Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  Because of this generative character of experience it becomes both problematic and challenging to manifest, to transmit, and to analyze individual sonic sensations. At this point the aforementioned cultural technique of narrating, of poetry, and of art becomes crucial as method. Imagination might be (and has been for ages) manifested and articulated in artifacts that evoke those imaginations; not arguments, not logically connected chains of signs and characters—but ones that bear all the richness of our experience. Narrations that manage to transmit an experiential depth and density to any person close enough to our cultural sphere. This skill to invent and to construct such poetic, truly new artifacts is what I call generativity. This concept—previously smuggled in to this chapter—originates from the sociology of aging (Kahlert 2012) and, in parallel, from the study of generative principles in the arts (Hay 1979, 2002). Both fields use this concept to refer to the erudite and mature ability to bring something into the world that effectively activates, inspires, and motivates others. Generativity is a much more open concept than for instance neighboring ones like creativity, productivity, or even work: concepts that are so deeply rooted in nineteenth-century concepts of industrial production and Eurocentric cultural hegemony that one could easily be witnessing them disappear as major concepts in the next decades. The most prominent example of a highly generative and imaginative writing on sound might be the sonic fiction of Kodwo Eshun (Eshun 1998, Schulze 2012, 2013a; Voegelin 2014). Writing a sonic fiction requires a sensory exploration into the processes of sound and into one’s individual appropriation of modes of listening (Chion 1994)—as well as into one’s idiosyncratic sonic experiences and imaginations. Eshun, his colleague Steve Goodman and—mutatis mutandis—also the sound artist and sound art scholar Salomé Voegelin are, so far, the most prolific writers and researchers who apply this approach of sonic and sensory fictions: rich with knowledge, experience and versatility, and just as rich in suggestions, imaginations, in phantasies and unsettling dreams. These are exactly the sources too often neglected in logocentric writing on sound, which, however, provide ways of understanding how various listeners experience sonic environments very differently. For instance, how Kodwo Eshun listens to the PhonoFictions (Eshun 1998: 121) inherent in the vinyl records issued by the three-person-collective known as Underground Resistance or UR:

  In UR, a constantly proliferating series of sonic scenarios take the place of lyrics. Sonic Fictions, PhonoFictions generate a landscape extending out into possibility space. These give the overwhelming impression that the record is an object from the world it releases. This interface between Sonic Fiction and track, between concept and music, isn’t one of fiction vs Reality or truth vs falsity. Sonic Fiction is the packaging which works by sensation transference from outside to inside. The front sleeve, the back sleeve, the gatefold, the inside of the gatefold, the record itself, the label, the CD cover, Sleevenotes, the CD itself; all of these are surfaces for concepts, texture-platforms for PhonoFictions. Concept feeds back into sensation, acting as a subjectivity engine, a machine of subjectivity that peoples the world with audio hallucinations. Parliament populates the world with cartoon universes; Sun Ra seeds the world with composition planets. Scientist reprograms the positioning of satellites, setting all chronosystems to warptime.

  Eshun 1998: 121

  Eshun takes us right into his personal machinery of imagination and immersion, which is triggered by the sound productions of Underground Resistance. He introduces us to what I termed a narrative immersion in the above; a sensation transference by means of the materiality of all the details in such a record. Or as the title of the quoted paragraph states: Sonic Fiction Is a Subjectivity Engine (Eshun 1998: 121)—a material engine that is connected to your listening body, to your incorporated idiosyncratic imagination, your sonic corpus. Generativity in action.

  For sound studies in general the potential of ambitious and poetically suggestive narration lies in exactly this transference of sensation. The individual but also highly intersubjective interpretation of sonic situations—as presented by Eshun, by Goodman, but also by Schwartz or Voegelin—might be analyzed via its ripples on the imagination of a particular, highly responsive listener. A sonic fiction is manifest in an artwork, in a sound piece, in conceptual sketches, or in any fiction in any medium the listener likes to choose. The contact between the listening researcher and the sound emitting situation or constellation generates this machine of imagination, this Subjectivity Engine (Eshun): an engine that manifests sonic traces, that makes it possible to come closer to the specific trajectories and signatures of how a specific sound performance proceeds, tumbles, and turns. Sounding and listening become apparent as an integrated aggregation that is only thinkable and operationable in cohesion, in corporeal listening and sound. The researcher-as-listener is, then, the best and—by now—the only reliable instrument of measuring personal affects by auditory experiences. An individual sonic persona (Schulze 2013b) thus unfolds his or her individual approach to the sounding world by applying:

  Imaginative thinking in the form of sonic fiction as a method to transfer sensation by means of a poetic or narrative immersion.

