Immanence and Immersion: On the Acoustic Condition in Contemporary Art 9781501315855, 9781501315886, 9781501315862

Citation preview

Immanence and Immersion

Immanence and Immersion On the Acoustic Condition in Contemporary Art Will Schrimshaw

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2017 Paperback edition published 2019 Copyright © Will Schrimshaw, 2017 Cover image: Matter into matter into matter © Peter J. Evans All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1585-5 PB: 978-1-5013-5203-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1586-2 ePub: 978-1-5013-1587-9 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements

vii viii ix x

Introduction I.1 Immersion is the new orthodoxy I.2 The ideology of immersion I.3 Immersion and correlationism I.4 Immanence and immersion I.5 Exteriority and the outside I.6 Exiting immersion

13

1

35

2

3

Decentralization 1.1 Get Out of the Defensive Position 1.2 Transcendental empiricism: Approaching the edge of the circle 1.3 Negative duration 1.4 Prodigious simplification

1 2 6 16 20 29

39 43 47 52

Infraesthetics 2.1 Extreme audition 2.2 Rolf Julius 2.3 Stephen Vitiello 2.4 Nina Canell

57

Writing Out Sound 3.1 Writing and exteriority 3.2 Exteriority and the real 3.3 Sound recording and writing sound 3.4 Sound is always-already written out

77

57 66 68 70

79 80 82 85

vi

4

5

6

7

8

Contents

Immersive Phenomenology 4.1 Husserl 4.1.1 Intentionality and direct realism 4.1.2 Realism and reduction 4.2 Merleau-Ponty 4.2.1 Immersive phenomenology 4.2.2 Return to the depth of the pre-objective Sonic Materialism 5.1 Affective matter 5.2 Material phenomenology 5.3 Sonic-material phenomenology 5.4 Sonic realism

89 91 91 93 99 100 105 109 113 116 119 122

The Scientific Image 6.1 Ryoichi Kurokawa: Abstraction and the lifeworld 6.2 Towards a corruption of aesthetic sufficiency

135

Repurposing Conceptualism 7.1 Immanence and representation 7.2 Extinction abounds: Katie Paterson

155

The Stratification of Immanence 8.1 Immanence contra immersion 8.2 Beyond the circle 8.3 Immanence and an ethics of exteriority

References Index

143 152

164 167 175 175 184 191 195 200

List of Figures Figure I.1 Plane of immanence relative to a subject Figure I.2 Subject positioned within absolute immanence Figure 1.1 Mark Fell, Get Out of the Defensive Position (2014), video still, exhibited at Unsound Festival, Kraków Figure 2.1 Rolf Julius, Ash 2005 (wood ash, two Korean plastic cups, two open loudspeakers, wire, sound), private collection, Torino. Image: courtesy e/static, Torino Figure 2.2 Stephen Vitiello, We were moving together, moving apart. Not speaking/sleeping together (2005). Photo: Claudio Abate Figure 2.3 Nina Canell, Perpetuum Mobile (25 Kg) (2009–10) Figure 3.1 Etchings, Video Stills, Dawn Scarfe, 2007, Photograph by Dawn Scarfe Figure 6.1 Installation view of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s unfold, 2016 at FACT, Liverpool. Image: Brian Slater Figure 6.2 Installation view of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s unfold.mod, 2016 at FACT, Liverpool. Image: Brian Slater Figure 7.1 Katie Paterson, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull, 2007, three digital films, 1 h 57 m, film still. Photo © Katie Paterson 2007

18 31 41

67

69 71 86 146 150

170

List of Tables Table I.1 Table I.2 Table 1.1

The audiovisual litany Deleuze’s dyads The audiovisual litany mapped onto Bergson’s dichotomy of space and duration

6 22 51

Preface The argument presented herein has its origin in practice, in my own experiences as an artist working with sound and other materials in installation and performance contexts. The arguments, ideas and problems discussed in what follows are, however, less concerned with my own artistic practice than the way in which my experiences as a practitioner served as a means of identifying some of the ideological assumptions of the broader field within which I work. The content of my artistic work is of little significance to the present argument in contrast to the way in which the practice of exhibiting and performing presented opportunities for discussion and reflection with other artists, curators, directors, researchers and so on. To use a metaphor from the world of sonic practice, the artwork was the impulse but it was the response that was significant and the catalyst for this project. This argument grew out of a number of articles and conference presentations on similar topics, some of which have been included in modified forms in the following argument. My gratitude to the organizers, audiences and anonymous reviewers for the discussion and reflection this afforded. Each article and presentation felt incomplete, and so it became clear that a longer form of argumentation was required. The argument contained herein is directed towards philosophically inclined practitioners and theorists of contemporary art, rather than to philosophers. To be philosophically inclined is to take an interest not only in the internal concerns of one’s practice, but also in how this practice might connect, borrow or rely upon other disciplinary areas and arguments that extend beyond the domain of artistic practice. For this reason, I have felt it necessary for certain philosophical concepts and arguments to be reconstructed at length, rather than to presume prior knowledge or awareness. It is my hope that this will contribute to a deepening of interactions between contemporary artistic and philosophical practice.

Acknowledgements I thank Emily Portman, without whom none of this would have been possible. My thanks to Salomé Voegelin for the generosity with which she engaged in critical discussions that lead me to start this project. To Lendl Barcelos and the PAF community for the opportunity to discuss this project at length during the summer of 2016. To Edge Hill University for their support of this project. To Bloomsbury for accepting this project and to Susan Krogulski for her assistance throughout its completion. To the various artists, galleries and collectors who have supplied materials for reproduction herein. To Peter J. Evans for allowing his work Matter into matter into matter (2007) to be used on this book’s cover. My thanks to Mark Fell for his patience in responding to numerous questions about his work. This book was written in Emacs using org-mode, org-ref and pandoc running on Debian Linux; my gratitude to the community of developers who produce and maintain these excellent free tools. An early and much shorter version of the introduction to this book appeared in Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 1. Chapter three presents a reworked version of an article first published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Introduction

Throughout the arts – but particularly in digital performance, installation, sound and media arts – a figure of immersion has become increasingly prevalent. This enveloping, encircling figure of immersion, describing an envelopment of the viewer-audient by the artwork, owes much to Marshall McLuhan’s figurative notion of ‘acoustic space’ – a notion that was never limited to the sonic but that from its inception described the way that a wide variety of electronic media broke with the historical dominance of inscription, writing and the printing press as technologies organizing communication and a cultural logic dominated by the ‘visual’ and typographic. Since the advent of digital and interactive artworks, the prevalence of immersion as a criterion of aesthetic value has grown, as is evident in experimental engagements with virtual reality environments and the ubiquity of immersive installations, enveloping viewers in combinations of sound and light. This book identifies the phenomenological underpinnings of the immersive as an aesthetic category while identifying exit strategies from the constraints imposed, where immersion is elevated from a description of ontological embeddedness in the world to one of aesthetic sufficiency. Immersion and immanence are often said in the same breath – the former conceived as the aesthetics of the latter – yet the philosophical relationship between the two concepts is more complex than this apparent unity would suggest. To expose the complexity of the relationship between these two concepts, the concept of immanence is contrasted herein with the phenomenologically defined quality of immersion prevalent in much contemporary discourse oriented towards immersive aesthetics.

2

Immanence and Immersion

I.1 Immersion is the new orthodoxy Within the production and curation of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely championed as an experiential quality whose value is inherent yet strengthened through opposition to the visual, the latter being considered the most distant, objectifying or counter-immersive of the senses. The figure of immersion describes omnidirectional, enveloping qualities ascribed to a specifically sonorous experience or sensibility. To be immersed in sound implies embodied presence, an affective experience that is often opposed to rationality, differentiation, critical thinking and decision. Arguments for a primacy of immersion generally prioritize sound’s affective capacities over the epistemic as the latter implies abstraction and a critical distance thought antithetical to the aesthetic interiority of immersive experience. Often coupled to this spatial immersion, to a sense of being surrounded or bathed in sound, is the temporal immediacy of the encounter wherein immersion is generated in the instance of a meeting between artwork and audience. The immersive artwork is ultimately incomplete without a subject to immerse, and so it is this relation between the audience and artwork that is primary and ultimately constitutive of the immersive work. Immersion is thus a spatio-temporal phenomenon, an experiential unification of the present in space and time through immediate experience of a primordial sonic flux or vibration. The enveloping and encircling qualities of the immersive contribute towards an internalist logic asserting the primacy of the perceptual encounter. This book seeks to challenge this logic of interiority, which asserts a strong influence upon contemporary discourse on sound in the arts and humanities. This logic is challenged on the grounds that it diminishes capacity for thinking beyond the immediacy of human experience, collapsing differentiation through the assertion of an affective homogeneity positing mystical unification through a figure of cosmic vibration.1 Internalist logic prioritizing immersion, immediacy and continuity within discourse on sound art has contributed to a limitation of the scope and

1 On the subject of cosmic vibration see Frances Dyson’s discussion of the primordial ‘spirito-acoustic trope of vibration’ (Dyson 2009, 88).

Introduction

3

contemporary significance of the practice to which this discourse attends, often limiting it to the domain of phenomenal appearances, vague descriptions of the human condition and uncritical affirmations of embodiment as immediate self-presence. This orientation imposes considerable epistemological constraints upon artistic practice and the discourse attending to it. This internalist orientation diminishes the contemporary significance of the work it informs and reflects upon in the sense that it turns away from a postconceptual orientation towards a medium-specific neo-modernism that the label ‘sound art’ entails.2 Consequently it is the use of sound in contemporary artistic practice – rather than the internal logic, description and definition of sound art – that concerns the present argument. Peter Osborne has presented a selective account of contemporary art as a speculative and futurally oriented post-conceptual practice that entails ‘the critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials’ (Osborne 2013, 48). A broader and competing understanding of contemporary art, which sees the post-conceptual as a marginal orientation beyond the predominant forms of contemporary art, is presented by Suhail Malik. Osborne outlines a critical theory of the contemporary through an optimistic and selective approach to contemporary art. For Osborne, a defining feature of contemporary art is its post-conceptual, anti-aesthetic and transmedia orientation. Contrasting with Osborne’s description is Malik’s more pessimistic view of contemporary art which takes a less selective approach to what he sees as the dominant genre in the international art world (Malik 2015). Malik’s account describes contemporary art as being defined according to sufficient aesthetics and indeterminacy. According to these two characteristics it is the individual, subjective encounter with contemporary art that is significant, with sense and value being formed in the encounter wherein a co-constitution of artwork and subject takes place. Where these two descriptions of contemporary art are most at odds is where one posits a radical insufficiency of aesthetics in contemporary art, while the other posits a sufficient aesthetics of the encounter. The negative view presented by Malik overlaps with what I 2 In 2000 Max Neuhaus discussed the constraints imposed and redundancy of the term sound art (Neuhaus 2000). In ‘Return to Form’, Christoph Cox referred to the medium specificity that sound art entails as neo-modernism (Cox 2003).

4

Immanence and Immersion

will refer to herein as the acoustic condition in contemporary art, a condition where a co-constitution of subject and object takes place within the sufficient aesthetics of an immersive encounter with an indeterminate artwork. The narrower yet more positive perspective presented by Osborne will be drawn upon in describing a range of possible exit strategies from this acoustic condition. While Malik’s criticism seems more adequate to the majority of what is called contemporary art, the post-conceptual orientation central to Osborne’s definition entails a critical imperative that should be maintained in support of an exit from aesthetic sufficiency. Situating sound within the post-conceptual and transmedia conditions of contemporary practice entails a rejection of aesthetic sufficiency. Where aesthetic sufficiency is withdrawn, a conceptual orientation compensates. This conceptual orientation should be understood not as a return to the Conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s but as a post-conceptualism that decentralizes rather than disavows the aesthetic. A concern of the present argument is to mobilize this post-conceptual orientation in relation to the resurgence of various realisms within contemporary art and continental philosophy. Where attending to the medium specificity of sound art often entails a rejection of conceptuality in favour of a phenomenological or sonic materialism, it is argued herein that this rejection diminishes the possibility of situating contemporary artistic practice in relation to contemporary realisms, particularly those that would seek to draw upon rather than reject the resources of contemporary science and analytical philosophy. Where postconceptual practice entails a decentralization if not a complete disavowal of the aesthetic a compensatory conceptualism emerges as a more adequate method for engaging with non-anthropocentric conceptions of reality. Against suggestions that any requirement to consider sonic practice within the critical frameworks of a generic, transmedia theory of art constitutes a submission of the sonic to the ‘hegemony of the visual’, it should be noted that contemporary art does not seek value on the basis of its visuality, due to its non-retinal orientation (Cox 2011, 157). What is being argued for here is not the submission of the sonic to the visual, but sonic practice that does not invite limitation in terms of critical efficacy and conceptual potency through an anachronistic argument for medium specificity courting exemption from

Introduction

5

a field of critical discourse attending to a transmedia, transdisciplinary or generic concept of art. Consequently the argument presented herein is less concerned with defending or defining sound art than exploring the role of sound in the arts. If sound art is distinct from music – an existing medium specific and long-standing art of sounds – then what this term refers to is sound in the arts, sound within the transmedia conditions of contemporary art. This is not to say that there is nothing distinctive about the use of diverse media within artistic practice, but to say that where an art of sounds does not indicate Music, the idea that Sound Art and Visual Art necessitate distinctive metaphysics is fallacious. What is called sound art should be understood as a continuation and enrichment of the non-retinal orientation of conceptual art. Conceptual art should here be understood in a weak and inclusive sense that is not absolutely hostile to its morphological or aesthetic characteristics, but entails a critical interrogation of these in relation to art’s necessary conceptual content. ‘Sound art’ is thereby situated within an expanded notion of non-retinal art after Duchamp. The use of sound in art continues a conceptual orientation that resisted complete identity with language or analytical philosophy, following on from the early works of Robert Barry, for example. In the context of conceptually driven and technologically mediated artistic practice the desire for immersivity often appears as an attempt at damage limitation, an attempt to cling to presence, aesthetic coherence and unity in the face of their evacuation. The aesthetic sufficiency of immersivity attempts to stem the emptying of immediate self-presence facilitated by conceptualization, ubiquitous mediation and the increasingly unignorable intrusion of a scientific image of humanity into the sanctity of what Wilfrid Sellars called ‘the manifest image’ (Sellars 1963, 6).3 In the face of these challenges the immersive provides an affirmation of presence through what appears given or immediately apparent, whether this be in the therapeutic vain of ambience or more ‘visceral’ forms of immersive art. In what follows, artistic and philosophical challenges to the limitations imposed by interiority will be considered in order to more adequately address the challenges of exteriority 3 Sellars’s concepts of the manifest and scientific images will be discussed in more detail below.

6

Immanence and Immersion

that continue to undermine the sufficiency of phenomenological, textualist or constructivist discourses that establish an apparently insurmountable anthropic horizon and interiority – these latter theoretical and philosophical modes falling under the rubric of what Quentin Meillassoux has called ‘correlationism’ (Meillassoux 2009, 5).4

I.2 The ideology of immersion As an experiential quality thought to be a privilege of auditory experience, immersion is often asserted in defence of the auditory domain against an ocular-centric culture and the ‘hegemony of the visual’ (Cox 2011, 157). This opposition of the auditory and visual is informed by what Jonathan Sterne calls the ‘audiovisual litany’, a list of differences – theological in origin – between hearing and seeing or the oral and the visual (Sterne 2003, 15). Undertaking a kind of ideological analysis Sterne outlines an audiovisual litany that plagues not only sound studies but also communication studies more broadly and can be summarized in a table of binary oppositions (Table I.1) that make explicit the terms according to which the visual is frequently opposed to the oral or auditory.

Table I.1 The audiovisual litany Oral

Visual

spherical

directional

immersion

perspective

affect

intellect

temporal

spatial

subjectivity

objectivity

interior

surface/exterior

contact

distance

life

death

4 A discussion and brief explanation of correlationism will be provided below.

Introduction

7

Sterne has described how Walter Ong popularized this litany of oppositions, yet its source resides in the work of Marshal McLuhan (Sterne 2011). A concise example from McLuhan’s numerous writings that makes clear the terms of a division along the lines of the audiovisual litany can be found in his definition of acoustic or auditory space – terms which he used interchangeably: Auditory space ... is usually defined as ‘a field of simultaneous relations without centre or periphery.’ That is, auditory space contains nothing and is contained in nothing. It is quite unvisualizable, and, therefore, to the merely print oriented man, it is ‘unintelligible’. (McLuhan 2006, 49)

What McLuhan refers to as ‘print oriented man’ is characterized as being ‘visually’ dominated, and so the ‘nothing’ that characterizes acoustic space from the perspective of the ocular-centric subject is only considered as such due to its invisibility, rather than its status as void. The invisible nothing characteristic of acoustic space is not so much void or hollow as populated by invisible waveforms, ad hoc relations, errant vibrations and pre-symbolic flux. The amorphous and ‘invisible’ structuring of acoustic space is contrasted to the discrete and linear organization of space that McLuhan considered to have been initiated by the Gutenberg printing press. This notion of acoustic space, defined as such in accordance with the binary oppositions of the audiovisual litany, has become the predominant ideology or orthodoxy in writings on auditory culture, sound studies and sound in the arts.5 Unchallenged, the predominance of the figure of immersion contributes to an ideology of interiority limiting the epistemological and conceptual potency of sonic practice. The assertion of the audiovisual litany, explicitly or implicitly, does a disservice to both the oral and the visual sides, diminishing the critical and creative scope of both while ignoring cultural techniques. It is the concept of acoustic or auditory space and its enrichment through the audiovisual litany that constitutes the acoustic condition in contemporary art, a condition that through privileging the ‘oral’ side of the audiovisual litany – envelopment, immediacy, simultaneity, affectivity – receives its

5 For more detail on the extent to which the audiovisual litany has taken hold in sound studies and related fields see ‘Exit Immersion’ (Schrimshaw 2015a), which includes a critical survey of a number of significant texts focused on sound studies, auditory culture and sound art.

8

Immanence and Immersion

clearest fulfilment in immersive aesthetics. Affirming the ‘oral’ against the ‘visual’, the acoustic condition entails an internalist logic that often contributes to a remystification through its withdrawal from that which it would regrettably assign to a ‘visual’ culture comprising the directional, intellectual, conceptual, analytical, external and so on. In contrast to the distal, linear logic of what McLuhan referred to as visual space, acoustic space is characterized through a circular organization of space. Where the frontal orientation of the visual gives rise to a linearity in thought, the omnidirectionality of hearing gives rise to a circularity. While McLuhan will describe auditory space as ‘without centre’, the absence of a single, absolute centre does not entail the absence of a number of individual centres, as the organization of acoustic space can be understood as an amorphous field of propagating waves, resonant relations or ‘affective flux’ within which a series of overlapping circles, with a listening subject at the centre of each, are immersed. The figure of the circle represents an immersive, encircling organization of acoustic space, with the listening subject positioned on the inside of the circle. The affective disposition of the acoustic condition prioritizes sensation over signification. Through its withdrawal from conceptual abstraction and representation in favour of an affective immediacy, the acoustic condition prioritizes a materialism that is equated with a primordial, pre-symbolic field of affectivity, a materialism entwined with embodied experience and positioned beyond representation. The argument made herein is that, through its rejection of the ‘visual’ the circularity of the acoustic condition constitutes incarceration as much as immersion, constraining thought, truncating ontology and epistemology within the somatic and phenomenological. The acoustic condition entails the presumption that while the distal logic of the ‘visual’ entails domination through objectification, an auditory culture would assume a more harmonious relationship to the world around it by recognizing the co-constitution of subject and object. Where distal visuality is understood to be the source of separation, differentiation and objectivity, the intimacy of the auditory ‘blurs’ distinctions between subject and object (see Bull 2003, 4–5). Where the identification of a blurring of subject– object distinctions could possibly be understood as an attempt to locate a

Introduction

9

transcendental horizon conditioning the limits of possible experience, this blurriness more frequently entails a withdrawal from the critical operations of thought this would necessarily entail. As a withdrawal from differentiation the blurriness presumed proper to sound and sonic experience – contrasted to the discretion of the ‘visual’ – entails a blunting of critical thought and cultural technique. Consequently auditory culture divests itself of conceptual resources in favour of an affective orientation frequently conflated with a somatic materialism. Through these divestments and withdrawals the circle delimiting the immersive acoustic condition closes in around the body of an auditory subject who hears more than listens. It is its purchase upon the conceptual that discourse on sound should not lose through too narrow a notion of the visual from which it sets itself adrift. Such a loss risks constraining sonic practice and discourse to vague affirmations of primordial flux, errant vibrations, or a phenomenologically construed interiority comprised of pre-symbolic affects. This threat to critical and conceptual thought posed by the predominance of immersion can be clearly identified in Salomé Voegelin’s thoughts on the distinctive natures of vision and audition: Sound’s ephemeral invisibility obstructs critical engagement, while the apparent stability of the image invites criticism. Vision, by its very nature assumes a distance from the object, which it receives in its monumentality. Seeing always happens in a meta-position, away from the seen, however close. And this distance enables a detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth. Seeing is believing ... By contrast, hearing is full of doubt ... Hearing does not offer a meta-position; there is no place where I am not simultaneous with the heard. However far its sources, the sound sits in my ear. I cannot hear it if I am not immersed in its auditory object, which is not its source but sound as sound itself. (Voegelin 2010, xi–xii, emphasis added)

Here we find reiteration of the oppositions comprising the audiovisual litany, as seen in Table I.1. What becomes clear in this excerpt is that the ascription of doubt to a sonic sensibility, concomitant with the blurriness discussed above, is the product of a withdrawal from critical activities and attention to cultural technique rather than something proper to sonic practice or sound itself. If the reader attends critically to sound – whether as a musician, musicologist, artist, sound engineer, acoustician or forensic scientist, etc. – it will

10

Immanence and Immersion

be apparent that the qualities of sonic experience underpinning the opposition of the auditory and the visual pay little attention to the trained ear or listening as ‘audile technique’ capable of critical differentiation (Sterne 2003, 137). For the trained practitioner, analyst or theorist the ephemerality and invisibility of sound presents little obstruction to critical engagement. In place of the trained or critical ear we find a preference for passivity, for an appreciation of sounds simply given, as they appear ‘immediately’ in a purely qualitative state. Supporting this passive notion of sonic experience is the emphasis upon hearing as a sense ‘full of doubt’, without addressing what is, in common usage, the more active term associated with audition, namely listening. Listening as a trained and selective activity – even before it enters the reified professional realms of audile technique – assumes a level of attention and criticality incompatible with the account of sound provided above. Where there is doubt in sensory perception it is not proper to one sense but to the senses in general, as the strict correlation between appearance and reality has been consistently challenged and undermined. Since the nineteenth-century, research in physics as well as the psychology and physiology of perception has rendered vision as susceptible to doubt as audition (see Crary 2001). In identifying a list of sonic privileges intended to relieve sound from its submission to ocular primacy an unfortunate situation arises where sonic experience, through being opposed to the distance of the visual, is consigned to an isolating interiority that actively disables critical engagement. Supporting the oppositions of the audiovisual litany is often an imbalanced comparison between a medium and a sense, with each being taken from opposing sides of the litany. Where the logic of the audiovisual litany is asserted we often find vision opposed to sound, rather than a comparison of mediums – sound and light – or senses – hearing and seeing. Furthermore, the refinement of the senses through cultural technique is often neglected whence differentiation between hearing and listening, seeing and looking might arise. Where these more balanced comparisons are made the oppositions propping up the audiovisual litany quickly fall apart: just as one cannot hear if one is not immersed in sound, one cannot see if one is not immersed in light. Light must enter the eye just as sound must enter the ear. Low-frequency light can be felt upon the skin as can low-frequency sound.

Introduction

11

Listening is capable of differentiation, determining distances, speeds, volumes and composition, as is looking. These imbalanced comparisons and a neglect of intentionality or cultural technique gives rise to an internalist logic and an unfortunate withdrawal from critical activity supporting the resistance of auditory culture to a hegemony of the visual which ‘no longer has much value or significance at all’ (Crary 2001, 3). To succumb to an embattled position regarding the hegemony of the visual is not only to risk falling into a spurious metaphysics of sound defined in opposition to the visual, but to succumb to an equally dubious metaphysics of visuality that bears little historical or cultural accuracy outside of simplistic and quotidian understandings of the senses. The neglect of intentionality and differentiation through cultural techniques can be seen in Christoph Cox’s assertion that ‘lacking earlids, we are forever and inescapably bathed in sound, immersed in it in a way that we are not immersed in a world of visible objects’ (Cox 2013). That one does not have ‘earlids’ does not mean that we cannot learn to differentiate between sounds, ignore or attend to them in differing degrees. Here we also find the imbalanced comparison mentioned above where sound as a medium is compared to visual objects, the products of intentional acts.6 Cox’s assertion would make little sense if a more balanced comparison of sound and light, sound objects and visual objects were presented. Where the opposition of the senses in the audiovisual litany are seen to be fallacious and fall apart, they give way to an underlying and more fundamental distinction between the rational and the sensorial, terms which cannot be meaningfully aligned with the visual and the oral respectively. If we accept that the terms of the audiovisual litany and the arguments building upon it are undermined by the insufficiencies of their sensorial oppositions, this line of argumentation appears to be more a resistance to reason or rationalism than to visuality. To use Veit Erlmann’s terminology this is more an opposition of reason and resonance than that of the auditory and the visual (Erlmann 2010). Erlmann’s work is notable within the context of this argument for its evasion of the audiovisual litany, showing the contribution made ‘by the ear’ or aurality to modern subjectivity and reason, the latter not being thought the reserve

6 The concept of intentionality will be returned to in more detail below.

12

Immanence and Immersion

of the visual but as something to which the senses in general might both contribute and be subjected to. Noting how Erlmann’s concept of resonance by extension entails the affective, it is important to point out that reason and resonance do not stand in for the visual and the auditory respectively, that they do not fall back upon the terms of the audiovisual litany. Reason and resonance remain distinct yet not entirely discrete, and so it is historical attempts to think and explore their relation or interplay that concerns Erlmann, a relational determination summed up in his coining of the term ‘reasonance’, summarizing the Cartesian ‘project of reconciling resonance with reason’ (Erlmann 2010, 64). For Erlmann resonance has exercised a ‘benign yet indomitable rule’ over listening (Erlmann 2010, 115), its constant threat of undermining of the autonomy and freedom of thought highlighted in the platitude that we are ‘lacking earlids’ (Cox 2013), permitting sound to enter, establish or force unfree connections via sympathetic resonance. It is this force, the circumventing of reason and selectivity, that establishes resonance’s distinction from reason: its unchecked, insidious and unavoidable affectivity. Resonance is a forced connection or relation, an unfree selectivity determined according to the resonant capacities of the body rather than the reasoned differentiations, distinctions and critical selectivity of thought. The interactions of reason and resonance, or even their nesting within each other as in Erlmann’s use of the term ‘reasonance’, indicates how resonance and the organ most readily associated with it is not, and throughout modernity has not been, precluded from reason, and therefore conceptual and critical activity. While resonance as an insidious, relational, enveloping, affective, pre-symbolic force is easily situated on the oral side of the audiovisual litany, Erlmann’s work shows how this has not excluded it from reason; the bidirectional relation highlighted by Erlmann’s ‘reasonance’ indicates how reason is not precluded from access to or knowledge of its own unreasonable conditions. Although the logic of the audiovisual litany is often asserted to redress cultural ocularcentricity, it results in a further impoverishment and consignation of the auditory to the margins of culture through divestment from critical attention. While we can, against the audiovisual litany, show the auditory’s capacity for criticality, conceptualization and reason through brief recourse to audile techniques, Crary has shown (Crary 1992, 2001) how the apparent

Introduction

13

certainty and objectivity readily ascribed to vision has long since  dissipated in everything but the most quotidian of contexts, as the objective certainty of the senses in general dissipated throughout modernity. Even where the audiovisual litany falters and consequently defers to a broader opposition of reason and sensation or resonance – the former often allied with the visual and the latter the auditory – Erlmann’s work on resonance and reason gives a historical account of these terms as distinct yet not in opposition – a difference in degree rather than kind – with neither being irrevocably assigned to eye or ear. While the distribution and opposition of terms in the audiovisual litany may not withstand scrutiny, thereby undermining many of the claims made for the specific qualities of a sonic sensibility, the perseverance of immersion in artistic practice – whether this be a privilege of the acoustic or not – also takes support from a wider philosophical investment in the logic of correlationism.

I.3 Immersion and correlationism Where then division of the senses along the lines of the audiovisual litany falls apart to expose an underlying hostility to how we look and listen, a hostility to reason in favour of affective resonance, the logic of interiority that this withdrawal affirms is itself supported by the broader logic of correlationism: Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself ’, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object. (Meillassoux 2009, 5)

Against objectivity or a notion of the real that can be equated with a rigorous notion of indifferent exteriority, correlationism argues that it is false to posit a pre-existing object or mind-independent reality, as there can be no object without a subject; equally, there can be no subject without an object as correlationism posits a ‘primacy of the relation over the related terms; a belief in the constitutive power of reciprocal relation’ (Meillassoux 2009, 5). It is

14

Immanence and Immersion

the constitutive power of the relation that produces both subject and object, the relation thereby having primacy over both. The constitutive power of reciprocal relation that is characteristic of correlationism is rendered sonorous by Voegelin for whom ‘phenomenological subjects’ participate in ‘generating ourselves and the world we hear through our being in the world’ (Voegelin 2014, 3). This correlational logic predominant in the continental thought influential in theorization of the arts serves as a conceptual architecture for the contemporary predisposition towards the immersive, insofar as the immediacy of the immersive – as a characteristically ‘acoustic’ organization of space – proposes to usurp the discretion of the visual constitutive of the apparent distance between subject and object. In contrast to the distinction constitutive of the objective – the distinction between subject and object – informed by the organizational logic of the discrete, typographic, lineal, ‘visual’ space, the immediate immersivity of acoustic space refuses a distinction between subject and object, emphasizing the irreducible subjectivity of the apparent object consequential to the ‘primacy of the relation over the related terms’. This relational primacy draws everything into the correlation: there is nothing outside of the correlation. This preclusion of the outside or exteriority by correlational logic constitutes a significant contribution to the philosophical architecture supporting the predisposition towards immersion and interiority within sonic practice, as the dissolution or undercutting of ‘visual’ distance instantiated by sound’s immediate immersivity also dissolves subject–object distinctions. The apparent transparency of vision that places a distance between subject and object is usurped by the blurry immediacy, confusion and dissolution of this distance thought peculiar to sonic experience. The circle delimiting the immersive and internalist logic of the acoustic condition is concentric with what Meillassoux calls ‘the correlationist circle’ (Meillassoux 2009, 5). The opposition of the visual and auditory in the audiovisual litany, which still informs the logic of sound studies, is underpinned by an opposition of reason and affect traversing the senses, and ultimately that of correlationism. The internalist logic of the audiovisual litany seeks to excise reason through its identification with the ‘visual’, and so its interpretation of the correlationist logic that ultimately underpins it is predominantly affective.

Introduction

15

One of the principal targets of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism is phenomenology, a philosophy widely adopted – whether explicitly or implicitly – within sound studies. Where the object-orientation that much phenomenology entails is excised from the sonic according to the logic of the audiovisual litany, the phenomenological character of the acoustic condition is principally affective rather than intentional, being more closely aligned with the material phenomenology of Michel Henry than that of Edmund Husserl, a distinction that will be examined in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5. The acoustic condition describes a regime of thought informed by the internalist logic of the audiovisual litany yet extends its oppositions along the lines of a broader underlying logic which affirms the affective and an immersive aesthetic sufficiency against the operations of reason. The combination of these factors involves the assumption of a correlationist philosophy. It is an exit from this acoustic condition that is sought herein. The constraints imposed by this affective phenomenology and its orientation towards an immersive interiority have also been identified by Seth Kim-Cohen who has sought an exit strategy through greater alignment with conceptual art and Derridean thought, both entailing notions of exteriority that would exit the circle of a sufficient immersive or ambient aesthetics (Kim-Cohen 2009, 2013). The extent to which Derridean notions of exteriority and a repurposing of conceptual art present exit strategies from the acoustic condition are explored in Chapters 3 and 7, respectively. Yet following the critique of correlationism presented in different forms by the likes of Wilfrid Sellars, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, an aim of the present argument is to move beyond the internalist logic and correlationism of the acoustic condition towards a theorization of sound in the arts that might better accommodate contemporary philosophical realisms, as will be explored in Chapter 6. Where Kim-Cohen seeks an exit from the ‘phenomenological cul-de-sac’ that sound art – as a medium specific practice – leads us down, the present argument seeks an additional exit from the textualism and constructivism that Kim-Cohen adheres to (Kim-Cohen 2009, 50). Ultimately Kim-Cohen’s limitation of the conceptual to textualist constructivism and his affirmation of the sufficiency of the linguistic turn constitutes yet another form or horizon of interiority, another form of correlationism.

