Sonic Thinking

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by Bernd Herzogenrath


  When signature (territory) becomes style or figure, then the experiences of the artist become only the trait of the experience that has transformed into sound and music. This is best explained with the example of Deleuze describing the trait of an animal in a painting by Francis Bacon in The Logic of Sensation. Bacon did not simply illustrate or represent an animal, but the brushstrokes themselves remind one of an animal’s movement. The way Bacon painted the animal is rather the trait of an animal, whereby the animal itself becomes something else rendering visible invisible forces. These forces come into being when animal trait and human body have built a zone of indiscernibility, which starts to intermingle, oscillating between animal trait and human body, thus creating a vibratory passage that one can also call rhythmic (Deleuze 2003: 19–20).6

  Similarily, in The Black Soft’s compositions the repetitious moans that shape the structure of the songs remind us immediately of explicit sexual moans. But these moans function very differently from a song like Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby (1975), where the moaning denotes directly its implied action. The Black Soft succeeds in breaking with the cliché, breaking with the simple imitation and representation of this sound. In their case it first has become signature; second, it has become style. It has become their autonomous style element as the moaning becomes a trait of itself.

  What Deleuze and Guattari call music, and what they assume has the true capacity to enable the listener to join into a process of becoming-other, cannot be achieved by imitation, but by the process that enables one to become something else and where this something else becomes purely sonorous:

  It is no longer a question … of imitating a child, even if it is a child who is singing. The musical voice itself becomes-child at the same as the child becomes-sonorous, purely sonorous. No child could ever have done that, or if one did, it would be by becoming in addition something other than a child, a child belonging to a different, strangely sensual and celestial, world. In short, the deterritorialization is double: the voice is deterritorialized in a becoming-child but the child it becomes is itself deterritorialized, unengendered becoming.

  Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 3047

  What The Black Soft creates is shaping a sonic body—an ecstatic “living something” rendering audible the tragedy in human existence without describing a human state of being. It is an abstraction of the human condition, a hystericized form, the trait of it that has gotten rid of the human cliché and has become pure sonic figure.

  Notes

  1See also Vladimir Jankélévitch: “Music acts upon human beings, on their nervous system .… By means of massive irruptions, music takes up residence in our intimate self and seemingly selects to make its home there. The man inhabited and possessed by this intruder, the man robbed of a self, is no longer himself: he has become nothing more than a vibrating string, a sounding pipe” (Jankélévitch 2003: Chapter one).

  2The following references originate from a personal talk with Joseph Topmiller and Chase Coughlin of The Black Soft in April 2013 in New York City.

  3Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of creation is captured throughout their writings, as well as Deleuze’s solo writings. I will refer in particular to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as to Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze draws attention to a common “problem” of the arts and refers to Paul Klee: “In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. For this reason no art is figurative. Paul Klee’s famous formula—‘Not to render the visible, but to render visible’—means nothing else. The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible. Likewise, music attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous” (Deleuze 2003: 48).

  4See Brian Massumi: “An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (Massumi 1996: 221).

  5“Figure” as famously described in Discours, Figure, and as Gilles Deleuze refers to in his work Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, which makes the distinction between the figurative, which is representing the object and therefore is illustrative, and the figure, which is presenting a sensation, which attacks your nervous system directly (see Lyotard 1971, and Deleuze 2003: 5–6).

  6“The deformations the body undergoes are also the animal traits of the head. This has nothing to do with a correspondence between animal forms and facial forms. In fact, the face lost its form by being subjected to the techniques of rubbing and brushing that disorganize it and make a head emerge in its place. The marks or traits of animality are not animal forms but rather the spirits that haunt the wiped-off parts, that pull at the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without the face” (Deleuze 2003: 19).

  7For Deleuze a genuine becoming-other can only be minoritarian, because that is what does not yet have a recognizable voice. The concept of man would be the all too known majoritarian being that has been socially fixed and coded. See also Claire Colebrook: “We need to see the world, Deleuze argues, not as some thing that ‘we’ know through perceptions, but as a plane of impersonal perceptions” (Colebrook 2002: 139–40).

  Works cited

  Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. London/New York: Routledge.

  Colebrook, C. (2002), Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.

  Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Athlone Press.

  Electronicfucksonic, 2011. [Song] The Black Soft, The Black Soft. USA: Totu.

  Jankélévitch, V. (2003), Music and the Ineffable, trans. C. Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Available online: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7540.pdf. (accessed September 30, 2014).

  Kheraj, E. (2012) The Black Soft. © 2012 All Rights Reserved.

