Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Sedimented in deep layers of our cultural strata, there materialize—according to Jonas—three characteristics of sight which have a strong impact on our everyday conceptual formation (Jonas 1954: 507), viz. simultaneity in the presentation of a manifold, neutralization of the causality of sense-affection, and distance in the spatial and mental senses. Each of them constitutes important peculiarities of our experiential prehensions (cf. Whitehead 1978)—usually interpreted as the very basics of our reality. The visual field, for instance, is intimately related to our “idea” of juxtaposition and co-existence, resulting in the concept of extensionality, i.e. space. As we have already seen with Strawson, the latter is thought of as a necessary condition for the constitution of an ontology of particulars—because of its potential for separation and co-ordination. With respect to time, vision is also constitutive for the emergence of a now, an instant, a “co-temporaneous manifold … at rest” (Jonas 1954: 507). As Jonas argues, “sight” is unique with respect to simultaneity. “All other senses construct their perceptual unities out of a temporal sequence of sensations.” This, in turn, implies that “the whole content is never simultaneously present, but always partial and incomplete” (Jonas 1954: 508). Thus, Jonas concludes, sight offers us a “degree of detachment of the signified from the sign” (loc. cit.) that eventually seeds the idea of persistent existence which we would never get at if we had to rely on temporal senses only.

  In a similar vein, Jonas analyzes other aspects of our conceptual apparatus, often drawing on ideas from Whitehead (passim), in particular his distinction between presentational immediacy and causal efficacy (Whitehead 1985)—as he himself documents in his paper (Jonas 1950). Jonas quite convincingly traces concepts like objectivity, being (vs. becoming), form, thing, (empathetic) distance, disengagement—to mention only the most relevant—back to their visual “roots.” In conclusion, then—as Whitehead already emphasizes in his later writings and as becomes central in his own metaphysics (Whitehead, passim)—the bottom line is that Occidental Metaphysics turns the whole “concept” of reality upside down: the— phenomenologically—most real prehension that we have in our experience, namely touch—as Aristoteles already knew (De Anima), and as recent physics rediscovers (Fuchs 2011)—was deprecated and, in the same breath, substituted with a very specific, subordinated sensorium—sight—merely in order to create a complex conceptual machinery whose only purpose is the re-construction of this very experience in terms of substance/attribute metaphors.

  This analysis can be both deepened and broadened, as Ihde (1976), for instance, has shown. According to him, it seems to be impossible to treat sonic experience in isolation, at least from a phenomenological point of view. Instead it would be appropriate to re-balance our various accounts of sensory experience. He also tries to counter Strawson’s argument with his own phenomenological approach. A no-space situation, as it is constructed by Strawson, seems extremely inappropriate, because it neglects many contemporary insights into the sophisticated spatial capabilities of the (human) ear (Ihde 1976: 58). “Directionality and location, particularly advanced in such animals as … bats …, have shown the degree to which echo-location is a very precise spatial sense” (loc. cit.). It remains open, though, and it should not be discussed further here, to what extent such scientific investigations of animals, and here in particular of bats, justify talk of a “precise spatial sense.” This sort of research is, at least, mediated by a complex transpathic interpretation and remapping of experimental data onto our very specific human sensorium; it is genuinely a visualization. And—as is also the case with comparable situations—a behavioral morphism between bats and human beings does not imply necessarily a morphism on the sensory level as well.

  Sonic naturalism

  What should have become more explicit now is the enormous difficulty of approaching sonic experience (and not sonic “phenomena”) theoretically, just because our scientific language (e.g. “theory”) seems categorically inappropriate for thinking sound, or, as we will discuss later, for thinking process in general.

  chóra

  It was noticed earlier 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 objects and their properties (ibid.). And there is overwhelming “evidence” that, additionally, the deepest “geology” of our conceptual apparatus is inter-stratified with evolved visual structures and elements, inducing a preference for endurance, distance, and “objectivity.” Our “everyday” as well as “scientific” thinking is heavily entangled with a Metaphysics of Light (Blumenberg 1957).

  What we want to suggest in the concluding part of this paper is a research strategy that combines an insight into the breakdown of traditional (visual) metaphysics (and, consequently, the scientific discourses based on this very metaphysics), with a decided challenge to rethink sound in terms of process. Firmly convinced that such an endeavor can only succeed if we “rewind” to the point in history where the crucial decisions were made, and convinced also that this strategy does not imply a complete rejection of sight (and its implications), we would—similar to Plato’s procedure in his “Timaios” (Plato 1902)—“pose” a thoroughly displaced, perhaps lunatic question. As Sloterdijk, paraphrasing a suggestion by Hannah Arendt, entitles one of his essays: “Where are we when we are listening to music?” (Sloterdijk 2007), we would seize (subversively) his suggestion, and would ask Where “is” Sound? Hereby we will join the Platonic discussion on chóra—the “non-space,” the ultimate receptacle, bare in-definiteness, différance (Derrida 1995) and creativity (Whitehead 1967). Guided by both of these latter authors, we will start thinking sound as echémata: poù echémata … where sounding? Re-membering—inwards—pure immanence; no-where getting in touch: zing!—a sonic naturalism.

