I sit in my chair, intensely concentrating on theory; I am near unaware of my body as I float in an abstract space of thought, even though the book I am reading may concern the flesh. Is it silent, here? No, not quite. If I try, I can hear the faint hum of my computer, halfway between a sound an a gust of wind. The fan ruffles the blinds and they click together as they sway back and forth. Still, I can ignore this and focus on my infinite abstract space of my thoughts and the comforting rhythm of my tapping fingers on the keys or the faint sound of my pen's impression under an important phrase or term.
But then, a dog barks. . .
I am jostled out of my thoughtful infinity into embodied existence. My apartment now feels small and oppressive, as I realize that I am not in a free space, alone, in a weightless ether of words. The bark interrupts the sentences in a rhythmic cadence. The word and the sound cannot correspond as the word loses to the harsh timbre of that dog. . .
The dog is my neighbor's. I can tell not only from the timbre, volume, intensity, but the direction of the sound. It is piercing through my window as it reverberates off the other apartment's walls. The call of the dog is echoed by another dog, fainter, probably the balcony on the other side of the courtyard. This dog is less annoying, but the counterpoint is irresistible to my musical brain. I cannot focus. The sentences move past, but all I hear are bursts of sound.
Now my space is a small, cramped room. I begin to think about moving to the bedroom, but no, I cannot escape the sound.
Silence again. no. BARK. BARK. BARK. I cannot take it.
I block it out with Elbow's newest album and my space opens up again. My head has become a concert hall as the dialogue of the dogs yields to the atmospheric polyphony of piano, guitar, drums, and voices. I am transported again, but I cannot focus on the words.
This music does not interrupt, it engulfs and saturates my environment. A new mood, a new state-of-mind, but still--not an adequate space for reading--maybe for writing.
I leave the concert hall, return to the apartment, and the incessant barking. BARK. BARK. "Shut up you stupid bitch," I say to no one in particular--perhaps the walls. My words merely return to me, mute and useless. The more I curse, the more I create sound, I only increase the cacophony of arbitrary sounds.
I am not as alone as I thought. This is not MY space, but a rented space, a space shared with others; not only fellow residents, but also the buzz of scooters and roar of cars on 23rd drive. But I am the lucky one. In one of my friend's apartments, located on the ground floor, a truck's passing on Old Archer makes his room buzz on its own frequency--the whole room becomes an unfortunate tuning fork for traffic.
My apartment is located on the second floor, with a generously sized balcony perfect for reading on a bright, summer day. A tree protects me from the harsh sunlight, but nothing can protect me from the sounds. Sometimes, its a bird and sometimes a squirrel; other times, its that damn dog or my neighbor's music or chatter. The tree and I have a symbiotic relationship, but as a habitat, it conflicts with my own necessary environment. Our soundscapes clash.
I am not a silent tenant. One can only read for so long. I often worry that I take up too much sound-space, when I decide to pick my guitar and sing on my balcony--or when I pump music through my speakers placed strategically near the screen door. My sound occupies the whole courtyard and people walking their dogs look up at the man who has intruded upon their space--some with interest, others with annoyance. When I am not reading, I have the urge to expand and fill my space with sound as I pour another beer and sing another song.
I believe I have heard my neighbor pounding on my ceiling or through my walls as a polite (but inarticulate) sign to quiet down.
I am a loud singer.
But it could have also been the maintenance men working on another apartment. Their saws and leaf-blowers sometimes wake me up and I realize that their sound is necessary for my space to exist in its best possible state. I try to think that their soundscape is a necessary evil.
"We" are now occupying the streets (not me, of course--why?) Perhaps I should say 'they', the 99% (?). They occupy space with their bodies and their noise, their yells more articulate than the dog's but in a similar, punctuated, rhythm, "this is what democracy looks like."
Meanwhile, the majority of us take comfort in the warm space of a bar--a more 'intimate' public space than the plaza. We make noise--probably more noise, but the space is sanctioned for noise--a particular noise. What if I brought in my guitar when it wasn't Open Mic Night and, forgoing the need for a mic, decided to pick a little on a barstool, crooning bluegrass music over the house's 90's alt rock? Would not people stare?
"Excuse me, we are trying to talk."
"Excuse me, we are trying to play pool."
"Excuse me. . .what are you doing?"
"Excuse me. . .you are not supposed to be here"
Who has the right to occupy a bar with sound?
A "DJ's" occupation is the occupation of space with sound.
As a renter, I am an "occupant" as well as a "tenant." This is not my 'space', although, it becomes 'my space' when I fill it with sound, with atmosphere, with mood.
chora(l)
As I write, my statements disconnect. I am creating a space between--a space for sound?
The Chain of Being is 'the' example of hierarchy. For Kenneth Burke, "the hierarchic principle itself is inevitable in systematic thought” (141). Burke argues that mystification occurs because there is a principle of hierarchy behind any one term. Mystification and, its pastoral equivalent, embarassment, occurs whenever there is communication between two kinds of beings: "There is the ‘mystery’ of courtship when ‘different kinds of beings’ communicate with each other. Thus we look upon any embarrassment or self-imposed constraint as the sign of such ‘mystery'" (Burke 208). However, this separateness (as well as the hierarchy behind it), what Burke calls "standoffishness" is necessary to communication and persuasion. Burke's dramatistic rhetoric is based on the idea of courtship, which always involves a distance. Indeed, it is this standoffishness or 'self-interference' that indicates what Burke calls "pure persuasion" (269). In the terminology I have been using lately, this would be the necessary 'noise' of persuasion and not only communication. Burke writes,
"—“We would only say that, over and above all such derivations, there is implicit in language itself, the act of persuasion; and implicit in the perpetuating of persuasion (in persuasion made universal, pure, hence paradigmatic or formal) there is the need of ‘interference’. For a persuasion that succeeds, dies.” (274).
