Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Neglecting and disregarding this contingent genealogy will inevitably end up in a quite positivist view of our so-called reality: the world as a stage of distal objects, with a non-participative epistemology and the well-known subject-object separation, and a more or less manifest mind/body dichotomy—taken as a non-circumventable, predefined space of possibilities, within which our “world” can be explored, exploited, and technologically deconstructed.

  As long as this specific view is treated as an out of many one (tolerating alternate “ways of world making”), we should not bother. Yet as soon as it turns into a vivid, sometimes even aggressive reductionism and universalism, combined with the claim of an overall ubiquity—we should! In the sciences, unfortunately, occurrences like the widely known Sokal Affair (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), or the arising hegemony of “computational ontologies” and artificial intelligence based algorithmic thinking, suggest an emerging imbalance of viewpoints which might eventually let us get stuck in a highly blind spotted reality—thereby concealing crucial alternatives of very different ontological setups. Yet exactly those, in turn, could reveal promising “images of thought” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007) in order to identify and overcome unmistakable rumbling conceptual inadequacies and incoherences of this apparently “ultimate” layout of (human) experience.

  Inadequacies and incoherences

  But why should this “metaphysical” colloquy matter anyway? Many people would even characterize this kind of “philosophical” dispute as—at best—superfluous.

  The fact is that there are quite deep problems with the ontological “rooting” of our current scientific discourses—problems that are even realized within sciences themselves, and which have led to strange aporiae. As we will soon notice this happens especially in one of the leading sciences itself: one of the most pressing topics in the foundations of physics today is the consolidation of a deep incoherence between General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory—a research field well-known as Quantum Gravity. Surprisingly, this incoherence can be traced back to a break-down of concepts like object, space, locality, participativity, to name just a few.

  Now, Alfred N. Whitehead, in his monumental Process and Reality (Whitehead 1978), has already suggested that we have to reformulate the ancient Syzygy of permanence and flow in order to get an appropriate ontological framework matching the needs of contemporary thinking. Unfortunately, this evokes an even harder problem—the adaption and redesign of language.

  Whitehead identified language as one of the most important “tools” available for metaphysical analyzes, and was quite aware of the problem of inadequate means of expression:

  An old established metaphysical system gains a false air of adequate precision … Thus propositions expressed in its language are more easily correlated to our flitting intuitions … When we trust these verbal statements and argue as though they adequately analysed meaning, we are led into difficulties.

  Whitehead 1978:14

  Let us illustrate these problems in a bit more detail.

  Everyday life

  It has often been noticed that the specific subject-predicate-object structure of our Standard Average European languages (Tyler 1984) imposes a substance/attributive thinking, a thinking in terms of things (i.e. objects) and their properties (ibid).

  Let us consider the concept of materiality, for instance. In everyday life we would most probably interpret material as stuff that has to be sculpted; a passive receptacle—in-formed by an active agency and molded by changing appropriate attributes. This concept—introduced by Aristoteles through the trilogy of hýle/morphé/stéresis—set the stage for the description of change as (formal) modification of an enduring being (i.e. substance).

  The implications of this conceptual arrangement are rather weighty. In the first place it gives us a dominance of permanence over fluency. Combined with a principal heteroactivity and a strong deterministic evolution, eventually our world will end up as a closed block universe, without time, suffering from a lack of any innovation and creativity (Barbour 2000, Rovelli 2009, Ellis and Rothman 2010)—a situation which is in a stark contrast to our everyday evidence, as the example at the beginning of this text has shown.

  Cultural studies

  Yet this thinking has also shaped the so-called cultural studies. To begin with, there is (beyond aggressive reductionist narratives) an almost universal tacit agreement that the “Social” and the “Natural” are games of a principally different kind, obeying its own rules, respectively, and interacting according to complex protocols managing the difficulties of dualistic, supervenient, reductionist, etc., layouts of the very gap between mind and body. As an inevitable consequence these “games” induce quite often “mysterious” endeavors to bridge these different worlds, sometimes up to a complete denial of each other.

  There are at least two braids of presumptions which control the strategies of cultural studies.

  First, almost anywhere there is an implicit agreement that any reference to nature is done from a Newtonian Physics perspective; rather naively the whole classical doctrine is taken as granted, and there seems to be no clue that this Weltbild (world view) within physics itself has changed for many, many years already.

  Second, as it stands, this obsolete metaphysics affects cultural studies with respect to their dominant semiotic paradigm. The ubiquitous imperialism of semiosis has infected almost every aspect of contemporary theories on (human) cultural and social processes. The early success of linguistics and structuralism at the beginning of the last century enticed other disciplines to import the entire existing conceptual machinery of these frameworks: sign, signifier, signified; meaning, sense; communication and mediality; materiality of sign carriers; text and intertextuality. A “semiotics” of music, architecture, and fashion, hyphenated semiotics of various sorts emerged; even emotions are now brought under the administration of the linguistic discourse.

