Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  If we assume that music and time-constituting consciousness are somehow connected we should also assume that Husserl’s use of “melody” to illustrate temporality is problematic—rather like endorsing a description of space by making reference to an Italian renaissance painting (and the particular methods it uses in order to represent the three-dimensional universe within a two-dimensional canvas). In my view Husserl’s description of temporality shares some of the ideologically contended assumptions present in those methods. The correspondence between temporal “perspective” and spatial perspective is an interesting point, and one that Husserl acknowledges within his argument:

  [T]he process “contracts” as it sinks back into the past – a sort of temporal perspective (within the original temporal appearance) as an analogue of the spatial perspective. In receding into the past, the temporal object contracts and in the process also becomes obscure.

  Husserl 1992

  Within this analog the idea of melody relates to time in much the same way that linear first-person perspective relates to space—melody represents the temporal, much like perspective represents the spatial. Similarly it sustains ideas about time in the way that linear first person perspective sustains ideas about space. For me Husserl’s analogizing of spatial and temporal perspective is interesting because the ubiquity of linear perspective in visual arts has been relentlessly critiqued by both artists and theorists throughout the last century. Such critiques question the belief that the three-dimensional space of the world can be impartially represented by the two-dimensional space of the canvas. By contrast, critical analyses of visual perspective suggest that, rather than presenting a value-free copy of the world beyond the canvas, the methods used to represent a three-dimensional world in a two dimensional plane are loaded with culturally specific notions of space, the self, and the world. Russell argues:

  By taking as its first premise a single point of vision, perspective had stabilized visual experience. It had bestowed order on chaos; it allowed elaborate and systematized cross-referencing, and quite soon it had become a touchstone of coherence and even-mindedness. To “lose all sense of perspective” is to this day a synonym for mental collapse.

  Russell 1981

  Similarly Kuhn suggests that Renaissance art provides an “a priori pictorial space” that emphasizes an “extraordinarily thorough conformity to the frontal format” that “the prestige of the frontal format surely had to do instead with its aura of architectural determinacy; we are in designed space, not found space” (Kuhn 1990). And tracing the development of linear perspective, Wright (1983) describes explorations of a number of grid-based systems, dividing space into units of equal and repeatable volume, placing an emphasis therefore on the geometricizing of space.

  Linear perspective sustains the following principles: a singular viewpoint; the world as rule-governed, ordered, coherent, controlable, rational (even-mindedness); the world as goal directed in terms of designed (as opposed to found) space; and the subject as spatially fixed (conforming to frontality). In doing so it reinforces the sense of separation between ourselves and the world, and promotes the view that the self is an identifiable, stable, remote, and rational viewer of the world outside ourselves. Thus first person perspective does not merely suggest “this is where you stand as an observer in relation to this space, the objects it contains, and the events depicted,” it actively demonstrates this position with the participation of the viewer. To sum up, the values embedded within the structural logic of this system construct the Classical/Cartesian-like subject (the subject as fixed and remote, rational viewer of the world, engaging with it in a goal-driven manner, central and singular).

  These kinds of arguments propose that linear perspective is a value-laden system that constructs a very particular depiction of space that is bound into a particular world-view. It necessarily also constructs a spatially identifiable position outside the canvas from which the viewer encounters the contents of the painting. Linear perspective therefore not only shapes our understanding of the space shown, but also our wider experience and understanding of ourselves as distinct points in relation to the extending space around us—a subjectivity that Sloterdijk (1998) characterizes as “remaining planted on its extensionless thought-point while observing an extended thing.”

  In critiquing this, Metzinger refers to the “self-model,” the Classical subject with which we are so familiar with is just another (albeit rather popular) self-model—a way of understanding ourselves, the world, and our place within it.

  Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognised as models. … you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated … Consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective are fascinating representational phenomena that have a long evolutionary history, a history which eventually led to the formation of complex societies and a cultural embedding of conscious experience itself.

  Metzinger 2003

  If spatial perspective is both “in and of” a particular world-view, how might the melodic structures to which Husserl refers function within the same world-view? The musics to which Husserl alludes (recall he never actually describes specific notes or sounds) presumably include the ordering of distinct notes over a given time frame—these are planned in advance and stepped through one event at a time, perhaps played in response to a written score or some sort of internalized pattern. In this sense Husserl’s melody is ordered in a temporal domain in much the same way that spatial objects are ordered in a spatial domain according to the techniques used in linear perspective. Here musical events emanate from the future (everything to the right-hand side of the now-note as written on a score); through the present (the note that is actually happening); and into the past (everything to the left-hand side of the now-note). Clearly this ordering is already associated with a conception of time as a linear, one-dimensional, one-direction “flow” of moments between past and future. It promotes the view that time is something that passes as opposed to temporality as being something stationary or wholly present. Within this particular framework emphasis is placed on an infinitely narrow, but overwhelmingly important, “now” point—the point where one is currently “located” within the overall musical or temporal landscape as it unfolds. The listener as a distinct entity is “here” within the “now.” Thus this framework constitutes the listener in a particular relation to the narrative sequence of events, placing the listener in an identifiable and stable moment (recall Sloterdijks’ “extensionless thought-point”) within a temporal “flow.” This establishes a temporally fixed “first-person-perspective” in relation to an ordered, coherent, planned, and typically predictable temporal landscape. In doing so it presents an inherently teleological framework that, much like the spatial form of linear perspective, simultaneously demonstrates the authority and authenticity of the Classical subject.