In order to keep up the courtship and the persuasive appeal, there must be some kind of interference or distance between the addressor and addressee. The question becomes: is hierarchy necessary for persuasion to occur, or is it merely differences in kind? Can we use Burke's thoughts on hierarchy to look at the 'noise' of the system, which is its principles of division and identification? How linear is Burke's 'hierarchy' in our age? Is an appeal by necessity and appeal to someone in a position of authority, someone slightly up the food chain? Is this not necessary in order to appeal to this? Burke thinks that all of these appeals, in their purest form (although this is impossible) would be a pure prayer, addressed not to an object "but to the hierarchic principle itself, where the answer is implicit in the address” (276).
Kahn subtitles his Noise Water Meat as “a history of sound in the arts,” but as Kahn admits, he focuses on sounds in the 20th century, what we usually associate as the periods of modernism and postmodernism. In his introduction, he tries to explain his goals with the book, which is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study. Because of Kahn’s wide-ranging methods and topics, the book seems a bit uneven and disconnected. Kahn does not provide a conclusion to the book, ending on his extended essay on Artaud. I suspect that the form of the book is an attempt to render it as a more ‘historical’ account than an interpretation, but the book does not move chronologically, and Kahn provides several instances of cross-referencing from previous chapters. My suspicion is that, like many academic works, Kahn had several papers and essays that he wanted to unify into a book. Although there is an apparent sequence of noise (Futurism), Water (Modernism—in particular in literature), and Meat (McClure’s ecology; Artaud), it’s hard to figure out exactly what Kahn is trying to achieve with this.
In the introduction, Kahn claims that modernist auditive states and the philosophy that backs them up “drown out [. . .] the social in sound—the political, poetical, and ecological—and this is what the present text seeks to reinstate” (4). Kahn does a good job revealing the ideological motives behind modernist art, which can be summed up as a banishment of signification (17). Kahn’s approach, at least for some of the book, can be considered a close deconstruction of various composer’s and movement’s rhetoric. By contextualizing the philosophies of composers, Kahn reveals composer’s attempt to eliminate the social and semiotic aspects of sound. The reason I invoke Derridean deconstruction is not because he uses deconstruction as a “method,” but because Kahn closely traces the textual and historical influences of artistic creation rather than looking at the ideas and sounds ‘in themselves’, which is a primarily modernist attitude.
If we look at Kahn’s project like that, I believe it succeeds. However, Kahn does not seem to really draw many conclusions from his observations. This may not be a fault and my criticism my come from my own purpose for reading: looking at music in relation to Writing. Kahn is also interested in music as inscription, phonography, and the visualization of music. But although these themes are addressed, I think we can expand on some of Kahn’s observations. Another theme that shows up a few times, but is never fully explored or foreground is ecology, environment, and biology: “McClure’s meat science[‘s] [. . .] pertinence lies in an imperative to supersede the destructive consequences of philosophies centered on a sociality isolated from biology and ecology” (324). I might not disagree with this, but despite Kahn’s tracing of sources that inspired McClure and also Burroughs, this does nothing to argue for the “imperative” for considering biology and ecology. Not that this evidence does not exist in the scientific literature. Kahn discusses L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, which is fictional, but accidently hits on theories with existing scientific support. Dianetics is based on the “recording” of trauma on the body into the reactive mind as opposed to the analytic mind. While such binary distinctions of minds are BS, we could understand this in terms of neuropsychology, which recognizes that a traumatic event does not pass through the part of our brain responsible for language. This is why it is difficult to articulate—even using psychoanalysis. My point being here, is that the argument for a consideration of ecology and body is not really made, but restricted to a tracing of these themes through Burroughs’ and McClure’s texts.
There is an implicit argument that comes from the way the book moves through modernism to return to an idea Kahn touches on in the introduction. With the phonograph,
The voice no longer occupied its own space and time. It was removed from the body where, following Derrida, it entered the realm of writing and the realm of the social, where one loses control of the voice because it no longer disappears. From bone to air to writing, permanence outside the subject invites greater mutability, where the primacy and purity of the voice are subjected to the machinations and imaginations of culture and politics. (8)
Much modernist art seems to be an attempt to return to this “presence” of the voice and body, culminating in the analysis of Artaud: a purity of the voice without reference and signification, a primal scream that eludes meditation. Here is Kahn again:
These trances and screams belong to a vibrational scheme found throughout modernism, whereby communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations, the sympathetic identifications of different vessels, often bridging different perceptual registers and always attempting to elude cultural mediation. (353)
This sort of vibrational communication space that Kahn finds in much modernist literature and practice seems to align with the movement of object oriented ontology and speculative metaphysics. This is the kind of thinking that I find in Deleuze and Guattari, which Kahn cites, but, due to his own preoccupations, does not go into depth about their relationship to the modernist impulses he finds in Cage and others.
Kahn implies that D&G also have an impulse to move away from signification through deterritorialization (see Kahn 105). Citing a passage from A Thousand Plateaus, where D&G argue that John Cage’s prepared piano pieces are “too rich” and remain “too territorialized: on noise sources, on the nature of objects” (115). Thus, we may understand deterritorialization as a move away from signification and reference, much like Cage tried to do with his entire philosophy. For Kahn, D&G’s attitude toward Cage’s prepared piano (and percussion) “reproduces the tradition of Europeans hearing non-European music, especially percussion music in a modernist response to primitivism as noise” (115). Let us look at a few other passages in A Thousand Plateaus regarding noise, music, and sound.
D&G characterize music as “a de-territorialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to language” (302). Furthermore, D&G characterize the machine as something that makes consistent rather than something that reproduces. I cite this long passage to show what I mean:
Varese's procedure, at the dawn of this age, is exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy. If this machine must have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. By assembling modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter. (343)
This is the passage that comes right before the one on Cage’s prepared piano. Making something “consistent” in itself is also something that D&G claim makes a concept (see posts on What is Philosophy?). But how this making ‘consistent’ and ‘synthesizing’ any different from the modernist impulse to synthesize all thought (which has been going on since the early 20th century)?