  In blunt consequence, the semiotic narrative, along with the Newtonian stance, deepens the entanglement with the Cartesian and Lockean bifurcation of nature, as Whitehead conceptualized the separation of our integral experience in primary (nature) and secondary (mind) aspects: the subject in a clear-cut, non-participative opposition to the (objective) world which can be explored, described, and represented.

  Most recently we can observe a shift toward the “materiality” of media and communication, obviously in order to overcome these semiotic legacies. One prominent topic—among others—has become what Aristoteles distinguished from “raw sound” (psóphos): the voice (phoné). “Voice” is a capacity of living beings, and implies the articulation of (raw) sound. Mersch (passim), for example, is concerned with the bodily-ness of the resonating voice, its singularity—as opposed to its mediality which is fundamental for the articulation of meaning, and as such is infected by alterity (break, cut, difference—“tranche” with Saussure) (Mersch 2006: 214). Yet, by adopting Saussure’s concept of an “amorphous matter” of sound that has to be articulated, Mersch still subscribes to an Aristotelian inspired ontology of substance/form—setting for himself the constraints for discussing change (in particular the performativity and event character of the embodied voice) in terms of modal (heteroactive) variations of substances (Mersch 2006: 215).

  Physics

  After all, especially due to its dramatic development in the last hundred years, we should expect that physics would present us a quite different narrative, at least with respect to most of the Newtonian legacies.

  If at all, the “enlightened physicist” of today should talk about “particles” in his everyday practise only in a metaphorical way—knowing that those very particles are not real anymore in any traditional sense: particles are only identifiable (and separable) under very specific conditions of observation; they exhibit only partial (i.e. complementary, but “incomplete”) views on reality; and they do not have in general, for example, a defined location—the list could be continued. And yet there is still plenty of non-metaphorical
talk: “enduring systems” (the stuff) can be identified—an “electron” for example—and their (observable) properties (the electron’s “spin”) can be measured. Or people tell us that they “observe” traces of particles in space-time; some are even attempting to re-design our logic in order to save propositional thinking and simultaneously fit it to “quantum reality” (Girard 2011: 370). But the most serious “deprivation” to tackle concerns the loss of (classical) “objectivity”: as it turns out, nature could not be treated from a distal point of view anymore; as the physicist John A. Wheeler already argued decades ago—our universe is participatory: “The universe is a self-excited circuit. As it expands, cools and develops, it gives rise to observer-participancy. Observer-participancy in turn gives what we call ‘tangible reality’ to the universe” (Wheeler 1978: 22).

  In sum: even in advanced physics Newton is luring anywhere; people still have difficulties to accept those strange implications of Quantum Physics.

  Yet there are many interesting attempts to overcome the Newtonian stance, in particular in the fields of Quantum Information, Quantum Computation, Quantum Gravity—“conceptual experiments” which we will discuss later with respect to their more general potential.

  Sonic research

  Now one area of research will be of particular interest in the context of our discussion: sonic research.

  Quite recently, the new field of “Sound Studies” came up, complementing classical musicology. As we might expect both these fields of research are distributed over diverse disciplines, as there are semiotics, media theory, history, hermeneutics, psychology, computer science, to name just a few.

  In order to understand why sound as a scientific objective suffers from ancestral ontologies, a brief glance at the archeology of sound, particularly in music and language, should help to put contemporary scientific discourses on sound into perspective.

  The Pythagorean line—as is well known—started with the astonishing fact that there is an intimate link between pitch and frequency, which in turn allowed the abstraction of enduring, identifiable relations between quite artificial sound occurrences (“tones”), and resulted in a mathematical treatment of harmonic patterns. The latter can be instantiated almost everywhere (a huge range of “models” exists); hence “real” sound depraved to being a minor matter. Nevertheless, this kind of research survived through the Middle Ages in the context of the “Artes Liberales” (as musica), and eventually led to modern acoustics. As such it generated the foundations for a thorough physical analysis of vibratory patterns in the air and in other “substances,” interpretable as sound (often called sound patterns), yet divested completely from their genuine phenomenal qualities: the contemporary “physics of sound” became—paradoxically—silent.

  But—we briefly touched this topic earlier in this paper—there was a second “line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) to re-territorialize sound: the language metaphor, particularly in music. Without any doubt there are raw semiotic aspects to sound, as to any perception; at least some sort of indexicality is at work. Aristoteles (1956: 418a) already made a distinction between whiteness—the directly perceptible (aisthetón)—and the Son of Diares—the incidentally perceptible (katà symbebekós). Thus it is quite seductive to extrapolate these rudimentary hints of semiosis, and construct a comprehensive semiotic architecture in order to theorize sound. This might work for language (but see below). It obviously does not work for music—except for very special situations and contexts, like program music, or the European (Baroque) doctrine of affections (in German: Affektenlehre) which enslaves music under a semiotic regime. Hanslick (1891) already discussed this topic at length in his “The Beautiful in Music,” arguing for a purified, formal aesthetics of music that—at the opposite extreme—reduces it to an arabesque mosaic, a kaleidoscope of tones and harmonies (Hanslick 1891: 67): disembodied, pure syntax.

