore, positioned as a force open to the multiplicity of flows that enable assemblages between bodies outside of what is readily representable; “in sound, intensity alone matters” and as such sound is always “non-signifying” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 6). The effect of this non-signifying material of expression is therefore one of re/de/territorialization; sound is not a process of reproduction or mimesis, nor is it representational, but rather a process of becoming. When the child summons their protective sonic wall while walking home in the dark, they are also mobilizing a force for becoming: becoming-sheltered, becoming-safe, becoming-residentiary. Likewise, in the example of will.i.am’s Reach for the Stars, sound is positioned as a force for becoming, that is, becoming-human, wherein a human face is projected against the void of deep space. Similar to man walking on the moon, the production of this sonic territory can be likened to the creation of a face that walks on the otherwise “inhuman face” of the cosmos. The problem that such sonic territorialization poses is thus not one of signification, but rather one of escape. How might sound be repositioned towards other becomings? Becoming-alien? Becoming-imperceptible? Becoming-inhuman? Becoming-pessimistic? What is needed is an exit from the overwhelming desire to identify the cosmos with a human face.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) unfold the concept of faciality upon the plateau of Year Zero. The idea of faciality is conceived in response to a particular political polemic, that is, the assertion that we require new commitments that work to dismantle a face that is always-already defined by a reassuring human essence, human “goodness,” or human exceptionalism. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the face that gives the signifier substance; the face “fuels interpretation” by taking the otherwise abstract holes and surfaces of a body and correlating them to specific signifying traits that are indexed to a human face (1987: 168). The “black holes” of the face—the eyes, the mouth, the ears—exist as the binary co-requisite of the flat “white surface,” or wall of the signifier. Although considered constituent elements of the human face, these holes and surfaces are not human per se, rather we have learned to discern these human facial details, the holes and surfaces, by idealizing the power of human facial images. In this way, and not unlike the production of sonic territories, the face does not come “ready-made” (ibid.). Instead, facialization is engendered by an “abstract machine of faciality (visageite),” which produces the face against processes of signification and subjectification. The face does not “make sense” all by itself, but rather this codification depends on a system of machinic operations that draw the entire body across a holey surface, over-coding decoded parts in the process. To summarize, the main point that Deleuze and Guattari make is that the face does not come a priori but rather it is imposed on us universally; we are over-coded with faces, constantly over-determining our identities. The face is thus another mechanism that works to territorialize an otherwise indeterminate universe of potential. As Deleuze and Guattari write, it is through the face that we learn to define “zones of frequency or probability” which allow us to “delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unnamable to the appropriate significations” (ibid.). If we extend this thinking to the example of will.i.am, the happy refrain of Reach for the Stars allows us to neutralize fear of an unknowable cosmos by constructing a face against which human significations can launch forth. Likewise with Comet 67P, the mediation and registration of its sonority (the speeding up of the signal for human perception) allows us to frame its signification through an indexically human face.
As Deleuze and Guattari assert, however, the face is also a sort of “horror story” (ibid.). Considered as a form of territorialization, the process of facialization is open to alternative becomings; the black holes and white surfaces of the face are susceptible to both self-annihilation and/or re-engagements with different planes of becoming. The inhuman in human beings, is, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 171), what the face is from the start; the face is “by nature a close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its emptiness and boredom” (ibid.). These thinkers therefore urge us to take a closer look at the face, so as to notice its constituent parts and their unusual becomings, in turn breaking through the dominating white face, or wall of the signifier, while avoiding being swallowed by the black hole. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari assert one must renounce the face by becoming-imperceptible, or what we might think of in the context of this investigation, becoming-inhuman: “[y]es, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective” (ibid.). We must therefore recognize that there is something “absolutely inhuman about the face” (1987: 170) and that it is the face itself that might reveal the indifference of the cosmos, and thus a certain pessimism when it comes to thinking humans in relation to the world.
Cosmic pessimism and dreadful possibilities
Considered as a non-signifying force for becoming, sound offers a trajectory for the revelation of such inhuman realizations in the way that it is able to tear sense from over-coded human representations. The bleak “singing” of Miranda, for instance, contorts the face of the cosmos through an intense material of expression that exceeds human perception. The sonic emissions from this body create a sort of dissonance, an irrevocable deterritorialization, that functions by “taking flight” and bringing into play new connections and perceptions (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 28). The inhuman improvisations produced by Miranda, as well as Comet 67P, recede from anthropic subversion, in turn affirming a cosmic pessimism that evokes a dismantling of the projected human face on the cosmos. The realization that such sounds exceed and override human capacities, creates a sense of unease; the fragm
enting perceptual excesses produced by these cosmic bodies quash commonsense correlations between thought and its object, thus producing an overwhelming sense of dread.