Furthermore, if we look more into D&G’s suggestion of attitude, it seems very close to Cage’s, although the goal is different. Whereas making and listening to music disinterestedly for Cage “is the means to integrate the personality,” for D&G “ “Sobriety, sobriety: that is the common prerequisite for the deterritorialization of matters, the molecu-larization of material, and the cosmicization of forces,” not integrating the personality but integrating matter (Kahn 173, D&G 344). To me, this does not sound like a new move in thought at all, but is an extreme metaphorization of the modernist impulse to synthesize the world into a coherent whole (with a postmodern twist)[1].
Back to Kahn.
Kahn characterizes noise as “the most common and the most productively counterproductive” sound of modernism (Kahn 20). I have written somewhere (as I’m sure millions have before me) that we characterize something as “noise” that we don’t understand or don’t care for. This characterization of noise should be modified in light of Kahn’s observations on modernist music:
Suppressing noise only contributes to its tenacity and detracts from investigating the complex means through which noise itself is suppressed, while celebrating noise easily becomes a tactic within the suppression of something else. (21)
This leads him into his critique of Futurism. I have recently been interested and inspired by futurism, despite its ideological problems (alignment with fascism, war, anti-feminism). Kahn basically argues that Futurist’s celebration of noise suppresses these political elements. However, on the specific musical side of things, Kahn allowed me to see Futurism as a movement in tension with itself.
The distinction that many of these composers want to make is between noise and sound (music and sound). Composers appropriate noise for music, making it pure and uncontaminated with reference and signification. Even the Futurist Russolo, although he stated that “music had become anachronistic, its self-referentiality had afforded no link with the world,” tried to separate musical noise from imitation. Noises, “once so controlled [. . .] had the advantage of coming from life and recalling it and thus could exceed music while remaining within it” (81). The modernist impulse that Kahn identifies from Russolo to Cage is this “freeing” impulse of composers: “It was necessary not to go outside of music for the rejuvenation that noise could bring but only to release the repressed within music itself” (83). Is this what D&G are doing too when they argue that we must making things sonorous and de-territorialize? The search for un-mediated experience—immanence.
Wassily Kandinsky developed the idea of an “inner sound” that was not concerned with imitating sound, but rather than using sound as a different kind of communication: “Communication among humans [. . .] would take place vibrationally, unmediated by signs” (107). A sort of metaphysical substrate is created that would bypass the contamination of inscription. The phonograph, rather than seen as a machine of inscription, promises “an alternative to musical notation as a means to store sonic time and, in the process, deliver all sound into artistic materiality” (103). We see later in Kahn’s book that Edison believed he could create a machine that could connect with the dead—to reach the Other side, the invisible world[2]. On the other hand (outside of modernist music) sound was beginning to be used to accompany the visual and took an imitative role.
The kind of appropriation of all sounds for the purposes of music (in a purely musical realm) is epitomized, for Kahn, in John Cage: “[Cage] was known for stepping outside the usual confines of Western art music to usher noise and worldly sounds into music and for proposing a mode of being within the world based on listening, through hearing the sounds of the world as music” (Kahn 161). Kahn meticulously traces Cage’s textual and philosophical influences in order to deconstruct his philosophy of music, which is based on liberating the sounds of the world into music, away from crude signification.
In terms of the argument I made in my paper discussing the film Noise, we can look at Cage as partially responsible for people’s ignoring useless noise:
The noise in the city would not be physically diminished [which would require political action and participation—not disinterestedness] but the city-dwelling concert-goers would accommodate themselves to it by appreciating it differently, removing the aggravation if not the noise, while both noise and aggravation would continue to exist for non-concert-going city dwellers. (Kahn 184)
Is this not Cage’s endorsement of a particular kind of status quo? Its true that David’s initial concern is to rid the city of noise in order to make it a more beautiful world, but the way he eventually does this is engage in the political order, not to assimilate to the noise, which he sees as the major problem. David identifies the noise as noise, which stands in for the noise of an indifferent public and an indifferent politics. This is quite different from the kind quietism endorsed by Cage. Silence against mass media? Is this not also silence against the masses? Silence against the impurities of film, television, radio—the impurities of signification and semiotic complexity? This passage from Cage shows his withdrawl from public participation: “My feeling was that beauty yet remains in intimate situations; that it is quite hopeless to think and act impressively in public terms. This attitude is escapist, but I believe that it is wise rather than foolish to escape from a bad situation” (186). The problem with this is that noise and sound penetrates the walls of ‘intimate situations’ and in terms of sound the public and private are inevitably intertwined. The blasting of rap music from a hummer provokes violent reaction in me—how dare they be allowed to blast that shit! How dare they put that noise in the air! The “noise” is a metonymy for the noise of the system—for the system that they believe does not benefit them. I am not taking the side of the person blasting rap music, but we must acknowledge the complex significations and subjectivities expressed by this noise (as sound—not just music).
David’s engagement with the noise of the car alarm is a metonymy for the power of the government, which does not listen to the people. As his helpful (temporary) girlfriend says, “The genius of a car alarm is that you can’t talk back to it. It has a mouth, but no ears. It makes you pay attention to it, but it pays none to you.” How is the car alarm like those in power? Or rather, is it that the problem with the local government in the fictional place is the disjunction between the people’s actions and the government—no one pays any attention to either—they are both autonomous realms.
At first David may be seem to be on a crusade for himself—pretending to the liberator of the people (the “rectifier!”) from their ignorance, but eventually he realizes that the locus of power is the law that says the car alarm can ring for 3 minutes before turning off. Eventually he realizes that he must turn the brute power of the car alarm against the government (which is the force and power behind the car alarm’s force). The only way to get the government to listen is to situate the car alarm in a disruptive situation, creating the extreme of the conditions he lives with every day.