  Just as perspective is a description of space, the relation of spatially ordered objects within it, and our position as observer; so too Husserl’s conception of melody offers a particular and culturally specific description of time-consciousness, the world and the self. This depiction of time is similar (as Husserl suggests) to linear spatial perspective—linear temporality that extends outwards in two directions (the past and the future) from the subject’s now point.

  I think therefore that Husserl’s mistake is to compare temporality to a system that in itself already serves as a framework within which our experience and understanding of temporality is constructed. He asks us to think about time by comparing time to something that is already a way of thinking about time. And thus arrives at a description of time that simply reasserts his particular package of European beliefs:

  members of a society share a common temporal consciousness; time is a social category of thought, a product of society … Collective-time is the sum of the temporal procedures which interlock to form the cultural rhythm of a given soc
iety.

  Hassard 1990

  For me this raises questions about the validity of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as a way of encountering the world with “no knowledge or preconceptions in hand” (Cogan n.d.). It is rather coincidental that after a process of phenomenological reduction Husserl comes to more or less the same assumptions about time that all we non-philosophers already generally adhere to in our day to day lives. Husserl merely reasserts his European prejudices in the guise of some a-cultural, transhistorical truth.

  For persons of European descent, space and time are our space and our time, that is concepts developed in “western” thought. But we are apt to assume that they are essential features of the cosmos rather than categories of thought which enable us to interpret the world as a system in accord with our experiences and purposes.

  Elkin 1969

  It is at this point that I find some similarities between Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and rhetorics surrounding the practice of deep listening—a technique pioneered by Pauline Oliveros to advance sonic awareness. I think deep listening is often a very positive and rewarding experience, but for me the idea that one can somehow transcend one’s culture and personality in order to experience the world in a “deeper” manner is problematic—we cannot unlearn our cognitive development. I raised this issue when I met Oliveros with a class of students, and in place of deep listening I proposed the idea “method listening,” a term derived from the practice of method acting. The term is intended to foreground how we often engage in role-play and adopt different personae in order to participate in different types of music activities. Although I can claim to have conceived the term, I do not claim to have invented the process—I think that it is something each of us does every time we listen to any piece of music. In accordance with method listening, music is not about getting in touch with some deeper feeling or self, but merely a means to facilitate role playing of one sort or another. I think this is as true when we listen to Miles Davis’s Birth of Cool, Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, Four Seasons (Vivaldi), LaMonte Young’s Trio For Strings or Cage’s Imaginary Landscape: if you want to “get into it” you are compelled to wear the stupid outfit that comes with it. For me music is generally about wearing a stupid costume, and the enjoyment of music is actually the enjoyment of wearing that costume—of continually reperforming one’s aesthetic prejudices as an attempt to convincingly achieve some semblance of what might constitute a “convincing” personality … “you could wear no better masks, you present-day men, than your own faces!” (Nietzsche 1891).

  Imagine for example someone really enjoying listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and involuntarily growing a massive white wig (of the kind worn by Italian Baroque composers). I suspect this is what is actually what happens at some purported psychodynamic level—recalling both Metzinger’s self-model hypothesis as well as the Nietzschean mask-as-face metaphor.

  For me the interdependence between music and “the self” takes two distinct forms: (1) in terms of the correlation between the description of music as a linear stream of events and the self as a stable position within those events (mirroring the interdependence of the Cartesian/Classical subject and first-person representations of space, i.e. music as a first-person representation of time); and (2) as a means performing a self-identity (as opposed to an expression of who one “really is”). To continue the costume metaphor of the previous paragraph these two distinct “forms” function as both coat hanger (1) and garment (2) and share that sort of relationship. A model that is very different to the kind of “system and its uses” dichotomy, or, the container and its contents scheme. What I mean is this model hopefully enables us to avoid questions like: what is the general structure of the self and who specifically am I?