  Process

  As Whitehead has suggested: what we have to rethink is a new balance of fluency vs. permanence, of generation vs. substance (Whitehead 1978: 208). And fortunately, as a matter of course, we do not have to start from scratch. Beyond Whitehead, there are strong allies in French poststructuralism and feminism, like Derrida (1978, and passim), with his concept of différance Kristeva (1984) with her Revolution in Poetic Language, and Irigaray (1985) with her “Mechanics of Fluids.” There is the heavy stratum of Deleuzian/Guattarian-inspired ontologies also, and the emerging field of vibrational ontologies (Goodman 2010; Bennett 2009); the list could be longer. Moreover, there are fields beyond those ontological and metaphysical narratives, which might inseminate research in sonic naturalism. Space is limited here, so we could only “touch” those disciplines, mention in passing Non-Commutative Geometry (Connes 1994), Category Theory, in particular Monoidal Categories with application in Graphical Languages (Selinger 2009), Linear Logic and Quantum Coherent Spaces (Girard 2011), and many conceptual experiments in Physics, above all Quantum Information (Nielsen and Chuang 2000), Quantum Computation (Markopoulou 2012), and Quantum Gravity (Rovelli 2004).

  This last field deserves to be mentioned in particular: as a highly speculative undertaking, Quantum Gravity seems to be extremely open for conceptual tinkering. Unsettled by the vain attempts to interpret Quantum Mechanics consistently, and challenged by the deep incoherence between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, Quantum Gravity seems to have potential as a highly inspiring field for ontological engineering—a conceptual constructivism completely in line with Stengers’ interpretation of Whitehead (Stengers and Latour 2011).

  Autoactivity

  One of the most confusing implications of Locke’s bifurcation (primary vs. secondary qualities), in conjunction with Descartes’ substantial dualism, is the separation of the world in a passive, dead “stuff” (nature, or data), and an active agency (human being, mechanism, process) manipulating data in order to achieve some desired result. Along these lines, the world is deeply heteroactive, to an extent that Aristoteles felt comfortable to base his proof of the existence of “god” on t
his relationship; albeit ironically—in a way—he introduced simultaneously one of the first cosmological singularities: the unmoved mover.

  Recent attempts to fake non-heteroactive processes (usually categorized under the concept of “self-organization”) on a pure Newtonian, mechanistic basis hide the emerging complexities in a strange conceptual “vapor,” simply because true autoactivity cannot be created. Either it relies on some sort of hidden dynamics, or it just fails.

  This situation has changed thoroughly with Quantum Physics. Among its heavily corroborated backbone features we find a non-epistemological, ontological indeterminism. For most physicists it was like a kick in the teeth, and it still is. Einstein, as is quite familiar to most of us, even did not believe, and spent a lot of time and energy to “repair” this breakdown of nature.

  Yet, by putting back the facts on their feet, many highly interesting ideas emerged, commencing with Schrödinger’s strange “Zitterbewegung” (Rusin and Zawadzki 2014), continued by Wheeler with his introduction of the universe as self-excited circuit (and the self-creation of the participant observer) (Wheeler 1978: 22), right up to the most recent Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen (2008).

  All these concepts and ideas (even theorems) comply amazingly well with Whitehead’s process ontology and its heavily-loaded, often strange and difficult to read explication (Whitehead 1978): the crucial difference between actuality and actualization; the implacable orientation of actual entities toward a (potential) self-creation in line with constraints of a nexus of luring contemporaries; culminating in their final satisfaction as a free decision for “buzzing off,” thereby joining the ever growing archive of dead, actualized actualities. (And yes!—this comprises ontologically any scale; from macro-, to meso-, micro-, nano-, or even Planck-Scale. It allows, e.g., for a free will of electrons, as the latter was elaborated by Conway and Kochen.)

  Additionally, there are strong interferences with Whitehead and Postmodern thinking. Catherine Keller (2002), introducing Bracken (2002) and Pedraja (2002), already pointed to the highly promising intersections between Derrida’s concept of différance and Whitehead’s process ontology. And both Derrida (1995) and Whitehead (1967: 187) explicitly referred to Plato’s chóra as a crucial aspect of their own thinking. By considering existing approaches to overcoming a Metaphysics of Light, we should identify subtle hazards that should be avoided, though. Mersch (passim), for instance, in his attempt to install some sort of thinking performativity or thinking the event, still seems to be trapped in a binary (dialectical) Hegelian logic, and still—as has already been pointed out—subscribes to a substance/attribute ontology, with all its implications. And it is not obvious to what extent Derrida, through his phenomenological and structuralist legacies, could be continued in a constructive manner, in order to introduce “multivalued” logics of open-and-ed disjunctions, for instance, in the sense of Deleuze (1990), or in order to overcome his deeply embedded anthropocentrism. This last point seems to be of general relevance. Most of the existing approaches neglect the contemporary change in scale. We begin to live in a nano-biological age. Molecular techniques come close to enabling a serious modification of what (human) subjectivity was traditionally thought to be. The borders between species get blurred. And one, perhaps the most pressing challenge of the near future might be to establish a non-mechanistic, organic ontology which would allow us to overcome the strong convergence toward a “technopoietic” exploitation on the nano-scale, a thinking nature in purely technical terms (what Posthumanism is most often about). This would require a decisive counterpoint to a traditional, non-creative and conservative tessellation of the nano-scale. A counterpoint to the implementation of a being-what nano-mosaic, substantializing and objectifying nature, and leading eventually to an until now unimaginable nano-fascism. It would thus require a decisive contrast (Whitehead) to the prolongation of an already established technoscientific vector, an op-position to a continuation of our war against nature.

  Whitehead, with his socially oriented concept of nature—dynamic multiplicities, with fuzzy borders, on all scales—might give us conceptual instruments to tackle these challenges. Thus, sonic thinking—maybe in line with already existing vibrational ontologies—would be done in a much broader context than just … thinking sound.

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