  The generativity of the flesh

  As you have been reading this chapter, at least one other soundscape did surround both you, your reading, and your understanding and doubts concerning my thoughts on sonic thinking. Or were there many different sonic environments? A quite different amount of noises, a number of annoying and (possibly) distracting or even disturbing sounds, a wide variety of non-, anti- or unsounds (Goodman 2010) did also accompany my efforts of conceiving, researching, writing, and revising this chapter. These noises and annoyances, listening experiences, and sonic discoveries I have tried to grant access to this chapter. “Sometime someone will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, someone sometime then will have a completed history of everyone” (Stein 1966: 290). Not only to exemplify the material effect such sounds might have on a person, but also to perforate my own text and its argument with sonically erratic moments. They can now and then seem irrelevant, maybe they make you furious—but nevertheless they act as truly generative in the course of an argument: representing the generativity of the flesh. A generativity that integrates spatial, corporeal, post-logocentric, and imaginative modes of reflecting sounding and listening. This chapter surely appeared to lose track at some points. As I finish writing this sentence, a police car with its easily recognizable siren is driving by. And then this chapter tried to get back on it. A bit later a series of huge motorcycles follow. Thinking with, through and beyond sounds. My laptop’s hard drive is still forming the gray and clicking general bass. Resonating, generating, reflecting. Researching on sounds while being immersed in these sounds.

  Notes

  1“Quand le corps n’est plus vivant, n’a plus de tonus, il passe soit dans la rigor mortis, (la rigidité cadavérique), soit dans l’inconsistance de la pourriture. Être un corps, c’est être un certain ton, une certaine tension. Je dirais même aussi qu’une tension est aussi une tenue” (Nancy 1992/2008: 126).

  2“Être à l’écoute, c’est toujours être en bordure du sens, ou dans un sens de bord et d’extrémité et comme si le son n’était précisément rien d’autre que ce bord, cette frange ou cette marge” (Nancy 2002: 21).

  3“[S]on musicalement écouté, non pas cependant comme phénomène acoustique (ou pas seulement) c’est-à-dire recueilli et scruté pour lui même, non pas comme phénomène acoustique (ou pas seulement) mais comme sens résonant, sens dont le sensé est censé se trouver dans la résonance, et ne se trouver qu’en elle” (Nancy 2002: 21).

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  12

  Immanent Non-Musicology: Deleuze|Guattari vs. Laruelle

  Achim Szepanski

  In this essay I try to explore non-representationalism in music, which has to be connected to the question of non-representational aesthetics. The philosophers of immanence—Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle—have something in common: since the mid-1980s they have rejected the discourses and techniques of post-structuralist interpretation of music and art in favor of constructing an aesthetics rooted in immanence and non-representationalism. Deleuze|Guattari work on the problem of how the relationship between immanence and multiplicity could be thought. They describe a world of pure multiplicity in which all multiplicities are equally immanent and include immanent transformations within a given set of virtualities. Multiplicities actualize themselves as occasions/events or as blips of singularity in heterogeneous assemblages. In this way the transcendental must get immanent, which means that the universe is not digital at its core, but analog. Deleuze|Guattari and Laruelle agree that representational aesthetics has come to an end, but they do not agree on what form immanence should take in aesthetics. While Deleuze|Guattari prefer the productive capacity of matter, Laruelle insists on the immanent and generic logic of the real/One.

  For Deleuze|Guattari one of the guiding questions in “music” is if the unformed can be heard as sound within the framework of the audible or music. But the unformed is not noise. So another question is, does there exist a passage
between sound and noise, made possible by musical events (not music)? When deterritorialization brings along a de-structuration of the articulated sound, which is a kind of deterritorialized and reterritorialized noise, this implies a state of the unformed that is still audible, but definitely not as organized music; such kind of “music” or the audible is no more a representation or mimesis, but a becoming. For Deleuze|Guattari such (unformed) sound-becomings take place within a three dimensional floating space (rhizome) rather than in a two-dimensional, vectorial one.

  In his current period Laruelle is in search for a quantum thought that is free from its mathematical expression that he finds reductive. One principle of quantum thought is “superposition“ or the standing wave of rhythmic superposition, a kind of concept, that resonates somehow with the work of Lefebvre, Deleuze, Stengers, and Whitehead, but also with recent sound studies. The Laruellian concept of “superposition” neglects two treatments of sonic thought, so to invent sonic thinking as non-representation (that is, thinking sonically rather than about sound). Laruelle illustrates an incommensurability of sound’s closure, hermetically separated from other material, theories; and he illustrates an incommensurability of the relation and exchange of sound, which is porous enough to permit heterogeneous assemblages without imposing them. While closure includes representation as thinking about sound, permanent exchange between sound and thought tends to confusion as it converts or even fuses thinking and sound. This con-fusion reflects the belief of experimental electronic music in its first period (from Russolo through Schaeffer and classic musique concrète) that everything in the world is musical, an unrecognized belief associated with what Jarrod Fowler calls the Principle of Musical Sufficiency (Fowler, n.d.). Non-musicology, by contrast, breaks with the idea that everything is musical and develops a science of music as well as a “music” related to science (e.g. Xenakis’s use of stochastic processes). For Fowler, “the program of Non-musicology is to use musicology to construct alien theories without those theories being yielded by the Principle of Musical Sufficiency: ‘All is not musical, this is our news’” (Fowler n.d.).