  Love to Love You Baby, 1975. [Song] Donna Summer. USA: Oasis.

  Lyotard, J. (1971), Discours, Figure. Paris: Klincksiek.

  Massumi, B. (1996), “The Autonomy of Affect,” in P. Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, 217–239. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

  Poe, E. A. (1998), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales. New York: Penguin.

  The Thing (1982), [Film] Dir. John Carpenter. USA: Universal Pictures.

  14

  Images of Thought | Images of Music

  Adam Harper

  A few years ago I was asked by the Belgian-Dutch magazine Gonzo (circus) to write a new music manifesto to mark the centenary of Luigi Russolo’s essay The Art of Noises, typically regarded as the futurist musical manifesto, and along with the aims of that genre of writing I adopted the bombastic tone of manifestos, hopefully with a tongue recognizable in my cheek and a twinkle in my eye. It began, “We demand the future of music, and a musical future. This is to say we demand new and greater thought, communication, and representation in relation to sound, in relation to each other” (Harper 2013). Demands, futures, greatness. “We.” A little while later I read it out at an event in Philadelphia also marking that centenary, where it was followed by a reading of The Art of Noises by a performance artist in character and dress as the early-twentieth-century futurist, complete with false beard. The resurrected Russolo roared his dreams and frustrations with high camp, bringing out all the absurdity and disquieting violence of his era’s aesthetics to much audience laughter. With the shades of Charlie Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator recalling the association of futurism with fas
cism, this was not just the text of a manifesto but the image of one, and it was something distanced, historicized, and palpably ironic.

  What might a manifesto for new music look like today, after the many failed dogmas of the twentieth century and the violence with which they are tainted? What fresh departure could such a call possibly make from a contemporary cultural milieu in which everything is (allegedly) possible, especially those departures made in the past? Such broad and tendentious proposals, particularly in the English-speaking world, not only appear ridiculous but dangerously blinkered or universalizing. Yet we live in a world—there’s that “we” again—that once again incites the imagination and makes a list of demands. Once again we have begun to dip our toes into a new, challenging and dangerous century, with new formations of collective subjectivity both necessary and emergent. A newly political musicology, animated by continental philosophy, has already begun to reject neoliberal postmodernism’s “end of history,” reconsidering some of the tenets of modernism in the process (e.g. Harper-Scott 2012; Currie 2012; Shank 2014). Music is called upon for its ability to philosophize and imagine new and better futures.

  In a bid to avoid the excessively prescriptive or assumptive nature of past manifestos, my Gonzo (circus) text focused more on critique of existing and naturalized structures within music-making than offering any concerted specification of tomorrow or any one particular set of ideas about the musical future. It hoped to dissolve music’s traditional ontologies in increasingly radical steps, moving from melody to harmony, rhythm, the work, the performance, the style, the instrument, the composer, the audience, and finally to “music” itself. Its main assumption was the direct equation of music with thought. The manifesto began with music obliquely defined as the sending of information relative to sound and society: “new and greater thought, communication, and representation in relation to sound, in relation to each other.” “Communication” and “representation” might also be considered types of thought, of the passing on and processing of information—different semantic facets of the same activity. Later, I elaborated on this processing of information and its political character:

  It often appears that music is a form of entertainment, but it is one of our species’ most important modes of communication. In the way it sounds and the way it is performed, it represents us all, our feelings, identities and desires. Music is a vote that all too frequently goes uncounted. It is a thought passing along the neural net formed by our entire planet.

  The manifesto’s final sentence offered one of its few actual predictions, again, oblique: “Music and the world and life will leave their cages, the ear will return to the brain, and there will only be the movement of information in thought.” Alluding to the poetics of John Cage, this implied the dissolution of any distinction between music and non-music and between the creation or perception of music and the wider activity of information (neural or otherwise) of which it is a part and with which it is continuous.

  Such a broad assumption of music’s ontology upholds, in the extreme, the ideal of open-mindedness that composing and listening to new music requires. It was also the central assumption of the book I had written before the manifesto, Infinite Music (Harper 2011). Although in many ways dressed as a manifesto and calling for a revival of the spirit of modernism, the substance of the book was its highly flexible, relativistic account of what constitutes music and musical forms. Following the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and much of the work he did with Félix Guattari, it was only musical difference, or change, itself that could be counted on as the one permanent characteristic of music up and down the ages, in the distant past and distant future. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) equates true thought with difference in itself, and in parallel it is difference that is the deepest fact about music, once all the lesser, impermanent specifics, ideas, and techniques—the manifestos—are stripped away. If music is to be philosophy, this musical difference is none other than thought itself. Whatever the word or concept of “music” means a millennium from now, whatever its significance, making any claims other than that it will involve difference and thought would reduce it to a finite concept. Whatever specifics there might be about music in the future, the one thing we can be sure about is that it will involve or be involved in “the movement of information in thought,” whether this event happens within a human mind, between two or more human bodies, or, more likely perhaps, between a multiplicity of nodes that we today might not immediately recognize as “human.”