16

Immanence and Immersion

I.4 Immanence and immersion Immanence asserts a single world, a single system or plane of existence within which everything that can be said to exit is included; there can be no world of the Gods separate to that of mere mortals, no compartmentalization of spirits or souls that would set them apart from the rest of nature. Spinoza, whom Deleuze identifies as having identified the ‘best’ plane of immanence, expressed such a one-world conception of immanence in the proposition that ‘God is the indwelling, not the transient cause of all things’, accordingly ‘all things which are, are in God ... besides God there can be no substance, that is nothing in itself external to God’ (Spinoza 1955, 62). The concept of substance more than that of God as the immanent, indwelling cause is of interest to the present argument. Of particular interest to clarifying immanence is the indwelling of all upon a single plane of being and the dismissal of ontological externality – by which transcendence might be attained – characterizing immanence. The assertion of an ontological levelling within a single plane of immanence does not devalue or simplify that which the concepts of souls or spirits, subjects and selves have historically attempted to contain – to render them equal to rocks, toasters, tofu steaks and so on – but indicates the complexity of the task that immanence assumes. While the task of immanence is to provide an account of possible existence that refutes ontological transcendence, we find throughout the history of philosophy a range of completing philosophies of immanence that when compared are characteristic for what they exclude from the realm of immanence as much as for what they attempt to accommodate. Summarizing a range of ‘postcontinental’ philosophies as philosophies of immanence, John Mullarkey claims immanence to be everywhere (Mullarkey 2006), a claim echoing that of Deleuze and Guattari who state that every great philosopher produces their own plane of immanence (Deleuze 1994, 51). It should therefore be possible to approach the history of philosophy not according to individual philosophers but the planes of immanence that they produce, respectively asserting the immanence of critique, appearance, language, affect and so on. Where immanence is discussed in relation to artistic practice, immanence and immersion are frequently thought together, the latter being considered an aesthetic actualization of the former. Where these terms are bound together

Introduction

17

we find claims that ‘immanence immerses in order to exceed specification or determination’ (Noys 2014, 173). This conflation of immanence and immersion has the consequence of constraining the former within the limits of the latter. A result of this conflation and constraint is that an immersive, aestheticized conception of immanence through exceeding specification and determination takes on the qualities ascribed to the oral side of the audiovisual litany. Despite this conflation, the adoption of a philosophy of immanence in excess of an immersive aesthetics presents an opportunity for an exit from the acoustic condition and its internalist logic informed by the audiovisual litany. In an alignment sympathetic to the oppositions of the audiovisual litany we readily find immanence conflated with affective immediacy, located beyond the reach of representation. This conflation presents immanence in aesthetic terms as an experience of immersion. The problem with aesthetics of immersion from the perspective of immanence is that the former renders immanence relative to the immersed subject through the positing of a primacy and centrality of experience. If immanence is to be absolute then immersion cannot be allowed to constitute a sufficient aesthetics of immanence. Immersion posits a plane of immanence, a plane within which there is no externality, nothing beyond a realm of affective appearances. That which is not grounded in an auto-affective production is ultimately cast as unreal transcendence, an instance of distal vision vitiating the authentic experience of immanence as immersion. Where immanence and immersion are conflated in aesthetics the plane of immanence is often homogenized as all becomes affect. The internalist logic of this homogenizing conflation of immanence and immersion is clearly presented by Michel Henry for whom: The Internal is not the fold turned inward of a first Outside. In the Internal there is no putting at a distance ... there is no exteriority in it ... [The Internal] is revealed in the way of Life. Life feels and experiences itself immediately such that it coincides with itself at each point of its being. Wholly immersed in itself and drawn from this feeling of itself, it is carried out as a pathos. Prior to and independently from every regard, affectivity is the ‘way’ in which the internal is revealed to itself, in which life lives itself, in which the impression immediately imprints itself and in which feeling affects itself. (Henry 2009, 7)

18

Immanence and Immersion

For Henry affect is both matter and method of the inside. As will be discussed in Chapter 5 theories of sonic materialism lay claim to a nonanthropocentric conception of the real yet assume an affective methodology and orientation similar to that outlined by Henry above. In contrast to this orientation the argument developed herein outlines a concept of immanence distinct from the aesthetics of affective immediacy. Where immanence is aestheticized it is often homogenized, all becomes affect, all is flux. The binding and truncation of immanence within immersion performs an ontoaesthetic conflation (see Kane 2015) where method and matter are confused in a becoming-sound of thought that withdraws from representation and conceptualization. Yet immanence need not entail homogeneity as the plane of absolute immanence may be stratified and the task of a philosophy of immanence becomes transit between these differentiated strata. Where the affective orientation entails internalist logic it is inadequate to a thinking beyond human experiences, beyond aesthetic immediacy. Consequently the

Figure I.1 Plane of immanence relative to a subject.

Introduction

19

pursuit of the absolute or real must reach beyond the aesthetic in terms of its object and method. To accommodate the equality of being that pure or absolute immanence entails (see Deleuze 1990, 173, 2006a, 261), a concept of immanence unbound from aesthetic immersion is required. Unbound from aesthetic constraints, an expanded concept of immanence is more adequate in addressing a non-anthropocentric conception of the real and the ecological ethics entwined with it. The localized and relative planes of immanence produced throughout the history of philosophy are typically immanent to a subject; in belonging to a subject this subject remains in excess of the plane of immanence proper to it and so in a position of transcendence, set apart (see Figure I.1). Where immanence and immersion are too closely bound, immanence is constrained within the localized plane of aesthetic experience; immanence becomes immanence to the subject undergoing this experience. Presenting a concept of immanence that exceeds its localization or truncation within subjective experience, Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of absolute immanence is to be drawn upon as a philosophical framework presenting the basic materials with which to stage an exit from the sufficient aesthetics of immersion. Yet to achieve this aim, Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence will necessarily undergo a series of connections, extensions and distortions to accommodate representation and an outside beyond sensation. Absolute immanence is irreducible to an aesthetics of immersion, extending beyond aesthetic experience. Where absolute immanence is that which accounts for everything within a single world, disavowing ontological transcendence, this plane of absolute immanence is equated with a concept of nature understood as the production of reality. Consequently the association of such a concept with immanence entails that all that exists must exist within nature, permitting no supernaturalism. This plane of immanence extends beyond experience, beyond the given, an absolute plane of immanence that cannot be reduced to a sufficient aesthetics of immersion. This identification of a plane of absolute immanence constitutes a counter-correlationist gesture, in that it situates the real beyond a founding subject and its co-constitutive relation with an object, asserting a mind-independent reality outside subjective experience. While positing an outside, immanence is maintained as it is within this outside, that the interiority of subjective experience takes

20

Immanence and Immersion

place. The position assumed herein is therefore the opposite of that presented by Henry, as seen above, as the positing of a naturalistic conception of the real requires that the internal be considered ‘the fold turned inward of a first Outside’ (Henry 2009, 7).

I.5 Exteriority and the outside In orienting ourselves towards the outside emphasis is placed on externality over interiority, an assertion which has significance for the adoption of a broadly Deleuzian ontology. Addressing the importance of an internal– external dyad in Deleuze’s philosophy supports a critical approach to the arrangement and opposition of these terms in the audiovisual litany and an exit from its internalist logic. While externality is associated with visuality in the audiovisual litany, the alignment of sound and vision to interiority and exteriority respectively is ultimately fallacious. Consequently exteriority is unbound from any sense or medium in particular, indicating excess over the experience of subjective, auto-affective interiority in general. Rethinking the relation of concepts of internality and externality to the role sound in the arts moves us beyond a phenomenologically defined sound art and the internalist logic and immersive aesthetics. Shifting attention from the experience of subjective interiority towards its external yet immanent conditions supports a conceptualization of reality beyond appearances and a more functionalist conception of sound in the arts, considered not according to its immersive qualities but as intensive quantity that affects change beyond the limits of perception and experience. The concepts of interiority and exteriority can be related to many of the concepts found throughout the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze. Many of the concepts central to Deleuze’s system are arranged in dyads; most notable among these are virtual–actual, intensive–extensive, implication– explication, smooth–striated and molecular–molar. While these dyads identify the poles of a co-implication or oscillation rather than terms absolutely separated, priority usually resides with the first term in each dyad.

Introduction

21

The virtual–actual dyad is the most significant and long standing of these pairings with the virtual referring to the generative potential and ceaseless production of actual events and appearances. Where the virtual might be associated with a lack of reality due to the proliferation of virtual reality, both virtual and actual remain real within Deleuze’s ontology. Deleuze refers to a real virtuality wherein  – virtual  – dynamic processes of production assume priority over – actual – products. Concomitant with this priority of the processual, in each of the dyads listed above the former term is associated with processual production, whereas the latter is associated with products, fixed forms and appearances. The coupling of virtual and actual within Deleuze’s ontology gives precedence to the virtual over the actual, the latter often appearing as a kind or second-order event, a residual by-product of the primary processes of virtuality. This hierarchical arrangement of virtual and actual poses some initial problems for an immanent philosophy: the actual encompasses most of our experience of the world, certainly our normal, everyday, common-sense experiences, the field of knowledge, certainties, our use of language, representation and so on. That such a field of experience should be relegated to a second-class order of existence devalues much of what we could identify as empirical experience. Secondly, such a separating out of the virtual and the actual, the introduction of a hierarchy and in particular a second order of existence would seem to vitiate the univocity required of immanence as a one-world philosophy. While the relationship between these dyads and immanence, a relation of the two to the one, will be addressed shortly, it should be noted that movement away from commonsense appearances and quotidian experience is seen to be a move towards immanence, a move towards the conditions of the given that operate beyond the recognition of common-sense events and intuition. This impoverishment of the actual, its characterization as residual or superficial crust of existence, has lead John Mullarkey to criticize Deleuze on the grounds of an ‘internalist logic’ (Mullarkey 2006, 20). Mullarkey identifies the above dyads operating within Deleuze’s philosophy and asserts that they are reducible to that of the internal and external. This mapping yields the dyadic relations seen in Table I.2.

22

Immanence and Immersion Table I.2 Deleuze’s dyads Virtual

Actual

Intensive

Extensive

Implication

Explication

Smooth

Striated

Molecular

Molar

Interiority

Exteriority

While the identification of relations between these dyads helps to decode aspects of Deleuze’s writing, the proposed alignment of interiority and exteriority that supports Mullarkey’s charge of an internalist logic should be questioned. While explication and extension associated with the actual can be easily aligned with externalization, expression and an exterior skin that congeals or encrusts the flowing processes of the virtual, there is also a ‘hatred of interiority’ and a prioritization of the ‘externality of forces and relations’ that can be seen to have informed Deleuze’s practice and historicization of philosophy (Deleuze 1995, 6). Where the relative nature of the internal and external are asserted by Deleuze (see Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 55 and 100), one way to understand this relativity is that it is to a subject that such distinctions are relative, a subject distinguishing between a familiar, internal world and an alien external world, while both are ultimately subsumed within a single plane of absolute immanence within which the subject exists. Consequently the internal and external would switch columns in Table I.2, wherein exteriority would become aligned with the virtual, which exceeds containment within subjective stratifications or molar forms, rather than withdrawing into a pure interiority. The concept of externality is necessitated in arguing against an internalist logic, yet ultimately, from the perspective of an immanent philosophy, the internal/external opposition and the use of such concepts must be collapsed towards the affirmation of a plane of immanence. Having discussed the positioning of the concepts of internality and externality within Deleuze’s philosophy, the characteristics of each should be clarified. To begin outlining the characteristics ascribed to interiority and

Introduction

23

exteriority we can consider Deleuze and Guattari’s analogous comparison of Chess and Go: Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfils functions of insertion or situation. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 389)

From this brief analogy we can extract some of the basic characteristics of interiority and exteriority. The ‘milieu of interiority’ according to which chess operates retains hierarchical, structured, fixed identities between its constituent pieces; the identity of each piece, its behaviour and so on, is specific and intrinsic. In contrast, the ‘milieu of exteriority’ within which Go operates is one in which each piece has no specific or fixed identity, potential movements are generic and universal; the function and significance of each piece and its role in the game is relationally determined. It is this relational determination – rather than intrinsic identity or essence – that is characteristic of exteriority; each piece, term, node or thing is conditioned from without through its emergence within a field of deterministic relations and interactions. The primacy of an externality of relations can be found in some of Deleuze’s earliest writings, most notably in his 1953 essay on Hume, wherein it is asserted that ‘every relation is external to its terms’ (Deleuze 1991, 99). This early concept of exteriority is clarified by Deleuze through a discussion of the constitution of subjectivity in Hume. Deleuze outlines the extent to which Hume’s empiricism engages in a critique of consciousness and experience through being situated ‘in a purely immanent point of view, which makes possible a description whose rule is found in determinable hypotheses and whose model is found in physics, we ask how is the subject constituted in the given? The construction of the given makes room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer given to a subject; rather the subject constitutes itself in the given’ (Deleuze 1991, 87). It is the question of the subject’s constitution within the given, rather than the question of the presentation of the given to an assumed a priori, transcendent subject, that renders Hume’s empiricism immanent. The given is thereby figured as being

24

Immanence and Immersion

in excess of the subject, it is the milieu of exteriority within which and out of which the subject is constituted. The constitution of subjectivity within the given presents an immanent perspective, whereas the presentation of the given to a pre-existing subject remains transcendent in presupposing a subject external to the given. The given within which the subject is constituted is, ‘says Hume, the flux of the sensible, a collection of impressions and images, or a set or perceptions. It is the totality of that which happens, being which equals experience; it is also movement and change without identity or law’ (Deleuze 1991, 87). Such a definition has a semblance of the interior or subjective world to it, being outlined with terms such as the sensible, yet the sensible is here a passive synthesis that prefigures subjective or intentional experience, situating experience in a physiological basis prior to its recognition. The exteriority of the given is therefore not simply an apparently external world, but rather ‘the flux of the sensible, a collection of impressions’, which provide the conditions for the mind. Yet the mind also constitutes a certain exteriority with regard to the subject: ‘The mind is not a subject, nor does it require a subject whose mind it would be’ (Deleuze 1991, 88); the subject is engendered as a synthesis in a mind constituted in excess of it. It is through this synthesis that ‘the imagination, having been a collection, becomes now a faculty; the distributed collection becomes now a system’ (Deleuze 1991, 92). We then have a chain of causal relations implicated in the constitution of the subject and defining what, in one sense, is external to it: given Æ mind Æ subject. The mereological relations of each of the three elements a) given, b) mind and c) subject, their respective nesting within each other, can be depicted as follows: a(b(c())). Through these relations the constitution of the subject is the emergence of an interiority within an immanent exteriority or outside (see Figure I.2). Contra Henry, the inside is to be thought as ‘the fold turned inward of a first Outside’ (Henry 2009, 7). Defined as the a-symbolic flux of the sensible this particular delimitation of the milieu of exteriority defines the edge of the circle of subjective synthesis, rather than an external world whose objects are transparently represented in the ideas of the mind. The relations describing exteriority remain of a phenomenal nature, being forged from the flux of the sensible, sensory impressions and so

Introduction

25

on. It is where the concept of exteriority is superseded by the outside that we begin to move beyond this particular circle of synthesis. Tension between the internal and external is found in both the audiovisual litany and Deleuzian ontology, where the former presents a strict opposition, the latter presents a dyad suggesting oscillation. Where interiority forms a condition of immersion, exteriority presents the latter’s excessive yet immanent condition. Thinking exteriority can assist in the production of conceptual resources for an exit from the ideology of interiority and its tendency towards affective solipsism. Seeking a route out of the phenomenological cul-de-sac that Seth Kim-Cohen (Kim-Cohen 2009) has identified as a constraint on conceptual efficacy in sonic practice and the epistemological constraints of correlationism as critiqued by the likes of Meillassoux and Sellars, the conceptual resources mobilized through a preliminary thinking of exteriority leads onto more radical concepts of the outside, immanence and the absolute. Rather than an ontological exteriority that would vitiate immanence, the thinking of exteriority is a methodological requirement in exiting the internalist logic of immersion and the audiovisual litany. While exteriority and the outside would seem to present a problem for a philosophy of immanence, they are important components in Deleuze’s thinking on immanence. Exteriority and the outside are, for Deleuze, concepts of fundamental importance to empiricism. The orientation towards exteriority is one towards relationality. Distancing itself from an essentialism concerned with what a thing is, external networks of constitutive relations are prioritized. While the scepticism of Humean empiricism will constrain the thinking of exteriority to relations between appearances and a constitutive subject, not straying into disquisitions concerning reality, Deleuze’s extension of exteriority to the outside attempts to remove such constraints. In the 1972 essay that sees developments in Deleuze’s thinking on Hume, we are told that: the real empiricist world ... is a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction ‘and’ dethrones the interiority of the verb ‘is’. (Deleuze 2005, 38)

26

Immanence and Immersion

Here the concept of the outside has joined that of exteriority, yet this relationship does not entail equivalence. It is through a methodological orientation towards exteriority that we establish a relationship with the outside. Exteriority becomes a practical or epistemological issue, whereas the outside becomes the noumenal realm which a practice of exteriority brings to thought. Through an unpacking of the concepts of exteriority and the outside, we are trying to ascertain the manner in which they extend beyond the interiority of subjective experience as the domain of aesthetic immersion. Where exteriority and the outside are often conflated in Deleuze’s essays on Hume, we find a distinction made between these terms in his later work on Foucault: We must distinguish between exteriority and the outside. Exteriority is still a form ... even two forms which are exterior to one another, since knowledge is made from the two environments of light and language, seeing and speaking. But the outside concerns force: if force is always in relation with other forces, forces necessarily refer to an irreducible outside which no longer even has any form and is made up of distances that cannot be broken down through which one force acts upon another or is acted upon by another. It is always from the outside that a force confers on others or receives from others the variable position to be found only at a particular distance or in a particular relation. There is therefore an emergence of forces which remains distinct from the history of forms, since it operates in a different dimension. It is an outside which is farther away than any external world and even any form of exteriority, which henceforth becomes infinitely closer. And how could the two forms of exteriority be external to one another, if there were not this outside, which is both closer and farther away? (Deleuze 2006b, 72)

If the ‘outside concerns force’, what kinds of forces does Deleuze have in mind as populating the outside? Force is conceived as essentially relational: ‘Force is never singular but essentially exists in relation with other forces, such that any force is already a relation’ (Deleuze 2006b, 59). This already places force on the outside due to its definition in terms of an essential relationality, as relations are defined as being external to their terms. This definition of force as essentially relational gives us what Deleuze describes as Foucault’s ‘simple’ definition of power: ‘Power is a relation between forces’ (Deleuze 2006b, 59).

Introduction

27

In  relation to the key dyad that we have been using to explore aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy – the internal–external dyad described above – force is aligned with the external or outside. Power and therefore force is not conceived as proper to knowledge, to a space of fixity or ‘the environments of light and language’, but rather to the outside, a space comprising unstable agitations and the generative conditions for the stable forms of knowledge. That force should be positioned on the outside, and therefore mapped to the virtual side of Deleuze’s ontology, is due to its role in change and mutation rather than fixity, stability, stratification and knowledge: ‘Force defines itself by its very power to affect other forces ... and to be affected by other forces’ (Deleuze 2006b, 60), examples of which are found in the power to incite, provoke and produce. Force is thereby additionally aligned with affective capacity, the capacity to affect and be affected, the capacity to produce and undertake change. That force may be aligned with affect might present confusion due to the frequent conflation of affect and emotion, yet the Deleuze’s conception of affects is far broader than this quotidian usage. Force as affective capacity is defined as ‘a physics of abstract action ... a physics of primary or bare matter’ (Deleuze 2006b, 60) and therefore as extending beyond the domain of subjective emotion which the use of the term affect might suggest. Force is what we could describe as an intensive quantity, as force is said in abstraction of a medium, for example, the force of wind, the force of water and so on. The force itself is an abstract, intensive quantity, distinct from both qualitative experience and knowledge. An outside comprised of forces is thereby the domain of physics, materialism or naturalism, yet this definition will be further refined in the assertion that ‘power’ and therefore force ‘refers back to a “microphysics”. But we must not take “micro” to mean a simple miniaturization of the visible and articulable forms; instead it signifies relations formed beneath the molar forms and images of representation and a dimension of thought that is irreducible to knowledge. “Micro” therefore means mobile and non-localizable connections’ (Deleuze 2006b, 62). The microphysics of power and forces is therefore concerned with the general, with patterns, potentials and tendencies, more than specific, localizable instances of the impact of forces upon particular bodies, this latter localization resulting in a categorization of power and forces, their presentation as articulable and visible forms to knowledge. Regarding

28

Immanence and Immersion

the methods of access proper to this outside Deleuze refers to ‘“anonymous strategies” that are almost mute and blind, [that] evade all stable forms of the visible and articulable’ (Deleuze 2006b, 62). These methods or strategies, in being positioned in a ‘depth’ beyond forms of knowledge becomes distinctly affective in orientation. Here we again find instances of an aestheticization of immanence, where the immanent outside is to be felt via an abstract affectivity ahead of its being known. Questions concerning methods for grasping the outside will be discussed further in Chapter 5 with specific reference to sonic materialism, but for now it will be noted that while forces are different from the historically produced forms of knowledge, it is not necessarily the case that they are beyond the reach of knowledge or insusceptible to quantification. Where exteriority is constituted as such according to a transcendental subjectivity and the forms of knowledge, the outside is conceived as a realm of pre-subjective force and affectivity. While the interiority of the subject determines a relatively stable appearance of exteriority, the outside constitutes an immanent excess further away than subjectively constituted exteriority – insofar as the subject is not the source of the outside – yet simultaneously being infinitely closer – insofar as the outside constitutes the immanent conditions of subjective interiority. Here we see the differences between the concept of relations as exteriority that Deleuze identifies as a key feature of Hume’s philosophy, and an expanded concept of the outside – a concept that moves beyond the limiting of a production of relations to the subject. It is where relations become an object not of subjective production but of the outside and proper to force, power and affect that the concept of the outside encroaches upon that of immanence. Despite the distinction Deleuze makes between forms of exteriority and forces of the outside, that both terms suggest a certain relativism is hard to shake off; it is only where the outside is seen to encroach upon a concept of absolute immanence that the sense of a necessary relation to a subject is removed. Where this subjective relation remains, the outside appears as the outside of the particular strata of absolute immanence within which the subject is constituted. Its being outside does not entail ontological transcendence, but rather an indication of perspective, that the subject that has emerged within the plane of immanence has turned its attention beyond appearances, recognition

Introduction

29

and the products of its auto-affective syntheses towards the material conditions of such things. The outside is labelled as such by a subjective interiority, yet as that which is also ‘infinitely closer’ than the apparent forms of exteriority the outside names the excessive yet immanent conditions of interiority (Deleuze 2006b, 72).

I.6 Exiting immersion Concepts of the real and immanence become entwined; what is asserted as being ultimately real, as a horizon of possibility or potential, constitutes a horizon delimiting immanence. Appeals to objects, agency or events outside of this horizon are then invalid instances of transcendence, untruthful, unreal. In moving beyond the sufficient aesthetics of immersion, a philosophy of immanence is drawn upon in accounting for counter-intuitive and nonphenomenologizable aspects of the real. Where we take nature as a concept delimiting reality, in the sense of a philosophical naturalism that posits the existence of mind-independent objects and events, claims regarding truth and existence must be made within a concept of nature. Here nature is not restricted to a terrestrial or bucolic image, but taken in the expansive sense of the natural sciences that encompass both the terrestrial and universal. Claims regarding causality or existence outside of nature thereby posit a supernatural domain that vitiates the immanence of nature, as we then require a system of rules that accounts for the natural world and another for the supernatural, instantiating the kind of ‘two-worlds’ system that philosophies of immanence seek to avoid. In contrast to the relative and localized planes of immanence produced throughout this history of philosophy an absolute plane of immanence must envelop all such plains, leaving nothing outside. If a history of philosophy is a history of planes of immanence, then an absolute immanence that subtends all such planes constitutes a pre-philosophical ground or condition. In contrast to relative conceptions of immanence, the absolute or pure immanence that concerned Deleuze, an immanence to nothing other than itself, posits an absolute plane of immanence that would encompass all relative planes of

30

Immanence and Immersion

immanence. Philosophy has produced numerous planes of immanence, yet it is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘THE plane of immanence’ that provides the pre-philosophical ground of these relative planes (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 59–60). While the nature of Deleuze’s concept of absolute immanence remains somewhat ambiguous and subject to change throughout his oeuvre (see Kerslake 2002), it could be claimed that the best attempt at accounting for absolute immanence is that underway in contemporary science wherein the humility of admitting to not have all the answers does not entail that these answers are beyond the scope of its enquiries, existing in another world beyond its reach. While Deleuze’s absolute immanence is drawn upon herein as a means of orienting the use of sound in the arts beyond immersion, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari we also find highly aestheticized considerations of immanence. Mirroring accounts of intensity as that which cannot be sensed – from the perspective of representation – but can only be sensed – through a transcendent exercise – there is a sense that immanence is something to be immersed in rather than known through operations of conceptualization, representation and formalization. In relation to the attainment of an affective immanence we find accounts of characters that ‘do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 169). Here a multi-sensorial consideration of landscape, inclusive of the soundscape and so on, frames this excerpt as an account of immersion: a dissolution of the distance between the perceiver and the perceived, a confusion of the hearer and the heard within an immersive field of mutual production. Additionally we find instruction that reaching the plane of immanence requires ‘measures that are not very respectable, rational or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 41). Here we again find immanence bound to aesthetic experience. What this journey to the horizon and back shows is that the horizon is never crossed via this method of esoteric and drunken exploration, which further constrains thought within it, and that the constraint is provided by the desire for attainment through aesthetic

Introduction

31

Figure I.2 Subject positioned within absolute immanence.

experience. Consequently, in the pursuit of immanence, we must draw upon methods other than those of aesthetic and affective experience, methods that do not withdraw from representation and methods of conceptualization, presenting tools for a more adequate thinking of the outside beyond experience. Navigating the plane of immanence in terms of experience binds it to aesthetic immersion, truncating it within the thresholds of experience. Consequently this becomes an immanence to a subject of this experience, even where the subject is larval and experience pre-symbolic. Deleuze claims that ‘immanence ... eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject’ (Deleuze 2005, 26). In eluding subject object distinction it is easy to see how an aestheticization of immanence often results in immersion, where the latter is, in accordance with

32

Immanence and Immersion

the audiovisual litany, principally ‘acoustic’ rather than ‘visual’ in terms of its organization of space and blurring of distinctions between subject and object. Rather than immanence to a subject, the requirement of absolute immanence is that it be immanent in itself. Beyond the accidents of the encounter absolute immanence is known via a patient process of experimentation entailing conceptualization, formalization and representation, rather than experienced through descent into the depths of subjective immediacy. Such methods arrive at a concept of immanence not limited to its qualitative, phenomenological residue and unbound from the sufficient aesthetics of the immersive. Absolute immanence is an ‘immanent objectivity’ that can be known if not experienced via the ‘latency of phenomena’ (Brassier 2007, 30–1). Where we are concerned with moving beyond the constraints of immersion and the correlationist circle, rather returning red-eyed from vertiginous, pharmacodynamic experimentation at the edge of the world (Deleuze 2004, 297), we find that affective methods entailing sensory distortion take us to the edge of this circle, to an identification of the limits of the sensorial that yields knowledge of the conditions of subjective interiority rather than knowledge of its immanence within absolute exteriority. These themes will be returned to in Chapter 1 in a discussion of the work of Mark Fell, psychoacoustics and transcendental empiricism. The pursuit of a concept of immanence in excess of aesthetic immersion is carried out in order to remove the constraints of interiority and immediacy that a sufficient aesthetics imposes. Where the use of sound as ‘the immersive medium par excellence’ (Dyson 2009, 4) tends to reinforce an internalist logic and the correlationism it entails, a concept of immanence that exceeds the limits of an immersive bubble – the absolute outside that provides the conditions for the inside – is drawn upon to situate artistic practices that pursue an anti-aesthetic and counter-immersive deployment of sound. Artistic practices oriented beyond perception, drawing upon the inaudible conditions of auditory experience, address a real that is not constrained to the immediacy of subjective interiority. Sound and signals are consequently situated within a plane of immanence that extends beyond immersion. While practices addressing a real beyond experience through explorations of the conditions of perception and the inaudible – Chapters 1 and 2 – provide a series of exit

Introduction

33

strategies from the acoustic condition, that from which they exit needs to be addressed. Accordingly, the phenomenological conditions of the immersive are explored in Chapter 4. These phenomenological conditions inform much theorization of sound in the arts, including theories of sonic materialism which seek to address a non-anthropocentric conception of the real through a withdrawal from representation towards the immediacy of direct experience – as is discussed in Chapter 5. Theoretical conditions for an exit from immersion found in philosophies that appeal to, rather than shy away from, contemporary science – Chapter 6 – entailing a repurposing of conceptualism towards the real – Chapter 7 – are outlined before arguing directly for greater distinction between immanence and immersion in the concluding chapter.

1

Decentralization

Acoustic space has been extensively explored within electroacoustic music. This genre of music makes spectacular use of multi-channel surround sound systems to immerse listeners within an often acousmatic sound world that minimizes visual interference in order to foreground the auditory experience of sonic events and transformations. Within this compositional framework, gesture and particularly the movement of sound through space is figured as a fundamental part of what sound is. Sound is not a static object simply comprising frequency, phase and amplitude but a complex spatio-spectrotemporal vector. Denis Smalley states that ‘spatial perception is inextricably bound up with spectromorphological content’ and proposes the term ‘spatiomorphology’ to refer specifically to this aspect of sound (Smalley 1997, 122). Whether an electroacoustic performance uses four speakers on a single plane or four-hundred speakers arranged in all directions, the listener sits immersed within sound field conjured through an encircling loudspeaker array. While some systems will present a spherical arrangement that treats all directions as equal, some retain a frontal orientation wherein the majority of the loudspeakers are positioned in front of the audience. This latter arrangement permits a more convincing illusion of gestural continuity to the fore than the rear. Where this arrangement can be understood to privilege a frontal and perhaps ‘visual’ orientation of the listening subject, distinct arrangements are found where loudspeakers are distributed equally in a circle around the audience. This latter arrangement is often seen in Francisco López’s performances. In many of López’s performances, loudspeakers are distributed equally in a circular pattern around an audience. At the centre of this audience is López, the artist, who occupies a privileged position or sweet spot enabling optimum

36

Immanence and Immersion

performance and listening conditions. Between the artist and the loudspeakers sit the audience in a series of concentric circles mirroring propagating waves that move out towards the edge of the circle. The audience often sit blindfolded in order to maximize the acousmatic impact of the work wherein cause is obfuscated in order to produce a reduced or purely phenomenological experience.1 Here the arrangement of technical infrastructure aims to mirror that of sound itself – understood momentarily as a physical wave – not the frontal orientation of the listening subject, but the sound wave which radiates out in all directions from a causal centre that remains hidden from the listener. In the work of López as well as more ‘traditional’ or institutionalized forms of electroacoustic music the illusion of a continuous acoustic space is centred upon an ideal ‘sweet spot’, a point at which the illusion is most convincing and coherent.2 For spatiomorphological vectors to be accurately reproduced and understood, they must occur with reference to this centralized listening position within the loudspeaker array where the acousmatic illusion is most successful.3 Those seated away from this central sweet spot experience a less convincing illusion that diverges from the composer’s intentions. Beyond the electroacoustic paradigm, anchored to a central listening position, many sound installation practices move away from the idealized centrality of the sweet spot that underpins the illusion of a continuous auditory space through which sonic gestures move. In installation practice acoustic space still describes an enveloping environment that immerses the listener, yet this immersion discards the notion of the sweet spot in becoming an acoustic space without centre. Accordingly the acoustic space of much installation practice comes closer to that presented by McLuhan as ‘a field of simultaneous relations without centre or periphery’ (McLuhan 2006, 49). To be without centre is to be without a sweet spot, yet the absence of a single centre upon which the illusions of acoustic space depend does not entail the absence of centres in general. Through the aesthetic sufficiency of immersion

1

The issue of phenomenological reduction is returned to below. 2 For a more detailed discussion of López’s work in relation to the issue of sound and space see ‘Any Place Whatever: Schizophonic Dislocation and the Sound of Space in General’ (Schrimshaw 2012). 3 This orientation around and dependence upon a single centre or sweet spot is improved through the use of ambisonics and wave field synthesis which allow for a more convincing illusion to be maintained away from the centre of a speaker array.

