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Sloterdijk, P. (2007), “Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik hören?,” in P. Sloterdijk and P. Weibel (eds), Der ästhetische Imperativ, 50–82. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt.
Stengers, I. and B. Latour (Foreword) (2011), Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. M. Chase. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
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Waldenfels, B. (2006), “Das Lautwerden der Stimme,” in D. Kolesch and S. Krämer (eds), Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen, 191–210. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
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9
Sound Beyond Nature | Sound Beyond Culture or: Why is the Prague Golem Mute?
Jakob Ullmann
I have to start by begging the reader’s pardon. First, as the outlines I will give are short and abridged—in more than one case the brevity of my explanations may stand in high tension to the complexity and the significance of the questions I ask.
The second reason, which makes it necessary to beg your pardon, is—as I would say—the a-synchronicity or non-simultaneity of my approach to the present situation of sound and its discussion. It seems to me that we undergo for the second time in Europe (better: in western Europe) a fundamental change in the relation to sound “itself,” to art, which deals with sound and the sociological results of the new situation and use of sound. We deal with sound differently: we are confronted with sound in a different way than in the centuries before. Perhaps we have to state that our relation to sound differs from the very diverging relations man could have to sound throughout history.
For the first time sound, however it “sounds,” can be produced, repeated, even fixed in a moment of free duration. We deal with this sound, we hear this sound as if it can be the same: produced by machines or by persons, by instruments, which need breath or motion of human limbs or instruments, which only have to switch on or off. Sound seems to be nothing else than a limited series of numbers, of zeros and ones, every time and everywhere available and in the same way identical with itself, as zeros and ones are identical with itself. The sound results of this fundamental change have a clear and pure surface; it is clean like a picture gone through the procedures of Photoshop-editing. I suspect that sound has lost at least a lot of its ambiguity and its non-availability in this process of change.
But before we can come to this point—and so to my a little bit old fashioned considerations—we have to assert, that in one aspect sound and its relation to human beings has not changed at all: you cannot escape from it. Sound will follow you everywhere. You cannot shut your ears and even if you try it by the help of the hands, the sounds of the environment, the sounds of culture and of nature will find the way to your brain.
It is not difficult to explain that this physical condition of the human body in the dawn of mankind had advantages over the sense of vision. Man had a sense of 360° to get wind of a danger. Even during the periods of sleep the ears stay open and give you the possibility to try to cover in expectation of danger. The brain is even faster in processing the aural impressions than the pictures, which reach the brain through the eyes. So the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound is balanced. But—as especially somebody who suffers Tinnitus knows very well—we have to pay a high price for the ever-open ears. We are not even able to decide clearly if the sound is inside or outside of us. Sound surrounds us, sound traces us and we have no possibility to escape. Perhaps sound does not denote danger, even less danger for body and life but it became an un-ignorable, an obvious part of every-day-life as well as part of every kind of artistic and scientific activities. Perhaps only the addition of these two tendencies: the omnipresence of sound and its reduction to a clean surface without any background made it possible to use it as a weapon.
I wondered why—after the legendary use of sound to destroy walls by the help of trumpets in the Middle East more than 2000 years ago—sound and sound-machines are used only to frighten the enemies and not to harm or to kill them. It was our time which changed this in a fundamental way: during the Iraq war the US army used the “Ride of the Valkyries” by Richard Wagner to conquer inhabited areas in northern Iraq (Rötzer 2005). The US army copied the famous movie by Francis Ford Coppola “Apocalypse Now,” so we can ask what it means for reality if reality copies fiction and not vice versa, but this is not our theme today. My assumption is, that this use of sound as a weapon was possible not earlier than sound lost its old ambiguity, its not removable background, which made it really dangerous to use sound also for those who tried to use it. Could one be sure that sound will not strike back, that sound will not harm the operator of sound? The history of sound and the history of music are full of examples, which can, which should be, seen as cautionary tales. Perhaps better than elsewhere we can see here the necessity to ask old-fashioned questions, to ask for the ambiguities of sound and its tendency to deprive itself from other phenomena of reality and from the listener who tries to catch the sound or even his experience of listening. So to say “in former times” we had no chance to fix the sound, we had to fix its source, its parentage and origin as fast as possible because it had gone before we became aware of it in the right way.
The attempt to locate the sound as a special sound, as an element of a system of signs, of a ladder of different steps of danger in nature or culture seems to be a first attempt to domesticate the wildness of sound. Where is it coming from? Is it a sign of a matter of fact or is it a fact in itself? Does the thunder speak, does the volcano roar? Are the birds singing for themselves or are they speaking to us? Is there any system of communication which contains the avalanche, a mountain creep as well as the sounds of stars, the singing of whales as well as the singing of human beings for Dionysos, other gods or their lovers? It is clear that in such a system the question of sounds of nature and sounds of culture cannot be asked.
