To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin.
Nancy 2007: 72
According to Nancy, corporeal thinking means that one has to abandon the bold assumption that there could be any action, including any thought, that would not be rooted in a culturally specific, a genuinely marginal and fringy resonance. A resonance of the situation and its meaning:
Sound that is musically listened to, that is gathered and scrutinized for itself, not, however, as an acoustic phenomenon (or not merely as one) but as a resonant meaning, a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance.
Nancy 2007: 73
This resonance is always responding in specific relation to its own history and its particular situation and thus it can be observed in individual bodily actions and attached to corporeal sensibilities and idiosyncrasies. Expanding this view beyond the subject would mean that theories on sound-as-resonance would have to be regarded as theories on situated and corporeal interactions between creatures, things and physical events manifest in resonating vibrations anthropoids like to call sounds. Individual bodies react to noises of any electrical, mechanical or electronic machine nearby (e.g. a video projector), they are embedded in a resonating nexus, a vibrational force (Goodman 2010: 81–4) and yours as well as my thinking are put in motion by these generative forces. A monist and perceptually radical epistemology is then implicit to the writings by Steve Goodman and Jean-Luc Nancy as a symmetrical anthropology (Latour 1991, 1999). A symmetrical and as such post-anthropocentric anthropology operates culturally and historically reflected to question the condition humaine, the condition of the human in culture, not to explore this condition with a normative approach, but to relate a humanoid and its body within a dense, materially and corporeally resonating field of possibilities, flexibilities and other relations of the human. This effort to emphasize present materialities as an indispensable ground for culture is a major issue of the so-called New Materialism; it differs largely from phenomenological studies undeviatingly adhering to a predominance of an anthropoid actor. Listening and sounding exchanges this assumed humanoid predominance for a sonic dominance (Henriques 2010). The corporeal situation of listening addresses a particular sonic, bodily felt sense manifest in sound practices (Altman 1992, Müller-Schulzke 2012) that is beyond any verbal articulation a Sonic Corpus—following Nancy. Eugene T. Gendlin, psychologist and phenomenologist, who proposed the term bodily felt sense for such corporeal manifestations of proprioceptivity, summarizes the multiple forms of knowledge inherent in this bodily felt sense as follows: “Any situation, any bit of practice, implies much more than has ever been said” (Gendlin 1992: 201).
In this very minute, for instance, while I am working on this chapter, the neighbors above seem to be listening to a rather urgently swinging and grooving Bob Marley song, which I cannot identify precisely: the ceiling of our apartment seems to abate and to filter the sound, letting only the most significant and deep vocal and bass frequencies get through—the sonic signature of a characteristic Bob Marley production. Luckily, I do not feel disrupted by this vibration entering my working space against my wish. Instead I have to smile, remembering former situations in my life in which I have (maybe even intentionally) had to listen to this music. And I remember once attending an impressive presentation given by Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut on the question: What can a Marley do if digitally zombified as part of a posthumous duet? (Piekut and Stanyek 2010) I feel rather lucky and privileged to be able to incorporate this otherwise potentially annoying sonic intervention in my current writing situation as a quite appropriate example of this second remark on the corporeal aspects of sonic epistemologies.
Due to this association, my neighbors’ taste in music on this early Monday afternoon in June has a quite generative impact on my writing. The generativity of this sound entering the realm of my private space precisely exemplifies the spatial and corporeal aspects of a listening situation. As such, this tiny intervention shows the main fundamental generative potential in focusing on a listening and sounding situation in all its spatial, corporeal, and situated aspects, which are to be found at the aforementioned intersections between the writings of Nancy, Goodman, and Gendlin. These aspects imply what I would like to call:
The Sonic Corpus as concept of a materialist anthropology of idiosyncratic, sensible interferences and interpenetrations between related sound actors.
How to think beyond logocentrism?
Both the transformations of and challenges to epistemology discussed in the two sections so far lead to an issue which has been at stake in critical theory for quite some time now. But not until recently has it seemed that the discourse, the production techniques, and the practices within sound studies were blossoming in such a way that one might turn to the problems inherent to focusing on reductive, language-related and syllogistic models of understanding sound or the senses in general. Whereas in academia these are the primary forms in which arguments are presented, questioned, and discussed, it becomes more and more obvious that such an approach tends to reproduce clichés and even an essentialism of structure when applied to the sensory experience of anthropoids. Arguing with the senses implies the logic of ever multiplying values, that cannot be subsumed by structuralist approaches.