Decentralization

37

each listener becomes an individual centre, a point of origin in a Ptolemaic order. Divestment from a singular centre in installation practices leads to a proliferation of centres, each grounding an individual acoustic space through an ultimately auto-affective aesthetic sufficiency. The listener produces their own centre through the synthetic act of hearing. The spatiomorphological content of the work is thereby indeterminate in the sense that it is produced by the position and movement of the listener within space rather than the movement of sounds throughout the space. Where the spatiomorphological content of electroacoustic music is determined by the movement of sounds through space, this space acts as an empty container, a pre-existing and ideal space through which sounds move. Contrasting with this pre-existing space is the space that the drones prevalent in much installation practice produce. Where these drones saturate acoustic space they produce a spatiality that cannot be said to pre-exist the sounds. The sounds do not move through space but produce space through the provision of sonic materials. The space these sounds produce often binds together sound, listener and the pre-existing installation environment – such as the gallery space – through the activation of sympathetic resonances that excite both organic and architectonic materials. Sound, listener and architecture are woven together within a space that emerges through the saturating presence of sound. Within this acoustic space which saturates and binds together architectonic, technological and organic bodies through sympathetic resonances, a further space may be hollowed out through acts of critical listening and differentiation. This production of acoustic space and any subsequent ‘burrowing’ through the exercise of audile technique do not presuppose an ideal and empty space through which sounds move. Where the production and saturation of space by sound presents a visceral and immersive spatiality that, through the force of the resonances established, may deprive the listener of the capacity for differentiation and decision through affective bombardment, the ability of listening to tune-out, identify, analyse and differentiate allows for the hollowing out of a space within which the listening subject might maintain its capacity for decision and differentiation. Divestment from the sweet spot entails an initial decentralization in terms of both spatialization and authorial intent that consequently results in

38

Immanence and Immersion

proliferating re-centralization around individual centres and listening events. Where the sweet spot entails a periphery that positions some listeners at the edge of the circle, the proliferation of individual centres within installation practices does away with both singular periphery and centre. Where the eradication of a singular centre does not entail the eradication of centres, the same is true for the periphery. Where distance from a sweet spot positions one towards the edge of a circle, in the absence of a singular centre this edge or periphery is defined by the limits of individual audition. This limit is in part defined through attention, training and listening, but also through the physiological conditions of hearing. Decentralization thereby becomes a process of reorienting attention so that it focuses not only on the intentional objects of auditory perception but also on the conditions of auditory perception, attending to itself through acousmatic and phenomenological reduction but to hearing itself through a further reduction. This latter process of decentralization, moving the listener towards the edge of audition, takes place in works which operate both beyond and at the limits or conditions of auditory experience.4 Practices drawing attention to the physiological and psychoacoustical conditions of hearing identify the limits of perception. In doing so they perform an exercise that can be considered equivalent to what Deleuze called transcendental empiricism, identifying the real rather than ideal conditions of possible experience. Furthermore, this identification of the limit of perception, often through a manipulation of psychoacoustical phenomena, poses the problem of what lies beyond, yet often without offering much in the way of answers. Experimentation with the conditions of sonic experience often constitutes a circumnavigation of the edge of the acoustic circle. The reality of sound, or the location of the sonorous real, is drawn into question as sonorous experience comes to refer to the synthetic products of a stratified auditory perception. Where it is equated with a perceptual limit identified by the physiological conditions of audition, the real refers not to the forms of an external reality – such as a car or ringing bell that might be heard to move

4 The orientation of sonic practice beyond the limits of audibility will be explored in the following chapter.

Decentralization

39

through a pre-existing space – but to an affective, synthetic reality that lends to the apparent immateriality of sound a materiality by grounding it in the synthetic operations of the body.5

1.1 Get Out of the Defensive Position Mark Fell’s work comprises electronic music, installation and curatorial practice. Most evident in Fell’s compositions is an exploration of synthetic sounds originating in popular forms of electronic music, including handclaps, bass drums and synth pads utilizing frequency modulation and additive synthesis in ways that often retain a timbral connection to House music. In its approach to time and rhythm, Fell’s compositional practice is far less familiar. We might use the term experimental yet Fell’s discomfort with this term’s association with institutional and rarefied forms of the avant-garde requires that we identify this experimentation as occurring within, yet at the fringes of, popular music. Where these sounds are subject to regular metre and linear structural development they become familiar, yet algorithmic approaches to their arrangement and modification sets them apart from easy recognition, while their repetition permits analytical attention to be addressed to the minutiae of their spectral composition. A similar sound palette is heard in Fell’s installation works, which often entail deconstructions of various illusions utilized in the production of electronic music, particularly by means of spatialization such as ambisonics, wave field synthesis and standard panning techniques. Exposure of illusions is also found in Fell’s occasional exploitation of psychoacoustical phenomena, as in Get Out of the Defensive Position (2014). Get Out of the Defensive Position comprises a circle of eight loudspeakers positioned above a rotating circular platform. Set apart from these two circles are a subwoofer and strobe light directed towards the circle of speakers. Listeners stand upon the rotating circular platform while listening to a composition comprising a synthetic bass drum, a saxophone solo and a drone

5 These questions regarding the site of the sonorous real and sonic materiality are discussed at length in Chapter 5.

40

Immanence and Immersion

constructed from a series of Shepard tones. Through the use of a drone and a series of interrelated circles Get Out of the Defensive Position (Figure 1.1) can be understood to explore the limits of the circularity presumed proper to acoustic immersion. The listeners are undoubtedly immersed in sound within Get Out of the Defensive Position, yet as with many other works by Fell we can identify a number of counter-immersive exit strategies. Observing Fell’s staging and performance practice, we can identify a number of simple gestures that puncture the immersive sufficiency that his work might otherwise entail. The first of these is the consistent restraint of any visible enthusiasm for the work being performed: ‘Trying not to show enthusiasm is important for me. Even though I am enthusiastic about the music, I am actively trying not to prompt the audience to share my enthusiasm. They should decide for themselves’ (Samuels 2013). This emphasis upon decision cuts an opening within what Oliver Grau identifies as the ‘power of immersion to deprive the human subject of the right of decision’ (Grau 2003, 110). During performances Fell can often be seen wearing a backpack – a sign of immanent departure – and unplugging smoke machines that might enhance mystificatory atmospheres and occlude perspective. As Frances Morgan noted regarding a performance of Recursive Frame Analysis (2015) a laptop casually left on stage, the movement of speakers and lighting during performance and the general foregrounding of the process of production all function as anti-immersive gestures (Morgan 2015). While Fell’s works are often visceral, rich and saturated, there is always an exit point from the immersion, a minimal gesture towards distanciation. Through a superimposition of scenographic, auditory and conceptual circles, Get Out of the Defensive Position presents a particularly immersive configuration of elements, the exit from which occurs through an identification of the limits and conditions of immersive circularity. Through this identification of limits the listening subject is moved from the centre of the immersive circle to its edges, taking a preliminary step towards an exit from what can be considered the most limiting aspects of immersive practice. The identification of a limit and condition entails an acknowledgement of the incompletion or insufficiency of the immersive circle as a delimitation of reality. The use of Shepard tones allows Get Out of the Defensive Position to play upon the psychoacoustic conditions of listening. The illusion of pitch

Decentralization

41

Figure 1.1 Mark Fell, Get Out of the Defensive Position (2014), video still, exhibited at Unsound Festival, Kraków. Used with permission.

circularity is created through the use of Shepard tones which are heard to ascend or descend continuously, without ever leaving the bandwidth of human audibility. Ascending Shepard tones will be heard to continuously rise in pitch, yet without ever becoming inaudible through entry into the ultrasonic domain. Pitch circularity constitutes just one of a series of circles that can be identified in Get Out of the Defensive Position. As an auditory equivalent to Op art, the illusion that Shepard tones create has been widely used. What distinguishes Fell’s implementation is the setting of a Shepard tone in space rather than time. While the continuous rising or falling of a Shepard tone is perceived to occur over time, Fell uses tones that remain constant over time while being emitted from one of eight speakers set in a circle. Progression from one degree of the scale to another must be carried out through a movement between speakers, so the ascent or descent of the Shepard tone depends upon the direction of travel that the listener takes within the circle of speakers. The Shepard tone is thereby set into space rather than time, or into a concept of time that differs significantly from our common-sense intuitions of linear temporal progression. Counter-intuitive conceptions of time are often explored in Fell’s work, wherein linear and absolute progression is supplanted with relative and topological exploration. This is manifest in a compositional practice that has

42

Immanence and Immersion

moved away from the use of sequencing systems wherein the linear movement of a playhead structures events in time to systems wherein time unfolds according to an exploratory movement between variables rather than the passage of an absolute line demarcating the present.6 In Fell’s work events do not unfold because time passes, but rather time unfolds because of a relative movement between events. The duration of a composition is determined by the repetitive adumbration of, and movement between, a limited set of sound objects as much the constraints of a medium or other external factors. We find that the occurrence of events in time depends upon a relative starting position and direction of travel between a collection of variables, potentials, objects and events that are better thought as locations on a map than events laid out according to a linear conception of time. Appealing to our intuitions, sonorous events are here laid out in a way that resembles our conception of space rather than time. The nearest and farthest events depends upon our position, the direction and speed of travel more than an absolute and linear progression of time that determines which events will happen first or the time between events. This counter-intuitive conception of time draws upon ‘B-theories’ of time that, developing ideas presented by McTaggart (1908), claim the passage of time to be illusory. In Get Out of the Defensive Position we therefore find a superimposition of illusions. Superposed upon the illusion of pitch circularity is a concept of time that presents linear temporal passage as an illusion. Events past and future, determined according to a line indicating a universal present, are replaced by more relative notions such as earlier and later. The identification and implementation of psychoacoustical knowledge through the use of the Shepard tone can be understood to halt any transparency or sufficiency of perception, as the source of the sound heard is identified with the physiological conditions of auditory perception as external signals and events. Fell here makes use of the Shepard tone’s illusory qualities: the knowledge that what we hear is not in fact what the sounds themselves, understood as autonomous external events, are doing. The illusion foregrounds a lack of 6 The use of linear playheads to structure sound events in time are found in common software packages such as Logic and Pro Tools, whereas algorithmic approaches (through the use of software such as Max/MSP, SuperCollider, Tidal, etc.) allow for a non-linear, improvisational approaches to sequencing, the unfolding of time as a movement between variables rather than the linear progression of a playhead.

Decentralization

43

resemblance between the signal produced and the sound heard. Continuity is framed as an illusion underpinned by a discrete series of tones. While Fell’s work has little concern for realism, there is nonetheless a sonic realism at work in Get Out of the Defensive Position. This realism does not posit transparency or identity between what is heard and an external object; the realism here is determined by the identification of a physiologically determined passive synthesis underpinning auditory experience. Approaching the edge of this circle of synthesis, Get Out of the Defensive Position identifies the real conditions of auditory perception rather than the auditory perception of an external reality. This is carried out through attention to psychoacoustics, a discipline focused on the physiological or real conditions of auditory perception. The identification of psychoacoustics with an examination of the real conditions of auditory experience is not intended to cast the cultural conditions of such experience as irreal, but rather to assert ontological if not methodological contiguity with Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which while oriented beyond the apparent objects of experience remains focused on the conditions of experience and sensory perception. Insofar as asserting that something is real asserts primacy or priority, transcendental empiricism locates its concept of the real within experience, not in the sense of being amid the apparent objects of experience but in the conditions of that experience. Transcendental empiricism is then not concerned with what appears real to us through the senses but with the nature or reality of sensation as such.

1.2 Transcendental empiricism: Approaching the edge of the circle The use of psychoacoustical phenomena in artistic practice is one of a number of turns towards a critical interrogation of the material conditions of artistic production, a transcendental orientation. The identification and exploitation of psychoacoustic phenomena in Get Out of the Defensive Position indexes the synthetic conditions of auditory experience, a physical and physiological rather than a conceptual understanding of the transcendental. Foregrounding a dissimilarity between the internal and external through an

44

Immanence and Immersion

explicit identification of the synthetic conditions of perception, this creative exploration of psychoacoustical phenomena can be understood to take us into the philosophical territory of what Gilles Deleuze called transcendental empiricism. This coupling of the transcendental and the empirical may initially seem odd as transcendental philosophies can crudely be summarized as being concerned with the general or abstract insofar as they privilege concepts, models and ideas, and the empirical is – again crudely – characterized as being concerned with concrete experience or the ‘materiality’ of sense-data, bringing with it a certain specificity. Yet from within this basic list of characteristics we can identify one of Deleuze’s broad goals for transcendental empiricism: that it be capable of providing an account of the nature of experience as well as that which is experienced. From transcendental philosophy Deleuze takes generality and abstraction while not limiting this to concepts; from empirical philosophy Deleuze takes a commitment to experience and sensation, yet unbinds this from atomistic, isolated and indifferent units. What we end up with is a generalized and abstract account of the empirical – the abstract being of the sensible – an empiricism that exceeds the bounds of discrete objects and distinct sensations in order to avoid presumption of their givenness, instead accounting for their genetic conditions. Transcendental empiricism is abstract insofar as it is concerned not with recognition but with genetic conditions that make recognition possible. As Beth Lord has concisely summarized it, ‘Transcendental empiricism is not concerned with the “empirically real,” but with the real immanent to the empirical; it is not concerned with the “transcendentally ideal,” but with the transcendental in the Idea’ (Lord 2011, 137). If empiricism is concerned with given objects of experience, transcendental empiricism is concerned with going beyond the given in providing an account of the genetic conditions of real experience.7 The ‘going beyond’ implied in the use of the term transcendental in no way refers to a transcendent domain beyond the world, a supernatural domain or a two-worlds ontology. The transcendental is not the transcendent, it does not refer to a plane of being 7 Genetic is used here in the broad sense of the term, referring to the generative and productive, rather than in the perhaps more common and specialized use of the term to refer to genes. The concern for the genetic expressed herein should not be confused with a concern for genetics and the biological.

Decentralization

45

separate from the material world, but rather to the conditions of possible experience. Transcendental empiricism entails the movement of thought beyond common sense, understood as the collaboration of the faculties yielding recognizable objects of experience, in order to account for that which resides in the world and gives rise to the objects of experience (Deleuze 2004, 180). The orientation beyond common-sense experience implied in Deleuze’s account of transcendental empiricism still finds us us embedded in the world, identifying that there is more to the world, more at work in the world, than is found in the manifest image of everyday, common-sense experiences. Deleuze claims transcendental empiricism to be a ‘superior’ empiricism through its concern for and account of the genetic conditions of real experience, rather than the recognizable and conceptually predetermined objects of possible experience. It is this concern for the genetic, understood as the generative, productive and originary, that leads Deleuze to ascribe a certain privilege to sensibility: ‘The privilege of sensibility as origin appears in the fact that, in an encounter, what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed are one and the same thing, whereas in other cases the two instances are distinct’ (Deleuze 2004, 182). According to this formulation the transcendent exercise of sensibility – which takes it to its limit – takes us closer to the originary conditions of thought than conceptual representation.8 When Deleuze claims that ‘the transcendent exercise must not be traced from the empirical exercise precisely because it apprehends that which cannot be grasped from the point of view of common sense’ (Deleuze 2004, 180) he is claiming that the conditions of experience should not be thought to resemble the objects of experience. This lack of resemblance is what Deleuze refers to as the ‘asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible’ (Deleuze 2004, 280). This asymmetry asserts that the recognition of an object exhausts neither the object nor its production, retaining a sense that there is unactualized potential residing in the world as the condition for novel production, evolution and emergence. Alternatively we could say that this asymmetrical synthesis is also a subtractive synthesis, insofar as there is more in the world than our experience

8 This position, which privileges the affective over the representational as a method for attaining the real will be subject to critique below.

46

Immanence and Immersion

of it. There always remains an unactualized virtual potential. Through its orientation towards conditions and generative potential rather than the recognition of the possible, transcendental empiricism is concerned with the being of the sensible, with the nature of the sensible, rather than the objects of sensation. Distinguishing transcendental empiricism from empiricism is a focus on intensive processes of production rather than on the recognizable products of these processes. Given transcendental empiricism’s concern for the genetic conditions of real experience – the force of the encounter rather than the recognition, taxonomy and analysis of apparently given objects – it is perhaps surprising that sensation should play such an important methodological role in Deleuze’s account of it. That sensation has a certain privilege within an account of the real conditions of thought and experience is due to Deleuze’s claim that ‘what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed are one and the same thing’ (Deleuze 2004, 182). Here we find a fusion or conflation of matter and method productive of a plane of immanence within the immediacy of the encounter. Given the ambiguity of the term sensation, what kinds of sensations are assigned this privilege in taking us beyond the apparent to real conditions? Transcendental empiricism entails an account of the force of the encounter more than the experience of an object of recognition (Deleuze 2004, 176). As such its characteristic experiences are those of sensory distortion rather than acts of recognition. Rather than an object of recognition, the transcendental object of ‘superior empiricism’ is intensive production, the force of an encounter and the synthesis upon which conceptual determination operates. This intensive production constitutes: the peculiar limit of sensibility. As such it has the paradoxical character of that limit: it is the imperceptible, that which cannot be sensed because it is always covered by a quality which alienates or contradicts it, always distributed within an extensity which inverts and cancels it. In another sense, it is that which can only be sensed or that which defines the transcendent exercise of sensibility, because it gives to be sensed, thereby awakening memory and forcing thought. The point of sensory distortion is often to grasp intensity independently of extensity or prior to the qualities in which it is developed  ... physical experiences such as vertigo approach the same

Decentralization

47

result: they reveal to us that difference in itself, that depth in itself or that intensity in itself at the original moment at which it is neither qualified nor extended. (Deleuze 2004, 296–7, emphasis added)

Here we find indexical acts of recognition bracketed out, yet reduction via transcendental empiricism rather than phenomenology yields not a pure sound object or sonorous quality, but exposure to the ‘harrowing character of intensity’ (Deleuze 2004, 297). Emphasis is placed upon the synthetic process of hearing itself rather than the purely qualitative sound objects it gives to conscious thought. It is in this sense that psychoacoustical illusion reveals not the objects of recognition but the synthetic conditions of perception, the processes entailed within rather than the products of perception. Transcendental empiricism entails a sensation of sensation, a hearing hearing. It is in this sense that the transcendental object of a ‘superior empiricism’ is ‘imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition’; it is not an object of recognition but a synthetic process of production, not the sound object heard but the synthetic process of hearing itself (Deleuze 2004, 176).

1.3 Negative duration In addition to the psychoacoustical and transcendental components of Get Out of the Defensive Position, conceptions of spatiality and temporality were also identified as being significant above, in particular Fell’s divergence from the usual implementation of Shepard tones by laying out the degrees of a scale in space rather than time. A Shepard tone or scale is usually implemented temporally through a continuous and cyclical variation of the amplitude of fixed tones, creating the illusion of an infinitely rising of falling tone. That such a tone, infinitely rising or falling, is impossible points to a gap or noncorrelation between experience and reality. Where we usually experience a scale as a series of more or less discrete tones, the illusion of infinite ascension or decension is most successful where there is glissando, with each tone in the series blending into the next. This continuity as opposed to discretion and the repetitive or in-principle-infinite reproducibility of the Shepard scale brings our experience of it into the territory of Bergsonian duration. Fell’s continued

48

Immanence and Immersion

engagement with concepts of time and the spatialization of the Shepard tone in Get Out of the Defensive Position proves particularly interesting in this context. Bergson frequently couched discussion of his concept of duration in musical or sonorous terms; we find a number of cases where duration is described through analogy with the ringing of bells and the progression of a melody. Christoph Cox has pointed out how ‘Bergson seems to point to drone as the ideal sensuous presentation of duration’ (Cox 2009, 124–5). The continuity we find at the root of Bergson’s analogical relation of duration and melody makes a similar connection to the apparently infinite continuity of the Shepard scale equally appropriate. What links both examples to the concept of duration is their continuity in the sense of a blurring, shifting and becoming between tones, their potentially endless continuity and effacement of spatial distinction and discretion. Equally in the experience of drone works and in principle endless continuity of the Shepard scale there is a common expression of a lack or distortion of temporality, where time is understood in the metric sense of the term to which Bergson opposed his concept of duration. The absence of metre by which one might mark out the passage of time leads to an experience not of time as measured quantity but of what Bergson considered a more ‘basic’ or fundamental time understood as duration. It is the loss of a clear perception of time passing in regular intervals when listening to drone based and highly repetitive works – where the result of the repetition is not an infinite counting of repeated and discrete events but a merging and confusing of the events repeated – that directs the listener towards an experience of Bergsonian duration, an unfolding and becoming without measure, a fundamental or basic experience of time as inner duration. Here we arrive at a broad definition of duration, which Bergson relates to sonic experience: Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states ... as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another. Might it not be said that, even if these notes succeed one another, yet we perceive them in one another, and that their totality may be compared to a living being whose parts, although distinct, permeate one another just because they are so closely connected? ... We can thus conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnection and organisation of elements, each

Decentralization

49

one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought. Such is the account of duration which would be given by a being who was ever the same and ever changing, and who had no idea of space. (Bergson 2005, 60)

The continuous melting and interrelation of tones in Get Out of the Defensive Position is not, as in Bergson’s example above, limited to recollection but manifest in perception and thereby set apart from memory. Showing the persistence of sonorous metaphors throughout Bergson’s writing, we find a similar linking of duration and sonority in Duration and Simultaneity, yet in this later text our grasp of pure duration is granted not through acts of recollection but rather through a kind of reduced listening. While Bergson’s reduced listening is distinct from the Schaefferian method, it can nonetheless be considered a further iteration of this reduction. Schaeffer’s reduced listening brackets out concern for a sound’s origin or meaning in order to arrive at an appreciation of pure sonority. Reduction towards a pure areferential sonority is performed in order to better understand and appreciate the specificities of the sound object, the specificities of the sound itself apart from what it might mean or from which object it originates. Through this method we might focus upon the details of the sound itself, its timbre, morphology and envelope, for example. The Bergsonian method can be considered to take this reductive operation further in that it assumes the bracketing of representation then further reduces the specificities of sound itself to what Bergson considered a more fundamental line or continuity that inheres within sound, a line of pure and continuous becoming or duration. Outlining a concept of time founded on duration as continuous successive development without separation, rather than time as external metric or quantity, Bergson once again reaches for sonorous metaphors: A melody, to which we listen with our eyes closed, heeding it alone, comes close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of our inner life; but it still has too many qualities, too much definition, and we must first efface the difference among the sounds, then do away with the distinctive features of sound itself, retaining of it only the continuation of what precedes into what follows and the uninterrupted transition, multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation, in order to finally rediscover basic time. Such is immediately perceived duration, without which we would have no idea of time. (Bergson 2005, 205)

50

Immanence and Immersion

Here we start with a basic version of the acousmatic reduction, closing the eyes to perceive the sound alone. Yet the results of this preliminary reduction retain too much individual identity, too much specificity and must be reduced further. For Bergson the acousmatic reduction retains too many qualities; to ‘efface the difference amongst sounds’ we must cut away these specificities, which we might liken to timbre, the series of overtones determining a sound’s specific qualities and identity. Excising these qualities yields a simple fundamental, whereas a fundamental tone distinct from its overtones is no stranger to quantity, identify and measurement, the fundamental that Bergson’s process of reduction aims at is something inherently resistant to such metrics. The fundamental or basic time of duration arrived at through a reduction of specificities is that which effaces ‘the difference amongst sounds’, just as a fundamental frequency may be common to sounds that deviate wildly in terms of their qualities, character or overtone series. That which remains after Bergson’s reduction of identity, quality and specificity is a continuous, pure and simple waveform progressing through uninterrupted transition, akin to the interaction of numerous sine glissandi if that weren’t already too concrete, specific and measurable. Where pure duration is anterior to specific sensory qualities we might liken experience of it less to sound events – which even where we refer to sine tones retain too much specificity, identity, individuality – than a pure intuition of the kind of continuous undulations seen in an oscilloscope display. Where this attempt at rendering Bergson’s sonorous analogies a little more specific falters is that ultimately duration refers to a pure and vital becoming, an experience of the pure synthesis of internal consciousness removed from or prior to any specific aesthetic register, and so the references to sound help elucidate a concept of pure duration yet remain metaphorical as opposed to being proper to the sonic. This attempt to render Bergson’s sonorous analogy a little more specific results in a retention of duration on the side of sound and signals, whereas Bergson’s reduced listening presented a means of folding perception inside the perceiver towards the pure duration that inheres within, rather than a reduction towards a sound object or sonorous matter. We find a similar operation performed in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as prodigious simplification, an operation that performs a reduction beyond

Decentralization

51

or beneath those timbral and temporal specificities that render sounds identifiable, significant and so on, yet resists the point at which this reduction would be folded back within the listener towards an experience of pure and internal duration. Distinct from Bergson’s reduction towards pure internal duration, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of prodigious simplification remains oriented towards the sounds and signals populating an outside, something other than the pure interiority of duration and thereby more susceptible to the quantification that, following Bergson’s ‘bald dichotomy’, is ascribed to spatiality (Brassier 2007, 164). Given Bergson’s preference for musical analogy, it will not be surprising to find that the dichotomy of time and space that runs through Bergson’s work is well accommodated within the oppositions comprising the audiovisual litany, as can be seen in Table 1.1. Table 1.1 The audiovisual litany mapped onto Bergson’s dichotomy of space and duration Bergson’s dichotomy Duration

Space

Becoming

Time

Continuous

Discrete

Quality

Quantity

Interior

Exterior

Life

Death

Elan Vital

Matter

Heterogeneous

Homogeneous The audiovisual litany

Oral

Visual

Spherical

Directional

Immersion

Perspective

Affect

Intellect

Temporal

Spatial

Subjectivity

Objectivity

Interior

Surface/Exterior

Contact

Distance

Life

Death

52

Immanence and Immersion

1.4 Prodigious simplification In their concern for the creative capacity of art and its materials, a concern for art’s ability to engender novel thoughts, concepts, affects, movements and so on, Deleuze and Guattari engage in what they refer to as a comparison of ‘the powers or coefficients of deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 383). Deleuze and Guattari draw up a comparison of the sonorous and the visual in a manner reminiscent of the audiovisual litany. Where their comparison improves upon the usual opposition of auditory and visual is that it compares the mediums upon which each culture might be founded, a comparison of light and sound, rather than the more common yet imbalanced comparison of a medium and a sense from opposed sides of the litany, such as sound and sight. Deleuze and Guattari’s comparison results in a privileging of the ear and the sonorous; their conclusion is that sound harbours a greater capacity for deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is an unbinding of all that is fixed, a becoming flexible, mobile, a slippage in terms of identity, a movement beneath and beyond the signifier. Sound is perceived to have a certain privilege regarding the avoidance of referential or symbolic fixity, a material whose ambiguity or fluid relationship to signs presents a pre-symbolic materiality or substrate more immediately than light which, due to its implication in sight and the latter’s accelerated capacity for identification, is perceived to participate more fully, efficiently and without sensorial remainder or excess in symbolic operations. Missing from Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion regarding the privileging of sound is an account of how this conclusion was arrived at, of the conditions, assumptions and practices that facilitate and set the parameters of their comparison of the sonorous and the luminous. While they claim that ‘there is surely no question here of declaring a given art supreme on the basis of a formal hierarchy of absolute criteria’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 383), where art is understood in a Greenbergian sense to be medium specific, there is nonetheless a declaration of sound’s functional, rather than formal, privilege over light, a hierarchical ordering of the luminescent and the sonorous, according to criteria that in the absence of explication appear absolute.9 Putting these criticisms 9 In what particular context, according to which conditions might sound be privileged over light according to a capacity for deterritorialization? The physiological and cultural conditions of Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion are poorly addressed, resulting in the appearance of the kinds of absolute criteria they claim to be avoiding.

Decentralization

53

aside – criticisms that were also levelled at proponents of the audiovisual litany above – we are now in a position to consider the method of prodigious simplification that Deleuze and Guattari describe as a means of maximizing sound’s capacity for deterritorialization: It is clear that what is needed to make sound travel, and to travel around sound, is a very pure and simple sound, an emission or wave without harmonics ... Your synthesis of disparate elements will be all the stronger if you proceed with a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture, or extraction that works in a material that is not meagre but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited, selected. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 380)

It is on the grounds of Deleuze and Guattari’s preference for and privileging of the mobile, fluid, affective and dynamic over the static, fixed and symbolic that it is considered necessary for sounds to travel, this travelling not being reducible to the movement of sounds in space but being a process of deterritorialization or a vector that moves between and beyond the welldefined territories of signs and the symbolic. What facilitates and maximizes this capacity for deterritorialization is a sound’s simplicity. It is here that we see how the simplification, limitation and selection described by Deleuze and Guattari resembles the reduction described above with regard to Bergson’s identification of an experience analogous to that of pure duration in sound. To render the experience of sound analogous to that of pure duration it is, Bergson claims, necessary to first ‘efface the difference among the sounds, then do away with the distinctive features of sound itself, retaining of it only the continuation of what precedes into what follows and the uninterrupted transition’ (Bergson 2005, 205). We find a similar ‘sober gesture’ of refinement, simplification and reduction in Deleuze and Guattari’s method above. For Bergson the process of reduction or simplification resulted in a more precise analogy for the nature of pure duration as ‘the very fluidity of our inner life’ (Bergson 2005, 205). In contrast to Bergson’s analogy, Deleuze and Guattari’s method of prodigious simplification has a primarily functional role of mobilizing and maximizing a pre-symbolic capacity for affective interaction between bodies. Both processes proceed by way of a removal of that which facilitates indexical function in listening, that which renders sounds identifiable, specific, referential: their timbre or overtone structure. The difficulty in localizing a simple tone, a tone

54

Immanence and Immersion

without or stripped off its identifiable qualities or overtones, is what endears Deleuze and Guattari towards such simplicity, its symbolic ambiguity presents a pure and simple wave as intensive quantity, as affective capacity capable of engendering movement and novelty. While both Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari share a certain privileging of a specific kind of sonic sensibility – which in the absence of substantial analysis Deleuze and Guattari render absolute, innate or proper to sound itself as opposed to being a product of the cultural context in which listening takes place – as well as prioritizing a reduction or simplification of sound, these related methods have differing ends. Effacing the differences between sounds that might render them distinct, identifiable or discrete results in a continuity that Bergson considers precisely analogous to the experience of pure duration, the vital flux, fluidity and un-metered temporality of inner life. In contrast to this concern for elucidating pure duration, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘sober’ method of simplification is functional rather than vitalist in its orientation, seeking to accelerate a sound’s affective capacity among disparate assemblages. The reduction performed by Deleuze and Guattari remains on the side of sound and signals whereas Bergson’s method sought to fold perception back into an experience of pure interiority. It is this prioritizing of a pure, un-metered interiority that Deleuze and Guattari’s method avoids in remaining resolutely materialist in orientation, and for this reason, is considered useful to the present argument through its orientation towards that which resides on the outside of subjective interiority, its orientation towards the genetic conditions of auditory experience. In its orientation towards the affective capacities of signals outside of the subject as opposed to the irreducible qualitative experience of the subject, Deleuze and Guattari’s method of prodigious simplification moves us away from an affirmation of durational interiority. In moving away from duration towards the functional affectivity of signals as intensive quantities, we move back towards that which Bergson aligned with space: quantity, exteriority and matter. It is in this context that Fell’s spatialization of events becomes particularly interesting, a process of spatialization that reduces duration to zero, at which point events become laid out in space rather than time. Where Get Out of the Defensive Position lays out the degrees of a Shepard scale in space rather than time, Fell’s interest in concepts of time can also be

Decentralization

55

seen in the multimedia work Five Studies in Negative ... Duration (2015), which comprises text, light, synthesized and recorded sound, vinyl cut diagrams, imitation Lego, acrylic plinths and two computers displaying screen noise and pure colours. Each computer screen is overlaid with silver card, each of which has shapes cut into it to reveal the content of the computer screens beneath. Setting out from the observation that musical works have positive or nonzero durations, Five Studies in Negative ... Duration considers what negative duration might entail. This consideration of negative duration, rather than simply running in reverse, unfolds into space in the form of an installation. In the Bergsonian context outlined above this consideration of negative duration that Fell begins in the Five Studies ... could be taken further. To impose negative duration onto a work has a number of implications: it collapses into the spatial side of the above litanies, taking on visuality, textuality and conceptuality, taking on a diffusive and schematic form. In this context an inversion of duration into negative duration affirms aspects of the spatial side of Bergson’s litany. Where pure duration is achieved through an act of withdrawal from analytical distinction, consequently emphasizing aesthetic continuity and connectivity, negative duration would be an interruption in this continuum, a discontinuity, interruption or stasis. If for Bergson duration is what is achieved when the ego ‘lets itself live’ (Bergson 2005, 60), negative duration entailing spatialization opens onto death, presenting an impedance to vitalism. Insofar as negative duration results in a collapse into space it inherits abstraction rather than immediacy, quantity rather than quality and so on. In this formulation negative duration conforms to the terms of the audiovisual litany in that the visual side of the litany is fixed and stable whereas the auditory side remains dynamic, unstable and liable to change. Yet Fell’s installation retains sonorous components within a multimedia, schematic form. Consequently the unfolding of temporality into spatiality that negative duration entails is less a retreat to an opposing side of either Bergsonian or audiovisual litany, but rather a refusal to perpetuate their separation and divest sonic practice of the components of the visual or spatial.