  Of course, this “thought” is by no means exclusive to music. Nor is thought somehow exclusively musical. But defining music as a discrete concept with necessary and sufficient conditions for being is besides the point. Music is continuous with other art forms such as dance, art, film, and gaming, even with life itself. Thought flows through all of these things without showing a passport or going through customs. Indeed, like thought, the domain of music is no more or less than the domain of the entire universe. This is the end of the road that John Cage reached when he would say “everything we do is music.” This is also the univocity of Deleuze’s philosophy, his and Guattari’s plane of immanence, Spinoza’s God, even. Definitions of music or musical activity, or “musicking”—the use of music as a verb that Christopher Small popularized and that crucially encompasses both composing and listening as well as everything else (Small 1998)—melts away into all of its super-categories, becomes infinite and, technically at least, useless. On a more practical basis, particular definitions and aesthetics of music and its subcategories do and will emerge, but hopefully provisionally, against the backdrop of infinite difference, to fulfill particular socio-political purposes (or not) just as thoughts do. Mindfulness of this backdrop, returning to it in moments that demand musicking and philosophizing, improves the potential richness and utility of these musics and these thoughts. In any case, there is a distinction, then, between particular “thoughts” and thought itself, between particular instances of or objects in musicking and musicking as possibility.

  Again, this lies in parallel with Deleuze’s account of philosophy. His concept of The Image of Thought represents a particular set of ideas about the properties of thinking—its relationship to truth, its end of recognition, its morality and so on—that reappears throughout the history of Western philosophy. True thought and philosophy questions and transcends that image:

  As a result [of Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy] the conditions of a philosophy which would be without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its point of departure a radical critique of this Image and the “postulates” it implies. It would find its difference or its true beginning, not in agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non-philosophical. As a result, it would discover its authentic repetition in a thought without Image … as though thought could begin to think, and continually begin again, only when liberated from the Image and its postulates. It is futile to claim to reformulate the doctrine of truth without first taking stock of the postulates which project this distorting image of thought.

  Deleuze 1994: 167–8

  We can similarly talk of an Image of Music, against which a music “without any kind of presuppositions” would struggle, “as though [music] could begin to [music], and continually begin again.”

  What might the “postulates” of this Image of Music be? One of them is the aforementioned “music [as] a form of entertainment.” But certainly, the strongest one defines a certain relationship to sound, specifically, that music is sound(s), is sound(s) primarily, and even is sound(s) only. The composer and theorist Edgard Varèse famously called his own work “organized sound,” and this has persisted as the broadest definition—and indeed aesthetic—of music (Varèse and Wen-chung 1966: 18). Firstly, the “organized” nature of this music presupposes an active agency (human or otherwise) behind the making of so
und(s), and might even imply a kind of order within it. We might say that neither is necessary for an experience of musical thought, and following Deleuze, we can radically critique this image of order as “non-musical.” It could be precisely in its disorganized and disruptive nature that true music and thought becomes possible.

  Secondly, music is widely considered an inherently and primarily sonic medium, rather than one that simply relates to sound. Moreover, for many composers and critics, sound is often held to be a more progressive category than music; music is seen as a less relevant subcategory of the more modern, more direct world of sound, one that often somehow circumvents the apparently corrupting mediation of culture and traditional musical technocracy (such as classical or industrial establishments). But sound is by no means a larger, more essential category than music. It could be seen the other way around, with sound as a subcategory of music, or at the very least, sound and music overlapping with neither subsuming the other. I have used the word “sonocentric” to describe both this privileging of sound and the reduction of music to sound or to plural definite or indefinite article sounds (Harper 2012: 33).

  It is wrong to apparently deny that music has a significant non-sonic dimension. Visual art, dance, and costume is a major part of music and this should be acknowledged both in terms of creativity and aesthetics. This is obviously true in popular music cultures, but is equally true outside them. Even when we try to pretend otherwise, music—and sound itself, too—is a multimedia event with purposes and effects that extend beyond sound. Sonifying music makes it discrete from the non-sonic. This is another area where the exclusivity of standard definitions of music begins to dissolve.

 

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