The previous reflections may only be a summary of my paper, but I hope that they extend the argument a bit, as I begin to understand the nature of noise and music better. I think that the key to an engagement between composition and sound is precisely that: sound and not music. If we rely on a musical model, it seems we are trapped in metaphysics, but if we look at sound, location, and space, we may be able to get somewhere with thinking writing as event and performance.
Thus, sound is a great way to look at the necessity of the local(e) (the place). Cage preferred barely audible sounds because “loud sounds were fixed to specific locations and too attached to actions and the quotidian to contribute rhetorically to his cosmology of sound” (235). Thus, composition as loud sound (not just noise)—composition as an intensity of sound (not just atmosphere or mood), and intensity of sound in relation to the space given—a disruption, a violence within a small space—a forced listening. Sound as an inscription on a particular space.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: MIT, 1999. Print.
Noise. Dir. Henry Bean. Seven Arts Pictures, 2007. Film.
[1]Ok, enough of D&G. Perhaps I want their work to be more obscure, to push the limits of language and thought, whereas I only see appropriations of scientific discourse to further modernist impulses. And its not that I am against modernism by any means! My favorite authors basically correspond with the authors D&G constantly mention (and are all part of the modernist/high modernist canon): Henry Miller, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf—could I get more canonical? My undergraduate thesis? Lawrence Durrell—another great ‘synthesizer’ of ideas. Blah blah blah. Is it that D&G’s work is art masking as philosophy? But then, should I not be just as frustrated with Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger? Why must I push against these two French philosophers? Is it them that I am frustrated with, or the willy-nilly way their thought is applied without consideration of the philosophical, assumptions/metaphysics that underlie it? And am I even getting those right? I was just reading Derrida’s (eulogy?) to his friend Deleuze, and, even though Derrida was friends with him and puts him in the best of light (although mostly praising his work alone than the one with Guattari—perhaps I should read Difference and Repetition in its entirety?), he may hit on my frustration: “Deleuze was, of all those in his "generation," the one who "did/made" (faisait) it the most gaily, the most innocently. He would not have liked, I think, the word "thinker" that I used above. He would have preferred "philosopher." In this respect, he claimed to be "the most innocent (the most devoid of guilt) of making/doing philosophy” (see Derrida “I’ll have to wander all alone").Its this innocence that makes him endlessly creative and, in a sense, ‘original’, but that I think also causes him to lapse into metaphysics—a difficult thing to escape!
[2] All of this makes me want to re-read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, where communication technologies, séances, war, noises—all of these are dealt with from the view of artistic satire.
All the Noise, Noise, Noise: Aural Disruption of the Public Sphere
It may seem strange to begin an academic paper with How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but I want to argue that this film gives us a way to think about the permeable boundary among noise, information, and music--particularly as this play out within the public sphere. As Mark C. Taylor writes, following Michel Serres, “If information sometimes can be noisy and noise informative, the logic of le parasite (i.e. interference) might help to clarify the fluid dynamics of information” (Taylor 101). Taylor continues to claim that “for those with more open minds [. . .] noise is a welcome guest whose interruptions and disruptions are as creative as they are destructive” (Taylor 103).
The Grinch sits atop his mountain, hating the Whos, and negatively daydreaming about the Christmas that will soon arrive. The worst part of Christmas, according to the Grinch, is the noise. While the Grinch recounts all of the manifestations of the noise, the film cuts to the Whos enjoying making their noise. At the risk of over-theorizing, the participation in noise for the Whos does not communicate anything per se, but seems to be an act of pure jouissance. Rather than each individual child receiving gifts and selfishly enjoying it (our culture) the Whos’ instruments require collective participation. The instruments are not merely to make music, but involve several bodies and are frequently mobile. The Grinch particularly hates the “electro whocarnio fnooks”—a vehicle without a tenor, a noise without a meaning, movement without a destination or direction--pure collective enjoyment.
Seuss’s non-sense language only reinforces a focus on aural affect rather than the instruments as a carrier of meaning or melody. The ‘instruments’ surpass Joycean punning to nonsense that seems to communicate communication itself. As Jean-Luc Nancy argues, “Communication is not transmission, but a sharing that becomes subject: sharing as subject of all ‘subjects’. An unfolding, a dance, a resonance. Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense. At first it communicates nothing—except itself” (Nancy 41). This is the communication that D. Diane Davis points to in Levinas: the saying rather than the said (Davis 194). The saying in the film seems to be, to use Davis’ terms, the address is “both the exposedness of the other and the obligation to respond” (194). The Whos sing:
“Fahoo forays, dahoo dorays
Welcome Christmas, bring your light
Fahoo forays, dahoo dorays
Welcome in the cold of night
These nonsense words, indicating the ‘saying’ rather than the said seems to be an openness to radical alterity, but this refrain is ‘colonized’ or, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, ‘territorialized’ with meaning by the narrator’s re-writing of the words into a coherent meaning at the end of the film. The words are no longer a pure saying of nonsense (noise)—a calling for the other’s response—we see that the Whos have a particular conditions that need to be met for Christmas to be welcome: “as long as we have we,” “as long as we have hands to grasp,” “heart to heart and hand in hand.” The Whos may not need presents and complex instruments to participate in song and community, but that is because they have “we,” they have a sort of homogenous communal solidarity based on sameness. Even the name the “Whos” indicate a kind of non-specific, universal people.