  Retuning to the issue of time-experience and its relation to musical time, as most contemporary musicians now accept, musical structures are not universally built of notes that are played in a predetermined manner and in a particular order. Even if we might agree that any music could be transcribed in this kind of linear fashion, it does not necessarily follow that the music is constructed, encoded, learned or inherited within a linear score-like paradigm. In fact many forms of vernacular and non-Western musics are based around dynamic systems rather than linear scores. And the whole body emphasis of many vernacular forms is not ideally encoded with the linear temporal diagram that is the Western score. Similarly unusual rule-based procedures, indeterminacy, and so on have been to some extent investigated and annexed by musical orthodoxies during the twentieth century. Ligeti’s Continuum (1968) for example presents a series of notes the speed of which hovers on the border of both the performers ability to play and the audience’s ability to distinguish. These challenge Husserlian assumptions about music—but do they constitute different temporal modes, different experiences of temporality?

  For Heidegger the temporal is not a reducible thing that exists independently of our experiences of it. Throughout his major work (Heidegger 1962) and in a colossal amount of supplementary writings, Heidegger promotes the view that the temporal shows up in various different forms throughout our encounters with the world and the objects within it. “Time is not something that happens outside of us, a kind of receptacle of being; we ourselves are time. The processes of the world are encountered in time” (Heidegger 2002).

  For me, as an artist working mainly with time-constitutive systems, this is the primary significance of Heideggerian philosophy. Drawing from this position I want to argue that different musics—forms, styles, traditions, sounds, and so on—construct distinct temporal modalities, that are themselves part of wider cultural beliefs about time and its structure.

  The temporal structure of Indian music is a living demonstration of how profoundly a musical tradition can reflect the influence of cultural institutions of time. Just as the visuals arts of India have been shaped by long-standing cultural preferences for a circular disposition of space, so have music and the other performing arts responded to preferences for a cyclical disposition of time.

  Macey 1994

  Other peoples with different cultural heritages, with different experiences and purposes, may conceive of space and time differently from ourselves. They do, as can be illustrated from, amongst others, the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines.

  Elkin 1969

  A principal point of agreement in much writing on Australian Aboriginal culture is the suggestion that Aboriginal cosmogony places a priority on space instead of time. Swain (1993) contends that Aboriginal ontology is one where being is understood primarily in terms of “place and space” as opposed to time.

  Rather than prejudicing the issue with the word “time,” I suggest it is best to state that the Aborigines operate from an understanding of rhythmed events. The semantic clarity is important in order to avoid giving time an unfounded ontological autonomy in Aboriginal life. In the popular Western view, time still, so to speak, ticks on even if nothing occurs; its emancipation from events is ensured by its own subjugation of an ongoing numbered measure. But in Aboriginal thought there is nothing beyond events themselves. This is entirely apparent in their cosmologies, which lack any reference to ultimate pre-event origins. For Aborigines, there is nothing more fundamental than the statement: events occur.

  Swain 1993

  There is no first cause, original world-stuff, moment of origin or co-ordinated emergence. Rather than a world creation, Aboriginal narratives affirm a multitude of independent place-shaping Events. … Aboriginal ontology rests upon the maxim that a place-being emerged, moved and established an abode … the Aboriginal spatial order has in fact left no room for the emergence of temporality as a principle of being. Rather [it] must derive from the ‘affirmation of place’.

  Swain 1993

  This assertion is validated by clinical studies, Davidson and Klich (1980) report “a preference for spatial over temporal order in free-recall tasks” of Aboriginal “desert” children aged between 9 a
nd 16 years. Similarly, TenHouten (1999) suggests that Australian Aboriginal thinking patterns do not feature “linear” information processing, and suggests “visuospatial” rather than “temporal” orientation. Drawing from this, TenHouten develops a distinction between two forms of time consciousness, defined as Patterned-cyclical and Ordinary-Linear. Pattern-cyclical time consciousness is associated with Aboriginal culture, and Ordinary-Linear consciousness is typically associated with a Western worldview.

  A particularly notable feature of TenHouten’s model is a difference in how time is experienced. In Ordinary-Linear Time-Consciousness time shows up as a series of fleeting moments, where time-passes. By contrast, in a Pattern-Cyclical Time-Consciousness mode it shows up as the experience of long duration. Elkin (1969) suggests the Aboriginal concept of The Dreaming is central to this extended temporality, it is simultaneously “here and now” providing the “grounding or conditions of existence.” Here temporarily is not conceived of as a horizontal line that extends back chronologically through a series of pasts, but rather of a vertical line that underlies and is contained within the present’s eternal now. Elkin’s description of an eternal now corresponds to TenHouten’s description of pattern-cyclical temporality as extended duration. The persistence of these extended temporal forms is in stark contrast to the ephemeral and momentary frame of Western time. Thus we have two very distinct versions of the phenomenological now: (1) that which is infinitely contracted into an impossible point of zero duration, slicing into time with infinitely sharp precision; and (2) that which is boundlessly expanded thus rendering all time both indivisible and immeasurable, neither containing nor contained within a grid-like temporal meta-structure.