2

Infraesthetics

The sufficiency of aesthetic immersion presents a domain of pure qualities grounded in the ultimately auto-affective immediacy of sensation. An exit strategy from this sufficiency can be found in a process of reduction, a quantitative rather than qualitative reduction moving from an aesthetic to a functional conception of sound. A functional conception of sound shifts the goal of reduction or simplification away from pure qualities to intensive quantities, stripping away the qualities of a sound that would render it an object and instead focusing on its affective capacities for physical interaction, displacement and resonance between the elements comprising an assemblage or body. In place of rich sonic matters a functional orientation often presents us with impoverished or prodigiously simplified materiality. Distancing itself from aesthetic sufficiency yet being neither inaesthetic (Badiou 2005) nor anti-aesthetic (Foster 1998), this functionalist orientation is described as an infraesthetics in order to indicate the manner in which its orientation towards intensive quantities rather than pure qualities addresses a physical realm of signals considered anterior and exterior to the qualitative experience of sound. The reduction this orientation entails is not one towards pure auditory qualities or the fluidity of inner life, but towards the forces populating an immanent outside.

2.1 Extreme audition The use of sound in the arts often seeks to exploit certain affective potentials not immediately evident in other mediums: a felt intimacy where sound resonates within the body and upon the flesh, the enveloping, immersive field of sound

58

Immanence and Immersion

waves more readily felt than that of light due to the omnidirectionality of hearing. This affectivity is associated not with the ability to conjure a specific emotional state – understood as the subjective capture of affect – but with a much broader and more ambiguous capacity to affect change in a body. This affectivity is considered both immanent and anterior to the emotional in the sense that it is active prior to the subjective recognition of an emotional state. The breadth of the affective when dissociated from emotion sees it include notions of force as well as feeling. This association with notions of force places the affective within a broadly materialist continuum, where the latter is oriented towards dynamic, energetic, forceful states of matter in flux. Much discourse taking a broadly affective orientation towards the arts draws upon Deleuzian discourse wherein affect is understood as an ambiguous, dynamic force, a capacity to change and be changed anterior to subjective capture in emotion.1 This affective force is most readily felt at the extremes of audition where at the lower end of the range of human hearing sound is felt upon the skin and within the body as a whole, as much as within the ear. At the upper end of human hearing, the ‘piercing’ qualities of sound are felt to cut into the inner ear, frequently causing discomfort if not damage. At these extremes, sounds begin to slip out of a matrix of identifiable, qualitative sound objects, becoming harder to locate in space due to both wavelength and the way in which interior and exterior are confused, as the intensity of the sound identifies the synthetic capacities of the body itself as much as an externally localizable and recognizable sound object. At these extremes sound is felt to be the product of an internal somatic synthesis as much as an external event. As an affective force not easily bound to a discrete and recognizable object sound becomes altogether more ambiguous in terms of its origin and location, and amorphous in terms of its objective coherence and consistency. As this description of sound would seem proper to orality as defined under the oppositions of the audiovisual litany, it is important to point out that these characteristic qualities

1 For an extended discussion of this topic see ‘Non-cochlear sound: on affect and exteriority’ (Schrimshaw 2013).

Infraesthetics

59

of extreme audition are defined by the limits of human hearing and cognition rather than a metaphysics of sound itself.2 Exemplary works utilizing this upper extreme can be found in the oeuvre of Toshimaru Nakamura. The feedback produced by Nakamura’s no-input mixing board is precisely controlled and articulated, producing piercing tones that resonate within the ear with such intensity that they are not easily localized and identified as external events. The performance spaces occupied by Nakamura are saturated with this sound which due to its extremity collapses the perceived distinction between external and internal. Attention is drawn to the exteriority of the immersive field of high-frequency drones Nakamura produces through small movements of the head that allow the listener to find nodes of differing intensity among a shifting field of interacting waves. The immersive qualities of Nakamura’s performances are affirmed though piercing quality of the sound which confuses interiority and exteriority, as well as the constitutive presence of the listening subject affirmed by shifts of the head that yield differing perspectives upon the complex wave field Nakamura produces. Jacob Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis (2008) makes use of this piercing capacity of sound at the edge of audition, confusing perception of the interior and exterior. Labyrinthitis is composed of recordings made within Kirkegaard’s ear canal during an attempt to excite the ear’s capacity to not only receive but produce tones known as otoacoustic emissions (see Moore 2008, 34–6). Combination or Tartini tones are well-known examples of this category of phenomena whereby the auditory system itself produces tones internally in response to received tones (e.g. f2 – f1, 2f1 – f2). Through this explicit identification of the synthetic capacities of the ear, what we are presented with in Labyrinthitis is hearing itself, an act of listening directed towards the mechanism of hearing.3 Predominantly composed of high-frequency, long-duration sounds that have a piercing quality, Labyrinthitis works with sounds at the edge or limit of audition in a sense that is both physical and transcendental, addressing the conditions of possibility of hearing, the active

2 Contrary to the audiovisual litany, a similar argument can be made regarding light. At the lower end of the visible spectrum where light slips into the infrared range, light is felt as heat upon the skin. 3 Douglas Kahn provides a discussion of this in his liner notes included in the published recording of Labyrinthitis. See http://fonik.dk/works/labyrinthitis.html.

60

Immanence and Immersion

and synthetic operations of the ear itself that precede and provide materials for the construction of concepts of the understanding. The intensity of these externally produced sounds, themselves originating from recordings made inside Kirkegaard’s ear canal, is met with the intensity of sounds produced by the listener’s own ears as a result of the various combination tones the composition excites. This conflation of interiority and exteriority within an enveloping sound field again draws upon the components of an immersive experience: the constitutive presence of a listener whose own auto-affective products form the conditions of an immersive experience within a shifting, enveloping sound field. Where the above works have a critical function that is less characteristic of immersive aesthetics is that in their excitation of a synthetic interiority to which listeners’ attention is explicitly drawn, the correspondence of this interiority to a problematic exteriority is brought into question. The foregrounding of non-linearities in the auditory system makes explicit the differences between external signals or events and experiential, subjective interiority. This distinction between interiority and exteriority contrasts with dominant tendencies in immersive aesthetics wherein subjective interiority is identified as the source and sufficient condition of a reality equated with appearances. That the means of immersive interiority cease to be transparent – the auditory system usually remaining inaudible itself – exposes them to critical investigation, allowing the listening subject to navigate or orient themselves in relation to an exteriority that is irreducible to the subjective interiority that it provides the conditions for. The work of Mark Bain can be felt working at the lower extremes of the range of human hearing, often falling significantly beneath it. Bain’s work makes substantial use of infrasonic frequencies as a means of exciting both buildings and bodies, concrete and flesh. Bain’s works are in many ways exemplars of immersive uses of sound. An intensely affective sound field is created through either the use of electronic oscillators common to synthesis equipment, or mechanical oscillators – motors fitted with weights – attached to the structure of a building. Predominantly working around the lower threshold of human hearing, Bain’s work is felt as much as it is heard. Low-frequency drones establish shifting wave fields that can be felt running through the body of those attending the installations and performances. The use of frequencies that excite

Infraesthetics

61

both human and architectural bodies establishes the now common immersive trope of a collapse of interior and exterior; the intensity and wavelengths of the sounds produced make it easier to localize the sounds within the body than without. Addressed through their shared resonant frequencies architectural and human bodies are woven together, being identified as existing on a common material plane. The wavelengths corresponding to these low frequencies can be navigated in a similar way to that described above in relation to Nakamura’s work: movements allow individuals to traverse invisible wave fields finding nodes of greater or lesser intensity. Yet due to the lower frequencies and consequently larger wavelengths used, these movements are not just those of the head but necessarily the whole body. Bain’s work consistently addresses the body as a whole, as a resonant object, rather than and often instead of the ear. The frequencies used are often felt more readily than they are heard, finding resonances upon the skin or within a lung as much as within the ear. The infrasonic domain that Bain works within is exemplary of immersivity in its felt intimacy and enveloping omnidirectionality. Yet infrasonics also identifies the fragile limit of this immersivity as an aesthetic criterion, slipping easily into imperceptibility where frequency or amplitude becomes too low. Infrasonics therefore defines a limit or boundary of immersivity and consequently points to a movement beyond. Where these infrasonic frequencies slip beneath the thresholds of perception they become not only infrasonic but more broadly infraesthetic, exceeding both the auditory and tactile aspects of the infrasonic. Sound becomes characterized as an inaudible intensive quantity, distinct from intentional acts and its phenomenological characterization as durational quality. Exceeding auditory and tactile perception, the infraesthetic use of sound utilizes an aesthetically impoverished affective force reduced to its capacity to move and displace. The infraesthetic orientation displaces and devalues the aesthetic qualities of artworks in order to foreground the material dynamics which are the focus of a functionalist approach, as defined above. This functionalist or infraesthetic approach provides an example of an ‘antiaestheticist use of aesthetic materials’ that – distinct from the post-conceptual practice which Peter Osborne had in mind when coining this phrase – remains broadly materialist in orientation, rather than strictly conceptualist

62

Immanence and Immersion

(Osborne 2013, 48). Not being purely anti-aesthetic, the infraesthetic retains an immanent link to an inescapable aesthetic remainder or residue. Where the orientation is towards a functionalist and dynamic consideration of aesthetic materials, this aesthetic remainder becomes impoverished in a manner opposed to the saturating sufficiency of an immersive aesthetics. Exemplary instances of this impoverished aesthetic can be found in the work of Giovanni Anselmo, whose sculptures are concerned with portraying the invisible and often imperceptible forces affecting all matter. Rather than placing an emphasis upon the aesthetic qualities of the materials used, it is the imperceptible forces active within and moving through them – gravity, magnetism, tension – that are the primary focus of Anselmo’s work. To shift attention towards these imperceptible but nonetheless immanent forces, the outwards aesthetic appearance of the materials used is impoverished; it is the change being undergone by materials or the potential energy embodied in them, the intensive quantities at work within them, rather than any sufficiency of their external aesthetic qualities which come to the fore. These sculptures attest to a dynamic materiality through a presentation of potential energy, susceptibility to invisible forces and decay. While clearly distinct from the work of Anselmo, the energetic orientation that runs through the work of Alvin Lucier results in a similarly impoverished aesthetic. In Lucier’s compositions, sound is used in a principally functionalist rather than aestheticist paradigm. Within Lucier’s work it is the difference that a sound can make within and between material assemblages, rather than the aesthetic qualities of the sound itself that comes to the fore. We can consider the use of sound for the purposes of echolocation in Vespers (1968), for the displacement of materials in The Queen of the South (1972) and the establishment of sympathetic resonances and pendular movements in Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums (1980). In each case sound is utilized principally as an affective force anterior yet immanent to its subjective reception as aesthetic quality. This impoverished aesthetic presents a dynamic materiality that is ‘not meagre but prodigiously simplified’, an impoverishment and simplification that in allowing movement and dynamism to come to the fore moves into a quantitative or functionalist rather than qualitative or aestheticist orientation (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 380).

Infraesthetics

63

The understanding of sound as a source of movement, displacement and affective intensity extends the role of sound in the arts, used not only as audible immersive quality but intensive quantity. The phrase ‘intensive quantity’ is taken from the work of Deleuze, for whom the intensive constitutes the generative conditions of empirical intuition. Quantity is here distinct from quality, as the qualitative describes a domain of subjective experiences structured through resemblance, recognition and representation. Intensive quantity identifies the conditions both immanent and anterior to these qualitative, subjective states – differences in intensity that are explicated in qualitative states and acts of resemblance, representation and so on (for a detailed discussion of intensive quantity see Deleuze 2004, 190–7). Here the broad understanding of affects beyond their subjective capture in states of emotion, resemblance and so on – affect understood as dynamic and generative force – is associated with the intensive quantities that Deleuze describes as subtending subjective, qualitative experiences. It is this notion of intensive quantities as distinct from subjective qualities or aesthetic experiences that the infraesthetic use of sound is to be associated with, sound used as an intensive source of movement and displacement rather than an object of aesthetic contemplation, sound as intensive quantity rather than aesthetic quality. The reduction of sound to a physical domain of signals of greater or lesser intensity, signals of differing affective capacity, presents a quantitative rather than qualitative orientation towards sound as ‘the more a definition of sound is linked to motion and vibration, the more it becomes defined in quantitative rather than qualitative terms’ (Pasnau 2000, 31). The infraesthetic use of sound is most apparent where the sound remains inaudible, yet this inaudibility is not an essential feature of an infraesthetic use of sound, which might operate between rather than within infra- and ultrasonic domains. The infraesthetic approach describes the use of sound as not principally a phenomenologically defined event of aesthetic quality but a physically defined signal utilized for its capacity to affect quantitative displacements. This reduction of sound to signals presents a quantitative reduction, rather than a phenomenologically reduced listening. Where intensity resides outside of its subjective capture as aesthetic quality, Deleuze suggests that methods of sensory ‘distortion’, methods that undermine the object orientation of

64

Immanence and Immersion

intentionality in order to expose the intensive ‘being of the sensible’, are most appropriate to grasping the intensive, transcendental conditions of perception (Deleuze 2004, 296–7). Such an approach can be identified in Kirkegaard’s Labyrinthitis, wherein we cease being indexically oriented towards an external object – for example, the sound of a horn, bird, thunderclap – and descend beyond the realm of entendre arrived at through a phenomenologically reduced listening towards the physiological conditions of audition.4 In orienting thought beyond sound itself, beyond any ontological primacy of perception towards its conditions of possibility, this orientation breaks with the phenomenologically defined sphere of immanence wherein all is appearance, situating the latter within a broader physicalist or materialist continuum that constitutes the external yet immanent conditions of audition. Beyond a method of sensory distortion – in Kirkegaard’s case the use of distortion product otoacoustic emissions – to bring the intensive conditions of qualitative perception to the fore, an immanent practice of exposing the conditions of experience within and through experience, we might refute the Deleuzian notion that such conditions can only be sensed (Deleuze 2004, 296) in asserting the susceptibility of such conditions to modelling and formalization. Where we are concerned with sound and auditory phenomena, models of the transcendental conditions of auditory perception are produced through research into the physiological conditions of hearing, and so Deleuze’s method of transcendental empiricism, which through sensory distortion would seek to uncover the conditions of appearances, finds a parallel practice in psychoacoustics, which through the avoidance of a principally affective methodology is less averse to the practice of modelling, quantification and formalization. This reduction of sound to signal and the conditions of audition, summarized by Friedrich Kittler as ‘onedimensional data processing in the lower frequency range’ (Kittler 1999, 118), is both mathematically and technologically facilitated, relying upon diverse forms of mediation and representation at odds with the affective methodology found in Deleuze’s writing and of central importance to theories of sonic materialism. 4 For a discussion of entendre as a category of Schaefferian reduced listening and its relation to Husserlian phenomenology see Brian Kane’s ‘L’Objet Sonore Maintenant’ (Kane 2007).

Infraesthetics

65

The Deleuzian orientation towards a quantitative understanding of intensity is, when placed in the context of artistic practice, described by Deleuze and Guattari as a functionalism: We are not at all arguing for an aesthetics of qualities, as if the pure quality (color, sound, etc.) held the secret of a becoming without measure ... Pure qualities seem to us to be punctual systems ... A functionalist conception on the other hand, only considers the function a quality fulfils in a specific assemblage, or in passing from one assemblage to another. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 337a)

The punctuality ascribed to aesthetic quality describes the subjective capture and occlusion of the generative capacities of differences in intensity, wherein the latter are considered insofar as they can be constrained within instances of resemblance and representation. Synonymous with the quantitative orientation described above, the functionalism that Deleuze and Guattari describe is primarily oriented towards the difference a sound makes within a body, material or assemblage. This functionalist orientation describes the infraesthetic use of sound as a means of generating movement and displacement within bodies, artworks and assemblages, examples of which can be found in the work of Rolf Julius, Stephen Vitiello and Nina Canell. Operating within a functionalist paradigm, the inaudible use of sound as intensive quantity exemplifies an exit from immersive aesthetics, wherein sound is not a means of envelopment but movement and displacement. In focusing on sound as a source of movement rather than as principally or irreducibly an auditory quality or experience, sound is defined beyond the thresholds of its subjective capture or reception. Sound is situated in an anterior inaudibility, its conditions identified in a dynamic but imperceptible intensity prior to the experience of hearing and the intentional act of listening. Situating sound within a broader continuum of immanent yet imperceptible signals presents a physical rather than phenomenological ontology of sound, making possible a non-correlational theory of sound in artistic practice that will be expanded upon below. While this functionalism tends towards aesthetic impoverishment and quantitative reduction, the results of these processes remain implicated within a poetics of the real due to a partial ‘victory of the aesthetic remainder’ that has withstood

66

Immanence and Immersion

artistic attempts at its evisceration (Osborne 2013, 50).5 Where art is oriented towards the real this is clearly not a crude objectivism, a neutral framing of autonomous and anonymous matters, as the schematic form of an artwork as an intensive, functional system operating within and beyond aesthetic appearances locates it in a point of transit between the real and ideal.

2.2 Rolf Julius In the work of Rolf Julius we find examples of a functional conception of sound active within a broader aesthetic strategy comprising found objects and an impoverished materiality manifest through an orientation towards the quiet, simple and diminutive. While Julius’s ‘quiet music’ was released as compositional material,6 these compositions were often functionally implicated within his sculptural and installation works. The compositions would be used as a means of exciting materials such as pigment or ash placed within speaker cones. Within these sculptural assemblages the quiet music itself becomes obscured by the pigment’s impedance of the speaker cone, yet nonetheless functions as an affective source of movement animating a variety of materials. Important here is the affective function that the sound has within a sculptural assemblage, as much as the aesthetic qualities of the composition itself. Julius’s use of different materials to stop speaker cones returns to the ‘sonorous’ from what Bonnet calls ‘domesticated audible’. For Bonnet ‘every audible is, a priori, sonorous, but the sonorous is not always audible’ (Bonnet 2016, 8). The sonorous is here the inaudible ground of the audible, a realm of intensive or affective signals that may remain imperceptible. Distinct from its audible givenness to perception, the sonorous is located within a material or physical rather than phenomenological domain, a natural force placed on a level with the materiality of pigment or sand. Where sound is used in this way to excite and displace materials there is an initial similarity to the use of

5 The orientation towards a physical realism and the implication of this realist orientation within a poetics of the real can be seen in prose scores of Alvin Lucier, as well as in the titles given to the work of Stephen Vitiello discussed below. 6 See Rolf Julius, Music for a Distance (2003–9) and Music for the Ears (1979).

Infraesthetics

67

Figure 2.1 Rolf Julius, Ash 2005 (wood ash, two Korean plastic cups, two open loudspeakers, wire, sound), private collection, Torino. Image: courtesy e/static, Torino. Used with permission.

sound in cymatics. Yet in Julius’s use of sound as a source of movement there is often no plane upon which granular materials may take form and be framed, with the materials being placed directly into the speaker cones (see Figure 2.1). Where the combination of loudspeakers, plane and granular materials is used in Julius’s work, such as Music for an Almost Empty Space (1998), the delicate, low-amplitude and high-frequency content of the sounds used prevents the emergence of cymatic patterns. Cymatic pictorialism tends towards a synaesthetic unity and completion distinct from the schematic openness of the works discussed here. While Julius was known for a synaesthetic conflation of sound, colour and texture in his groupings of materials, there is an openness that remains through the use of near-imperceptible sound to activate an impoverished materiality, the diffusive arrangement and association of materials in his installation work and the absence of a formal unity of sonic and visual experience through the projection of waveforms onto a planar surface. Cymatic pictorialism, as deployed in artistic practice, is less oriented towards a functional conception of signals beyond their aesthetic qualities than the qualitative unity of auditory and visual experience combining to form a common and sufficient

68

Immanence and Immersion

sense. In contrast to this qualitative unity and aesthetic sufficiency, here we find sound prodigiously simplified or reduced, tending towards a one-dimensional source of excitation.

2.3 Stephen Vitiello In Stephen Vitiello’s (2005) We were moving together, moving apart. Not speaking/sleeping together twelve speakers are suspended in pairs from a crucifix-like frame. Pairs of speakers face each other, one pointing upwards, the other down. The distance between each pair of speakers gradually increases until the final pair break this formation with one speaker affixed to the supportive frame and the other offset at an angle and positioned roughly halfway between the preceding pair. The effect of this arrangement is a series of gradually increasing intervals between the pairs of speakers with the final speaker released or displaced from an otherwise harmonic arrangement. The first five pairs are held in ever looser harmonic relation while the sixth breaks with this relationality, suggesting flight and exit (see Figure 2.2). The work presents us with silence but not stasis. Through each pair of speakers a sound is played, yet the frequencies contained in the recording are so low as to be inaudible resulting in movements of the speaker cones that are slow enough to see yet too slow to hear. In addition to being inaudible, the amplitude of the sounds is beneath that required to feel the effects of the slowly displaced air upon the skin – as one does in the work of Mark Bain, for example – resulting in the production of an entirely imperceptible sound. Furthermore the pairs of speakers facing each other are suggestive of a phase cancellation, the active production of silence through the combination of two waves that on their own would be audible but when combined result in silence. While one can see that the speakers are producing sound, the sound itself as an audible quality is unavailable to us, being in excess of our auditory and haptic thresholds of perception. Sound is reduced to movement, to a series of onedimensional variations in intensity indicative of the quantitative orientation described above. Where sound is reduced to movement this reduction strips it of its auditory qualities, performing a quantitative reduction. The frequency

Infraesthetics

69

Figure 2.2 Stephen Vitiello, We were moving together, moving apart. Not speaking/ sleeping together (2005). Photo: Claudio Abate, Used with permission.

of the sounds reproduced in We Were Moving ... is at times so low that one is almost able to count the peaks and troughs of the emitted yet imperceptible waveforms, an act leaving it open and susceptible to a form of quantification alien to the irreducibly qualitative nature of duration. This quantification places the imperceptible sound closer to a Bergsonian conception of space than that of duration, a concept that Bergson repeatedly elucidated through sonic metaphor.7 The reduction of sound to movement subtracts sound from the richness of the lived, from the plane of relative immanence proper to phenomenological philosophy. Yet this subtraction and reduction is woven back into a poetics through the titling of the work which frames an interpretation of its form 7 Bergson’s concepts of space and duration are discussed in chapter one.

70

Immanence and Immersion

according to relational dynamics. The subtraction of the work from any aesthetic sufficiency is compensated for by the urgency with which it is seized upon by conceptualization and recollection, reinscribed into a poetic framework. This poetic reinscription draws upon an inescapable aesthetic remainder that withstands subtraction and quantitative reduction. While these speaker works are inaudible and present us with the simple movements of commercially available, ubiquitous objects, there remains an identifiable style to Vitiello’s arrangement of them, to their positioning and angling, to their exposure of sound as reduced one-dimensional variation in intensity and movement, rather than a means to move other materials, as in the work of Julius and Canell. There is an aesthetic remainder or residue here, yet it is undoubtedly impoverished and alien to the richness and aesthetic sufficiency of the immersive. This impoverishment gives the work an openness, its aesthetic insufficiency becoming an incompleteness that while situating it partly within the indeterminacy characteristic of much contemporary art also permits its schematic form to provide transit between a real in excess of perception and an ideal order of poetics.

2.4 Nina Canell Nina Canell’s work makes use of the functionalist conception of sound outlined above, using it as a source of movement, a source that often remains imperceptible itself. While visibly comprised of objects and materials of varying degrees of stability and consistency – oscillators, fans, clouds of mist, fluorescent light, sticks, setting concrete – it is the invisible forces and energies – electrical currents, ultrasonic sound, magnetism – utilized in Canell’s work that is often most significant. An impoverished materiality moves the aesthetic qualities of the objects themselves to the margins in order to foreground dynamic and energetic states immanent to matter: the movement of a cloud, the force of wind, the gradual hardening of concrete, the imperceptible agitations of ultrasonic sound, the interruption of a signal that shows it to have always been there, forgotten and tuned out due to its quotidian ubiquity.

Infraesthetics

71

Figure 2.3 Nina Canell, Perpetuum Mobile (25 Kg) (2009–10). Used with permission.

Describing a practice that presents dynamic relations between networks of often found objects, Canell states that ‘I don’t really make objects, but rather work in a syntax of relations and transfers. I think about sculpture as something that is grounded in material and objects, but is, at the same time, external to them’ (Canell et al. 2016). This orientation towards transfers belies the functionalist orientation of Canell’s work, wherein invisible forces moving between the components of diverse assemblages often constitute the primary content. Tone generators and ultrasonic transducers generate signals that, often remaining imperceptible, are utilized for their affective capacities to displace matter ahead of their aesthetic qualities. Where movements and transfers of energies between visible objects of varied consistency constitutes the primary content of the work, it is often a schematic form and understanding that reveals this focus. There is less emphasis upon the qualities of concrete, tone generators, signals and bulbs than the changes they undergo and the forces flowing through them, animating a system. That sculpture exists externally to its objects indicates the importance of cultural and intentional acts, but also a conceptual or schematic orientation wherein it is less the objects than an abstract diagram or schematic that describes their relations and constitutes the sculptural intention. Less a craft of forming objects, sculpture is here figured as the establishment and identification of material

72

Immanence and Immersion

relations within and between objects, the determination of a network that has a diagrammatic or schematic form that being abstract permits repetition and material variation. The diagrammatic or schematic forms underlying many of Canell’s works makes possible the maintenance of their identity under differing instances of realization, differing quantities, scales and arrangements of their component parts which nonetheless indicate the same underlying schematic. This diagrammatic form is traced by the various signals that Canell’s work often includes, running through and between the constituent parts of an assemblage. Here we again see the functionalist orientation of Canell’s work, understood as a sensitivity less to the aesthetic qualities of assemblages but the intensive function that signals and affects have within and between assemblages, the relations and transfers running between them. Both a functional and schematic orientation, the persistence of a work as a network of relations capable of being scaled up or down in different dimensions, can be seen in the Perpetuum Mobile series of works. Canell’s Perpetuum Mobile (2009–10) is always followed by a specific weight in parentheses, corresponding to the amount of cement being used in a particular instance of its realization. Examples of this are Perpetuum Mobile (10 Kg), (40 Kg), (2400 Kg) and (283 stone). Parentheses indicate the secondary status of each manifestation of the piece, and the continuity of its schematic form between each instance, regardless of the specific scale of any particular realization. With each difference in weight comes a corresponding difference in the aesthetics of Perpetuum Mobile’s manifestation. As the weight increases instances become more complex: amplifiers and hydrophones are added to the list of media and the larger number of bags of concrete being used are stacked in more complex forms. What each of these variations provides is differing instances of ‘punctuation’ to the otherwise continuous, schematic or diagrammatical form of the piece that maintains its identity beyond each instance of realization. These variations ultimately have little impact upon the identity of the work in its schematic form. In the lower weight categories – 10 Kg, 40 Kg – the piece has a simplified set of media that aligns these lighter instances more closely with the schematic form of the work. In its heavyweight versions (>100 Kg) the media used consists of – taking Perpetuum Mobile (283 stone) as an example – water, bucket, steel, hydrophone, mist-machine,

Infraesthetics

73

283 stone cement, relay timer, amplifier cable. Below 100 Kg we find a reduced set of media: water, 10 Kg cement, mist-machine, basin (see Figure 2.3). In this lower weight category the use of sound remains imperceptible, ultrasonic transducers are used not as the source of an audible quality but as the means of disturbing water and producing mist that slowly drifts from a basin to an opened bag of cement. Diminished materials and an impoverished aesthetic emphasizes the process of evaporation and solidification, the relations and transfers between visible elements. As the aesthetic complexity and richness of the work is reduced, movements and transfers between and within the components of a system come clearly to the fore. The presentation of processes and dynamic materiality in excess of perception presents a conceptual orientation in a weak or morphological sense comparable to that evident in the early works of Robert Barry, such as the Inert Gas series (1969) and the electromagnetic and ultrasonic works of 1968 and 1969. Rather than strict attention to the ontological status of the concept, here we find the diagrammatic form of an idea that persists beyond its aesthetic actualization. While the aesthetic elements of Canell’s work may be secondary to the transfers and relations between components, there remains a clear style in terms of the objects selected, their age, signs of wear and hue, a persistent aestheticization of the experimental. The honing of this style does not undermine the anti-aesthetic and functionalist orientation towards imperceptible forces that constitutes the central element of Canell’s sculpture, but acknowledges the persistence of an aesthetic remainder that the strong Conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s attempted but ultimately failed to eviscerate. Engaging with this remainder Canell presents a selective approach to the aesthetic residue generated by an orientation towards imperceptible forces and the affective relations they establish. Yet the persistence of this residue and the adherence to aesthetic criteria in the selection of objects is not to subscribe to a sufficient aesthetics that would diminish the orientation towards the dynamics of the imperceptible. It is this orientation towards the imperceptible that situates Canell’s work in relation to a concept of reality beyond experience and irreducible to appearances. As a dialectical counterpart to the continuity of relations and transfers that constitute the schematic form of Canell’s works, her various cut-cable works

74

Immanence and Immersion

present a series of interruptions and discontinuities. These works comprise cuttings taken from a wide range of subterranean cables used in communication systems, systems that are increasingly hidden from view. These cable works indicate the materiality of the imperceptible fields of relation and transfer that exist between the components of Canell’s sculptures. As a counterpoint to this orientation towards the apparent immateriality of signals passing between the elements of an assemblage, wherein the activating or animating forces of acoustic and electromagnetic vibrations might suggest a kind of vitalism, the cable works present a physical realization of this transfer, its grounding in a brute materiality rather than transcendent, occult energetics. The apparent immateriality of the tones generated and electromagnetic signals transferred between the components of Canell’s sculptural networks of often found objects is given physical presence through the presentation of subterranean cables and their internal composition. That the cables comprising many of these works are intended for subterranean use, for the long-distance transfer of communications between countries, continents and under oceans, addresses the hidden materiality of the means of communication and transfer between bodies. Exposing not only the cables but their interiors indicates the material composition of a means of transfer and communication, grounding the apparent immateriality of communications in a network of material channels and relations. Having a status akin to a glitch that suddenly exposes the layers of mediation structuring ‘immediate’ appearances, transmission and communication, the cut cables expose the infrastructure that when operating normally remains hidden through its transparency. As such these cut cables are analogous to the short-circuits of the auditory system described above, where one begins to listen to hearing itself rather than the object heard. The cut cables analogously draw attention to the material conditions of immaterial communications, relations and transfers, identifying the transcendental conditions of these transfers in the affective capacities of the mediums through which they move. Where sound features in these works it is one medium amongst many, an often imperceptible but nonetheless affective force between the elements of a sculptural assemblage. Through this functional and quantitative orientation sound is taken out of the terms of audiovisual litany and utilized beyond the

Infraesthetics

75

scope of its phenomenological description. In ceasing to be the immersive medium of a sufficient aesthetics, the imperceptible use of sound as signal forces thought beyond the apparent to an order of nonetheless immanent imperceptibles, to a reality active beyond given or intuitive experiences. In orienting thought beyond the apparent the constraints of an immersive and correlational circle are exposed and made available for criticism.

3

Writing Out Sound

Writing about sound art within academic, artistic and curatorial texts tends to gravitate towards certain common terminology: the ‘enveloping, immersive and intense’ are often taken to be a particular privilege of ‘the sonic’ or ‘auditory culture’ (Henriques 2003, 451). These terms are usually contrasted or opposed to the distal exteriority of ‘visual culture’. The assumption of such terms and oppositions is usually carried out in an attempt to steel the identity of the sonic, auditory or oral against the ‘hegemony of the visual’ (Cox 2011, 157). While the assumption of such terms has undoubtedly helped to enrich discourse on sensory culture there is also a danger in too readily assuming these terms, resulting in a limitation and homogenization of practical and theoretical activities concerned with sound in the arts. Defining the boundaries of the oral or auditory in opposition to the visual too strongly can disempower sonic practice and discourse, limiting the scope and terms of its operation to the phenomenological and auto-affective. The aim of what follows is to identify a route out of this increasingly constrictive discourse of interiority and immersion, a route where sound is written, or even writes itself, out of interiority towards an expansion of sonic practice’s epistemological scope. The logic of immersive interiority presents a distinctively qualitative understanding of sound centring the listening subject. Yet as Jonathan Sterne notes, where we are not ‘bound by Christian doctrine, there is no law  – divine or otherwise – requiring us to assume the interiority of sound and the connection between sound, subjective self-presence, and intersubjective experience. We do not need to assume that sound draws us into the world while vision separates us from it’ (Sterne 2003, 18). There is no requirement to frame discourse on sound in terms of interiority and immersion, and so contrary to this ontotheological doctrine that consequently sets quality apart

78

Immanence and Immersion

from quantity in its definition of sound we can address a definition that does not assume privilege or priority regarding qualitative interiority. In contrast to descriptions of sound bound to an ontotheological interiority, we can consider a near ubiquitous description of sound in physical terms: ‘Sound originates from the motion or vibration of an object. This motion is impressed upon the surrounding medium (usually air) as a pattern of changes in pressure’ (Moore 2008, 2). One could argue that this is not yet a definition of sound as it is concerned with the origins of sound rather than sound itself, simply describing the production of waves not necessarily synthesized as sound by an ear. Additionally, this physically reductive description of sound hardly requires citation due to its ubiquity. Addressing both of these points it should be stressed that the notions of 1) motion impressed upon a medium which results in 2) a waveform passing through that medium, are both considered anterior to the experience of sound, a point of importance in the argument that follows. Moore’s description of sound waves is quoted due to its mention of an ‘impression’ upon a medium, a term of importance in what follows where sound is considered in relation to a ‘deep’ notion of writing (Sterne 2003, 50). This deep notion of writing identified by Jonathan Sterne comes from the application of Derridean theory to the study of sound reproduction and recording in particular, wherein recording media have been understood as a means of writing sound, impressing it upon one medium or another. Where Sterne is critical of binding sound reproduction too tightly to writing and recording, it is the sense of exteriority that comes with Derrida’s conception of writing that I wish to retain in rethinking sound in the arts.1 It is from this link between sound and writing, specifically due to the exteriority associated with the latter, that sound can be understood to be written, or even to write itself, out of the interiority to which it is usually consigned. In what follows I will reiterate this connection between sound and writing in two ways: 1) through reference to sound recording as a technical process and 2) through the notion that sound is always-already written. In both instances the link between sound and writing is reiterated in order to ascribe sound to an order 1 Sterne resists this linking of sound reproduction to writing and recording as the technological conditions of this process may entail a sense of disembodiment, and Sterne is concerned to articulate a somatic theory of sound reproduction extending beyond recording.