Indeed, the Whos cannot handle the radical other within their mists because the Grinch as Grinch cannot be accepted because he does not participate in the ritual of Christmas. On one hand, if we figure the ‘whos’ as the utopian other (the other we would like to be) as we identify with the Grinch, that other invites us to respond, but this is not by interrupting our desire for meaning. True, the Grinch could be said to ‘learn’ something by the trauma of his heart growing several sizes in a day—“a trauma, a shattering of the self and world” (Davis 199). However, we as viewers, familiar with the the joy of Christmas, read the Grinch as an outsider. Notice, only when his heart grows two sizes and he becomes essentially another non-descript Who is he truly welcomed into the community. The Whos are settled in the values of the community such that its disruption is impossible. In this sense, it is an extreme version of Habermas’ ideal public sphere, where neither reason nor the taking away of material goods can disrupt Tradition. In Whoville, democratic process is impossible and, to me, seems to be a self-enclosed community that has little meaning for us in our world driven by networks and complex power relations.
Now, one could level this charge at pretty much any children’s film—particularly one made in the 60s (a hopeful time for utopia) and my analysis of noise, the public, and communication will not stop with an overblown reading of the Whos. However, I do believe that the film leads into more serious considerations. The community of the Whos, as an egalitarian society, can afford to live in Christmas jouissance everyone accepts the noise as signifying communal feeling. This interchange between noise and information is something theoretically explored by Taylor through Serres: “But noise is parasitical and thus is never pure. There can no more be noise apart from the signal with which it interferes than there can be signal apart from the noise it excludes” (Taylor 110). But what happens to this theory when we explore instances of noise in relation to the tensions between the public and private sphere? Christmas time in Whoville consists of an entire community coming together and participating in the noise, but we know that this communal participation is always in tension with private existence. In order to investigate this tension, I will now look at Henry Bean’s 2007 film, Noise.
A couple weeks ago, John suggested that the strength of How Images Think is that it introduces a lot of issues to be explored more in depth, but leaves us this task. In a way, I think Barry's Visual Intelligence does the same thing and, for me, more than the Burnett. Its still not a masterpiece of writing and the book contains some inconsistencies and essentialist rhetoric, but, as we discussed in class, it engages some of the work done in psychology, neurology, and other sciences.
Our conversation this week seemed to center around the interaction between the sciences and the humanities, with John offering an important insight that each has its distinct methodology, but that the objects of study are not how the disciplines are defined. Barry's methodology is kind of a mix of methodology, but her framing discipline is probably gestalt psychology. A gestalt "implies a configuration that is so inherently unified that its properties cannot be derived from the individual properties of its parts" (42). This holism that Barry derives from the gestalt school provides support for Sid's observation that "visual rhetoric" may be a misnomer. If rhetoric breaks things into parts, then the gestalt considers their total effect as well as their production and formation of wholes.
Perhaps Barry's biggest strength is the physiological and neurological evidence that supports the gestalt hypothesis. Rather than looking at the eye as functioning like a camera, she considers how the eye actually interacts with the environment. The eyes is unlike a camera because the image on our retina is in constant motion and our 'mental image' (which, I take, must a be a metaphor) is created through what stays constant within that motion. Thus, movement is essential to vision because our eyes function by noticing and recording change (Barry 29-32). Furthermore, while the images in a camera are "bounded" what we see is "unbounded" (33). Barry convincingly argues that the retinal image is only part of the mechanism of seeing and not its product (Barry 33).
And yet, although she has shown that even the images on our eye our involved in a complex process of production and interpretation of our world, she still seems to hold onto an idea of some sort of "reality" or "direct experience" that we can see with our eyes, but that becomes mediated when some sort of technology is introduced. As Sid suggested last week, we may need to think about the eye itself as an incredibly complex technology. Indeed, Barry claims that "human vision is still the most powerful means of sifting out irrelevent information and detecting significant patterns" (34). Why is this? Perhaps because significance can only come through emotions as well as personal and cultural memory. Neurological research suggests that we frequently are affected by the visual before we can evaluate it critically. The amygdala in our brain is what detects emotional significance (see Barry 17-18). As V.S. Ramachandran has shown, however, some of the information we receive may correspond to our physical/topographical map, but does not reach the amygdala, such as the case where a man looking at his mother said "this looks like my mother but it is not her." However, once his mother began to talk he recognized her as his mother.
Why is this? Because the verbal and visual parts of our brains, although intimately connected, are also independent systems. Neurologist VanDerkolk has shown that traumatic experiences are stored in different parts of the brain. Routine thoughts tend to stimulate the 'Broca' area, which controls verbal language, but traumatic experiences do not. This is why people have difficulty putting traumatic experiences into words (Barry 40). This neurological explanation suggests to me the usefulness of certain psychoanalytic techniques to get the patient to verbalize their experience. As Slavoj Zizek has said, the first time something happens it is an intrusion of the Real but the second time is when it enters the symbolic order (the order of language).
Barry's research is drawn frequently from holistic theories such as J.J. Gibson's "ecological optics theory." For Gibson, it is the change that signals visual and the relationship that carries meaning (Barry 41). We would do well to critique Barry's language here of "carrying" meaning, but the ecological model is useful in understanding how she moves from the visual process itself, to gestalt psychology, to her musical metaphors and investigations into the creative mind.
On that note--Music is a prominent metaphorical resource for Barry--particularly when related to gestalt theory. Using Christin Von Ehrenfels argument that 'melody is relationship since it is still recognized in another key, Barry plays out this idea of melody" (see Barry 43). She continues this metaphor: "It is as if we begin by learning to put together different notes into meaningful melodies, gradually building a musical repertoire on which we come eventually to rely for all performances" (Barry 65). I find this a useful metaphor, but I also question Barry's harmonious holistic approach. While Barry, cognitive science, neurology, and optics theorists may be correct that our process of vision tends to look for patterns and creating a whole (see for instance the discussion of the 'blind spot' and filling in on pg 26), I think that we need to consider the inharmonious aspects of vision--those things that we can't quite put into a pattern--what Michel Serres has called "noise," which is as essential to communication as information (according to Mark C. Taylor).