The dreadful impression created by these planetary bodies is significant in the way that it differs from more common feelings of danger ascribed to human explorations of deep space. It is not that we fear these sonic emissions in terms of their content, but rather, what we fear is our inability to recognize ourselves within them. This dreadful sensibility is not a sensation of immediacy, but rather a feeling that something is impending. Positioned as an occult manifestation of some near future event hovering over the now, dread allows us to project forward into the future by dismantling the over-coded faces, the human exceptionalism and anthropic subversions that have come to define our conceptions of the world. It is therefore this sense of dread that might catalyze the misanthropic subversion of which Thacker (2011) speaks, in turn activating the necessary conceptual frameworks for revisioning the future in terms of lines of flight, or new openings. Like dread, it is these abstract and formless openings—the uncoded holes and their co-requisite surfaces—that mark the horizon of new possibilities for thinking.
Sound at the end of the world: Interstellar refrains
and inhuman speculations
Our desire to continuously facialize the cosmos stems from a deep-seated fear of our own species’ extinction. Through anthropic territorializations, including those created through sound, we are able to mark out a shelter within an otherwise unfathomable space-time continuum, thus holding the dreadful and inhuman potential of the cosmos at bay. Christopher Nolan’s (2014) Interstellar exemplifies this all-too-human aspiration, counterposing the threat of human extinction with the promise of intergalactic space exploration. As the film foretells, the future of the human species is linked to an escape from an unrecognizable Earth at the brink of the post-anthropocene. As the film’s unshrinking hero, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), articulates, “[m]ankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” In an effort to save the species, the remnants of NASA organize a last-ditch effort to locate a habitable world for colonization. With Cooper at the mission helm, a team of astronauts venture beyond the solar system where they are tasked with surveying three potentially habitable worlds. In this mission, Interstellar imagines the death of the Earth as a predestined eventuality in humankind’s cosmic ascension. On the teleology of this ascension, Cooper opines, “[w]e’re still pioneers, [we’ve] barely begun. Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, [because] our destiny lies above us.” Such destiny is marked by anthropic subversion through which the weird cosmic events figured in Interstellar are ultimately attributed to human design, or rather, made to reflect in the presumption that the cosmos is not only for us, but further, by us in design. Reterritorialized upon a human face, the inhuman horror and queer cosmic phenomena of Interstellar’s wormholes, black holes, and paranormal events are captured in the image of human ardor, ingenuity, and perseverance. Here, Interstellar rehabilitates the general idea of manifest destiny at a cosmic scale of significance, expanding the presumption of anthropocentrism to universal proportion.
Post-anthropocene sonority
While reiterating the colonial-pioneer dream of expansion, Interstellar concomitantly jettisons an Earth that no longer repeats in the image of human dominion or supremacy. Here, Interstellar figures alongside a growing body of dystopian films that palpate the pessimistic sonority of a planet-without-us. The haunting silence of London in Danny Boyle’s (2002) 28 Days Later, the reterritorialization of the New York soundscape by animal life in Francis Lawrence’s (2007) I Am Legend, and revelation of elemental sonority of AMC’s The Walking Dead each pertain to thinking the end of the human species counterpart to the revelation of inhuman sonority. And so it goes with the speculative television series Life After People, which posits a post-anthropocene soundscape of audibly decaying architectural forms, dampened human refrains, and the intensified auditory expression of animal life and primordial elemental sonorities. This is to suggest that our encounter with cosmic pessimism does not simply pertain to the visual absence of the human, but the adumbration of an inhuman sonority that detaches from its representation or reflection of human vitality. It is in this vein that thinking born from both the inhuman and its expressions might figure as a fulcrum for relaunching metaphysics without the presumption of human exceptionalism at its center. Not every “bump” in the night has as its root either a human manifestor or recognizable meaning “for us.” As in the horror fiction of H. P Lovecraft (2008), the inhuman marks the doom of human signification—the destruction of the face—in the way that it indicates something delinked from human meaning as its organizing referent. Once the face is destroyed, the “black holes” and “white surfaces” are relieved of their signifying duties, positioned instead as harbingers of alternative connections and novel becomings. Cosmic objects such as 67P provide speculations on such becomings, that is, the imperceptible temporalities, scales, and materialisms beyond the scope of human production and sense. Not even the dystopian scene of a decelerated planet given back to the “green earth” (resonant with an all-too-human fantasy about starting over) yet fathoms the impersonal pessimism of the cosmos, let alone the impersonal inhumanity of the Earth as it recedes from the ostensible supremacy of human control and management.