Writing Out Sound

79

of exteriority to which it is usually considered antithetical. Before going any further with this link between sound and writing, it is necessary to clarify the link that Derrida makes between writing and exteriority. At this point it should also be noted that the notion of exteriority serves as a stopgap in trying to move from a situation in which things in themselves are confused with their manifest appearances to a situation where the in-itself is unbound from such appearances. The in-itself is in this sense exterior to the interior world of subjective phenomenal appearances. In working towards a concept of immanence that necessarily prohibits ontological exteriority, the notion of exteriority serves as a necessary stopgap in presenting an argument that attempts to undo the knot of interiority that constricts conceptualization of sound in the arts. Where the form of exteriority undoes this knot the affective interiority considered a privilege of the sonic is unfolded in the pursuit of immanence.

3.1 Writing and exteriority Jacques Derrida described at length the assignation of writing to an order of exteriority regarded as a residual impoverishment of language, a characterization derived through comparison to the apparent primacy and immediacy of the spoken word as a unity of sound and sense (Derrida 1997). Yet for Derrida it is metaphysical doxa that erroneously defines or delimits writing as secondary exteriority in relation to an original interiority. For Derrida ‘the order of writing is the order of exteriority’ (Derrida 1997, 45) yet it is also the case that ‘the outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside’ (Derrida 1997, 35). Against the idea of a primary orality interrupted by writing the orality thought constitutive of immediate interiority is ‘always-already’ riddled, punctured or fissured by an ‘original ... eruption of the outside within the inside’ (Derrida 1997, 34). This ‘outside’ is that of writing, exterior to the immediate unity of sense and sound. Where it is contrasted with the voice and spoken language, writing is exterior to the circle of vocal auto-affectivity, to the immediate affirmation of presence that comes

80

Immanence and Immersion

with hearing oneself speak. Whereas the auto-affectivity of the voice and the affectivity of sound more generally is taken as an affirmation of presence, writing marks an absence, a recording, a document or supplement to the primacy of the affective sound event. As such writing breaks with the circle of interiority and immersion within which sound envelopes and centres us. If a sonorous envelope delimits interiority, the outside is delimited through writing, yet if we follow Derrida’s argument the outside is always-already present on the inside; the interiority of sound is always-already punctured by the exteriority of writing. Making sense of this claim that the apparent immediacy of sound is always-already written out will require recourse to recording technology, but also through the reductive or subtractive definition of sound given above, wherein impression occurs prior to audition. Before going into more detail on this point it is necessary to further clarify the extent of what is called writing in Derridean thought. Where writing is readily bound to language and the recording of signs, through its association with the Derridean concept of trace writing is unbound from this sense. In contrast to a writing bound to sense the vitiating exteriority of writing gains traction in Derrida’s concept of the trace: an occulted impression that punctures the plenitude of presence, an ‘irreducible absence’, ‘the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside’ (Derrida 1997, 70), ‘a spacing [that] is always the unperceived, the nonpresent, and the nonconscious’ (Derrida 1997, 68). It is in the concept of the trace that the absence manifest through writing is most apparent, as this absence extends its antithetical relation to presence to include the absence of sense or meaning.

3.2 Exteriority and the real In plotting a route out of the circle of interiority predominant in discourses on sound in the arts it is my intention to make provision for discourses and practices more accommodating to contemporary notions or realism and materialism, particularly those theories where ‘the real’ ceases to entail the phenomenological and somatic associations inherited from areas of study such as Lacanian psychoanalysis and New Materialism. The notion

Writing Out Sound

81

of the real being pursued herein assumes a naturalistic or even scientistic guise; it is a notion of the real situated within this latter theoretical context that is being linked to the term exteriority herein. This notion of the real is admittedly alien to Derridean thinking, yet Derrida’s concepts of writing and exteriority nonetheless remain useful in constructing not only a critique of sonic interiority but also a provisional escapologist’s toolkit. Where we are concerned with the aforementioned notion of the real, the critique of affective self-presence and sonic interiority enabled by Derrida’s concept of writing can only take us so far, to the edge of the circle. We will depart from Derrida in seeking to regrounding exteriority in the real. As Derrida’s ‘original eruption’ of exteriority undermines the binding of sense and sound, in approaching something akin to what Friedrich Kittler called the ‘writing of the real’, the binding of writing and sense must also be undone via the concept of trace (Kittler 1999, 44). It is through a concept of writing built upon the emptiness of what Derrida calls spacing and the trace – both indicating an irreducible absence – that its characteristic exteriority becomes clearest, as a being exterior to sense and intention. This exteriority creates a space for the accidental writing or inscription constituting a mark of the real. What must be noted here is the distorted use of the term trace as that which in its unmotivatedness is ascribed to the real, as this ascription differs significantly from Derrida’s use of the term as that which underwrites an infinite ‘play’ of signs; this difference is also manifest in the use of the term exteriority which herein remains somewhat scientistic, referring to the order of a non-phenomenologizable, un-intuitable real as opposed the infinite play of unmotivated signs. Where the trace becomes bound to a concept of the real it becomes akin to an empirical mark and therefore a presence to which Derrida’s trace is alien. This misappropriation of the trace pursues a further iteration of its exteriority. Becoming fixed in some minimal degree to the real, the trace herein registers a mark of the real extending beyond possible experience and any immediate affirmation of presence. This equation of trace, exteriority and the real constitutes a close of play marked not by the unity of sound and sense but a writing of the real. Emphasis on the writing of sound entails a certain amount of agreement with Derrida on the value of a ‘reduction of phonic

82

Immanence and Immersion

substance’ where this substance is understood as the aesthetic or appearance of sound (Derrida 1997, 53). While for Derrida reduction entails a ‘bracketing out’ of sound in order to extend or maintain the play of signs, the quantitative reduction of concern herein, stemming from the aforementioned subtractive definition of sound, does not involve a bracketing or putting aside of sound but a reduction by way of writing as technological or phonographic mediation, a quantitative reduction concomitant with Kittler’s characterization of acoustics as ‘one-dimensional data processing in the lower frequency range’ (Kittler 1999, 118). Quantitative reduction entailed in a scientistic and subtractive definition of sound is less a bracketing out of sound towards an extension of play than a dissolution of the apparent sufficiency of phenomenological clarity which may constitute epistemological opacity. Quantitative reduction through a writing of sound involves not a displacement of phonic substance but a ‘descent’ through it towards the equivalence of sound, signal and silence found in the traces of the real.

3.3 Sound recording and writing sound The recording of sound can be considered a writing of sound. Having addressed the connection made by Derrida between writing and exteriority above, to address sound in terms of its being written is to couple it to the notion of exteriority with which writing is associated. Addressing the writing of sound through technical mediation serves to associate sound with an order of exteriority to which it is usually thought antithetical within sound studies and related fields, this being more readily associated with the visual. It is in the following section where sound is considered as being always-already written that the exteriority attained through association with writing is assigned to or regrounded in the real. Turning our attention to the writing of sound, rather than writing about sound, is to focus on a largely automated procedure of impression, representation, recording, reproduction and dissemination, to what is a technologically mediated procedure. The writing of sound is a writing down and a writing out of sound, taking it outside of the phenomenologically

Writing Out Sound

83

defined circle of immersion and interiority to which it is usually committed. The interiority with which sonic experience is usually associated is most easily addressed through the auto-affective experience of speech that Derrida understood to be the cornerstone of a ‘metaphysics of presence’ (Derrida 1997, 50). To hear oneself speaking is to affirm one’s own presence through immediate orality. It is this auto-affective circle that writing is understood to puncture in manifesting exteriority and absence, which for Derrida crucially occurs within the circle of auto-affective interiority as ‘the meaning of the outside was always present within the inside’ (Derrida 1997, 35). As a means of writing sound, ‘sound recording preserved the exteriority of the voice while completely transforming its interiority, its insides’, this transformation is that inaugurated by the realization of the presence of the outside on the inside, a technical as opposed to somatic body, a sound written out (Sterne 2003, 298). In excising the voice from the self that it singularly affirmed the auto-affective circle of vocalic interiority is punctured by the writing of sound and the disembodied voice comes to affirm an absence concomitant with a ‘deep’ notion of writing in general. By extension it is not only the recorded voice that comes to stand for an absence but the recording and mediation of sound in general that in its having been written, encoded, impressed or inscribed in one form or another presents the challenge of exteriority to the experience of interiority thought peculiar to the sonic. Where we are concerned with the writing of sound as a technically implemented process, this writing underpins many an immersive art experience. The immersive installation is increasingly digitally implemented; despite the experience of immersion, immediacy, envelopment and so on, the infrastructural underpinnings of this experience depends upon a reduction of phonic substance through its digital encoding whereby its status as sound is dissolved in the discrete nature of the digital that makes possible a process of ‘infinite exchange’ (Osborne 2010). Peter Osborne’s notion of infinite exchange is derived from his thinking on digital photography, yet this thinking quickly leads to the conclusion that what the digital brings to photography is that its images need not actually be photographic in origin due to the a-specificity of the data file which may be rendered as an image. What quickly becomes clear when reading Osborne’s writing on digital photography is that what is said therein of

84

Immanence and Immersion

digital photography can be said of digital phonography; consequently it is not the phono or photo that is of significance but the -graphy which is responsible for the dissolution of media and medium specificity towards a ‘generic field of the digital’ (Osborne 2010, 66). It is this dissolution of specificity that makes possible an equivalence between any given data set and a consequent infinite exchange, understood not only in terms of in-principle-infinite reproduction, distribution, exchange and consumption but in terms of a transformation of data through the equivalence of the binary order from which data sets or files are at base composed. Just as an image need not originate from photographic procedures, a sound need not originate from phonographic procedures – as practices of visualization and audification have extensively shown. Once analogue to digital conversion has taken place, one may just as easily render the resultant data as sound, image, text and so on, regardless of it’s specific origins. The process of analogue to digital conversion presents us with material indifferent to its origins and eventual aesthetic manifestation. Equally the process of digitization accelerates auratic degradation through in-principleinfinite potential for multiplication and distribution; in a post-internet age, that a file exists on one machine means it most likely exists on any number of machines, whether the author is aware of this or not. The dissolution of unity entailed in a process of rendering the apparently continuous discrete and thereby susceptible to infinite exchange – in a sense not limited to infinite reproduction but transformation through the alternate methods of counting, representing and rendering binary data – underpins the apparent unity and continuity of aesthetic immersion. A related concern is raised by Seth Kim-Cohen regarding the disarming tendency to lull through ambience: ‘While you’re in the soft space of light, the NSA and Facebook are still collecting your data’ (Kim-Cohen 2013, 151). The ‘soft space of light’ to which Kim-Cohen refers addresses James Turrell’s immersive installations, but most of the points and criticisms raised by Kim-Cohen regarding such practices can be levelled at the immersive in general – nullifying the mapping of the distal and the immersive onto the visual and oral, respectively. What Kim-Cohen’s identification of ubiquitous data collection raises is a disjunctive or parallel relation between aesthetic experience of immersive interiority and the externalizing implications of ‘deep’ writing, recording, encoding, exchange

Writing Out Sound

85

and so on. Nested within the unificatory experience of the immersive or ambient interiority is the distributive, externalizing capacity of writing in general as implemented through digitization, mobile media and so on: ‘the outside was always present within the inside’ (Derrida 1997, 35). It might be argued that such technical concerns are necessarily secondary to the unificatory primacy of immediate sonic experience. Contrary to this argument which hopes to find solace from exteriorizing, distributive and diffusive digitization in the live, the immediate and the analogue – as if the post-digital in its dialectical return to medium and materiality had successfully cauterized the flow of information, personal or otherwise, through digital media’s iteration of writing in general, rather than simply allowing it to operate as a background process – recourse to such spontaneous forms and their apparent retention of continuity exacerbates the vitiating force of exteriority where this ‘deep’ sense of writing is found to operate in the real as well as the symbolic. In the sense that sonic experience requires anterior impression upon a medium, we find that sound is always-already written out of the circle of interiority to which it is usually ascribed. This is not, however, to bind the present argument into a play of texts as the writing with which we are concerned is a writing after the phonograph: ‘Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God’ (Kittler 1999, 44). Where writing is taken in a suitably ‘deep’ sense, it is not only intentional encodings but accidental impressions that fall under this term. Where for Derrida the ‘destruction of onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence’, the reduction of phonic substance and the irreducible absence of the trace sustained an infinite play of signs unburdened by a transcendental signified, the writing of the real that Kittler found in phonography interrupts this play by regrounding exteriority in the real (Derrida 1997, 50).

3.4 Sound is always-already written out Where we understand sound according to the physical and subtractive definition already given the writing of sound is not only accomplished

86

Immanence and Immersion

Figure 3.1 Etchings, Video Stills, Dawn Scarfe, 2007. Photograph by Dawn Scarfe. Used with permission.

through technical mediation but is a prerequisite of sonic experience due to the necessity of sound’s being impressed upon a medium prior to audition. To consider sound apart from these impressions is to consider sound as pure appearance and thereby to consign oneself to the contemplation of such appearances at the expense of their conditions. In stating that sound should be considered always-already written is not to assert irreducible symbolic or semantic deployment but rather the impression upon a medium that we find in the most basic definitions of sound (see Moore 2008, 2). The sense in which sound can be considered always-already written, impressed upon a medium, prior to its symbolic encoding can be seen and heard in Dawn Scarfe’s Etchings (2007).2 In Etchings we see Scarfe situated within a mid-nineteenthcentury dairy repeatedly swinging a long branch through the air (see Figure 3.1). The audiovisual recording of these events is slowed down in order to emphasize the impressions made upon the air by the swinging motion. The varying strength of Scarfe’s swings result in varying frequencies of sound 2 Documentation of Etchings is available at the following locations: https://vimeo.com/5993571, http://www.dawnscarfe.co.uk/project_etchings.

Writing Out Sound

87

being produced; due to the slowing down of the recording we are able to perceive and consider more clearly the contours, magnitudes, contractions and rarefactions of the resulting waves produced as they proceed from Scarfe armed with stick, situated at one end of the roughly rectangular dairy, to the recording equipment situated at the other. Scarfe’s actions, both the swinging and the slowing down of the recordings, emphasize the impression a moving object makes upon a surrounding medium, in this instance air, the swinging becoming an act of inscription – more than an etching due to the latter’s chemical implications. In so doing Scarfe’s actions reiterate the quantitative reduction contained within Kittler’s history of phonographic revelation wherein we find an account of ‘continuous undulations recorded ... as signatures of the real’ (Kittler 1999, 118). In ascribing such undulations to the real Kittler describes how: the phonograph permitted for the first time the recording of vibrations that human ears could not count, human eyes could not see, and writing hands could not keep up with. Edison’s simple metal needle, however, could keep up – simply because every sound, even the most complex or polyphonous ... formed a single amplitude on the time axis. Put in the plane language of general sign theory, acoustics is one-dimensional data processing in the lower frequency range. (Kittler 1999, 118)

Focusing on the production, audition and understanding of undulations in air as ‘signatures of the real’, Scarfe’s Etchings emphasize the impressions anterior yet immanent to sound as sensation, an outside on the inside, an exteriority grounded in the real. Accordingly we may take these Etchings or impressions upon the air as examples of a ‘deep notion of writing’ that Sterne identifies as being active in discourse on the reproduction and recording of sound, a writing drawn out or made perceptible through the use of sound recording and reproduction technologies yet falling short of fetishizing such technologies through emphasis upon an impression anterior to them (Sterne 2003, 50). Rather than defaulting to discourses of immersion and phenomenological envelopment, Etchings emphasizes sound as having always-already been written, an emphasis that presents the challenge of exteriority to the near ubiquitous ideology of interiority dominating discourse on sound in the arts. In Etchings sound is explicitly linked to writing in two ways: 1) through its

88

Immanence and Immersion

recording and subsequent manipulation, and 2) through the emphasis upon impressions prior to this technological mediation and manipulation. Through this twofold connection with writing sound is written out of the circle of interiority to which it is usually consigned. Insofar as these impressions constitute ‘signatures of the real’ rather than signs, the exteriority that such impressions attain through their connection to a ‘deep’ notion of writing is rendered distinct from the exteriority that Derrida assigned to writing against the auto-affective interiority of sonority (Kittler 1999, 118). Distinct from the exteriority lubricating an infinite play of unmotivated signs, here we find an exteriority grounded in the real.

4

Immersive Phenomenology

Through envelopment immersion affirms embodied presence, wherein listeners or viewers assume a constitutive role in the production of the artwork, rather than observing an autonomous object from a distance. The work itself, as conceived or constructed by the artist remains indeterminate in the sense that it is equally produced or completed in the passive synthesis of reception. Immersion presents a primacy of the felt over the thought, the affective over the conceptual. Examples of this position can be found in the work of James Turrell whose light installations are entered by the viewer, occupied and explored from within rather than observed from without. There are no discrete objects to perceive but rather a continuum of light that envelops the viewer, often assailing the perception of distance or any limit to the space being occupied. We might also think of Kaffe Matthew’s Sonic Beds (2005–), which invite an audience to enter and lie down in a large bed into which compositions designed to stimulate the body, to resonate within the flesh, are played. Less a listener than a feeler of sound, the subject enters the bed alone or as part of a group and is immersed in a sonic environment designed for the flesh as much as for the ear. The project makes a distinction between feeling and listening to music, where the latter is associated with audile technique and the trained ear, the former might be considered an innate capacity of the body. As such this music becomes more available to the deaf, being perceived through the skin as much as through the ear. This expanded sensuality of sound entails a certain inclusivity through its articulation beyond what John Drever refers to as the ‘auraltypical’ listening subject (Drever 2015). Through this same distinction, between listening and feeling, Matthews’ Sonic Bed project also identifies the tendency of

90

Immanence and Immersion

the immersive to distance itself from the intentionality of listening – its analytical, critical and conceptual capacities, the prioritization of a passive over an active synthesis. One of the principal theoretical underpinnings that grounds a sufficient immersive aesthetics is phenomenology. The diversity of positions within phenomenology makes it hard to speak of phenomenology as a singular or uniform philosophical perspective. When phenomenology is being discussed in passing, it is often difficult to know if it is Husserl, Heidegger or MerleauPonty, for example, that are the focus of critique. The argument presented herein against the sufficient aesthetics of immersion is presented from a theoretical perspective sympathetic to contemporary philosophical realism, within which phenomenology is often a target for critique. Yet as Dan Zahavi has noted (Zahavi 2016) phenomenology is often poorly defined within such critiques. While the nuances of differing phenomenologies are overlooked or marginalized by some realist philosophies, there are nonetheless commonalities that attract the critical attention of realists and lead to the broad use of the term phenomenology. These commonalities include the assumption of a firstperson perspective, the primacy of perception, a philosophy of immanence wherein immanence is described as the immanence of appearances to a subject, a destruction of the natural attitude – the positing of a mind-independent reality – which in turn leads to correlationism. A similar list of assumptions can be found underpinning the internalist logic of immersion and so are subject to criticism herein. This book is concerned with seeking an exit from the limitations imposed by too strong an adoption of an embodied phenomenology and the correlationist logic it entails. Having identified a phenomenological orientation as part of the problem that immersive aesthetics presents, this chapter will attempt to avoid the neglect of differing approaches within phenomenology through an outlining of the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, in the following chapter, Michel Henry. These philosophers are chosen for their position within the canon of phenomenology, thereby giving a broad sense of what phenomenology might entail or mean, but also due to the impact these philosophers have had upon the theorization and understanding of sound in the arts.

Immersive Phenomenology

91

4.1 Husserl The concept of intentionality has already been drawn upon in this argument, and due to the role this concept plays within the more specialist domain of audile technique it requires attention and a clearer definition. Where audile technique entails an object-directedness, a training of the ear in support of the analytical, critical and professional application of the ear to a specific range of phenomena, it works against the passivity and homogenization encouraged through an aesthetics of immersion. The phenomenological concept of intentionality that serves as a foundation for the development of audile technique is taken from the work of Edmund Husserl, to whom we now turn. While phenomenology is to be identified as providing a philosophical architecture for immersive aesthetics, a number of concepts drawn from Husserlian phenomenology can be drawn upon in outlining a counter-immersive strategy, concepts that permit degrees of transcendence and differentiation within an immanent philosophy. While there are various positive reasons for addressing Husserl at this point, the subjective conditions of reality underpinning Husserl’s correlationism are viewed critically herein due to the assumption of a realist or naturalistic perspective incompatible with fundamental aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl’s phenomenology is not without its realism however, and so it is towards a clarification of differing concepts of the real that Husserl is discussed below.

4.1.1 Intentionality and direct realism The following presents an account of concepts relating to intentionality and phenomenological reduction, as these terms are used throughout this argument. In addition to providing an overview of key terms, the question of realism in relation to phenomenology is discussed as while arguments presented under the rubric of speculative realism have criticized the antirealism of phenomenology, phenomenology has often presented itself as accounting for direct, concrete reality. This latter line of argumentation is also taken up in contemporary sonic and new materialisms which return to phenomenology as a means of addressing ‘things themselves’ and accounting

92

Immanence and Immersion

for a real obscured by the symbolic nature of the linguistic turn. For this reason the nature and siting of phenomenology’s concept of reality will be discussed. Intentionality is an object-directedness intrinsic to consciousness, ‘the unique peculiarity of experiences “to be the consciousness of something”’ (Husserl 2012, 171). Through consequent methods of bracketing or epoché that isolate the intended object from its context, and a transcendental reduction – both of which will be discussed in more detail below – intentionality is presented as constitutive, not simply reflexive, being implicated in the production of its objects rather than passively receiving or responding to external objects and events. As a conscious directing of attention towards something, we can think of intentionality as an initial gesture towards or basic condition of cultural and audile technique, which takes a more skilled and analytical approach towards its objects. Intentionality can be thought of as a first step, an initial identification of an object or sound object, before it is studied in more detail by drawing upon cultural techniques or the phenomenological methods of epoché and reduction. That which the intentional act or experience is directed towards is the intentional matter, the content, object or meaning of the intentional experience as distinct from the intentional quality which names the type of experience through which we encounter the object (Husserl 2013, 143). These differing intentional qualities include perceiving, recalling, desiring, hallucinating, willing and so on. Given these differing types of experience or intentional qualities, the object-directedness characteristic of intentionality does not presume that the objects necessarily exist and so it is possible to intend both existent and non-existent objects. The intended objects of everyday experience are often products of imagining or mis-remembering as well as direct perception. That intentionality does not presuppose the existence of its object allows for a more clearly constitutive and transcendental theory of subjectivity. If the existence of an object were necessary for intentionality the intending subject would always be responding to external objects and events. That intentionality does not presuppose the existence of its objects means that subjectivity is not cast in a passive or simply reflexive role, but rather in a more profound and constitutive role. While intentionality does not presuppose the existence of its object, neither does it preclude it; on the contrary, where a

Immersive Phenomenology

93

perceived object does exist Husserl asserts that we encounter the real object immediately and directly (Husserl 2013, 127). In perception, as distinct from intentional qualities such as recollection or hallucination, we address or encounter real objects directly making such experiences presentational rather than representational.

4.1.2 Realism and reduction The following chapter will address sonic materialism, a position invested in the oppositions comprising the audiovisual litany and the celebration of immersion as a distinctly sonic experience. Arguments for a sonic materialism can be seen to be divided over the role and importance of phenomenology. Furthermore the concept of matter to which sonic materialism attends remains ambiguous with regard to its relation to a listening subject and a reality beyond. Husserl’s concept of intentional matter helps to clarify the concept of matter found within sonic materialism, its position in relation to the subject and the centrality of a phenomenological perspective to many of its claims. Through elision of the role of intentionality and its role in constituting a phenomenological concept of matter sonic materialism claims to attend to inhuman matters via a nonanthropocentric or post-correlational orientation. Despite this orientation, the methods of sonic materialism remain broadly phenomenalistic, entailing that the concepts of matter arising from these methods remain subjective in nature and correlational in orientation, being built upon intuition and conscious acts. As sonic materialism inherits methods from phenomenology, that its concept of matter should be aligned with the content of a conscious act of intentionality distinguishes it from any concept of matter aligned with inhuman exteriority or a non-anthropocentric materialism, a position that assumes too naturalistic an attitude to be compatible with the fundamentally correlative nature of phenomenology. The natural attitude deconstructed by the phenomenological method assumes the existence of a mind-independent reality that can be addressed objectively, without considering the nature of subjectivity’s mediation or involvement. Rather than a conception of world and reality as brute and indifferent to a passive subjectivity, phenomenology foregrounds the

94

Immanence and Immersion

constitutive role of subjectivity in the appearance of the world, claiming that the structure and possibility of appearances are conditioned by transcendental subjectivity. Subjectivity thereby has a constitutive rather than simply passivereceptive role in appearing. Appearance here is not thought pejoratively as mere appearance, as this appearance is thought fundamental to the existence of the world, appearance in this sense is the constitutive emergence of the world in correlation with the subject. Addressing reality through a reorientation towards transcendental subjectivity and the essential correlation between world and subject, phenomenology seeks to dismantle what it calls the naive or natural attitude. There are a number of stages through which phenomenology disassembles this natural attitude: 1. Assuming first-person perspective: Phenomenological study sets out from the first-person perspective of individual, concrete subjectivity and that which appears given. It is only from this first-person perspective that transcendental subjectivity can be revealed and studied. This is in contrast to the third-person perspective assumed by science which, due to this perspective, loses sight of transcendental subjectivity. 2. Intentionality: Object-oriented experience; taking place in a first-person perspective, intentionality is the conscious act of directing attention towards an object as such. At this stage the attitude towards the object may still be naive or naturalistic. 3. Epoché: A change in attitude towards reality that entails a suspension of our naturalistic, realistic inclination and ‘naive’ metaphysics which posits a mind-independent, objective reality. The epoché is the condition of possibility for the reduction. 4. Reduction: The centralization, focusing or ‘thematisation’ of the correlation between subject and world. In investigating this correlation the reduction is transcendental in nature. The reduction may take different approaches, ultimately arriving at the same transcendental reduction: i. Ontological approach to reduction: Analysis of apparent objects leading to an analysis of the conditions of their appearance. The discovery of these conditions is the discovery of a correlation between the subject and the world, a discovery of transcendental subjectivity.

Immersive Phenomenology

95

ii. Cartesian approach to reduction: Setting out from an analysis of the subject, of consciousness, experience and intentionality, leading on to apparent objects. This approach arrives at the same point as the ontological approach: the irreducible correlation of subject and world. Deconstruction of the natural attitude results in a transcendental orientation placing intuition first, constituting the source or foundation of knowledge. It is this intuition which is considered originary, taking precedence over the apparent objectivity characteristic of the natural attitude. While the epoché and consequent reduction dismantle the natural attitude towards a revelation of the reality of experience, this procedure which seeks to do away with the notion of an objective, mind-independent and indifferent reality is carried out without loss of reality, performing a reformulation of how we conceptualize reality. Through this reformulation it is the natural attitude which comes to occupy a position of irreality due to its neglect of the correlational function of transcendental subjectivity. It is the transcendental reduction which focuses thought upon this constitutive correlation, thereby regrounding and rescuing realism from its naive objectivity and naturalism, asserting the subjective conditions of reality, rather than abandoning reality. What must be noted is that in seeking to rescue or resuscitate realism in this way, reality comes to mean the reality of experience, reality as it is experienced directly and immediately. This procedure results in a concept of reality that depends upon subjectivity, as the transcendental reduction reveals subjective intuition as the condition of reality. This is not simply an epistemological position, wherein knowledge of reality depends upon subjectivity, but a more radical ontological position wherein reality itself depends upon subjectivity. Reality thereby remains the central focus of phenomenology, yet a reality that is distinct from that of the natural attitude. Through this orientation towards a correlational concept of reality, phenomenology is not pursued as an exploration of pure, internal subjectivity, mental content and representations. The same can be said of phenomenology’s relation to the world, as while phenomenology turns away from an empirical orientation towards autonomous objects in the world, it turns towards a constitutive correlation of world and subject. Rather than an internalist anti-realism, Husserlian phenomenology sets out a direct realism: through appearances it is claimed that we access reality

96

Immanence and Immersion

as such rather than epiphenomenal residue or phantasmic irreality. In the context of direct realism, the appearances central to phenomenological study are not exclusively mere appearances, but may also directly present us with the reality of the world rather than a veil behind which reality hides. The degree to which appearance may reveal reality corresponds to the level of observation or attention exercised: a passing glance will reveal less of an object and its reality than a careful study drawing on developed cultural techniques or scientific methods in ideal conditions. While it is asserted that appearances reveal the reality of objects, this reality of objects does not return us to the natural attitude that posits these objects as anterior to, independent and indifferent from experience, but rather asserts the reality of the objects as appearances, a reality that is revealed only after the epoché which suspends the natural attitude. Despite this dependence of reality upon appearance, meaning that a concept of reality can only be established after and upon that of appearances, distinctions between appearance and reality are nonetheless maintained within Husserl’s phenomenology. Furthermore, this distinction preserves phenomenology’s concept of immanence as this distinction is made internally to transcendental subjectivity and between types of appearances including those resulting from hazy recollections, hallucinations, patient observations and scientific analysis. Where it is claimed that the natural attitude entails a transcendence as it posits a condition exterior to subjectivity and thereby a ‘two-worlds’ image, phenomenology maintains an immanent account of reality, a ‘one-world’ image, founded upon transcendental subjectivity as the condition for reality. Transcendental intersubjectivity delimits the terrain of immanence and thereby relies upon nothing outside of itself. Phenomenology’s immanence is thereby a subjective immanence. Within this immanent account of reality, phenomenological distinction between reality and appearance is a distinction between reliable and unreliable appearances. While not all appearances exist, if something is said to exist it must necessarily appear within the realm of possible experience. Through this brief summary of Husserl’s direct realism, we see how phenomenology’s inaugural return to things themselves is a return to actual appearances and a grounding of reality in those appearances. Where the phrase ‘things themselves’ indicates a realism, this is a realism after the suspension of

Immersive Phenomenology

97

the natural attitude that would position things themselves as objective, mind independent and indifferent to subjectivity. Against assertions of anti-realism that might follow from phenomenology’s construction of things themselves atop necessarily subjective appearances, Husserl’s phenomenology remains oriented towards a realism, yet this realism remains a reality of experience, a reality for the subject. Where they are grounded in intuitive experience and appearances, phenomenology’s concepts of world and reality remain truncated by the limits of possible experience. It is this truncation that is in part responsible for drawing out the criticism of certain realist philosophers, momentarily grouped under the rubric of speculative realism. The diverse group of philosophers that this term usually refers to are united by little more than hostility towards the correlationism which appears at the heart of phenomenology’s thinking on world and subject as irrevocably intertwined, rejecting the formulation that reality depends upon subjectivity (see Brassier et al. 2007). This rejection of correlationism is a rejection of one of phenomenology’s core metaphysical principles. Proliferating hostility towards phenomenology from those sympathetic to continental realism has drawn out the criticism of Dan Zahavi (Zahavi 2016), who argues that criticism of phenomenology amongst continental realists overlooks its investment in a concept of the real. While this may be true, the realism Husserl’s phenomenology entails is not equivalent to that posited by many continental realists, from whom reality is often asserted despite rather than through appearances. Amongst Zahavi’s criticisms is the claim that ‘if realism is about affirming the reality of everyday objects, the speculative realists fail miserably’ (Zahavi 2016, 301, emphasis added).1 Underlying this criticism is the conflation – particularly common in art criticism and theory – which reduces speculative realism to object-oriented ontology (OOO). A conception of reality located at an aesthetic register is not consistent across direct and speculative realisms. Of the diverse perspectives momentarily grouped under the rubric of speculative realism, only OOO could be said 1

Perhaps the most pertinent critique that Zahavi makes is that Speculative Realism lacks novelty when considered in the light of areas of analytical philosophy and philosophy of science, something acknowledged by the likes of Brassier given his attention to the work of Wilfrid Sellars.