On one hand, Barry's science seems to support many of theoretical humanities' assumptions. We create meaning by our ability to see patterns in essentially disparate elements, but not so much by what we sense, but by what we believe (Barry 27). And again, Barry denies that scientific analysis can ever get to the heart of things alone. She argues that the 'phi phenomenon' shows that scientific dissection could never yield adequate answers because the principles of perception lie in spaces between the elements rather than within them (Barry 44). However, this holism turns slowly into a sort of idealism where resistance to these processes can only be combated by "deliberate thought and active higher reasoning" (Barry 68). This sounds suspiciously to me like a reasoned criticism rather than using the "perceptual logic" found in most visuals and images itself to complicate its own assumptions and (ab)uses. Perhaps rather than hardening our experience into significant patterns we need to pay attention to what we exclude (the visual and audible noise) just as much as what we include.
This leads me to Barry's discussions of the creative temperament. I was reading this section through the recent lecture I heard by V.S. Ramachandran at UF a couple days ago. Ramachandran talks about how a neurological explanation of synethesia can help explain the metaphorical process. Barry recognizes this connection and argues that the creative mind works in metaphors (Barry 72). Indeed, I would argue (and this in no way is a unique claim) that the humanities' "methodology" to return to John's distinction between the humanities and science. Our methodology is metaphorical, creative, and inventive. However, I am not sure I can support this distinction since it is clear that such models of the atom as the "plum pudding" model or even our current model are in reality "images"/metaphors of what *really* is there. Perhaps the humanities are just a bit more honest about the metaphorical and contingent relationship between the Real and our description of it and the necessity for metaphor (see Derrida's "White Mythology" for a brilliant analysis of philosophical metaphor and catechresis).
To return to Barry's work proper: Why does she want to make such a clear distinction between the "abstract" system of language and the "visual" or the "image". In the section "Mental Images," Barry argues that we have this ability to abstract from the world to form--a concept, by the way, that has been around since Aristotle, and indeed someone who Barry relies on extensively. Strangely, its when she gets into the territory of literary works, theories, and authors that her argument becomes a bit messy and problematic for students of English. While it appeals to our literary sensibility, I sense a very conservative program here--as we have discussed in class today.
In the section metaphors of the mind, she turns to neurological researcher Zeki and agrees with him that the task of the brain is one of extracting invariant features from the continually changing information from the environment to provide a unified image, but that each area is synchronous and that there is no master area of the brain controlling the other ones (Barry 93). Drawing on the theories of Crick, we see that from a neurological perspective "the conscious mind receives information from the brain rather than directs it" and thus our sense of "unity and mental control" is an imperfect illusion (Barry 94). What I like about this insight is that we get away from this notion of the "subject" as some sort of transcendental I or some sort of "soul" that resides within us. Consciousness, a subject speculated on by many philosophers (and, I may add, which still needs to be considered philosophically) is materialized, but not in a deterministic way but through material interactions. Zeki argues that "it is no longer possible. . .to divide the process of seeing from that of understanding nor is it possible to separate the acquisition of visual knowledge from consciousness" (Barry 44).
However, I want to repeat--this does not mean that there is no consciousness or "mind" separate from the brain. For Barry and many of the works she draws on, our "mind" is less a director of the brain than an Interpreter. This reminds me of the theory of the "Focalizer," which is not a narrator nor a character but basically a 'voice' that filters and offers a certain perspective on the narrative. A friend of mind used this concept to look at the "Cyclops" chapter in Joyce's Ulysses.
But perhaps a better metaphor would be a "screen" or "filter" because the mind can only pay attention to so much of what the brain is currently doing. Barry argues that if we were to become aware (conscious) of the inner workings of our brain, we would be paralyzed by the overwhelming activity and noise or driven to madness--we may become autistic (Barry 98).
Barry briefly touches on chaos theory in her work, drawing from it the idea of "spontaneous emergence of self-organization" (Barry 96). I think that we should look at Barry and the visual intelligence through Mark C. Taylor's discussion of complexity theory and see where we end up. I will try and also pit Mark Taylor's metaphor of the musical fugue as an alternative to Barry's focus on the symphony, which I think may open up her insights into greater complexity rather than assuming our writing must be as holistic and "experiential" as our being-in-the-world or, to echo phenomenology once again, the lebenswelt (Life-World). Its this sort of generalized universalism that existential phenomenology is frequently accused of that we must get rid of in order to deploy some of Barry's insights. I think Taylor's discussion of complexity theory, particularly the concept of "between order and chaos," needs to be put into conversation with Barry.
Despite Barry's use of chaos theory, she does not take chaos theory seriously throughout her entire work. She makes reference to it, but when distinguishing between the visual and the verbal, she argues that "verbal language is essentially a linear system imposed on a non-linear experience" and that language is a static system. This is patently false and seems to only serve her interest in maintaining a distinction between the visual and the verbal based on human "experience" (which she never really defines in any systematic way). As we have said in class, this essentialist rhetoric without any sort of theoretical justification seems to continue through the work. For instance, in the section "Image Affordance," she argues that "essential characteristics that define the essence of things become meaningful through what they off use as useful within our everyday experience" (Barry 79). This is almost pragmatist in the Deweyian sense, but there is no mention of this theorization, preferring to claim an essence without qualification. Strangely, though we could read Barry as entrenched in a kind of Husserlian life-world approach, she does tend to separate appearance and "reality" without realizing the implications of doing so. For instance, "In Western art we pay attention to appearance rather than the meaning images take on through experience" (Barry 81). This metaphysical opposition is more apparent in her reference to the medieval philosopher, Maimonides: idolatry is "missing the whole concept of the image" and to mistake "surface appearance for essence" (Barry 126). And so we arrive at a different kind of interpretation of gestalt psychology than say, Merleau-Ponty: Barry still seems to maintain this distinction between appearance and reality that doesn't take the phenomenological critique of this metaphysics seriously. She is speaking of the life-world, but ignoring an entire tradition and making the mistake of creating these useless oppositions.
