Articulating a method: Hyperstitional thinking and sound without organs
Returning to Smith and Murphy’s provocation that “what I hear is thinking too,” we can see sound how sound might operate as a conceptual tool that unfolds along two trajectories. First, sound is positioned as an expressive mode aligned with moments bound up in the emergence of new becomings; by destroying the face we are pushed to recognize the limits of the all-too-human “black holes” and “white walls” that have come to bind signification to the world as something that is given, as opposed to how it might be. In turn, these productions call for a dilation of thought beyond what is readily recognizable and accessible to human systems of perception and registration. Secondly, and as the emissions of Comet 67P and Miranda highlight, sound provides a site to speculate on the “thinking” of planetary bodies themselves. Like Meillassoux’s arche-fossils, the cosmic sonority referenced in this investigation reveals a “cosmic horror,” that is, the revelation of immense and inhuman time scales, dark materials, and energies that foretell the existence of dimensions outside of our traditionally recognizable reality. Positioned in conjunction with thought itself, sound therefore offers a site for philosophical speculation, and ultimately the production of new hyperstitions.
Coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the 1990s, hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words “hyper” and “superstition” to describe the action of favorable ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstition describes both the effects and mechanisms of what the CCRU term “apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture,” wherein the (hu)man itself is something that needs to be overcome (Carstens 2013). According to Nick Land (2012b) hyperstition can be understood as a positive feedback circuit defined as the experimental science of self-fulfilling prognostications. Whereas superstitions are understood as merely fictitious beliefs, hyperstitions, by their very existence as ideas, work to bring about their own versions of reality. Free-market capitalism, for example, is one hyperstitional feedback cycle that has been “downloaded” into the cultural mainframe, in turn exponentially accelerating social transformations. Likewise, and in relation to this investigation, the legacy of anthropic subversion is another hyperstition that has come to subtend the very way in which we perceive and thus construct reality. Falling outside the parameters of conventional philosophy, the concept of hyperstition operates as an approach for speculative thinking wherein ideas are understood not in terms of their a priori significations, but rather as diagrams that are “executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages” (Land 2012b: 443).
Hyperstition, in this way, can be likened to what Deleuze and Guattari have termed Bodies without Organs (BwOs), those connective exploration devices that function to “map” new cognitive territories. The BwO, like a hyperstition, indicates an indeterminate flux of deterritorialized energy, which necessitates an investigation of the very mechanisms of striation and stratification that make up our own constructions of reality. The CCRU, along with 0rphan Drift, use the concept of hyperstition to outline the way in which such mechanization operates, highlighting four functionalities that, taken together, describe the way in which “meltdown” culture comes about. These functionalities characterize hyperstition as: (1) an “element of effective culture that makes itself real”; (2) a “fictional quality functional as a time-traveling device”; (3) a “coincidence intensifier”; and (4) a “call to the Old Ones” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3). These characteristics describe how hyperstitions enact their subversive influences in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived “truths” that subsequently impact the outcome of history. At the same time, however, these functionalities indicate the way in which hyperstition also signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous “other” into the cultural arena. In the case of this investigation, this “other” might be understood as the inhuman and indifferent sonority of the cosmos itself. It is this horrific sonority that might work as a hyperstition, a BwO, or what we would like to propose here as the SwO, Sound without Organs.
That speculation on inhuman sonority might intervene with the philosophical presumptions of correlationism and anthropocentrism suggests the necessity of a broader reconceptualization of sound, such that it might be freed from its overdetermination by all-too-human refrains of expression and meaning. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the precursor to such reconceptualization might be figured in the form of an anti-model we dub Sound without Organs (SwO). By the SwO, we intend to not only delink sonority from its orthodox assemblages (the lung-larynx-mouth or hand-instrument indexed to the human face), but further, to dilate sonority beyond the organism itself, where sound might become capable of remaking thought via such weird instantiations of expression as the electromagnetic materialisms of cosmic bodies. Here, what might be dubbed the SwO portends a style of thinking that is not yet a refrain, nor the reflection of human potentials for sonorous expression. Rather, to think the SwO astride the inhuman suggests dilating the very notion of the organism so as to produce a broader ontological account of sonorous expression such as the electromagnetic registration of ionized cosmic particulate. Yet, this dilated ontological account of expression is not simply additive, but more radically, subtractive for its misanthropic subversion of the (human) organism and its expressive territorializations of both the planet and cosmos coextensive of anthropocentrism. What is needed is thus a new demand for philosophical developments, wherein thought is not defined by a world bound by anthropic subversions, but rather the impetus to develop new philosophical speculations. The hyperstitional functionality of the SwO provides one such opportunity for speculation.