As Athanasius Kircher shows in his huge Musurgia Universalis, these sounds are all attributed to creation, which is an established order of things, events, animate beings, humans, and even superhuman creatures. Sound loses its connotation of danger when it becomes attached to an ordered divine activity. But in reality you cannot change or move sounds—you are not allowed to as Morton Feldman states!—as Kircher did with the organ of creation; there the keyboard is changed for reasons of symmetry (Kircher 1650: 367). So Kircher has to answer the question why birds can make so marvelous music but mammals do not. Kircher suggests that mammals are also able to make music; he gives a proof by quoting a friend who tried to proselytize the South American aborigines. This friend told the roman polymath that he found a sloth, which was able (in the times of Kircher) to sing the hexachord correctly (Kircher 1650: 26). In the times of Charles Darwin the apes learned—from the sloth?—to sing the 12 notes of the scale in equal temperament (Darwin 1981: 332). Sounds of culture and sounds of nature cannot be distinguished in this order of life and of reality. Sounds have lost their danger because the only sound, which is not a response expected and ordered by God the creator, is the Word of creation itself. It is clear that it is beyond nature as well as culture containing creation. It comes into the world in a double and strange way: not as a sound but as flesh and blood. To understand this theory it needs more time than we have he
re and more intelligence than I can offer, so we can put this idea away for a little bit; we will have to come back to it after explaining the first fundamental change in European apprehension of sound and the handling of it.
One of the problems with sound—perhaps not only in the time before its technical reproducibility—is that we not only have few or even no time to identify its source, to decide if it is a sign of something or presence of somebody or if it is a matter of fact, a “thing” itself, but that we feel in a somewhat strange way that there is “something” behind the sound, a background which is not only indicated by the sound but an area of reality or even beyond “reality” which gives the sound a special and indomitable force and power. We do not know why, but we all agree that sounds can “change the mind” or “change the soul,” even change the state of the whole world. We can—in the better case!—only observe this event or process; in the worse case we are victims of the strange, wild, primordial powers which are not only indicated by sound but executed. It is not difficult to understand why Plato tries to avoid, to reject, even to forbid these powers from his program of education and his ideal of a political system (Plato 1962: 397c). He knew as a man with skills in mathematics and—not to forget!—in psychology well enough that the sound can overcome man but man cannot overcome sound. Is this background of sound “nature” an area which is so archaic that it has primordial force, force from the neighborhood of the old chaos that it predates and resists the operations of reason? Or is it even beyond “nature” because it has power on bodies and souls? This is not easy to understand and even more difficult to decide. What we can see is, that this question has a strong relation to the fact, that “sound,” even the artistic, the “musical sound,” takes no part in what is called “mimesis” in the theory of art and representation, not only in antiquity.
What we learn from Plato’s “Republic” is that the musician, the Auletos as well as the player of the lyre, does not and cannot depict or reproduce any sound of nature. He can and he will change minds, he will become himself like a drunkard in a tavern and will move his listeners as well in such persons, but he will not imitate or reproduce the sounds of drinking holes. So the sound resists not only the clear and illuminated identification of its parentage and origin, it seems to be impossible to speak about it in the same way as about real objects, things or facts of the world of matter and the world of imagination. You cannot make the sound to an object of consideration as others about which you can speak and think sine ira et studio without being affected by the object you speak about. Sound is close to language where the abyss of confusion of the levels of speaking and understanding is threatening. The problem is not to become the well-known Cretan, who tells us that every Cretan is a liar. The problem is that you cannot eliminate the fear that in the moment you speak about sound you are affected by this (or the) sound in a way that your considerations about your object of thinking are infected so intensely that your considerations cannot stay in the area of scientific research, of philosophical thinking. Sound seems to be even stronger than love!
In the “Symposium” Plato lets us participate in the debate between Aristophanes, Alcibiades and Socrates about the appropriate way to discuss the “Eros” (Plato 1976: 189d, 214e). We know that Eros is close to the gods; he is a daemon. And even this daemon we can transfer in a rational, in an un-affective discourse on human love and conditions of humanity in its entirety. Perhaps we should be more careful in respect to the dramaturgy of the philosophical text. Neither Aristophanes nor Alcibiades, not even Socrates is the person who explains to us the most important things: it is the woman Diotima who is able to go a step further than Aristophanes, Alcibiades and Socrates (Plato 1976: 202a). But after stones and animals, after natural forces and powers, even after Gods in Heaven and Hades, the woman is forced to turn and to follow the miracle-working power of Orpheus’s sounds. Is Orpheus not sure about the supernatural power of sound, is he obtained by the knowledge that his instruments will ever and ever repeat the cry of the killed beings which had been the precondition to give him the power to produce sounds? Why did Orpheus turn around? It is said, that the Thracian maenads killed Orpheus. Why could not he appease them after appeasing the animate and the inanimate worlds and its inhabitants? I want to express a slightly temerarious speculation: the combination of the power from beyond nature with the cultural practice of art loses its inevitable force in the moment in which this power comes in conflict or in contact with beings which can speak and which are determined by this ability. Greek Gods are speaking too, but it is not their destiny. Their destiny is a speaking which creates and which destroys.