Everything has an agenda and I in no way meant to critique Barry merely for having an agenda (although I think the arguments she makes are conservative in the worst possible way), but its interesting to me that Barry discusses repetition only from a neurological and psychological side. While this may seem an obvious insight, it is nonetheless important for her engagement with the humanities: more repetitive thinking patterns, the more these patterns become entrenched neurologically (Barry 63). While she is insistent that patterns are how we make meaning, she is aware that these patterns can become habits and create stereotypes. Thus, she argues that the more "open and flexible a person's abstract thinking remains, the more open the person is to new learning and change" (Barry 64). Repetition seems to be at once confirmed by the making of "patterns" but also vilified as something that creates stasis. Repetition of something, however, is always repeating within a different context or moment in time and so it is never truly repetition (i'm sure I could cite some theorist on this insight). Barry doesn't seem to outright reject repetition because patterns are in some ways based upon it, but there does seem to be a focus on this concept of "creative thinking" that, while I am not against it in principle, is once again not explored in depth.
But the meat of my question comes down to how her musical metaphor, with its emphasis on melody contains a certain commitment to consistent and holistic narrative without taking into account other disruptions of our productive and interpretive moment outside of critical reflection and interpretation. For Taylor, following Heidegger, distinguishes scholarship from thinking: "Writing is thinking, but scholarship is not writing" (Taylor 807--JAC 24.4). Although he at first denies that he can make the distinction, he seems to say that not-writing is writing that is accepted in scholarly journals while "writing" is creative: "Writing, by contrast, is transgressive. It violates accepted codes and crosses boundaries guarded. Creativity and invention occur, if at all, in the gaps between disciplines" (Taylor 808). Taylor actually agrees with Barry in her focus on the importance of visual, but the visual in Taylor is meant to be disruptive and transgressive, not a holistic integration: "We can no longer write merely with words but now must learn how to think and write with images and sound. Design--visual as well as graphic--becomes integral to writing" (808). But is this really an accurate distinction? Barry does seem to worry about the ways that images are used to stabilize meaning and stereotypes, but she is so reliant on gestalt theory and holism that she doesn't think about how her musical metaphor may not recognize the potential of writing (in Taylor's broad sense) to disrupt this stabilization without a sort of "active higher reasoning" that she attributes to Spinoza (once again, without a detailed consideration of Spinoza's philosophy).
In Sid Dobrin's soon to be released book Postcomposition, he argues that writing is violence and not just disruption:
Postcomposition works to create tremors in composition studies’ ground,
with the intent of violence. It works within what Victor J. Vitanza would call
the “terrorism of theory” specifically against the “will of the field” (143). It
is a work of disruption and discomfort; it is a work against the discipline’s
pedagogical imperative toward the contingency of writing. (Dobrin 2)
I don’t mean violence as
a negative, destructive act; rather, violence operates to change the object
upon which it is enacted. That is, violence does not work toward destruction
in the negative but instead creates possibilities through disruption or,
at minimum, through Foucault’s notion of thinking “differently.” (Dobrin 113)
In a way this is a bit of a digression, but I do want to consider the sort of "violence" done to music by the likes of John Cage, Webern, and Schoenberg. Indeed, I think that this kind of hyper-order (in particular of Schoenberg) that approaches mathematical theorems is an important metaphor for complexity theory. I'd like to explore this further in another post or in a paper. But for now, I want to look at Taylor's choice of musical metaphor in comparison with Barry's: Fugue as opposed to Symphony.
For Barry, symphony and melody is the primary metaphor. True, she does argue that symphony is actually created by silences which in turn creates rhythm (Barry 125). And indeed, Oliver Sacks has argued in a podcast lecture on one of his books that rhythm is something humans are predisposed to, but the experiments by Schoenberg, et. al. show that music does not necessarily have to contain a consistent rhythm (We might also look at what Muckelbauer has said in his recent book about "singular rhythms" and see if this offers a way out of 'rhythm' in the sense Barry is getting at). As Dobrin argues in Postcomposition, we might want to look at writing in terms of its viscosity, which I think complicates our traditional notions of rhythm. I'm not sure how yet, but I think that we might be able to look at Dobrin's concept of saturation and viscosity of writing in terms of the irregular "rhythms" and "rules" (that are somewhere between order and chaos) of these composers I'm suggesting.
As I mentioned above, Barry seems to think that repetition implies a solidity of thinking patterns, which is indeed supported by neurological research. However, repetition (with a difference) is a key aspect of Fugue, particularly a Bach Fugue. The Fugue, like the rigor (and apparent chaos that is actually regulative) in Schoenberg, was considered at the time "too austerely intellectual for the common ear" (Taylor 158). I quote Taylor at length on what Bach's fugue "Musical Offering":
In a canon, the same melody is repeated by one or more voices overlapping in time, "in order for a theme to work as a canon theme, each of it snotes must be able to serve in a dual (or triple, or quadruple) role: it must first be part of a melody, and secondly, it must be part of harmonization of the same melody. When there are three canonical voices, for instance, each note of the theme must act in two distinct harmonic ways, as well as melodically. Thus, each note in a canon has more than one musical meaning; the listener's ear and brain automatically figure out the appropriate meaning, by referring to context." the complexity of the canon increases as the pitch of different voices or 'copies' is staggered, their speed varied, or the theme inverted by making the melody jump down wherever the original jumps up. The most complex canonical structure results from the inclusion of "retrograde copies" in which "the theme is played backward." Named after the creature that moves backward in space, this type of composition is known as a 'crab canon." What Hofstadter finds so fascinating about Bach's Musical Offering is the way in which the different parts fo the score work together as a whole. He alerts listeners: "Notice that every type of 'copy' preserves all information in the original theme, in the sense that the theme is fully recoverable from any of the copies. Such an information-preserving transformation is often called as isomorphism (Taylor 157-158, all italics mine except the final one)
Thus, the "melody" is indeterminate--no "original" melody can really be discerned unless one appeals to the first "melody" played. Everything cannot be integrated in the same way, but the music only provides a set or a potential combination of ways to formulate the piece rather than foregrounding one particular pattern and creating a figure/ground, gestalt relationship. Or perhaps this is misleading. The gestalt is created by the subject (like the 'melody' created by the listener). This is another issue I'd like to explore further.