Let me give you an example of a situation where a specific sound event, which I can look at and listen to, takes place. For instance, my experience of how The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) presented their latest video essay, titled People to be Resembling at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (The Otolith Group 2013). In standing in front of the screen watching this video, in listening to the accompanying music recorded by Don Cherry, Colin Walcott, and Nana Vasconcelos in 1978, in listening to a recording of Gertrude Stein reading a passage from The Making of Americans on top of this musical piece—“There are many ways of making kinds of men and women” (Stein 1966: 290)—and in watching photographs shown in the video from the original recording sessions in Ludwigsburg in the 1970s, sorting the celluloid and the photographic negatives—in doing all of this, I just go with the flow of this essayistic video. I might not identify all the details at first sight or sound. But I like to take my time for this heterogeneous and highly contingent meeting of sensory artifacts. And I like to enjoy the sheer qualities of colors and noises, of cuts and layers, of astonishing sound events, compositional structures and inspiringly developing connections between moving images, sounds, words, and flow.
After the video has ended I feel soothed. I feel refreshed and full of questions, phrases, and ideas, possible arguments and possible worlds in which this artifact would make sense to me. But I take my time. I do not rush. With both expert and background knowledge at hand, I might now be able to elaborate a bit on this work by Otolith in words and in arguments: how it might have been historically constructed; how it might be technologically advanced or outdated; how I might link it to a more original or a more restricted theoretical model of sound. I may even be able to describe how a communication process is put forward by the specific listening and watching situation implied by the piece. And I might do this by scrutinizing the semiotic operations dominating this piece—or the mathematical operations equally dominant, especially in Stein’s text that is actually based on algorithmic operations. All of this might even be of a certain interest to some of the readers of this chapter—but still: Would it be of any relevance to a situation in which you would actually listen to this piece?
There might be instances of sound art and video art in which historical, contextual, and referential clarifications would change an individual’s inspiration by or rejection of a particular work. But there are—(I assume) a lot more—cases in which such additional information surely will not change my experience at all. This fact, which might be hard to swallow for the majority of academics, is exactly the main argument of the
mathematician, cultural historian, and philosopher Michel Serres in Les Cinq Sens from 1985. In this volume he argues very clearly that—as researchers and as hommes or femmes de lettres, but also just as a common man in writing cultures—one has to be aware of what one is convincingly able to say and write about something, however vigorous, energetic, and fervent it may be, might in the end not be close to truth at all. It could as easily be a merely pretty sounding theoretical artifact, sensorily detached and actually contradicted by experience.
Such a habit of speaking and writing, rapidly and fluently, Serres names the golden mouth, la “bouche d’or” (Serres 1985: 166). This golden mouth speaks eloquently and it has convincing arguments and concise descriptions quick at hand at any given moment. Though this might seem a quite desirable ability, Serres sees this as one the most harmful déformations professionelles of academia and research—and surely he is right. He proposes a massive slow down: instead of letting yourself being taken over too fast by your own habitual phrases and arguments, your knowledge and your ideas, he proposes that one takes her or his time to simply perceive, to let an experience sink in, to get a genuinely profound and radiating sense of what is actually taking place around us, at this very instant. Such an extended, intense, and also exclusive experience, such an epoché, harbors the potential of a far more inspiring understanding and interpretation of the sensory events going on around you, a potential that can be explicated at a later point. Serres is therefore making a plea for a situated empiricism and sensualism, and for the epistemic value of pure experience. This emphasis on the continuity between sensing and thinking, between experience and reflection, is a late resonance of the radical empiricism William James (1912) proposed a century ago. James then insisted, similar to Serres, on an experiential continuity that needed not to overcome any separation between experience and reasoning:
[T]here is in general no separateness needing to be overcome by an external cement; and whatever separateness is actually experienced is not overcome, it stays and counts as separateness to the end. But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact that experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. That one moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is ‘of’ the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past’s continuation; it is ‘of’ the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.
James 1912: 89
Such transitions of one’s experience (prospectively as well as retrospectively) are not per se covered by a verbal argument—but rather by a narration, by poetry, or by the arts. So, to hesitate and to progress only after having granted yourself the time to experience something, and to deliberately scrutinize the transitions of such a process, that is the proposition which both James and Serres make. For both, the experiential is a fundamental and generative force, as it contributes to (or even is) the creation of meaning (Gendlin 1962). This generative quality of a situated experience can be observed as soon as one invents new and very specific, rich statements in language for describing any sensory experience. This language does not emerge out of the matrix of known phrases, idioms, and vocabularies—but out of a truly inspiring, situated, and often erratic experience, which leaves us speechless, maybe stuttering or blushing (cf. Gendlin 1992). I listen again to the recording of Gertrude Stein’s voice; I turn again to People to be Resembling. It seems to me as if I am hearing very soft and tiny, almost nanoscopic noises, incredibly evanescent and yet very present; sounds that may be a recording of someone flicking through the photographs and photographic negatives. I am not sure whether I actually do hear these noises or if I am imagining them whilst watching the video. Watching it once more, I still hear them. I like them and I like to indulge in them. For maybe a minute or so they seem to me to be the most striking and impressive element in this video. This impression of course changes again, soon after.