The other awful story about sound and sound-practice in Greece seems to me to aim in the same direction: the atrocious fate of Marsyas, which on the one hand tells us something about the important role of the interval called third in sound-art (which is later called music), but on the other hand it tells us that the Greek world tried to domesticate the wild and by reason undefeated sound through the LOGOS. This LOGOS seems also to resist the dichotomy of nature and culture because in the Greek world it is not culture or nature which threatens all at the end, but the future: death. The God, who is the Lord of the LOGOS, is the one whose bow (its name is “life” but its work is death) hurts from far (Heraklit 1922: 22 B48). But also the LOGOS is ambiguous: it is the counterforce of reason by using words with sounds. The indissoluble combination of words and sounds is seen as the correction of the fact that reason alone cannot overcome sound. But the sound itself can—as Marsyas had shown!—express the LOGOS. Not only the LOGOS of mankind and language, but the LOGOS of the world! Did not the order of the world in the harmony of spheres show in an unsurpassed way that LOGOS and SOUND are one as proof that the world is not a chaotic agglomeration and a cluster of senseless atoms? Plato has shown us in his unequaled myth at the end of his “Republic” that this syzygy of sound and logos, of present, past and future, of heaven and earth, of life and death is—like the rope of the Greek triremes, where the word comes from—in harmony with beauty and the good in truth (Plato 1962: 616b). One can experience, one can even see this harmony, but not before death; this Platonic kind of sound is heard and seen in a life after death. The Platonic LOGOS needs to exceed the death row of Apollo; nature and culture are not equal in respect of death; nature and culture are equal in coordination under the system and structure of the unsurpassable good which is—as the Greeks say—“epekeina tīs ousias” (Plato, 1962: 509b), beyond nature as well as culture.
It is interesting that it took only around 300 years for the roman author and politician Cicero to give a much more pessimistic version of this vision (Cicero 1979: 340–345). He does not deny the harmony of spheres, the belt connecting heaven and earth. The belt, which is expression and guarantee of the order of the world, is not cut, but it is limited to the regions above the moon and beyond the ear. Human beings cannot hear the sound, which is the assertion that even under the moon in the chaotic world of human history and society a harmonic ground of existence is preserved. Cicero explains this fact with a kind of familiarization. As the people who live next to the waterfall of the Nile River (“Catadupa”), so the whole of mankind became deaf to the enormous sound of the spheres.
But this is not convincing. If the sound from beyond the sphere of mankind—human nature and human culture—is so great that human beings become deaf, why can we hear nature and culture?
The myth of Plato, as well as the myth of Cicero, tries to give the reader a source of the mythological knowledge. This is a little bit contradictory. If a myth is a myth, then it is a message from nowhere. A message from “somewhere” cannot be a myth in the full sense of the word. In the case of Plato it is much easier to understand than in the case of Cicero. If Plato tells us a “myth,” then he says to us in the same moment, that it is something that exceeds discourse, speech of philosophy and scientific research—in the moment anyway. For Cicero the case is much more difficult: the greatest and highest sound is from
nature, but it does not only exceed natural experience, it destroys the fundamental conditions of aural experiences. So not only is this sound cultural as a result of non-aural cogitation, it is only a reminiscence of an old golden age, in which the order of the world was not yet disturbed by the order of man.
We cannot be surprised that exactly in the moment in which nature became again a counterpart of man after the resignation of God in the eighteenth century, the great myth of music as a message to all mankind created a similar situation as in antiquity, but a situation with inverse signatures. Sound does not emerge from nature, (musical) sound cannot copy nature (the attempts to do this are really ridiculous in the eighteenth century); sound is art at the highest level, because sound is only, so to say, a real, insinuating phenomenon if it is totally artificial, not to say artistic. For the first time (in western Europe) sound-structure itself can form semantic patterns which are independent from extra-musical knowledge and extra-musical structures. But to make this possible sound has to have a receiver who is able to speak. The supposed sound-language beyond the ordinary languages of listeners of all countries and all times can—more felt than understood—be heard only if the one who gets the message is a being who is designated by being able to speak. Romantic music can be seen in this respect as a symmetrical situation to what we have seen in antiquity. There we had the chain, the “yoke” over the borderline of nature. Here we have the same situation with regard to culture. The ambiguity and the wild, forceful past of sound are tempered by their reconnection to a cultural practice in which the change of feeling replaced the change of being.
This turn around was only possible in Europe due to the first fundamental change with regard to sound “itself,” but much more to the art, which is connected with sound. There is no time to explain the complex history of sound-art from late antiquity to the beginning of the medieval era, but I think (perhaps we will have some discussion later) I can assert that all European music takes part in the decision of early Christianity to reject music at all. The WORD, what was mentioned above, came in flesh and blood but not in sound. So the word of what is again and again in the early Christian communities called the “message,” the “word of the cross” has to be stripped of and located far from sound. The sound is what pronounces the message, but the sound is not allowed to change the message or to add something. Because the sound—from the viewpoint of early Christianity—cannot be cured from its exceeding beyond nature and beyond culture, it has to be rejected at all. We all know very well that this rejection changed sound-art or established a new sonic art (perhaps), but sound came back through the holes of mouths, later of pipes and strings. So it can be instructive to look—at the end of my perhaps too much-abridged outlines—to a remarkable and strange phenomenon of the High Middle Ages.
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