  An yet, why does it not work anyway? The irony is that with respect to sound, it works neither for music nor for language. Rather, the semiotization of both music and language evidences the legacies of the ancient Gigantomachia between Plato and the Poets, in particular Homer. It reflects the intellectualization and idealization of experience, the invention of “mind” and the establishment of the “idea” as the really real, and the denunciation of process, in particular sound, as deficient. Mimesis was turned into a pharmakon (Derrida 1981): like a virus it had to be put in quarantine and was banished from the “Republic” (Havelock 1963).

  The inevitable result of this maneuver was—again—the elimination of sound: in the Occidental mind there is dead silence. Both in the mind of the philosopher and in the mind of the musician. The voice, as the prominent medium of thinking in our Occidental phonocentrism, achieves its prominence precisely as a result of its ontological transparency, its mode of enduring absence, whereby it creates the illusion of perfect self presence (Selbstgegenwärtigkeit), as Derrida has analyzed in extenso (Derrida 1973). Sound “is” un-real, for “it is” non-present. And the same happens for thinking music as soon as it operates under a semiotic code, either with a direct linguistic perspective, or in a more indirect, “syntactical” mode (as with Hanslick): in any case, real music exhibits itself as a (formal) play of signs; materiality is turned into an extrinsic carrier of occurrences: it does not matter anymore.

  As Waldenfels noticed: “In all theories that assume the being-what as a primary mode of being, the voice has a difficult position. Because a voice sounds, … continues to sound, stops and resonates, in short it presents itself as an event, something which happens” (Waldenfels 2006: 195). To put it more generally: a sound is not substantial, “it is” never ever an object, for “it is” never present. As soon as “it is” heard, it is already gone, dead, as Derrida would name it. Thus we do not have any hook to lock our ontological machinery onto sonic experience; we can not localize, and therefore can not identify or re-identify sounds. As Strawson (1964) recognized early on: sounds cannot serve as particulars in any ontology whatever; they are doomed to a deficient mode of existence. In order to construct a “working ontology” we need space: only this allows for co-ordination, separation, re-identification, and thus for “thingness,” i.e. objectivity. Sounds in themselves are unreal.

  Visual objectivism

  Once we have dived into some of these rather confusing inadequacies and even incoherences of our legacy ontologies, we are forced to ask for alternatives: is there any escape?

  As Whitehead (1978) and Tyler (1984) already suggested, we definitely have to analyze the language we use to articulate our conceptual frameworks.

  Genealogy

  Hence we should start to (re-)construct a genealogy of those concepts, e.g. by identifying events where basic “girders” of the current discursive formation were scaffolded. Furthermore, Whitehead suggested as well that we have to rethink the relation between permanence and fluency.

  Along these lines, we are almost inevitably pointed to one of the most influential pre-socratic “debates,” which two and a half thousand years ago took place between Parmenides and Heraclitus. As is well known, both represent an opposite stance concerning Being and Becoming, respectively, with Heraclitus as the proponent of Everything Flows—one of the first generalized ontological positions in Western Philosophy anyway.

  We will not pursue all this further here. Instead, in our analysis we will focus on an often neglected aspect of this ontological framework: its inherent Ophtalmocentrism as it is already revealed in Parmenides’ famous fragment (Diels 1974: 231): “… tò gàr autó noeĩn estín te kaì eĩnai”; which is usually translated as: “For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be” (Parmenides and Burnet 1892 Chapter IV).

  Postponing for a moment the imposition of the Potentialis (can be thought … can be) the most remarkable aspect is the identification of noeĩn and thinking (thought).

  Burnet (and, of course others as well) suggest a “calm surface” of a fixed and arrested “truth” there, yet P
armenides’ fragment reveals a quite forceful (perceptual) dynamics which got harnessed and crystallized in his concepts of unity, eternity, and unsurpassable perfection; in the first place noéo gains its semantics from seeing: to perceive by the eyes, observe, notice.

  This genuine setup of Parmenides’ (implicit) visual bias—surely reflecting a cognitive attitude of the ancient Greeks in general—became manifest in the ontological framework of Plato and Aristoteles. Both of them established a long-range setting of concepts, thereby imposing a still enduring oculo- rsp. Ophtalmocentrism on occidental thinking which only as late as a century ago came into the focus of serious criticism.

  Analysis

  This criticism of “The Nobility of Sight,” as Jonas (1954) framed it—accompanies the imperialism of the eye since its very beginnings. A comprehensive portrayal of its genealogy, and in particular of the critique articulated in French poststructuralism, can be found in Jay (1993). For historical details we refer the reader to this volume; here, we only want to highlight some important aspects which should become relevant in the course of our argument.