Towards an inhuman speculation
By speculating on the inhuman and occult sonority of the cosmos, one might not only fabulate modes of thought capable of counteractualizing the correlationist conceit of reality’s a priori givenness to thought, but further the tendencies of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphization as they are reified and extended in an act of accelerated cosmic territorialization. Speculation, in this way, offers a form of escape from the inveterate anthropocentrism that has come to characterize thinking, that is if we are to take seriously the existence of fundamentally alien, inhuman worlds. The strategy of speculation has become increasingly popular in philosophy circles. Speculative realism, a term developed in conjunction with a 2007 academic conference at Goldsmiths College in London, is now used to describe a wide range of contemporary thought. As writers and thinkers associated with speculative realism are eager to point out, this philosophical current does not encompass one single philosophical framework. What these positions do have in common, however, is their attempt to think beyond the limits of what we, as human beings, were long considered able to think, speculating instead about the nature of the non-human and what such thinking might provide for the many issues we face in our contemporary moment. Understood as the ability to articulate and enable contingencies of the given, always with incomplete certainty, while remaining faithful to an incalculable future, philosophical speculation allows the development of an “experimental responsiveness to epistemic, ontological and systemic variation” (Reed 2014: 578). Such speculation employs many different conceptual strategies that work to “shatter the Kantian Mirror” and/or turn that mirror around, what we have explored here as the correlationist legacy, so that it might face away from reified visions of the subject, towards thinking the world in terms of its relationship to itself (Braidotti and Vermeulen 2014). Although rife with potential, the strategy of speculation is vulnerable to the temporarily of “what is,” a nowness that works to cloud the very futurity of what might be, thus limiting thinking to a set of givens that are always-already known. Philosophical speculation therefore necessitates a sense of becoming possible of the impossible and thus a mobilization of powers of the false that might work to create a future that goes beyond pure diagnostics and/or historical exemplification.
Taken as a speculative gambit, it might be ventured that the revelation of an occulted and inhuman sonorous universe necessitates the radical reassessment of why thought would continue to be grounded in the human as thought’s horizon.5 To rejoin here with Murphy and Smith’s (2001) provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” engages the horrifying prospect of inhuman thought t
hat is neither for us or resemblant with human modes of cognition. Despite our thinking of them in ways that assume their passivity for us, the sonority of cosmic objects impart their thinking in a primordial mode that antedates human epistemology. The sonority of such planetary bodies as Miranda and Comet 67P palpate an occulted materialism both without-humans and indifferent to human reception. To conjecture on inhuman sonority is to encounter a cosmos of a wholly alien order, singing as it does with primeval organs that resemble neither the privileged lung-larynx-mouth assemblage or hand-instrument assemblage of human expressivity. Analysis of this expression must therefore be extended to a horrific speculation on the thought of the inhuman where such thinking begets a form of extreme negativity toward a universe ordered from the perspective of the human species.
To extend Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we might in this vein wage the potentially horrific speculation that the expressions of deep space objects themselves constitute inhuman territories of unfathomable motive. Akin to Thacker’s (2012) speculation on the occulted will of oil figured in the petrol-horror fiction of Fritz Leiber’s “Black Gondolier,” the anthropocentric conceit of discovery might be misanthropically subtracted. Where the “Black Gondolier” posits the misanthropically subversive proposition that oil discovered humans, a similar premise might be extended to such objects as the nomadic Comet 67P. Composed of elements from the pre-solar nebula, Comet 67P is one of the most primitive bodies of the cosmos and yet was not discovered until 1969, having long since discovered us in its periodic orbit through the solar system and perhaps further, the interception of radio waves broadcast from the planet’s surface. The song of 67P, therefore, constitutes a version of Meillassoux’s (2008) arche-fossil, or rather, an ancient material and materialism predating the emergence of (human) life. This materialism introduces a curious problematic to the reactive tendencies of contemporary anthropic thought. Anterior to the emergence of (human) life, the arche-fossil exists prior to both the supposition of the world’s givenness to (human) thought and its attendant, all-too-human metrics of temporality, scale, and consciousness. Not only is the arche-fossil prior to the world’s presumed givenness to thought, but as Meillassoux advances, it is “indifferent” or rather, non-correlative to the ambit of human interpretation (2008: 22). The arche-fossil posits the limitation of human thought by constituting an unfathomable “outside” both prior to and unexhausted by human meaning. That “what I hear is thinking too” herein suggests not only the conjunction of sound and thought, but as it pertains to inhuman sonority, to a style of thinking without humans, and further, of thought launched along inhuman vectors of expression though which we might question not only the vaunted supremacy of human epistemology and creativity, but perhaps more profoundly, the metaphysical ordering of reality from the vantage of a single expressive species.
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