98

Immanence and Immersion

to make a commitment to the reality of everyday objects. Where reality is identified in an aesthetic register it is only with OOO that direct realism might compete for such a position. Affirming the reality of everyday objects is not a priority for the work of Brassier, Grant or Meillassoux, wherein we are likely to find criticism or indifference towards the everyday or objects as an irreducible ontological category. Amongst the work of these latter authors we find speculative or scientistic images of reality that include wholly unfamiliar and imperceptible entities. Zahavi states that ‘it was in order to save the objectivity of the world that we know, that Husserl embraced transcendental idealism and insisted that reality involves a necessary intertwining of subject and object’ (Zahavi 2016, 301). This attempt to ‘save the objectivity of the world that we know’ attempts to truncate reality within the limits of possible experience, clinging to the familiar in the face of an emergent scientific image wherein reality is increasingly not what it seems. It is a challenge to the everyday conception of reality and expansion beyond intuitive knowledge that is entailed in the work of the likes of Grant, Meillassoux and Brassier. In contrast to phenomenology’s direct realism which presents a truncated image of the real by grounding reality in an originary intuition, normalizing it within the limits of given experience, we find an expanded image of the real presented through speculative or scientistic means. This expanded conception of the real encroaches upon the manifest image, which through the inclusion of the wholly unfamiliar and imperceptible extends considerably beyond the given. This scientific image – which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 – which extends the concept of reality beyond the given or the manifest occurs without entirely rejecting the efficacy of the manifest image a certain level. While the scientific image holds the phenomenalistic to be epiphenomenal, it is not without considering the real conditions for this epiphenomenal manifest image. While removed from its central position as the condition of reality, subjective appearance is nonetheless accounted for within the scientific image. Just as this image presents an expanded conception of reality it presents an expanded conception of immanence, neither reducing realism to appearances nor describing it as naive transcendence. The naturalism the scientific image entails necessitates that everything be immanent to nature rather than

Immersive Phenomenology

99

transcendental subjectivity, a nature or reality more adequately described through mathematization and modelling than direct perception or intuition.

4.2 Merleau-Ponty In Husserl’s phenomenology we have identified a correlationism within which the subject is the condition of reality, a reality of appearances. The logic of correlationism can be identified in an immersive aesthetics wherein a return to the real is a return to the immediacy or primacy of perception anterior to the operations of representation. The site of the real becomes the synthesis of the sensible. While an overview of Husserl’s phenomenology helps to identify the logic of correlationism common to both phenomenology and a sufficient aesthetics of immersion, the intentionality underlying phenomenological reduction yields an orientation towards objects that is problematic for any proposed sufficiency of immersion. This intentionality exemplified in acts of seeing constitutes an instance of transcendence that inserts a distinction between an individual subject and an object that supports eidetic reduction, an identification of essential forms beyond the accidents of an encounter. Phenomenology comes closer to an aesthetics of immersion and the logic of the audiovisual litany in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of vision, sight and anonymous observation supports the audiovisual litany through an assignation of the visible to exteriority: ‘the visible is what we grasp with our eyes; the sensible is what we grasp through our senses’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 7). Whereas the grasping with suggests an apparently direct encounter with the object, thereby supporting the semblance of neutrality and objectivity of vision, the grasping though entails mediation or sensory membrane through which and on the grounds of which the object is grasped; this membrane of the senses constitutes the transcendental conditions of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. This grasping through the senses asserts the implication of sensing in the constitution of the world, not simply sensing as a passive receptor of external objects and events. That vision is set apart from the senses in this way sets it apart from this constitutive implication in the world: the apparent transparency of vision

100

Immanence and Immersion

implicates it in localization, alteritous identification, in the identification and reception of an external and objective world rather than a primordial synthesis. It is the apparent transparency of vision that leads the seer to neglect firstly seeing as a sensing and secondly the radical or transcendental role of sensing. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology we find further resonances with the acoustic conditions of the immersive through a resistance to certainty, an opposition of perception and knowledge whereby ‘the nature of the perceived is to tolerate ambiguity, a certain shifting or “haziness”’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014,  11). Perception delivers hazy, shifting, contextually and subjectively contingent objects. The contingency of perception is contrasted to theories of sensation that would seek to know sensation, introducing constancy into its operations and submitting it to knowledge. An example of such a theory of sensation would be psychoacoustics wherein models of auditory sensation introduce degrees of stability, predictability and certainty into the contingencies of the subjective encounter. Such practices which through engaging perception as a material process to be studied and understood contributes to the alienation that drives Merleau-Ponty from the scientific image, an alienation of the conscious subject from the body as it is felt and immediately imagined. It is through such study that ‘the living body became an exterior without an interior, subjectivity became an interior without and exterior, that is, an impartial spectator’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 56). Having become an object of scientific study, the living body is divested of its mysteries, of its spirit, through the culture of visuality that would grasp it as an object from without, holding it in place in order to carry out numerous observations and analyses. In this process the prying eyes of the scientist forget themselves and their conditions, assuming impartiality and transparency, a floating interiority ignorant of its contingencies. It is through a visual culture rendered distinct from the senses, comprising theories of sensation and objectification, that we forget the contingencies of subjective experience ‘as the immediate source and as the final authority of our knowledge’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 24).

4.2.1 Immersive phenomenology The reduction of sensing to the possession of a quality, that which we ‘grasp with out eyes’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 7), places sensation in a passive-receptive role,

Immersive Phenomenology

101

ignoring the problem of its transcendental status and thereby contributing to the distanced objectivity ascribed to visual culture. Where this grasping with is replaced with a grasping through and the transcendental and synthetic nature of sensation is thematized, we find that Sensing ... invests the quality with a living value, grasps it first in its signification for us, for this weighty mass that is our body, and as a result sensing always includes a reference to the body. The problem is to understand these strange relations woven between the parts of the landscape, or from the landscape to me as an embodied subject, relations by which a perceived object can condense within itself an entire scene or become the imago of an entire segment of life. Sensing is this living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life. The perceived object and the perceived subject owe their thickness to sensing. It is the intentional fabric that the work of knowledge will seek to decompose. (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 53)

Rather than qualities as quantifiable objects grasped by sensation we find qualities that are lent vitality and significance by the embodied act of sensing, qualities that are entwined with or woven into the act of sensing, thereby asserting the irreducible correlation of subject and object. The account of sensing outlined above can also be read as a summary of an immersive side to phenomenology that has asserted the lifeworld of the late Husserl against the eidetic orientation of his earlier work. Here the metaphysical implications of Husserl’s assertion of subjectivity as the necessary condition of reality, thereby asserting the correlation of subject and world or object, is transposed into an aesthetic, experiential and methodological register, marginalizing the methodological importance of seeing, intentionality and the relative transcendence this method entailed. Here we have a conflation of aesthetics and ontology, or at least one bleeding into the other, whereby the ontological claims of phenomenology, specifically the assertion of transcendental subjectivity as the necessary conditions for reality and the correlation of subject and object, comes to be taken as a preferential aesthetic or experiential state, where the interwoven nature of being is manifest aesthetically in the haziness of perception wherein boundaries between subject, object and world are blurred. This amounts to a kind of onto-aesthetic extension of the correlational nature of subject and object to the experience of the world, where the experience of the world mirrors its ontology. One experiences the

102

Immanence and Immersion

correlation, the ‘strange relations’ and interweaving of subject and object. This blurring of distinctions between interiority and exteriority, this strange relationality or the extension of affective interiority into a position where it becomes constitutive of perceived exteriority is a characteristic of immersivity and the related notion of acoustic space. To focus this passage further upon the immersive aesthetics in question, we might momentarily adapt Merleau-Ponty’s account of sensing in order to focus it on the primary matter of the present argument: the sonic. Where MerleauPonty speaks of relations woven between landscape and embodied subject, we might focus on the soundscape as a component of the landscape or environment being occupied in order to focus attention on the broadly or metaphorically acoustic conditions of immersive practice. This landscape is our immediate environment, and so where our concerns are with immersive practices the landscape may be that which is fabricated within an installation setting, for example, being composed of light and sound as much as earth, hills and sky. A sense of being woven together with an immediate environment characterizes the experience of immersion wherein one is positioned within an immersive field yet the distinctions between the interiority of the immersed subject and the enveloping environment are not clearly defined, the hapticity of lower frequencies creating a sense of immediacy and intimacy as they find a resonance in the flesh, setting it in sympathetic motion. The medium of immersion is felt to pass through the body, weaving the two together. Accordingly the immersive encounter grasps the medium of immersion in its ‘signification for us, for this weighty mass that is our body’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 53, emphasis added); thus the irreducibly subjective nature of the immersive experience, of my immersive experience, my immersion in the world, and that this for us which affirms the subjective nature of immersion should come through the body enveloped, immersed, woven into the fabric of the immersive encounter. This is to be contrasted with an attempt to grasp the medium not for us but in itself, which one finds in acoustics or ontologies of sound itself. From the passage above we can also draw out a resonance between the account of sensing and the immersive as that which affirms the presence of ‘the familiar place of our life’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 53, emphasis added), as while immersive aesthetics may not rely upon recognition there is nonetheless

Immersive Phenomenology

103

a familiarity operative at the centre of the immersive experience. Here ‘place’ is not taken to indicate an external environment or identifiable location that one frequents, but rather an embodied stance or state of being, a place of affective immediacy that remains pre-objective and beyond the grasp of vision or the objectification of the gaze. This place is not one of fixed identity and location but one that is ceaselessly generated through living communication with the world. The familiar place of our lives is the processual act of sensing that constitutes a ‘living communication with the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 53), it is that place we carry with us and generate through acts of sensation and living communication. It is not what is sensed that is familiar but rather the act of sensing itself: the intimacy of auto-affection. What is familiar is that I am sensing, and that such sensing affirms my own presence. This familiar place that is the sensing and living entwining of embodied subject and landscape is the ‘intentional fabric’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 53) or concrete matter of affective encounters with the world. That this familiarity should address not an object of recognition but the familiarity of an affirmative sensing accounts for the way in which the aesthetics of immersive artworks may often be ‘abstract’ in the loose sense of being non-representational, diffusive and non-object based, amorphous environments fabricated in light and sound, yet nonetheless engendering a sense of familiarity, if not with the work itself but within the encounter itself or the sensing of the work, awakening a perceived primacy of the affective and sensual, a return to the immediacy of the pre-symbolic. The sensual immediacy of the encounter engenders a sense of return to the familiarity of a pre-conceptual affectivity and hapticity not decomposed through concepts of the understanding and divided by the operations of knowledge. This familiar place is not a fixed space but a mobile, mutable and generative spatiality that emerges from the body at its centre. Distinct from a geometrical or quantitative conception of space – as criticized by Bergson – manipulated by a detached, objective observer, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of a phenomenological spatiality places a sensing subject as both source and centre of space: Space is not ... a network of relations between objects such as would be seen by a third party, witnessing my vision, or by a geometer looking over it and reconstructing it from outside. It is, rather a space reckoned starting from me as

104

Immanence and Immersion

the null point or zero degree of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is around me, not in front of me. (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 138, emphasis added)

The conception of space as anterior to a sensing subject who within such a space becomes one object amongst others is refused. Instead we find an immersive conception of space that re-centres the embodied, sensing subject as the origins of a production of space consequently woven into a world. That such an immersive conception of space should ground an aesthetics of preconceptual familiarity can be seen in the way immersive space is described as originating from the subject and then enveloping the subject who lives it from the inside. The subject is immersed in an enveloping space of its own production and it is in this production as the productivity of sensing that the familiarity of immersivity is grounded, as even while the identity of the artwork may be unfamiliar we are presented with the primacy and familiarity of auto-affection. For this familiarity to be foregrounded the metaphysical suspension of the natural attitude must be extended to an aesthetic register wherein it is not objects of recognition that are encountered but the intentional fabric of the encounter itself as the generative site of immersive spatiality. This suspension goes beyond the broadly Husserlian gesture performed by Schaeffer in isolating sound objects through excision of sound from source, as it is objectivity more broadly that we find suspended in favour of a pre-objective phenomenological field, a continuity positioned prior to the discretion of objectivity. While the metaphysical correlation of subject and object was central to Husserlian phenomenology the aesthetics of the encounter found in Husserl still permitted an objective, eidetic essence maintaining a certain distinction from the perceiving subject – it was this distinction exemplified in transcendent acts of seeing that drew out Michel Henry’s critique of Husserl on the grounds that vision thus vitiated affective immanence.2 While the subject constituted the conditions of reality and thereby that of the object, the object could nonetheless be encountered as an object distinct from the subject and so we find a distinction between metaphysics and aesthetics preserved, an avoidance of onto-aesthetic conflation. Where the correlation has a 2

We will return to the work of Michel Henry in more detail in the next chapter.

Immersive Phenomenology

105

metaphysical primacy within the Husserlian paradigm it is in Merleau-Ponty’s account of an immersive phenomenological spatiality that the correlation also attains an aesthetic primacy, whereby it is not the object perceived but the act of perception as a generative sensing that is foregrounded. Where the primacy of the correlation is foregrounded through onto-aesthetic conflation we find an aesthetics constructed not around the grasping of objects as discrete entities but an aesthetics of a pre-objective domain, of fields, atmospheres, environments and ambience with an auto-affective subject as source and centre.

4.2.2 Return to the depth of the pre-objective The task of phenomenology to explore a ‘pre-objective domain within ourselves’ in order to ‘understand sensing’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 12) is conceived as both a return to the primacy of sensing and a descent from the simplicity and superficiality of a symbolic or conceptual surface that occludes access to concrete reality. The radical gesture of phenomenology is thereby to return and descend, ‘to return to the lived world beneath the objective world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 57) and in doing so to ‘awaken the perceptual experience buried beneath its own results’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 64). Where it is posited as a response to conceptual, representational accounts of the world and to the scientific image of reality, this return to the lived world of perceptual experience and the ‘pre-objective’ retreats to the familiarity of the immediately present world of the manifest image. This return and descent heads in the direction of what appears given, what is apparent to direct perception prior to the theoretical contamination of these direct observations. Such a return leads us back towards the familiarity of a naive and common-sensical image of the world wherein ‘reflection can never make it the case that I cease to perceive the sun on a hazy day as hovering two hundred paces away, that I cease to see the sun “rise” and “set,” or that I cease to think with the cultural instruments that were provided by my upbringing, my previous efforts, and my history’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 62). Such an orientation has a certain Ptolemaic character in re-centring the assumptions and intuitions of direct observation. Here the immediate appearance of a rising sun is too tightly bound to social and historical conditions, as while there is little to disagree

106

Immanence and Immersion

with in asserting the importance and influence of social, cultural and historical instruments of knowledge formation, to seek to correct the Ptolemaic image of a rising sun is not to disavow epistemological issues or the social and historical conditions of knowledge. This return or retreat to the assurances of the immediate and everyday, to the familiarity of that which appears given to common sense, is partly what draws out the contemporary realist’s resistance to phenomenology, as it is seen as a resistance to the emerging world view that has continually decentred humanity and revealed an image of nature that is increasingly unfamiliar. This resistance to phenomenology is thereby a critique of its response to a continued decentring and alienation of the self in the cosmos. In the face of the scientific image as an emergent world view the phenomenological tendency to return or retreat to the ‘immediately present world, the only world we know’ (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 60) is seen as an unduly conservative gesture both ethically and epistemologically. While it would be overly dramatic to claim that the emergent world view partially comprising the scientific image has revealed that our embodied and empirical knowledge tells us nothing of this world, it is less of an overstatement to say that the world is not as we have always known it, that it is not simply as it appears, that it becomes less and less recognizable the more we come to know it. Knowledge therefore exceeds what can be sensed or perceived. The world that we know through immediate experience and intuition appears to be an ever narrowing truncation of the world, with the familiarity of the everyday coming to occupy an ever shrinking portion of our knowledge of the world. This resistance to the familiar is not simply the result of an aesthetic preference for the ‘weird’ or avant-garde but also an epistemological and ethical orientation that seeks an updated world view, an overhaul of the manifest image, in line with emerging knowledge that often defies immediate experience and common sense.3 From an epistemological perspective one 3

While this resistance to the familiar is not reducible to an aesthetic preference, the involvement of the likes of Ray Brassier in experimental music groups and the popularity of authors such as H. P. Lovecraft amongst some speculative realists should be acknowledged as perhaps playing some role in shaping an orientation towards an unfamiliar and alien image of reality. Regarding this overhaul of the manifest image, the conjoining of scientific and manifest images was one of the goals of Sellars’s philosophy: ‘To complete the scientific image we need to enrich it not with more ways of saying what is the case, but with the language of community and individual intentions, so that by construing the actions we intend to do and the circumstances in which we intend to do them in scientific terms, we directly relate the world as conceived by scientific theory to our purposes, and make it our world and no longer an alien appendage to the world in which we do our living’ (Sellars 1963, 40).

Immersive Phenomenology

107

may harbour resistance to the familiar and immediate in order to remain open to the unexpected, to consider knowledge that does not present itself immediately, challenging intuitions and common sense. From an ethical perspective one might consider climate change as one issue that we would seek to influence, modify and decentre the immediate experience of many occupying the global north who are yet to immediately feel and experience to effects of climate change, those for whom many predictions may remain the somewhat abstract products of scientific models and predictions akin to a dystopian fiction as much as an accurate model of the laws of nature. It is in this sense that the movement of return and descent can be seen as a shying away from the challenges of a scientific image of reality and a conservative response to knowledge which is forcing a reconceptualization of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Where the problem of how to engage artistically and ethically with such emerging images of the world and concepts of the real presents itself, the retreat to a pre-symbolic conception of the real grounded in phenomenology that positions itself against the abstraction and formalization of the scientific image appears to shy away from such problems – asserting the primacy of correlationism in place of the natural attitude – rather than considering methods for a more considered and adequate response.4 Merleau-Ponty’s immersive phenomenology provides philosophical scaffolds for the acoustic conditions of a sufficient immersive aesthetics. This immersive phenomenology is advanced in the work of Michel Henry whose material phenomenology has a number of resonances with sonic materialism, a theory which cements the acoustic conditions of immersive aesthetics and to which we now turn.

4

These themes will be taken up in more detail in discussion of Katie Paterson’s work below.

5

Sonic Materialism

Sonic materialism presents an ontological turn within discourse on sound in the arts, turning away from the linguistic turn and returning to an immediate reality of sound itself, to a sonic materiality understood as anonymous flux. Through its opposition to the conceptual and representational sonic materialism assumes an immanent position with regard to the sound that is its object of study. The immanence proposed by sonic materialism is bound up with an aesthetics of immersion due to the intuitive and affective methodology it posits as primary, but also due to the ‘onto-aesthetic’ conflation that it performs whereby the nature of sonic experience is understood as mirroring a particular ontological account of sound (Kane 2015). While the present argument shares an orientation towards the real that is presented in theories of sonic materialism, it is argued in what follows that the concept of the real referred to in accounts of sonic materialism is not well defined, remaining bound up with a slippery concept of matter. Furthermore, the present argument seeks to unbind immanence from immersion, and so the affective methodology and aesthetic orientation presented within arguments for sonic materialism is subject to critique, seeking to undo the onto-aesthetic binding in order to more adequately address the real and permit broader ontological discourse. Brian Kane has presented the term ‘onto-aesthetics’ as a means of criticizing the ontological turn in sound studies, a turn which both sonic materialism and the present argument are invested in. For Kane this ontological turn is undertaken at the expense of adequately accounting for the cultural conditions of perception and artistic practice. While Kane’s criticism ultimately aims to undermine this ontological orientation, the coining of onto-aesthetics also presents an opportunity to refine the way in which this ontological turn is

110

Immanence and Immersion

pursued. Onto-aesthetics names a conflation of aesthetics and ontology, specifically the principle that a work of art should seek to disclose or exemplify its ontology. This exemplification of a sonic ontology is most readily found in a predisposition towards immersive aesthetics, focused on the presentation of sound itself, beyond its implication in representation, as asignifying or pre-symbolic affective flux. Kane claims that there is no need to exemplify an ontology of sound, for example, through an immersive aesthetics, as sound cannot but embody this ontology. An ontology of sound can therefore be identified in any sound, regardless of its complicity in regimes of representation or ‘the imperial aspirations of the visual’ (Cox 2014, 98). Sound’s ontology is not necessarily occluded through its participation in representation, as addressing this ontology is an issue of attention, of listening, rather than aesthetics or authorial intent. The listener may choose to listen to sound as such, to sound itself, or to focus on its indexical or semantic implications. Just because a sound may be presented as amorphous asignifying flux of sonic materiality, as in the widely varying drone works of Éliane Radigue, La Monte Young, Phill Niblock or Kevin Drumm, we should not make the mistake of thinking that these sounds embody an ontology of sound any more than the spoken word, the work of Beyoncé or the explicit indexicality of sound effects collections – squeaky doors, thunder claps, car horns and so on. One can therefore maintain realism without divestment from sound’s role in representation and conceptualization or cultural technique. Signifying sounds embody an ontology of sound no less than asignifying sonic flux. Onto-aesthetics thereby places an undue burden upon aesthetic and creative strategies attending to notions of the real through the requirement that material ontology be reflected or exemplified at the level of aesthetics. This burden is most clearly realized in immersive aesthetics. Through requiring a reflection of material ontology in aesthetics ontoaesthetics causes a conflation of the reality of sound itself with a constrained understanding of sonic experience as that which resides outside of representation. This conflation can be understood to impede a sonic realism, and so it is through an undoing of onto-aesthetics that a realism might be better pursued rather than abandoned. Where onto-aesthetics names a conflation of ontology and aesthetics the realist should seek greater distinction between the two so as not to constrain a notion of the real within the thresholds of possible

Sonic Materialism

111

experience. Through greater distinction we become more able to understand how artistic practice might entail a realist, post-correlational orientation, without assuming onto-aesthetic conflation. Beyond the constraints of onto-aesthetics we are more able to understand how methods entailing representation, conceptualization and picturing might equally well or better address a conception of real that is naturalistically construed and identified in excess of the human. Severing the onto-aesthetic conflation relieves one of the obligation to divest from conceptual and representational practices, as method need not reflect matter. Such an assertion undoubtedly amounts to a rejection of Christoph Cox’s call for a ‘sonic thought’, a thinking through or as sound, a becoming-sound of thought (Cox 2015). Where we are not obliged to perform a ‘sonic thought’ we are less likely to consequently scale or extend an ontology of sound as amorphous flux to an image of nature or the real in general, and may therefore be more open to heterogeneous images of the real that permit more varied ontologies that are sensitive to scale or levels of reality. In addition to a rejection of onto-aesthetic conflation an unbinding of immanence from immersion is considered necessary as the latter imposes an epistemological limitation that we need not accept. This limitation is imposed through the assumption of a phenomenological and correlational logic equating the real with a primordial phenomenological matter anterior to the distal abstractions of representation. This position ultimately gives ontological priority to immediate experience. Assuming this priority establishes a conservative orientation to the present built upon the habitual familiarity of the past whereas methods entailing formal abstraction, modelling and representation can better orient thought towards the future and that which lies beyond the immediacy of common sense. The immediacy of immersion and its underlying logic of phenomenology and correlationism asserts that what is real is what is immediately experienced whereas that which can only be thought, modelled, predicted remains abstract and less real. Within the internalist logic of immersion the given names the real; what is predicted and presently accessible only through abstract thought is less so. Contemporary interest in immersive aesthetics repeats a broadly phenomenological return to things themselves, in that it moves from a broad concept of the linguistic turn towards sonorous matters, to the nature of

112

Immanence and Immersion

sound itself. The contemporary return to sounds themselves, while broadly phenomenological, does not find adequate summary in Husserlian philosophy, as it did when Schaeffer undertook his experimental eviscerations. A return to the nature of sound itself entails entering immersion as an escape from representations and indexical perception that would bind sound to external objects. While these operations might suggest a bracketing out of the sound object, the contemporary return to sound frequently entails entering a field dominated by an immersive aesthetics in which subject and object are confused in the immediacy of sensorial events. As we saw in relation to Husserl, the assertion of correlational conditions does not necessarily entail rejection of realism. The return to sound itself through immersion and its correlational conditions entails a claim on the nature of sonic materiality and the location of the real. For this reason concepts of reality and materiality require our attention. While an ontological turn within sound studies – largely a turn towards a contested concept of sonic materialism – entails distinctive conceptions of reality and materiality, common is an opposition to the representational, to what we could broadly refer to as the linguistic turn. In place of this linguistic turn and in alignment with the audiovisual litany the ontological turn towards sound can broadly be understood to favour affects over concepts. In what follows the affective and phenomenological determination of reality in sonic materialism will be addressed in an attempt to understand how the orientation towards immersion entails a delimitation of reality. Two notable theories of sonic materialism are presented by Christoph Cox and Salomé Voegelin, positions remaining distinct due to differing concepts of matter. What follows is an attempt to clarify what is meant by matter in differing accounts of sonic materialism and to identify interactions between concepts of matter and reality. Discussion of Michel Henry’s material phenomenology will clarify how the matter in sonic materialism refers to presymbolic affects and sensations, being addressed through immediate intuition rather than the mediation of a conceptually or theoretically contaminated seeing. Within this context we find arguments for the primacy of matter, but does this assertion of primacy amount to an assertion that matter, understood as affect or sensation, is the site of the real, or rather that it constitutes an epistemological limit beyond which it is fruitless to speculate upon the real as

Sonic Materialism

113

exteriority? Clarifying this terminology will entail situating differing concepts of matter and the real in relation to the listening subject. While both operate under the rubric of sonic materialism, the distinctions between Cox and Voegelin’s approaches can initially be outlined as follows: for Voegelin sonic materialism is pursued phenomenologically, and so sonic materialism is a material phenomenology. As a material phenomenology sonic materialism explores the correlational and ultimately auto-affective conditions of sonic experience. For Cox sonic materialism entails a naturalistic physicalism, wherein matter is that which resides beyond the human in a mind-independent reality. Within sonic materialism we can thereby identify two competing ontologies, one phenomenological the other physical. Despite these differing ontological commitments the methodologies that both positions entail remain phenomenological due to a common commitment to the terms of the audiovisual litany, privileging the affective over the conceptual, the interior over the exterior and so on. The question arises as to the adequacy of this methodology to attaining differing conceptions of matter and reality. Entailing a phenomenological methodology and ontology, Voegelin’s sonic materialism is ultimately more consistent, presenting a clearer localization of the matter of sonic materialism. Yet Voegelin’s position delimits rather than escapes the correlational and internalist logic of immersion. While Cox’s sonic materialism entails a commitment to a non-anthropocentric, mind-independent reality – a commitment that I share – the combination of a physicalist conception of matter and a phenomenological methodology is to be questioned.

5.1 Affective matter Sonic materialism theorizes sound as inherently resistant to conceptualization and representation (Cox 2011, 148; Voegelin 2014, 91), arguing that intuition and sensorial encounter are the more appropriate methods for addressing the reality of the sonic. This is in part due to a broadly underlying bias that sees affect and concept as proper to auditory and visual culture respectively. Sonic materialism can be understood to respond to a ‘visual hegemony’ (Cox 2011, 157) that has prioritized the visual at the expense of the auditory. That sound

114

Immanence and Immersion

might have greater purchase upon the fundamental materiality of a primordial experience grants it an ontological primacy and priority. This priority is perceived to gazump vision within a hierarchy of the senses, putting sound and auditory culture first through proximity to a fundamental materiality truer than the distal abstractions of visual culture. Sonic materialism commits to the primacy of pre-symbolic materiality; as the data of immediate sensory experience must constitute the foundation of all that we can know, upon which and through which we develop abstract concepts for knowing, that which attains proximity to this immediate primordiality stakes a greater claim on the real, on that which is primary and foundational. As images, representations and conceptual abstractions are readily identified as the objects of visual culture a privilege with regard to the primacy of immediate, pre-symbolic experience falls to sound. Orientation towards a concept of pre-symbolic matter and an aversion to representation and the conceptual leads sonic materialism to outline a principally affective methodology. This affective methodology proceeds via sensations and feelings, seeking to circumvent representation and intentionality in order to directly access a primordial materiality. Asserting the primacy of affects over representations, sonic materialism is less concerned with what a work of art may be about or what it signifies than the sensations or feelings produced in an encounter with the work. Prioritizing pre-symbolic affectivity, sonic materialism renders the work itself indeterminate, completed only in and inseparable from the contingent encounter. An internalist logic means that any determinate form or content of an artwork becomes secondary to an auto-affective production of sensation and significance. Affect, in addition to its common association with emotion – which Massumi describes as a ‘capture and closure of affect’ (Massumi 2002, 35) – has been understood as describing more ambiguous forces of feeling and sensation that subtend and exceed subjective emotion.1 Broader still, the ‘autonomy of affects’ (Massumi 2002, 35, emphasis added) which identifies an openness and capacity to exceed participation and capture in individual bodies or subjective emotions, sees the affect opening onto and grounded in what must ultimately be a physical rather than transcendent 1 This ambiguity of the affective is drawn upon and related explicitly to sound in Sonic Warfare (Goodman 2010).

Sonic Materialism

115

spiritual domain – where emotion might be considered proper to the latter. This excessive autonomy of the affect is readily associated with the work of Deleuze and Guattari for whom: affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be seen to exist in the absence of man [sic] because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 164)

This openness of the autonomous affect to the extra-somatic finds an explicit materialist connection wherein affirming both the autonomy and agential participation of materials – whether these be stone, paint, metal or sound – in the production of the work of art Deleuze and Guattari state ‘how the plane of the material ascends irresistibly and invades the plane of composition of the sensations themselves to the point of being part of them or indiscernible from them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 166). Here we find sensation grounded in the material world, an immanence of materials and sensations that challenges the assertion that there is a difference in kind between sensation and matter, that sensation should be of a different plane of existence separate to that of matter. Positioned within and immanent to the physical real, sensation marks an affective or intensive channel between dynamic material conditions and subjective experience. An equation of affectivity and materiality is also found within material phenomenology, yet in this latter context affective materiality is more clearly positioned within subjective experience. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of affective matters maintains a more ambiguous relation to subjective experience as where the affective is understood to reside within a material, physical domain, this materiality is to a certain degree outside or in excess of perception. This is a partial excess as, in Deleuze and Guattari’s account above, materials and sensations are rendered different in degree rather than kind through the ascension of a material plane. While it is partial, that there is excess places this material outside of perception to some degree. Consequently we find a possible opening onto a physical, naturalistic realism. This connection with ‘the plane of the material’ is what characterizes Cox’s sonic materialism as naturalistic

116

Immanence and Immersion

in that it appears to allow for material reality beyond any necessity of human perception. As we will see below, Christoph Cox’s sonic materialism remains intimately connected to a broadly affective continuum of thought, particularly where this entails the kind of ‘pure sensation’ characteristic of what Cox identifies as ‘neo-modernist sound art’ (Cox 2003). Where the matter of sonic materialism does not coincide with an external materiality but is equated with sensation and auto-affection, the material reality of sonic materialism is grounded within subjective experience. It is this latter perspective that we find in the work of Salomé Voegelin. Before turning to a more detailed consideration of Voegelin and Cox’s positions, and specifically the differences between the two, an overview of Michel Henry’s material phenomenology will be provided. Due to concerns for the invisible, affective and specifically autoaffective a number of resonances between Henry’s phenomenology of ‘nonsignifying material’ (Henry 2008, 19) and sonic materialism can be identified; identifying these resonances clarifies the concept of matter found in sonic materialism.