To complicate the music metaphor even further, we have to introduce Jean-Luc Nancy's work Listening into the mix, a work that I have already created a long, involved post on. However, I feel I am now prepared to engage Nancy's relationship to Taylor's reading of complexity. If timbre in psychoacoustics is "In music, timbre (pronounced /ˈtæmbər/, like the "tambour" of "tambourine", and spelling pronunciation/ˈtɪmbər/; French: [tɛ̃bʁ]) is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. In psychoacoustics, timbre is also called tone quality and tone color" (wikipedia)
First, this reference to color makes an interesting connection to synaesthesia, but also the attention to timbre adds a new layer of complexity to the strands of instruments. Now, when we consider the material instrument being played, we realize that the same melody with different instruments--though a repetition of the silences and the notes--are actually repetition with a difference. While I don't wish to appropriate Nancy's particular interpretation of this 'resonance' in terms of the subject and the self (even though he strives to separate this talk of the subject from the subject as a stable entity--see pgs 8-9 of Listening--Dobrin's Postcomposition suggests that we need to move away from this notion of the 'subject' and 'self' completely to focus on writing as such--I believe Raul Sanchez also moves in this direction) I do want to call attention to the relationship between noise and timbre, with an aim to extending this connection with Serres' (and Taylor's reading of him) conception of noise. Nancy writes,
Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense. At first it communicates nothing--except itself. At its weakest and least articulated degree, one would call it noise. (there is noise in the attack and extinction of sound, and there is always noise in sound itself.) But all noise also contains timbre. In a body that opens up and closes at the same time, that arranges itself and exposes itself with others, the noise of its sharing (with itself, with others) resounds (41).
Thus, by looking at these smaller *almost* silences at the beginning and at the end of a sound we come to realize that these "silences" between the notes are echoes of the past--perhaps in the same way that Mark Taylor engages with the ghosts of his own writing:
"Rewriting does not merely repeat but also transforms in a way that complicates the parasite/host relationship. As the work takes shape, it becomes the host for ghosts now appearing as parasites [. . .] My words remain ghostly because they are haunted by others who have gone before and will haunt other yet to come. Writing always involves the screening of this spectral interplay of parasites and hosts" (Taylor 196).
And so we arrive at Taylor's idea of the "screen." Like Barry's use of the "interpreter" to describe the mind and like the concept of "focalizer," the "screen" both "hides while showing and shows while hiding," a concept that can be traced back probably to ancient wisdom, but which recalls to me some of the late Heidegger when he discusses truth and error among other things. Taylor writes, "In network culture, subjects are screens and knowing is screening" (Taylor 200). While this may seem like Taylor is saying "then, this was this, and NOW this is this" (a la Burnett) Taylor is aware of historical precedents, citing Augustine's Confessions and going all the way back to Plato's concept of ananamisis: "Augustine finally concludes that cogito (to think, reflect) is, in effect, cogo (to bring together, collect)" and a Heideggerian might add to gather (Taylor 201).
Barry supports this kind of thinking with cognitive psychological research--as cited above--with the idea that we cannot be aware of all the activity of our brain. For Taylor, this extends to the information society: "Though there are multiple sources of turbulence, one of the most important factors creating unrest in today's world is the unprecedented noise generated by proliferating networks whose reach extends from the local to the global" (Taylor 202). Dealing with noise in a way that recalls Nancy's analysis of timbre, and drawing on the work of Norretranders, Taylor distinguishes between information and "exformation."
Exformation is perpendicular to information. exformation is what is rejected en route, before expression. Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want to say sayable. exformation is the discarded information, everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything all all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterances as we actually come out with it" (Norretranders qtd. in Taylor 203)
Taylor reads this in a way that suggests Nancy's "communication" as such, which also recalls D. Diane Davis' attempts to get at the sayable rather than the said, which she gets from the thought of Levinas and, as she says in a recent interview, Nancy. Taylor writes,
"Exformation, in other words, is what is left out as information is formed from noise. As such, exformation is not simply absent but is something like a penumbral field from which information is formed. Since information is constituted by what it excludes, it inevitably harbors traces of noise" (203).
Are the traces of noise that Taylor discusses the inevitable echoes, reverberations, and resonances that result from any material embodiment of musical notes? In this sense, performed music never (or rarely) contains utter silence--there is always some sort of noise in between the notes that itches for acknowledgment. Of course, the question is--does writing echo? Does it reverberate? Or is it something particular to sound? Does writing contain a timbre--an attack and a fade such that the spaces between letters or words are really (here we have the I heart huckabees moment) echoes of the words and letters past and future?
Writing does seem to have this self-reflexive, echoing quality, with each echo simultaneously a repetition of the initial sound as well as a completely new element. Does writing contain reverb or delay?
Perhaps this noise within the notes is what John Cage tried to get at with his 4:33:
The point is not the silence of the written piece of music, but the experience and the minute noises that accompany the piece of music--the idea that the audience is not a passive consumer of the music and that the context (a concert) matters as much as the written piece of music itself. This mirrors writing because some pieces of writing are only validated in a certain context within a certain performance/material situation.
Returning to my example of Schoenberg:
Is this chaos or complexity? I leave this question for another post or another night.