Drawing on Serres, James, and Gendlin it seems that sonic thinking also emphasizes the experiential and generative sides of listening and sounding in situ. This means that as a supplement to, or maybe even in spite of, the undoubtedly powerful discourses implemented in contemporary cultures, it is necessary not to neglect the status of the individual experience of a phenomenon. To understand this as a merely arbitrary or only subjective experience would be to underestimate the non-arbitrary qualities of individual experience and individual subjectivities. As such, it only goes to show how contemporary logocentric research and writing culture often neglect (via individual speakers and protagonists) the fact that no humanoid could possibly be capable of experiencing this world as a well-tempered, objective, and neatly organized model of arguments and examples. Instead one encounters the world as a succession of individual, incredibly tiny and particular situations and experiences, which might be erratic and scary, hasty and hectic, lame and boring, eluding and inspiring, all in surprising comminglings. Stressing these experiential moments in combination with their contextualization and historicization might provide a subtle and inspiring empirical foundation as a way to start and to guide a sonic analysis. Such an analysis, corporeal and blatantly aware of the pitfalls of its own logocentrism, seems to be far more appropriate to the field of the sonic than one which would proceed exclusively to describe the lines of signal processing, the communication processes, or the information theories behind sonic events. To transcend such generalizing and abstraction-driven scripted experience, this scripted evidence, would then equip researchers with the means of articulating, of reflecting and of manifesting specific experiences within a particular sonic situation. To write such a thick description (Geertz 1973), such an intense and personal narration of an auditory experience and one’s highly idiosyncratic, explorative, essayistic reflections on it, is then to think imaginatively offering:
Experientiality and generativity as means to transcend scripted, traditional, and logocentric discourses on the sonic.
How to think imaginatively?
So far, thinking about sound has led me to a discussion of aspects of spatiality, of corporeality, and of logocentrism in research and in the arts. At the end of the previous section it seemed that an individual imaginary, incorporating both a bodily self-perception and a sense of spatial situations, could have the potential to play a major part in research on the sonic:
That humming background sound is ancient—the ringing of a huge bell. Exploding into a mass of intensely hot matter, pulsing out vast sound waves, contracting and expanding the matter, heating where compressed, cooling where it was less dense. This descending tone parallels the heat death of the universe, connecting all the discrete atoms into a vibrational wave. This cosmic background radiation is the echo of the big bang.
Goodman 2010: 81
In the year 13.7 billion B.C. Steve Goodman, the author of these lines, was not yet born—nor was any other anthropoid or any of its predecessors. Nor did anything exist which one could name earth or planet or even locatable matter. The author is very vividly describing a moment just briefly after the Big Bang—or should I say: the author is imagining it? Any author legitimates the relevance of his or her writing not least by the relevance of the objects of description he or she chooses. For instance, writing about international politics, important inventors and entrepreneurs, or major inventions of science, has for a long time been deemed far more relevant tasks for historiography than writing about social and everyday practices of maintaining a larger family household, more important than the subtle interactions in teaching, and a lot more important than the arduous work of cleaning the work environment for a large group of people. But the
contemporary social field within which any author writes is the main determinant of ascription of such relevance and importance. Thus, writing about the Big Bang can be quite joyful and, at the same time, it is a strong proclamation of the author’s assumed relevance. But yet, Goodman integrates his interpretation of the Big Bang in the latter part of the first third of his book. Hillel Schwartz goes a bold step further, as he starts his cultural history of Making Noise (Schwartz 2011) with age-old narrations of the Big Bang and of creational situations in mythology and literature. His book thus resembles an ultimate encyclopedia of unwanted sounds—an (un)holy book of noises.
In the paragraph by Goodman, cited above, and in similar passages written by Schwartz, the imaginative versatility and rhetorical skill of its author affect me as a reader immediately and deeply. While reading Goodman’s paragraph, I am actually teleported through time—by my imagination—to the situation briefly after the Big Bang. It makes me try to imagine at least some elements of its auditory and sensory quality. The pervasive effect an imaginative text might have on us, the narrative immersion, the experiencing via imagination, has been quite a well-known fact and poetic technique in literary writing for ages and across different genres and cultures. But in many fields of research—outside of ethnographic field research for instance—it might be a rather surprising but yet effective approach to analysis not only in retrospect but also in synchronic approaches: experientiality and generativity take effect as soon as a sensorial experience catches our attention. In these moments one’s body, or—to be more precise—one’s flesh, the empire of the senses (Howes 2004) guides the thinking: a sonic, a corporeal epistemology (Schulze 2015). Here I am obviously following the train of thought that Merleau-Ponty laid out in his late works on the body and on the imagination. In these he explored (which is in close proximity to the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy) how anthropoids perceive themselves, not as the signifying and tidily constructed bodily machines known from anatomy, but more as a sensory formation in flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Humanoids as you and me do not actually live in logocentrically arranged and immovable structures of bodily functions. On the contrary, at any given moment one is experiencing a quite particular generativity of the flesh: you sense and think, I resonate and react—both are we continuously transforming and transmuting.
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