Conceptualized in terms of its hyperstitional power, the SwO exposes the horrific and inhuman quality of sound, bringing about a sort of apocalypse in thinking—a cosmic pessimism—in turn creating space for new speculations. Like Land’s hyperstition, the SwO operates as an “element of effective culture that makes itself real” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3) in the way that sonority is dilated beyond the organism itself. The SwO produces an alternative sense of perceptual reality that is not bound by “human” potential, and is therefore open to new connections and cultural assemblages. In addition, the sonic effects to which the SwO gives rise, that is the overwhelming sense of dread produced through misanthropic subtractions, acts as a “fictional quality [that functions] as a time-traveling device” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3). The dreadful prospect of an inhuman cosmos launches us into the future, not as all-knowing pioneers, or manifestors of some pre-determined “human” destiny, but rather as partial objects that are actualized by our immanent relations to the world and beyond. The SwO also works against correlationism, instead functioning as what we might think of as a “coincidence intensifier” (CCRU and 0D 1999: 3). As both the examples of Comet 67P and Miranda illustrate, these celestial bodies exist prior to the supposition of the world’s givenness to (human) thought, and it is thus only through “coincidence,” a cosmic indifference, that we have “discovered” their being. As Land writes: “[f]rom the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time” (Land 2009). Lastly, like Land’s hyperstition, the SwO signals a “call to the Old Ones.” Similar to Meillassoux’s arche-fossils, the inhuman sonority of the cosmos reveals an ancient materialism predating the emergence of (human) life and thus human meaning. Made possible by advances in the technological capacities of our processors and the vision-enhancing capabilities of our microscopes, we have “unveiled” the existence of dimensions outside of our perceptual limits, which in turn presents a new challenge to anthropocentric and correlationist legacies in thought.
Thought as a hy
perstitional force, the concept of sound without organs (SwO), or the delinking of sonority from its orthodox philosophical assemblages, provides the necessary deterritorialization that might recapitulate thought as a mode of concept-production. It is this concept-production, fuelled by the provocation that “[w]hat I hear is thinking too” that holds the potential to rejoin thought to inhuman trajectories, the “old ones,” in turn relaunching sound as a strange conceptual impetus for the creation of both new problems and alternative horizons for thought.
Notes
1This electromagnetic oscillation is presumed to be the effect of cometary jet ionization and particle interactions with the comet’s magnetic field.
2Other instances of uncanny soundscapes in the media range from the detection of “trumpet sounds” linked to background noise generated by the Earth to longstanding evidence of uncanny atmospheric noises hypothesized to large-scale acoustic-gravity waves produced by solar flares distrupting the magnetosphere, ionosphere, and atmosphere.
3This distance reflects the closest orbital distance between the Earth and Mars, with the furthest being recorded on March 3, 2012 at 100.7 million kilometers.
4As Mackay (1997) develops, the colonization of Africa by the West included the destruction of tribal drums, the machinic instrument connecting the body of the individual to the collective and further, to the collective virtual history of the tribal assemblage. Western colonials intervened first to eradicate the machinic potential of the drum, marking one of the primary strategies underpinning the African slave trade. Upon the tatters of destroyed drums, colonials would subsequently claim that Africa was devoid of both historical memory or the means for its recording.
5Emerging inquiry in the field of epigenetics suggests that human genes are being “triggered” by planetary transformations and environmental factors such as global warming.
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8
Buzzing off … Toward Sonic Thinking
Christoph Lischka
Proem
“At the outset … we are furnished only with material for the production of material, that is, of sound of high or low pitch; in other words, the measurable tone” (Hanslick 1891: 144).
“Sounds are among the things we hear.… Sounds, therefore, are intentional objects of audition” (Nudds and O’Callaghan 2009: 4).
“Sound, as singularity, … as bodily manifestation … reveals, even that which … cannot be said …” (Mersch 2002: 116f).
Q: What is real about a quantum system?
A: That “sensitivity to the touch,” that “zing!” that keeps us from ever having more information about it than can be encoded in a quantum state (Fuchs 2011: 521).
Ontologies
It is still quite amazing how easily you could get people confused as soon as you enter a conversation about everyday life with, say, a physicist and a lay person.
Free will
Let us start with a well-known argument, which usually runs as follows.
Everyday experience tells us that we are involved into “decisions” every moment, and that these decisions are free—at least to some crucial extent, e.g. our whole society is based on some sort of blaming apparatus, where derangements can be controlled and eventually “repaired” by identifying responsibilities.
Yet, asking our physicist, we would get a very different narrative; because—she reminds us—nature is thoroughly deterministic, and because we—as human beings—are essentially part of nature as well, there is no free will: every detail of our behavior is physically determined (actually, we are just complex machines), and (free) decisions, responsibilities, etc., are nothing but a “subjective” epitheton ornans of hard-wired physical processes—in fact, they are pure illusions.<
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To reformulate this narrative in more technical terms: every natural “system”—including human agencies—can be modeled along the lines of (nonlinear) Dynamical Systems Theory; its behavior might be unpredictable, but it is still deterministic.
Thinking positive?
Both these narratives can be raised immediately to a highly confusing level: by revealing some of the most obvious underlying assumptions of the arguments we would most often terminate any further discussion—most often, because our dialog partners would not understand our questions. For example, it usually turns out to be unimaginable by many people that concepts like system, thing, process, space, agency, cause and effect—concepts which populate our minds when we are “thinking” or talking about our world—that those concepts are part of a very specific, contingent archeology of ways of world making (Goodman 1978), i.e. that they are contingent sedimentations of “ideas” back at least two-and-a-half-thousand years, coined by people like Parmenides, Plato, Aristoteles and “enhanced” later by modern philosophers like Descartes and Locke.
Sonic Thinking Page 17