5.2 Material phenomenology Michel Henry’s material phenomenology seeks to recover that which Husserl’s phenomenological method, through its eidetic orientation towards universal essences, lost sight of – the ‘hyletic’ or material reality of immediate affective experience. In its pursuit of universal essences and forms (morphe) and the pursuit of a rigorous science, Husserlian phenomenology cut away and marginalized the material (hyle) and the affective. This method, the phenomenological reduction, claimed immanence on the grounds that it restrained itself to appearances, to that which is given to experience and particularly to the pure gaze or seeing; for Henry ‘the reduction is ultimately nothing but seeing’ (Henry 2008, 49). For Husserl this methodological reduction yielded immanence on the grounds that nothing was permitted that was not ‘seen’, that was not internal and accessible to the gaze; seeing as an act of intentionality permits a transcendence within its supposedly immanent method, thereby vitiating what Henry calls the ‘true

Sonic Materialism

117

immanence’ of auto-affective self-experience (Henry 2008, 58). For Henry, seeing posits distance and exteriority, the gaze yields an object or essence that is distinct from the subject, and so while posing as a method for grounding an immanent philosophy seeing contaminates true immanence with an act of transcendence. Here we find clear resonances with the audiovisual litany. The immediate and intuited real claimed by sonic materialism is usually asserted against the distal abstraction identified with the visual side of the audiovisual litany, an assertion that finds allegiance in Henry’s critique of the ‘transcendence’ of the ‘site of visibility’ (Henry 2008, 12). This critique of seeing echoes the characterization of the visual carried out in the audiovisual litany. Against Henry’s move of rendering the phenomenological reduction specific to seeing we should assert that intentionality and the reduction applies not to a specific mode of sensory perception but rather to a technique that may apply equally to all senses where they are adequately trained – something of which we are acutely aware after Schaeffer’s exposition of reduced listening or audile technique more broadly. Henry’s critical procedure of isolating seeing and then, as a specific case of intentionality, attributing transcendence to seeing, could – against ‘the hegemony of the visual’ (Cox 2011, 157) – be leapt upon as a means of claiming that non-visual or invisible modes of perception circumvent this transcendence, operating immanently within the real. Against this opportunism, where Henry criticizes seeing as an act of transcendence we should acknowledge the breadth of auditory experience and admit that listening or audile technique as intentional acts must be subject to the same critique. Just as seeing permits transcendence and posits exteriority through the conscious, intentional identification of objects, listening or audile technique is capable of the same. Against this kind of critical technique Henry calls for a return to ‘the pathetic phenomenality of an auto-affection where there is no longer any exteriority’ (Henry 2008, 53). Without exteriority the site of Henry’s material phenomenology is that of immanent interiority, ‘the self-experiencing of subjectivity and life’ (Henry 2008, 26). Against an understanding of this materiality as simply the content of intentional experience – materiality as that which is revealed or comes to light only through the conscious act of directing one’s attention towards something – Henry wishes to reposition this materiality as not the content

118

Immanence and Immersion

but the condition, the originary ground, of phenomenology. Through Henry’s redress of materiality it is figured not as the distal object of audile technique or the gaze, but rather as ‘Archi-givenness as self-givenness, self-impression, and transcendental affectivity’ (Henry 2008, 19, emphasis added). As immanent interiority Henry’s materiality constitutes transcendental auto-affectivity, matter is not simply the content but the condition of phenomenology, of experience, of knowledge; it is not that which is sensed but sensation as such; it is not some external thing but internal self-experience. Accordingly matter is thereby equated with sensation as such, with the auto-affection of a body and a life. What should be clear from this is that the concept of matter employed in Henry’s material phenomenology is distinct from any sense of crude, objective exteriority, being sensation as such rather than that which is sensed, simultaneously site and product of a transcendental auto-affection. While the concepts and cognition characterizing the Kantian transcendental are here supplanted with auto-affection and sensation, this remains a subjectivist project that is incompatible with the kind of naturalism we will find in Cox’s argument for a sonic materialism, identifying the real with an external and objective nature; for Henry ‘reality resides in the self-experiencing of subjectivity and life’ (Henry 2008, 26, emphasis added). For Henry reality resides in subjective auto-affection, the immanence of which excludes the transcendence of seeing; as stated above this equation of seeing and transcendence and the former’s consequential ejection from immanence begs the question of other sensory modalities. As seeing is equated with transcendence it cannot also be equated with reality in Henry’s philosophy, this presents an opportunity for a claim to be made upon the real by accounts of other sensory modalities, such as the auditory. Such opportunism should be resisted, as to take this opportunity returns us to the oppositions of the audiovisual litany, where seeing would be characterized as transcendent and listening immanent, and where the real is equated with flux, becoming or vital life force, seeing irreal and hearing real. While the arguments presented by Cox and Voegelin regarding sonic materialism remain distinct, the notion that auditory experience might attain greater purchase upon the real is presented by both. The idea that sound and the invisible are somehow more real, closer to the real or more suited to attaining the real than the visible informs the

Sonic Materialism

119

priority that sonic materialism assumes. For Cox this can be seen in the suggestion of an allegiance between the development of continental realism and materialism and growing interest in sound within the arts, suggesting that the sonic might better attain the real (Cox 2013), whereas for Voegelin the subterranean mobility and invisible generative potential of the real is expressed and accessed through the sonic (Voegelin 2014, 2). While there is consensus regarding sound’s privileged relation to the real, the composition and location of this real remains equivocal, pertaining to either the autoaffective experience of the listening subject or an external yet immanent nature extending to the inhuman. These positions cannot be simply labelled interior and exterior respectively, as the immanence to which Voegelin’s position pertains – an immanence in the fashion of Michel Henry – posits exteriority as an apparition produced within the auto-affective interiority of the auditory subject. For Cox the interior–exterior relation is almost the inverse: it is the excessive exteriority of his naturalistic conception of the real that is inclusive and productive of the interiority of auditory experience. While both positions present nested conceptions of interiority and exteriority it is the enveloping term that names the plane of immanence to which each author commits that should ultimately be taken as naming the site of the real. Having started to address some of the differences between Voegelin’s and Cox’s theories of sonic materialism and the real we will now address their individual positions in a little more detail.

5.3 Sonic-material phenomenology A number of resonances can be identified between Voegelin’s sonic materialism and Henry’s material phenomenology. The reasons for identifying commonalities here are that in Henry’s material phenomenology we find a concise and explicit set of epistemological and ontological commitments that are broadly concomitant with those found in Voegelin’s writing, yet presented in a more expository form. Where Voegelin presents a generative poetics that aims at activating the reader’s listening, in Henry we find a more explicit philosophical architecture that supports this project. Clarifying the status of

120

Immanence and Immersion

matter in sonic materialism Voegelin presents us with a particularly clear linking sonic materialism and phenomenology: Sonic materialism proposes to pursue a phenomenological materialism that engages the reciprocity of being in the world and the world being the commingling of all the slices of its possibilities ... at times unintelligible and unreliable but felt and lived. (Voegelin 2014, 86)

Clarified here is the distinctly affective orientation of sonic materialism, aligning it with the ‘felt and lived’ rather than the clearly intelligible and reliable, where the latter terms can be associated with the certainty and stability that concerns Voegelin due to a perceived ‘visualisation’ of the senses, thought and culture (Voegelin 2014, 88). This commitment to the ‘felt and lived’ finds a resonance in Henry’s claim that ‘reality resides in the self-experiencing of subjectivity and life’ (Henry 2008, 25). What we can take from Voegelin’s clear alignment of phenomenological and sonic materialism is the sense that matter pertains to the sensorial events of a contingent encounter that ultimately boil down to an auto-affective sensation of the self. This is what we will call phenomenological matter. Both Henry and Voegelin associate seeing with a distal orientation and transcendence that vitiates affective immanence, claiming that an undue focus upon the seen ignores the urgency and immediacy of what is heard (Henry 2008, 24). Similarly there is a shared concern for what Henry will describe as ‘the radical auto-affection of life in its phenomenological reality’ (Henry 2008, 38), a sense that reality is not that which pre-exists the subject and is positioned exterior to it, but that ‘sonic materialism’ names ‘the materiality of private lifeworlds, from which we negotiate contingently the material form of the world’ (Voegelin 2014, 100). The phenomenological concept of the lifeworld can be described as naming a pre-scientific world of experience correlated with a living body or corporeality in general. The matter populating the reality of such a lifeworld entails appearances, affects, sensations rather than the objects of theoretical or empirical science, or theoretically contaminated modes of perception. The reality with which Voegelin is concerned is that which is immanently generated in the affective encounter, the experiential reality of a subjective lifeworld rather than objective exteriority. In both Henry’s and Voegelin’s commitment to the felt and the affective we find a resistance to acts

Sonic Materialism

121

of intentionality that would seek to grasp and prioritize that which is essential or universal (morphe) over that which is contingent and material (hyle). While not stated explicitly by Voegelin there is nonetheless an implicit conflation of seeing and the intentional, something which is more explicit in Henry’s account of material phenomenology. Accordingly where Voegelin states that her argument is not with the visual as such but rather with a particular visual engagement with the world – rendering Voegelin’s references to sensory modalities metaphorical, with the visual and the auditory standing in for the rational and the affective respectively – this could be understood as a critique of intentional engagement in the manner of Henry, of intentionality in seeing, hearing, touching, rather than seeing as such. Given what are significant resonances between Henry’s material phenomenology and Voegelin’s sonic materialism we could propose some key characteristics of what we might call sonic-material phenomenology: 1. Concomitant with the audiovisual litany, sonic-material phenomenology entails a critique of the seen (Henry) or the visual (Voegelin) where these terms are understood as exemplary cases of intentionality and transcendence. 2. Sonic-material phenomenology entails a commitment to the priority and primacy of the lifeworld over so-called objective facts of the natural sciences.2 3. As a consequence of the commitment made to the primacy of the lifeworld, sonic-material phenomenology entails a concept of reality comprised of the contingent events of lived experience rather than the objects and theoretically contaminated perceptions of empirical science. 4. This concept of the real is situated within auto-affective subjectivity rather than objective exteriority. Having briefly outlined some of the resonances between Voegelin and Henry in an attempt to clarify what a phenomenological conception of sonic materialism entails, this concept of phenomenological matter can now be contrasted with Christoph Cox’s sonic materialism, built upon a broadly physicalist of naturalistic concept of matter. 2

This commitment entails a commitment to what Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism.

122

Immanence and Immersion

5.4 Sonic realism Across a number of articles Christoph Cox outlines a concept of sonic materialism that through its emphasis upon asignifying flux and flow distinguishes itself from the privileging of meaning, signification and representation in much cultural and aesthetic theory of recent decades.3 Being oriented towards the material conditions beyond or beneath representation, Cox’s sonic materialism prioritizes ‘the materiality of sound: its texture and temporal flow, its palpable effect on, and affection by the materials through and against which it is transmitted’ (Cox 2011, 148–9). Where this might initially suggest a return to the products of phenomenological reduction, to sound itself, the emphasis placed upon the affective and material conditions of the sonic vitiates any such alignment in moving beyond the pure appearance of sound as such. Here we have an affective ontology of sound itself that understands affect beyond its subjective ‘capture’ in emotion (Massumi 2002, 35) and appearance. Here affect names the interactions of materials through sound and constitutive of sound. Affect here refers less to the determination of emotions or the synthesis of subjective feelings than a physics of signals. This understanding of affect as an important component in Cox’s ontology of sound is clearly distinct from the subjective auto-affection that plays a similarly important role in Henry’s material phenomenology and Voegelin’s ontology of sound as simultaneous or correlated with the listening subject. Where both ontologies of sound have affect at their core, the concepts of affect drawn upon remain distinct. Cox will endorse a broadly Deleuzian form of affect theory in his ontological approach to sound, an affectivity not bound to human experience and emotion but identifying the capacity for objects and energies to affect each other, human or otherwise (Cox 2011, 148–9). Cox’s physical concept of matter cannot simply be defined as exterior to the interiority of phenomenological matter, as Cox describes an immanent relationship between physical exteriority and affective experience, positing 3

This section engages in a fairly detailed criticism of Christoph Cox’s writing. It should be noted that Cox’s work has consistently been a source of inspiration for my own writing, and that the criticism that follows is presented in the spirit of contributing to common interests and shared goals through a refinement of conceptual and methodological resources. It is hopefully through mutually constructive criticism that these shared concerns and interests can be furthered.

Sonic Materialism

123

the latter within the former – what we could summarize as the presence of the outside on the inside. The physicalist-materialism that Cox endorses seeks to account for the conditions of the phenomenological materialism discussed above. Beyond the apparent stability and discretion of everyday objects, Cox assumes an expanded ‘notion of matter understood as a profusion of energetic fluxes’, this matter then populating both ‘nature and culture as a collection of flows’ (Cox 2015, 125). That matter-as-energetic-flux is thought common to both nature and culture indicates the materialist conception of immanence to which Cox is committed as the complex interrelationship of (phenomenological) interiority and (materialist) exteriority. Despite its commitment to an extra-subjective physicalism there is slippage back into the realm of phenomenological appearances and affectivity. For example: When we speak of ‘matter’ we tend to think solely of solid matter. Few would take liquids, gases, or plasmas ... as paradigms of matter ... . But surely sounds, odours, and tastes exist, and surely they are as material as sticks and stones. (Cox 2015, 124)

The intention in this passage is to expand the quotidian, common-sense understanding of matter as referring to relatively stable physical objects. Immediately spurious however is the claim that liquids, gases and so on tend not to be thought of as instances of matter, as being somehow immaterial.4 Where an intuitive inclination might lead one to exclude such states of matter from a concept of matter, such a tendency holds only for an instance, or under conditions of distraction and inattention, until one’s mind is cast back to childhood lessons in physics and chemistry. This issue highlights an important point in the argument for sonic materialism, namely the level at which it operates, or the conditions under which its assertions could be considered 4

We do however find examples of this in Immaterial Architecture (Hill 2006) which includes a puzzling index of architectural immaterialities including sound, air, dust, clouds, but also paper steel and plaster. What quickly becomes clear is that rather than considering the immaterial as such – an idealism perhaps – it is apparent immateriality understood as ephemerality and determined through a certain mode of perception and inattention that is the subject of immaterial architecture, thus anything could be considered immaterial as long as we either refrain from focusing our attention upon it too closely, producing a blurry image of an object, or focus our attention only on that which changes in an object. That such change should render something immaterial exposes a highly limited and quotidian concept of materiality, such as that which Cox sets out to critique. The difference here being that Cox’s emphasis upon sound is intended to expand the quotidian sense of what materiality is, rather than to render matter immaterial, as in Hill’s argument for immaterial architecture.

124

Immanence and Immersion

true. For the arguments presented by sonic materialism, and the audiovisual litany that supports it, to hold one must disengage from attentive, trained or intentional perception. Many of the claims of sonic materialism operate only at a level of superficial appearances – the level at which we might momentarily think only solids as matter. Despite the claims for a materialist-realism that posits the objectivity of mind-independent reality, the claims of a sonic materialism emerging from a ‘sonic thought’ hold only under the conditions presented through phenomenological appearances. The ‘sounds, odours, and tastes’ that Cox argues are ‘as material as sticks and stones’ undoubtedly have a material grounding in the kind of physical reality Cox has in mind, but it does not follow that they can be adequately addressed through the same concept of matter (Cox 2013). The terminology used here causes a conflation of two differing concepts of matter – the physical and the phenomenological. We can reclassify Cox’s list of objects or materials in the following way, with the sticks and stones representing physical objectivity and sounds, odours and tastes remaining correlational objects of experience. While Cox is concerned to express the ontological unity of these two categories within a univocal materialism, the tension remains between these two categories; we could claim that the distinction remains implicit within Cox’s own argument, as the sounds, odours and tastes could be of the sticks and stones, which have an existence beyond these secondary qualities. While it could then be argued, as Cox does, that these secondary qualities have an objective ‘material’ existence of their own, this is a different category of material existence, as these become phenomenological rather than physical matters. Cox’s argument here relies upon contrasting the intuitive ease with which sticks and stones are aligned with a sense of physical objectivity, and then attempting to regroup the qualities of objects within the same category of materiality, thereby asserting the objectivity of sounds, odours and tastes. Through this operation the products of phenomenological reduction are hypostatized. While Cox is concerned to assert the ontological unity of these two distinct categories of matter, asserting a materialist ground of phenomenological appearances, a distinction remains between objects of experience and the objectivity to which ‘sticks and stones’ is meant to intuitively appeal. The problem here is that if we are to assert the autonomy, universality or objectivity of appearances, then we are asserting a

Sonic Materialism

125

phenomenological concept of objects, objects yielded by intentionality and the phenomenological reduction. Even where sonic materialism attempts to distance itself from intentionality and the critical discretion of objects, asserting instead a univocal affective flux of anonymous matter, we remain within the domain of material phenomenology due to sonic materialism’s principally aesthetic and affective methodology. Where the conflation Cox mobilizes in order to naturalize objects of perception and sensation serves to place them within a materialist continuum, the homogeneous concept of matter that effaces the distinction between the physical and phenomenological impedes the realism to which Cox is committed, a non-anthropocentric, postcorrelational realism that asserts the autonomy of a mind-independent reality. Cox presents ‘a realist conception of sound as an asignifying material flux’ (Cox 2011, 157). This material flux can be considered equivalent to the expanded and autonomous conception of affects described above. Towards an immanent philosophy objects of nature and culture are positioned within a materialist continuum that, without denying instances of transcendence in the form of cognition, conceptual abstraction and representation, identifies such things as problematic due to their vitiation of immanence and an apparent elevation that such instances of transcendence support, lifting the human above the animal and nature, the mind above matter and so on. Cox asserts the primacy of the un-elevated, low-other in these opposed pairs. Consequently we are encouraged to ‘start from sound’, to adopt a sonic thought the desists from the decisional, transcendent structure of standard philosophical thought.5 Due to this taking of sides Cox’s ultimate ontological commitment is to the objects of an immanent materiality, a mind-independent, non-correlational reality that should be considered the material conditions of culture. In this sense what is ultimately considered real, that to which an ultimate ontological commitment is made – after representation having been labelled problematic – resides in excess of the subject. Cox’s image of the real exceeds subjective containment, 5

The terms standard philosophy and decision are taken from the work of François Laruelle, whom Cox has recently drawn upon in articulating a sonic thought, a mode of thinking through sound rather than about sound from the elevated position of ‘standard philosophy’ as a kind of master discipline that reflects upon everything and in so doing sees itself in everything. For a concise introduction to Laruelle’s non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy and his critique of the decisional structure of standard philosophical thought see Ray Brassier’s Axiomatic Heresy (Brassier 2003).

126

Immanence and Immersion

rather than simply residing outside of subjectivity, as it constitutes an interior exteriority, an ‘ancestral’ matter that has evolved to form the material conditions of subjectivity. Accordingly the matter populating Cox’s concept of the real overlaps with that of the sciences, as this concept of matter includes, among other things, genes, mountains, lava and sound, all of which are interpreted by Cox as flows of becoming. Reality is thereby non-correlational, in excess of the subjective and cultural, and while constituting an immanent condition of subjectivity must nonetheless be considered largely outside or beyond the limits of the subjective. Accordingly Cox’s realist theory of sonic materialism distinguishes itself from the phenomenological theory of sonic materialism discussed above. Within this image of reality populated by flux, flow and autonomous affects, sound is considered a special case of the real. The image of reality constructed by a sonic materialism is one of ‘a collection of flows’ (Cox 2015, 125) rather visibly stable objects. This image is constructed by an attempt to think through sound, perform a sonic thought or a becoming-sound of thought that invites our intuitive experience of the sonic to reshape ontological discourse. Having focused ontological discourse upon flux, flow and becoming, sonic materialism then seeks to address and critique the ‘hegemony of the visual’ through the imposition of a new hierarchy of the senses wherein ‘sonic flux is not just one flow among many; it deserves special status insofar as it so elegantly and forcefully models and manifests the myriad fluxes that constitute the natural world’ (Cox 2015, 126). Where we ask how sound attains this privileged position in relation to the real, we find answers in the above quote from Cox: through aesthetics and representation, through the elegance and intuitive appeal of sound’s manifest ephemerality and variation as a model presenting analogy or representation of nature depicted as a collection of flows. Where reality is imagined as a collection of flows beyond representation there is an intuitive appeal to positioning auditory experience as closest to the real, as sound is experienced as an ephemeral, variable waveform more readily than light. Outside of the identification of speech we are less quick to assign sounds to objects and discernible, specific events, than we are through the gaze. This latter point remains a particularly cultural phenomenon, a question of training, profession, interest and intentionality. Through modelling, aesthetic

Sonic Materialism

127

elegance and sensory intuition the auditory is mobilized to undermine the hegemony of the visual, positioning the sonic as a special case of flow and flux within a new hierarchy of the senses. These means of access or approximation of the real raise problems for a sonic materialism that is critical of the phenomenological orientation towards appearances while claiming to operate ‘beyond representation’, as they present instances of representation – sound as a model for nature as a collection of flows – and an intuitive aesthetic experience that is phenomenological in nature. Due to its affective and intuitive methodology Cox’s sonic materialism entails a transcendental affectivity akin to that found in Henry’s material phenomenology. Underpinning the claim that the sonic events of auditory culture are somehow more real than visual culture, immanent to rather than transcending the real, is a methodology principally built upon an intuitive aesthetics of elegance while somewhat surreptitious permitting modelling and the cognitive, representational strategies it draws upon. The methodology employed with the intention of defining sound’s privileged ontological position – as a special case of natural flux – and epistemological status – as a model representing nature as flux – regarding the real in fact undermines the ontological and epistemological commitments made in the name of sonic materialism. Cox’s realism, understood as an ontological commitment to a mindindependent reality, commits him to a version of philosophical naturalism, wherein nature is the exhaustive category of reality, permitting no supernatural entities. The acknowledgement of this realist materialism entails ‘naturalizing reason, mind, culture, and language, treating them not as anomalous or miraculous endowments but as variants of processes discernible in the rest of the natural world’ (Cox 2016, 26). The subjective and cultural is therefore rendered immanent rather than transcendent with regard to nature. While this ontological commitment results in a certain overlap with more scientistic variants of naturalism, Cox’s materialism remains speculative in nature and employs a radically differing methodology. The issue regarding Cox’s siting of the real is that although it is posited as immanent within a materialistphysicalist paradigm adherence to the audiovisual litany entails divestment from conceptual and representational strategies, and so access to the real

128

Immanence and Immersion

must be intuitive and aesthetic. While Cox will assert that the conditions of possible experience are physical in nature rather than conceptual or cognitive, access to the real must, due to the aversion to conceptual abstraction, proceed via aesthetic intuition. In assuming the divisions of the audiovisual litany one assumes that a properly sonic methodology is one that proceeds via an affective aesthetics – that through a blurred vision or withdrawal from intentionality sees everything as continuous and homogeneous – rather than ‘visual’ systems of cognition, representation and conceptualization. Despite Cox’s criticisms of phenomenology as idealist and transcendent (Cox 2011, 147–9, 156), we find that the intuitive methods employed by both Cox and Voegelin’s sonic materialism result in the same data being presented to the mind, the synthetic products of sensation as such. The correlation thereby remains primary, demarcating an epistemological horizon along the lines of the given. Cox’s materialism seeks to critique what he sees as an anthropocentric hylomorphism, where inert matter requires the impression of form upon it from without. Yet there is a problem with the rejection of hylomorphism towards asserting the self-organizing or emergent properties of matter itself (Cox 2011, 151) where this matter is equated with asignifying aesthetic experience. Here a conflation of physicalist and phenomenal conceptions of matter persists, and the matter referred to here is not that of the inhuman becoming of the Earth, for example, but the products of sensory experience, the synthetic products of the body as presented to the mind. The asignifying matters to which Cox suggests broadly intuitive, aesthetic and affective means of access are hard to distinguish from what Henry describes as ‘non-signifying material’ (Henry 2008, 19), yet the latter remain resolutely subjective thereby vitiating Cox’s physicalist naturalism. The immanence that instances of transcendence, such as representation, vitiate is an affective and aesthetic immanence. Cox’s claims thereby resonate with Henry’s critique of seeing and transcendence, yet the latter rules out the realism to which the former subscribes. Due to its aesthetic orientation Cox’s method is liable to confuse auto-affective, nonor asignifying ‘matters’ with the ‘the micro-level of physical, chemical, and biological matter’ that Cox’s realist project seeks to introduce into discourse on sound (Cox 2011, 152–3). It is through sleight of hand that matters pertaining

Sonic Materialism

129

to phenomenological, aesthetic experience are equated with matter as an object of the physical sciences, something that occurs through a lack of clarity on what is meant by the term ‘matter’; just because the materialist asserts that everything emerges from or is underpinned my material or physical processes, it does not follow that we can simply address all those processes with the term ‘matter’ and treat them as equivalent or synonymous; there is difference and distinction within the univocal materialist ontology that needs to be taken into account, just as there is heterogeneity amid immanence. Despite the criticisms above there remains a shared orientation towards the real in the present argument and that presented by Cox. Both Cox and I are concerned to understand and encourage artistic practices that can be allied with a broadly ontological turn in philosophy, seeking to address a non-anthropocentric, post-correlational and naturalistic conception of the real. While I am also sympathetic towards Cox’s ontology of sound as autonomous affects – which could also be described as an ontology of sounds as signals (see Schrimshaw 2013) – it is the onto-aesthetic assertion that aesthetic practices and methodologies should necessarily mirror this ontology that I disagree with, the requirement for a realist art – in Cox’s understanding of this term – to ground its aesthetics in exemplification or expression of a material ontology. A methodological problem arises from an attempt to identify a naturalistic conception of the real through affective and intuitive methods, methods not well suited to the determination of a naturalistic ontology that extends beyond the realm of possible experience. Being underpinned by the oppositions of the audiovisual litany this method divests itself of the conceptual and representational methods that have more successfully been developed in philosophical naturalism and the natural sciences. Where the image of reality constructed through sonic materialism limits itself to the affective and intuitive its image of reality is limited to the given, to embodied, immediate perception, and in particular to a ‘sonic’ mode of perception that actively withdraws from intentionality and analysis in favour of a passive synthesis. These methodological issues result in a conflation of phenomenal and physicalist conceptions of matter and the real, and to a conflation of sonic materialism and realism. Yet this materialism and realism are not necessarily synonymous or interchangeable.

130

Immanence and Immersion

The conflation of physicalist and phenomenological concepts of matter that results from the assumption of an affective-materialist methodology results in a short circuit that feeds an ontological commitment to naturalistic realism back into a phenomenology. This short circuit means a naturalistic realism is not achieved, but rather a real that remains conflated with transcendental affectivity. This can be seen in the two initially differing concepts of the transcendental relating to the phenomenological and physicalist strains of sonic materialism: transcendental affectivity and transcendental materialism. Due to the problems identified in the physicalist strain that posits a transcendental materialism – an affective epistemics limiting access to the physical real it posits – both the transcendental affectivity and transcendental materialism of sonic materialism remain bound up in providing an ontology of the experiential, addressing the reality of experience rather than the possibility of an experience of reality. Despite different goals and concepts of the real, both strains of sonic materialism that we have looked at coincide upon an exploration of experience. Where both strains of sonic materialism converge upon an exploration of the reality of experience, both remain bound to a transcendental empiricism or affectivity. Due to its phenomenological methods and hostility towards formal abstraction, representation and conceptualization, sonic materialism is less a naturalistic realism than a phenomenological or new materialism. Similarities between sonic realism and new materialism can be seen where both address a notion of ‘impersonal matter’ as the conditions for the personal and subjective. This orientation seeks to position the subjective and cultural immanently within a materialist continuum, rather than permitting such things to seem transcendent. This immanent materialism is built upon a ‘post-Darwinian, naturalist but not reductionist account of creative subjectivity’ (Orlie 2010, 117). While subjectivity is naturalized it is also decentred, countering the anthropocentrism of the humanities and social sciences. The subject is neither the centre nor the telos of evolution, but one stage of evolutionary material processes among many. The impersonal which constitutes the material conditions of subjectivity is described as asignifying, anonymous and beyond representation, the pre-symbolic flow and flux of ceaseless material becoming within which humanity is but one temporary concrescence.

Sonic Materialism

131

It is this flux and flow, the dynamic becoming of matter itself that new materialism seeks to direct our attention towards. While this orientation towards material conditions constitutes an ontological turn, the turn itself entails epistemology and a method for redirecting attention that is often overlooked. Where the turn towards ontology and material conditions entails a turn away from conceptuality and representation, it is affective immersion that becomes method, matter and aesthetic. The ‘phenomenological task’ that new materialism entails ‘is to show how consciousness emerges from, yet remains enmeshed in, this material world. To remain faithful to its own insights here, it must “plunge into the world instead of surveying it”’ (Coole 2010, 101). The immanence of matter and mind which describes our being enmeshed in the material world at an ontological level need not entail that we cease to ‘survey’, to make use of the distal techniques of the ‘visual’ and the abstract methods of conceptualizaton and representation. Matter and method need not be confused just as immanence need not entail homogeneity in the form of an immediate stream of affective flux into which we must plunge. The method and aesthetics of immersion that sees us plunge into the world of amorphous impersonal chaos seeks reinsertion into Heraclitus’s river, a re-connection with the ceaseless flow of primordial and impersonal becoming that subtends the subjective tendency towards fixation and differentiation. The opposition of the ceaseless becoming of impersonal being to fixation is significant in identifying continuities between new materialism and sonic materialism as informed by the audiovisual litany. The alignment of these two materialisms makes clear the phenomenological methods that underpin both. The fixation that both oppose is the analytical action of holding an object beneath the gaze, a production of images or concepts through knowledge and understanding. This fixity is easily aligned with the static nature of ‘visuality’ that, according to the audiovisual litany, is opposed to the ceaseless durational becoming of the sonorous. Where the fixity that an orientation towards impersonal becoming opposes is aligned with a ‘visual’ capacity to survey, it must also be aligned with the audile capacity to listen, which learns to isolate and hold an object before the ear as the gaze does before the eye. Accordingly this impersonal becoming cannot be thought proper to the sonic or an auditory culture at large.

132

Immanence and Immersion

Where explication of new materialism’s focus and appeal specifically addresses artistic practice, we find a number of resonances with sonic materialism. Regarding conceptualism, resurgent materialism in the arts is described as entailing ‘moves against Conceptualism inasmuch as its languageand text-based approach is renounced. Many artists and designers are returning to matter to explore immanent, elusive, and reclusive, properties of materials’ (Coole 2015, 41). Here we find immanence opposed to conceptualization and representation; immanence is posited as proper to an immediate material domain beyond representation, which constitutes a vitiating transcendence. The move away from a strong, pure or sufficient conceptualism constrained to the ideal is clear in turns towards the real and material, yet this pure conceptualism names only one short-lived area of conceptualism amid a wider ‘weak’ or morphological approach that did not entirely divest from materiality. Here we might contrast the work of Joseph Kosuth or Art and Language with that of Robert Barry whose work with sound and electromagnetism remained conceptual in orientation yet open to a materiality and physicality that challenged the limits of embodied or immediate perception. Furthermore, contemporary post-conceptual practice takes a critical approach to the shortcomings of pure conceptualism in acknowledging an ineradicable yet insufficient aesthetics that works with and through rather than against conceptuality. As we will see in relation to the work of Katie Paterson below, it is often the conceptual aspects of a work rather than its immediate materiality which takes us closer to a radically non-anthropocentric concept of the real that does not depend upon the limits of immediate human perception. While the present argument shares with these new and sonic materialisms an orientation towards a non-anthropocentric conception of the real, the phenomenological methodology both entail precludes the naturalistic realism that new materialism might entail. The matter revealed by this phenomenological method privileging primordial immediacy is ultimately auto-affective, providing materials for the construction of an immersive spatiality ‘starting from me’ which is not surveyed ‘according to its exterior envelope’, but lived from within (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 138). Where new materialism’s return to things themselves aims beyond appearances at brute or elusive materiality, its principal method for attaining such things remains a

Sonic Materialism

133

form of perceptual intentionality and reduction. In seeking out the ‘elusive, and reclusive, properties of materials’ it is not clear how a methodology privileging the immediate and phenomenological, thereby limiting itself to the given, might gain better access to these properties than methods employing ‘abstraction or formalism’ and techniques of modelling that take thought beyond the apparent and immediately available (Coole 2015, 41). The sonic-materialist method, which ultimately remains a material phenomenology, occludes a naturalistic, realist ontology. In making a commitment to a naturalistic realism the sonicmaterialist methodology should be superseded by one which does not assume the oppositions of the audiovisual litany and thereby does not divest itself of cognitive, conceptual and representational resources that would prove more useful in expressing a thoroughly non-anthropocentric account of the real.

6

The Scientific Image

The logic of the audiovisual litany results in materialist and realist discourse on sound in the arts being constrained to a phenomenalism, ultimately unable to achieve a naturalistic or post-correlational concept of the real. The methodological rejection of conceptualism and representation in favour of the affective immediacy of immersive experience leaves certain materialisms and realisms unable to accommodate a scientific image of the real entailing imperceptible entities and extending beyond the limits of the given. Such an image of the real moves beyond the constraints of a material phenomenology or sonic materialism, presenting a more radical exit from anthropocentrism than a return to the apparently immediate depths of pre-subjective autoaffectivity can accommodate. The challenges presented by the scientific image to the significance of perception and to the conceptualization of both the real and the positioning of humanity within it are often addressed in artworks responding to scientific research and its impact upon wider culture. An instrumentalization of the art–science relationship sees the merger of the former within the latter’s public relations and communication mechanism, often seeking to render the imperceptible perceptible through aestheticization, visualization or audification. We also find artistic practices which register and critically examine the shocks of the real that an expanding scientific image continues to present within wider culture and the conceptualization of self and reality. Explorations of such art–science interactions will be discussed below in relation to the work of Katie Paterson and Ryoichi Kurokawa. Before exploring artistic responses to developments in the scientific image, the concepts of the scientific and manifest images, which have already been mentioned above, should be addressed in more detail. Discussion of these concepts will outline a philosophical position that moves beyond the affective and phenomenological

136

Immanence and Immersion

impediments to realism discussed above, articulating a naturalistic realism without discarding representation or conceptualism. Addressing the disparity between reality as it appears and as it is described through scientific enquiry, Wilfrid Sellars made a distinction between two competing accounts or images of reality: the manifest and scientific images. The manifest image is an account of reality as it appears to us, to humans. As an account of reality as it appears given, the manifest image has historically been conceived as being generated according to direct impressions of the external world or through the illuminating powers of intelligible essences, that is, as something directly or immediately instantiated within the mind. Sellars’s conception of the manifest image differs from these impressional or illuminating accounts in that it asserts the manifest image has emerged as a social phenomenon that transcends the individual – retaining a distinction between the essentially autobiographical ‘I’ and the accidentally autobiographical ‘anyone’ – to which it nonetheless remains immanent. As the conceptual framework within which we operate and through which we engage with the world the manifest image appears given, rather than as something produced or mutable. Sellars’s account of the manifest image differs from this in showing it to have been modified over time. Rather than being purely receptive or transparent the manifest image is a selective framework tuned to populate its image of reality with beings that fall within defined yet ultimately mutable conceptual and perceptual thresholds. In this way the manifest image constitutes a transcendental account of an image of thought. The beings or objects populating the manifest image fall within certain thresholds of scale and stability including persons, animals, ‘inert’ objects, rivers and stones (see Sellars 1963, 9). The manifest image of everyday experience includes objects that appear both static and dynamic, fixed and flowing, vital and inert. While the manifest image is populated by a diverse range of objects, its primary orientation is towards persons. As a conceptual framework used by persons to make sense of the world, the manifest image is most attuned or sensitive to persons, their behaviours and interactions. Sellars’s account of the development of the manifest image, an image of reality that has been critically refined throughout the evolution

The Scientific Image

137

of humanity, describes a trajectory that moves from the personification of all objects – wherein the trees, rocks, rivers and so on, had agency, character or spirit – to a manifest image wherein this is no longer the case, outside of certain animistic or esoteric traditions that have continued a practice of personifying objects. From this brief summary we can note the compatibility in terms of scale and object-orientation that exist between the manifest image and both sonic and new materialism. While these contemporary materialisms may often ascribe an agency to objects in a way that would problematize Sellars’s linear account of the manifest image’s development to its present state, these contemporary materialisms nonetheless remain grounded in the manifest image, being populated by objects of a similar scale and stability to those in Sellars’s account of the manifest image. To evoke stability here is not to assert that the objects populating the manifest image upon which these materialisms are built are entirely static – as in unduly reductive accounts of ‘visual’ culture – but rather that their appearance as objects depends upon a relative stability that permits a degree of mutability wherein a flowing river, a decaying sound, a gust of wind or a passing wave all appear as objects or events that the manifest image is able to accommodate and count as one. While the manifest image may accommodate objects of a certain scale and stability, as well as ephemeral events composed of sound, light, heat and so on, there are many things that the manifest image is not equipped to accommodate derived from forms of reasoning that involve ‘the postulation of imperceptible entities, and principles pertaining to them, to explain the behaviour of perceptible things’ (Sellars 1963, 7). That such imperceptible entities might explain perceptible things does not mean that imperceptible entities must be considered ‘“calculational devices” [that] do not exist in the full-blooded sense in which observables exist’ (Sellars 1963, 86). Nor is it the case that the imperceptible names only that which is imperceptible from the perspective of representation, as is often the case in Deleuzian and phenomenological paradigms, wherein a reorientation of perception beyond representation might give us access to a primordial and pre-symbolic flux antecedent to the objective world. The imperceptible here indicates that which is unequivocally beyond the thresholds of direct, immediate and  embodied perception yet nonetheless must be considered

138

Immanence and Immersion

to exist in a ‘full-blooded’ sense. It is what Sellars refers to as the scientific image which is populated by these imperceptible entities to which ‘fullblooded’ existence is ascribed. The scientific image and its imperceptible entities do not present a parallel world view or simply an alternative perspective upon reality, but, among other things, an account of the conditions of the manifest image. While the scientific image may necessarily presuppose the manifest image, this presupposition is methodological only, not ontological (see  Sellars 1963, 20), and it is the scientific image that is considered primary in providing the most expansive and inclusive account or explanation of reality. In accounting for the conditions of the manifest image, the scientific image tells us that ‘manifest objects are “appearances” to human minds of a reality which is constituted by systems of imperceptible particles’ (Sellars 1963, 26). This reality is then not as it appears within the framework of the manifest image. Considering the objects populating both images, we find the scientific image postulating imperceptible entities that explain perceptible events, whereas the manifest image ‘limits itself to what correlational techniques can tell us about perceptible and introspectible events’ (Sellars 1963, 19). In the latter the conditions of these events remains un-addressed, which raises the question of an outside or exteriority that would vitiate claims of immanence made on the grounds of the manifest image. Here we see how the correlational techniques to which Sellars refers impose an epistemological limitation wherein what can be known is what appears through perception or introspection. It is this same methodological limitation that prevents certain contemporary materialisms from achieving the naturalistic realism they strive for: the correlational techniques or affective methodologies employed are not adequate for grasping a reality that is naturalistically construed. Within these materialist paradigms claims and conceptualizations of reality are made on the grounds of an immediate affectivity. Contrary to such positions Sellars’s distinction between manifest and scientific images entails a primacy of the scientific image when it comes to accounting for reality. For Sellars it is the scientific image that adequately accounts for reality, rather than appearances. Where new and sonic materialisms attend only to the body of objects, events or beings to which the manifest image is selectively attuned they account only for how things appear

The Scientific Image

139

given, and then build an ontology upon such appearances – an onto-aesthetic conflation. In this sense both new and sonic materialism remain broadly phenomenalistic in orientation, describing a reality of appearances rather than a naturalistic reality. The phenomenological materialisms discussed above can be considered part of a broader return of the real (Foster 1996) within the arts and humanities, with sonic materialism in its various forms appealing to either a reinvigoration of ideas about reality along phenomenological lines (Voegelin 2014, 3) or a philosophical naturalism (Cox 2011). Reality, a concept of central importance to these diverse positions, appears as a site of contestation. Yet the differing arguments unfolding within this contestation all remain broadly phenomenalistic in orientation entailing the ontological commitment that things are as they seem when encountered through pre-symbolic, asignifying or broadly direct means. That all these accounts are broadly phenomenalistic groups them within what Sellars calls the manifest image, highlighting the correlational techniques that underpin them. That the reality to which these paradigms attest is contained within the manifest image means that they are undercut by what Sellars takes to be a more adequate account of reality as formulated in the scientific image, and none are adequate for a philosophical naturalism which asserts the existence of imperceptible entities as the conditions of appearances or the given. In seeking a concept of immanence most able to provide an account of reality without recourse or question of an ontological exteriority that would reintroduce a two-worlds paradigm, we might take the scientific image to provide the better account of immanence in the sense that it takes nothing to be outside of nature, being the most expansive and inclusive account available. The means by which it provides this account are in contrast to the correlational techniques of the manifest image in that they employ conceptualization, abstraction, formal modelling and other techniques that are seen to vitiate the immediate reality of affective immanence underpinning immersive aesthetics. Where we are interested in naturalistic concepts of the real and their relations to concepts of immanence as deployed in artistic practice, then we should not shy from the techniques that have been used in accounting for such an image of nature and reality, embracing methods of abstraction, conceptualization and representation, not in order to

140

Immanence and Immersion

reduce everything to a series of texts, but in order to embrace the methods that have been most successful in providing an account of naturalistic realism.1 Where art is engaged in a return of the real, as chronicled by Hal Foster (Foster 1996) or evident in the current popularity of speculative realism and new materialism in contemporary art, how this real is conceptualized informs aesthetic strategies and the mode of engagement solicited by the work of art. Where the real is conceptualized as apparent, as given, as built upon an irreducible correlation, the appropriate mode of engagement is a form direct perception or immediate affectivity. Where the real is conceptualized as being contrary to or in excess of appearance the immediate or direct perception of the work takes on a symbolic or representational function in catalysing thought of a reality in excess of perception. This necessarily proceeds through conceptualization that extends beyond aesthetic immediacy and appearances, relying upon systems of representation, modelling and formalization. Despite the assumption of methods marginalized by certain materialist discourses, and against assertions that representation vitiates the real, the real is nonetheless retained. Representation is in this sense considered immanent to the real rather than a vitiation of immanence. The aims of art are not those of science. While artistic practice may not seek to uncover an image of reality in the same way as the sciences, it nonetheless constitutes one site where further modifications to the manifest image may be explored, allowing a contamination of the manifest image by the scientific and contributing to a shift towards what Sellars described as the stereoscopic image. This stereoscopic image describes the conjoining of manifest and scientific images. This stereoscopic interaction of images describes how,

1 Where it is a naturalism that is aimed at, the abstract, mediated and formalized techniques employed in populating the scientific image are better suited than the affective and immediate. Such techniques are employed without assuming the ontological irreducibility of the correlation, whereas this assumption underlies the assertion of affective methodologies as best suited to an account of reality. Objection may be raised to the idea that affective methods assume an ontologically irreducible correlation by advocating a direct realism, where it is solely the real object or event that is directly perceived through pre-symbolic and immediate means, rather than the act of sensing itself. Three counterarguments to this objection can briefly be presented as follows: Husserl’s direct realism comes after the suspension of the natural attitude; in Sellars’s critique, direct realism remains broadly phenomenal in assuming reality to be as it appears within the framework of the manifest image (Sellars 1963, 89); in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism the phenomenalism of direct realism remains epiphenomenal in ignoring its conditions. What these latter arguments assert is a concept of reality that is other than it appears while retaining differing forms of naturalism.

The Scientific Image

141

despite providing a competing image or account of reality, the scientific image is not intended to completely destroy the manifest image, but rather entails a repositioning of the manifest image. While the scientific image is populated with imperceptible entities that the manifest image cannot accommodate due to what we might summarize as issues of scale and materiality – that such objects are beyond the thresholds of immediate embodied perception – the manifest image provides a conceptual framework for intentionality while the scientific image provides an altogether different account of that which is intended and how it is intended. These two images are conjoined in a stereoscopic view that has a pragmatic orientation wherein the manifest image is useful at a level limited to apparent objects, perception and introspection yet not useful in accounting for the imperceptible conditions of these things amid a broader account of reality. It is the broader account provided by the scientific image that exceeds the limitations of perceptibility and introspection, that ‘descends’ beneath the level of apparent objects and events, yet nonetheless provides and account of them. It is through this breadth and explanatory capability that the scientific image attains its primacy in Sellars’s account, a breadth delimiting a more inclusive conception of immanence than is available via phenomenological and affective means. This stereoscopic realignment of images entails an embrace of representation and formalized abstraction in artistic practice towards the adoption of a noncorrelationist conception of the real. This gesture does not seek to uncover the real in the manner of the sciences, but to position and reposition the self, to modify the framework of the manifest image through which we encounter and make sense of the world. The correlational techniques and affective orientation that the manifest image and phenomenalistic orientations most easily accommodate retain and re-centre a constitutive subject, whereas noncorrelational modes of representation, abstraction and formalization are more suited to a decentring of this subject within a broader conception of nature and reality that does not revolve around this subject. The adoption of noncorrelational techniques (i.e. non-affective techniques) in art does not seek to uncover the same objects as that of scientific practice, but seeks to modify the manifest image to better accommodate the scientific image that accounts for its conditions as well as that of wider reality.

142

Immanence and Immersion

A series of returns to the real have done little to challenge the primacy of the manifest image, the affective and the phenomenological. Where reality is conceived in accordance with appearance the realism art entails is often one of everyday object-oriented perception that would ascribe agency to all of the objects populating the manifest image through an evocation of their hidden depths or vitality, as was found throughout The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, an exhibition curated by Mark Leckey which toured throughout 2013. Underlying this exhibition was an observed techno-atavism that Leckey identified in contemporary culture wherein objects seem to speak, an ‘internet of things’ that address not only each other but the humans who make use of them. This perspective on networked devices is atavistic precisely in the sense that it conjures earlier forms of the manifest image described by Sellars. For Sellars the social development of the manifest image entailed a ‘gradual “de-personalisation” of objects’ (Sellars 1963, 9–10). Leckey’s techno-atavism identifies a re-personification of objects, resulting in a remystified world view highly accommodating to ever greater levels of commodity fetishism (see Leckey 2013). This atavistic tendency is identified by Leckey as technological in origin, but specifically computational as it is current levels of automation, voice recognition and synthesis posing as artificial intelligence that drive this remystification and a personification of the everyday objects of the manifest image. The Universal Addressability ... identified this atavism largely without criticism, celebrating a return to enchanted forms of engagement with the world. Yet the return to enchanted animism that Leckey’s techno-atavism entails is largely built upon an ignorance of the construction and operation of the objects that populate it: smartphones, networked refrigerators, robots and so on.2 This object-oriented atavism and re-enchantment is underpinned by a lack of critical engagement, deconstruction and analysis that would reveal the workings of such objects and displace this re-enchantment through understanding. This mystification and animism of objects is, in Leckey’s work, 2 This can be contrasted with the demystification of such objects carried out in Danja Vasiliev, Gordan Savicic and Julian Oliver’s ‘Critical Engineering’, which seeks to enhance a ‘techno-political literacy’ that would undermine the mystified and atavistic relationship with networked devices that Universal Addressability drew upon (Oliver et. al. 2011). For more information on Critical Engineering which provides workshops on technological and political understanding of the internet and its infrastructures, self-hosting, establishing communally owned web infrastructure and commandline literacy for artists and activists see https://criticalengineering.org/.

The Scientific Image

143

associated with an aesthetics of immersion, as Leckey states a desire to not only look at things but ‘to be in them’, a desire for immersion in a world of mystically reanimated objects (Charlesworth 2014). Here we again see how the sufficiency of aesthetic immersion relies upon a withdrawal from critical engagement and all but the most immediate and superficial of experiences. That art might better accommodate the scientific image does not suggest that artists might practice science but that adoption of the scientific image might shift the site of art’s concept of the real from the atavistic and phenomenalistic to the naturalistic. Such a shift, entailing that reality may be other than it appears, has the effect of allowing the manifest image to better accommodate counter-intuitive truth claims, to accept models as having an important bearing upon reality that might contradict immediate experience. The adoption of the scientific image and its non-correlational techniques influences the way in which we represent and imagine the objects populating the manifest image. As well as altering the composition of the manifest image to better accommodate the scientific, this alteration of the manifest image as a cultural activity in which artistic practice participates has impacts upon the existential significance and positioning of the human, making a contribution towards greater adoption of Copernican displacements that do not seek debasement or objectification for its own sake but as a gesture concomitant with an ecologically oriented ethics. Allowing the scientific image to contaminate the manifest image is therefore not simply to adjust the objects populating the latter but also to adjust the conceptual positioning and composition of the subject perceiving these objects. The subject becomes displaced from a position at the centre of this world view, no longer being an irreducible condition of reality but another of its products.

6.1 Ryoichi Kurokawa: Abstraction and the lifeworld Where digital media is involved, art–science interactions often result in forms of visualization and audification, seeking to render the scales of scientific research and the abstraction involved in its execution intuitively accessible. Through engagements with scientific research and concepts these

144

Immanence and Immersion

interdisciplinary interactions grapple with concepts and images of reality that extend beyond the given and the everyday, and so the scope of such interactions for presenting a possible exit from aesthetic sufficiency should be considered. Through engagements with and representations of scientific concepts and images of reality, visualizations and audifications may presents one exit strategy from the trappings of immersion and acoustic space. Yet there is a danger that positing such an exit strategy could appear to reaffirm the terms of the audiovisual litany, as here visualization would provide an opportunity for perspective, distance, critical thought, generality, abstraction and so on, while the acoustic space that visualization might puncture is limited to that of an immersive, sensory immediacy accessed through intuition rather than cognition. To avoid slipping back into this fallacious opposition it should be stressed that what is sought is the identification of those critical capacities aligned with the visual side of the audiovisual litany within sonic practice rather than as something opposed to it. It should be noted that the internalist logic of the acoustic condition divests itself of these critical and analytical capacities, rather than being necessarily distinct from them. It is in certain areas of sound studies that McLuhan’s metaphorical references to the qualities of sound and acoustic space have been interpreted too literally, perhaps in the hope that the assertion of such qualities might stem proliferating ‘visual hegemony’, resulting in them being considered proper to the sonic and auditory culture. Against this argument we should note that the ‘acoustic space’ of electronic media – a term that McLuhan used metaphorically, without special concern for sound – is at its strongest where it projects multimedia, multi-sensory and particularly immersive and synaesthetic experiences that contribute to the experience of an apparently common sense. ‘Acoustic’ or ‘auditory space’ in McLuhan’s usage has less to do with the specifically acoustic or auditory than it does with modes of dissemination and a certain habitus or mode of perception. Similarly the qualities and practices associated with McLuhan’s concept of visual space have been interpreted too literally and ascribed too strongly to vision, thereby resulting in the assumption of the audiovisual litany to render distinct auditory and visual cultures. In seeking to undermine the distinctions and dividing line upheld in the audiovisual litany the metaphorical status of McLuhan’s concepts of acoustic and visual

The Scientific Image

145

space should be reaffirmed to emphasize the presence of the ‘visual’ or the rational in the auditory. The identification of the ‘visual’ within the ‘acoustic’ should not be understood as suggesting synaesthetic conflations whereby we might ‘see sound’, but can be considered structurally equivalent to Erlmann’s discussion of the interplay of resonance and reason, and his coining of the term ‘reasonance’ (Erlmann 2010, 29). Accordingly the aim here is not to simply step back into the visual side of the litany as an exit strategy from the limitations of acoustic space, but rather to show how the critical capacities ascribed to the visual side of the litany do not respect the line that might separate them from the acoustic, indicating ‘the ear’s relationship with rational mastery, knowledge, epistemological certainty’, rather than any abstinence from such modes of thought that might falsely be considered proper only to the visual (Erlmann 2010, 30). Where visualization might apparently present opportunities for an exit from acoustic interiority, the multimedia and common-sensical composition of acoustic space can often strengthen this interiority through the construction of a synaesthetic experience. Whereas visualization might present opportunities for the comprehension of abstract concepts and theories, it also presents a tendency towards synaesthesia and synchronicity through the presentation of a unified, singular aesthetic and common sense which favours intuition, occluding abstraction and therefore a more generic concept of immanence. In the context of immersive aesthetics and art–science interactions, Ryoichi Kurokawa’s unfold (2016) is exemplary for its combinations of sound, sonification and visualization, and due to its relationship with astrophysics. The art–science relationship at the centre of unfold’s production sees the work treading a line between scientism and the lifeworld of everyday experience through a dramatic and highly aestheticized evocation of astrophysical phenomena. While the experience of the work remains distinct from the everyday – seven channels of surround sound and three channel HD visualizations pertaining to star formation – it is the way in which the work seeks to render the astrophysical phenomena accessible through immediate sensory experience that locates it within a domain of familiar affectivity contrasting with the formalized abstraction of the data and the remoteness of the astrophysical events it represents.

146

Immanence and Immersion

Figure 6.1 Installation view of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s unfold, 2016 at FACT, Liverpool. Image: Brian Slater. Used with permission.

Three screens arranged vertically tower over the viewer, forming a curved surface that threatens to engulf, adding to the immersive qualities of unfold (see Figure 6.1). The curved vertical arrangement of screens mimics the openings seen in ground-based observatories to allow the telescopes housed within clear view of the sky above; the position one occupies when viewing unfold is that of the telescope within the observatory, looking up through an opening. While this arrangement references the scientific relationship underpinning unfold it also has the effect of helping to create a sense of immersion in the work via an arrangement of screens that is a variation on the more common arrangement of consecutive screens in a horizontal orientation to create an immersive and occasionally encircling panorama. Where a horizontal arrangement

The Scientific Image

147

of screens can help create an immersive experience by surrounding the viewer and offering varied viewing positions, the vertical arrangement used in unfold affords only a singular, linear perspective that still attains a sense of envelopment through the way in which it bears down upon the viewer. Where this linear perspective might limit the work’s celebrated immersive qualities surround-sound compensates, filling in the gaps.3 Sounds and sonic gestures similar to those heard in many electroacoustic concerts fly around the listener, or around a central sweet spot determining an ideal listening position. The sounds mirror the visual aim of creating awe and sublimity through melodramatic gestures. This gives the piece a cinematic feel, comprising rapid contrasting cuts and accompanying reverb-laden staccatos. Where many of the sounds are rapid, staccatoed and percussive, occupying precisely localizable yet moving positions in space, the space as a whole is filled out by a drone that runs through the piece binding its disparate elements together, including the members of the audience. The drone which runs through the work, the space and the viewer, binding these otherwise disparate elements together, does not remain constant; there are pauses, moments of calm and quiet that serve not as opportunities to step outside or gain perspective on the work but as a method to retain or rather recapture the audience’s attention, should they have grown accustomed to the drone’s presence and begun to tune it out. This drone also serves to bind both viewer and work into the exhibition space by exploiting sympathetic resonances between the architecture and the body – both floor and flesh shake synchronously and sympathetically in relation to the frequencies emitted by the surround sound system. The drone, more than any other sound in the work runs through the body, affirming the viewers embodied presence or more precisely a relational being-in-the-presence-of the work, whose synchronicity strives for totalizing aesthetic singularity. Synaesthesia is central concern for Kurokawa, and should there be any gaps left in unfold its synaesthetic intentions and synchronized audiovisual events complete the circle, wrapping up the viewer in the work and binding any potentially disparate elements together into a singular work. 3 As with other exhibitions at FACT Liverpool where unfold was first shown, the immersive quality of the work is very much a selling point, with unfold described as ‘an immersive and sensory installation which transports you into space’.

148

Immanence and Immersion

The data that unfold draws upon is taken from the astrophysical research carried out at the Research Institute into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (CEA Irfu, Paris-Saclay), and concerns investigation into star formation from molecular clouds. unfold draws its authority and authenticity from a data set that is dramatically at odds with the pre-scientific lifeworld that concerns phenomenology. A comparison useful to the present argument can therefore be drawn up between unfold’s poles of scientism and phenomenology, its concern for the formalized and the intuitive. While the conceptual content and data sources that unfold draws upon are wholly alien to experience, the affective mode of engagement that unfold solicits grounds it within the familiarity of auto-affection, a familiarity not of recognizable yet distal objects but the familiarity of the body sensing. The combination of a highly aestheticized mode of audiovisual expression and intuitive experience situates the work in a register relative to immediate experience and sensory impressions, to that which is given to the eye or the ear, thereby linking it to intuitive modes of engagement with the world. unfold entails a decision that research into astrophysical phenomena is best communicated or publicized through immediate sensory events embedded in our intuitive experience of the pre-scientific lifeworld, rather than cognitive and discursive modes of engagement that might enable a grasp on its underlying abstraction. That the means of non-specialist or pedestrian access to such phenomena should be through an experience of awe, beauty, sublimity and even bewilderment is a strategy common to much recent popular science broadcasting seeking to emphasize the beauty of science. unfold is considered exemplary here for its engagement with the question of access to information and knowledge of a field that relies heavily upon mathematical abstraction, formalization and modelling as well as empirical observation – although this should not be considered a strictly embodied means of observation. The nature of this access has significance for determining the nature of the art–science relationship that unfold entails, but also art–science interactions more broadly. unfold claims a certain authority and authenticity through an intimate yet epistemologically unilateral relationship with scientific processes wherein the latter receives beautification, improving its occasionally controversial public image. In unfold astrophysics gains an undoubtedly

The Scientific Image

149

beautiful image helping to publicize and popularize the discipline. Through this relationship unfold has been advertised as granting its audience access to knowledge and data concerned with cosmic phenomena, yet it is most successful in its attempt to beautify and create a sense of awe and sublimity around the scale of the scientific research it draws upon. Accordingly it is more successful in promoting, increasing awareness and improving the public awareness of astrophysics than it is as a means of gaining access to or understanding of astrophysical phenomena. The question arises as to the role of art in art– science, as to whether art should seek to explain, beautify or render ‘accessible’ scientific knowledge and information in a manner that would instrumentalize it. Where this beautification and aestheticization of science is assumed as art’s role in art–science interactions, art may claim to explain or grant access to otherwise bewildering, counter-intuitive and highly demanding scientific knowledge, yet what is it that one, as non-specialized observer, accesses through such aestheticized and principally affective modes of engagement? The access to and experience of the knowledge or data is often mediated by and restricted to awe, beauty, bewilderment or sublimity. We might be brought into proximity with a particular data set through encounters with visualization and sonification, but proximity does not necessarily entail meaningful access to the knowledge and information such data facilitates. Where art seeks to grant access to scientific knowledge then it might better achieve such aims through methods that are not limited to singular aesthetic experiences and intuitions, but rather through methods that propel thought into realms of abstraction and discursive exploration. Where art refuses its instrumentalization and retains a certain autonomy in its interactions, engagements or responses to scientific knowledge it forms a site for registering, mapping and measuring the cultural, social and inter-subjective impacts of science, a site for the modification of the manifest image, rather than the beautification of data and an opportunity for enhanced public relations. unfold presents an aesthetic spectacle of great detail and dynamism, but also a level of sensory stimulation that impedes responses other than immediate excitement, awe or perhaps overwhelm and bewilderment. The work constitutes such a singular aesthetic unit that there are few available gaps or holes, few invitations or suggestions of ideas to be followed through

150

Immanence and Immersion

Figure 6.2 Installation view of Ryoichi Kurokawa’s unfold.mod, 2016 at FACT, Liverpool. Image: Brian Slater. Used with permission.

cognitively; one is invited to simply feel at the expense of cognizant investment, speculative thought and discovery. unfold affirms presence, both its own and that of the audience, through a combination of enveloping drones and dramatic, attention-grabbing gestures to the extent that only the present is possible. Any speculative response that might cast the mind outside the immediate experience of the work, into the future, venturing beyond the immediate sensation of the work, is thereby made all the more difficult. Taken on its own, the immersive presence of unfold comes at the expense of opportunities where one might get a foothold by which to gain perspective upon the work and its extensive relational ontology, built upon a network of scientists, organizations and producers of different kinds. A relational ontology is invoked here not in order to make the hackneyed point that all works are the products of relations, networks of actors and so on, but in a more specific sense that unfold invests heavily and draws its authority and authenticity from its relationship with scientific researchers, methods and institutions. Where this network is better addressed is in the various events that accompanied the exhibition and the precursory iterations of unfold. A series of more ‘minor’ works that disclose elements of the processes involved in the production of unfold are given the separate title unfold.mod (2016), setting them apart from the main

The Scientific Image

151

work. In these smaller scale, print- and audio-based works the immersive aesthetic that dominates unfold is punctured or breaks down, presenting exit points whereby one might gain a different perspective. unfold.mod is not a singular work but a collection of smaller works and experimental iterations produced in the development of unfold. Three pairs of headphones playing different synthesized data sonifications and six wall-mounted images, each displaying metadata – used to classify the origin of the data used in unfold’s production such as observatory location and details of observation method – and visualizations comprise unfold.mod, as exhibited at FACT Liverpool in 2016 (see Figure 6.2). The lack of completion or singularity in unfold.mod and the works that comprise it, the gaps left between their various elements (metadata, visualizations, audifications) invite cognitive investment that is not simply free-form subjective, constructivist hermeneutics, but invites without didactics a more cognizant engagement with the source and processes involved, from which unfold is derived. The elements comprising each print – metadata and a range of visualizations – are laid out in series, the connections between and the reasons for their being grouped are not made explicit. For each pair of prints there is a pair of headphones, and again the relationship between these elements is not entirely clear, other than that they are united by a common data set that they render perceptible in different ways. The spaces, breaks or escape from immersion offered by such discontinuities do not simply offer a hermeneutic opportunity, wherein the viewer is the sole or primary site of the work’s determination, but provide opportunities whereby one might enter into a more cognizant relationship with the work, its themes and constituent elements – the labour of an artist, observatory, scientific community, stars and so on. The audible scanning of the data gives one a sense of a system patiently, iteratively deriving sense from otherwise unfathomable complexity of the data, even if that sense itself is not revealed to us explicitly, we hear a complex network and system striving for sense. Beyond the spectacle of immersion and a sufficient aesthetics, this collection of disjointed but related works forms a diagram or schematic that the viewer must trace in order to grasp the problem behind the work or the object to which it responds. Undoubtedly the works comprising unfold.mod are more demanding works – the sound inspires no awe, has none of the visceral impact or drama

152

Immanence and Immersion

of unfold, there is no synchronicity of audiovisual elements – but this renders the work all the more inviting and refrains from positioning the vieweraudient at the centre of the work, refrains from making an affirmation of the viewers being-in-the-presence-of the work its primary ‘spectacular’ aim. A sense of the alien and alienation is maintained, and this provides a welcome challenge to thought, a challenge to think rather than an invitation to ‘just feel’ (Kurokawa 2016).

6.2 Towards a corruption of aesthetic sufficiency Where the manifest image underpins the phenomenalism that takes reality to be as it appears, an immanent system is posited where all is accessible within a domain of appearances, making possible a direct realism. Yet for the likes of philosophers as different as Sellars and Deleuze, such a position raises the question of its own conditions, the conditions of the given. A concept of immanence built upon the manifest image finds expression in the reality of appearances and the aesthetics of immersion. The immanence that naturalism entails – that everything that exists falls within an account of nature, that there is not a two-worlds divide that would separate the human psyche from the natural world – cannot find adequate expression in immersion. Immersion attests to correlational techniques that are inadequate in accounting for and responding to the imperceptibles that populate the scientific image upon which naturalism is structured. The shocks of the real emanating from an expanding scientific image are registered and explored in artistic practices, yet where they are grounded in an aesthetics of immersion they solicit engagement at an affective register that frequently obscures conceptual mediation and representation, re-centring the subject within the immersive experience. Where immersion is an experience or aesthetics of immanence it can only be an immanence founded upon correlationism, an immanence of experience that must disavow the existence of imperceptible entities populating the scientific or naturalistic image as such entities are addressed and revealed only through complex systems of mediation, representation and formalization that vitiate a concept of reality founded upon pre-symbolic affectivity and

The Scientific Image

153

the immediacy of appearances. Where we wish to address a naturalistic or scientific image of reality, the aesthetic strategy employed cannot be one that shies away from abstraction, formalization and conceptualism in order to reassert the primacy of transcendental auto-affection. Consequently we must find alternative aesthetic strategies not bound to immersion, and consequently the irreducibility of the correlation between the subject and reality, but inviting the corruption or contamination of immersion through conceptual, schematic and formalized mediation that would inhibit the appearance of aesthetic sufficiency.

7

Repurposing Conceptualism

In place of a rejection of representation intended to preserve the immediacy of the real, the real’s excess over aesthetic experience requires a methodology accommodating representation that nonetheless retains a commitment to the real. While this conception of the real entails an excess, this is not an excess that might vitiate a commitment to immanence. This excess arises from a methodological limitation rather than ontological excess, and where the real is in excess of experience this excess is recouped through a broadening of methodological approaches to include the conceptual and formalized. Where a practice entails representation, and this representation is understood to be conceptual in nature it does not necessarily follow that this practice is only concerned with the nature of concepts or that it is devoid of concern for a concrete sense of reality. Here we seek a realist project that does not reject conceptualism on the grounds that it consigns thought to an anthropocentric sphere of representation devoid of concern for the real or that which falls outside of the symbolic, but rather a repurposing of conceptualism within a broader realist project. More specifically we should consider how the fruits of conceptualism might come in useful for a realist project concerned with a naturalistic conception of the real. Where naturalism posits a mindindependent reality, a reality in excess of our experience of it, conceptualism and representation are useful tools for preserving a distinction between the act of representation and the represented, a distinction attending to the excess of reality over experience. While the concept is a representation for us, it is nonetheless a corrigible representation of a non-conceptual reality. What a methodological conceptualism offers is a thinking of the real without collapsing the real into experience, the maintenance of both immanence and a reality beyond experience.

156

Immanence and Immersion

This repurposing of conceptualism towards a contemporary, noncorrelational realism is evident in the demands Suhail Malik makes of art, wherein the repurposing of conceptualism suggests an exit strategy from the aesthetic sufficiency underpinning the indeterminacy of contemporary art. In contrast to the object-oriented ontology (OOO) that currently exercises considerable influence within the art world through what, in this context, amounts to a comfortable conservatism and somewhat retroactive gesture of privileging the material autonomy and internal composition of art objects, ‘the critique of correlationism made by rationalist [speculative realism] is not the generalization of aesthetic experience [OOO] but, to the contrary, the demonstration that there can be a knowledge of what has never been experienced’ (Malik 2015, 189). It is therefore the challenges posed by formalized knowledge rather than affective experience that will determine the artistic methodologies appropriate to a naturalistic, rationalist conception of the real. This rationalist conception of the real, and the challenges it poses to experience through a reversal and reorientation of LeWitt’s first sentence on conceptual art, suggests a more intriguing and radical upheaval within artistic practice than that of a generalized aesthetics.1 Malik takes contemporary art to be the dominant genre of the international art scene. For Malik the aesthetics and indeterminacy of central importance to contemporary art are established through an undermining of authorial intent, a death of the author, wherein meaning is determined at the point of reception rather than production. As a consequence of this logic that places the power of determination within a perceiving subject of aesthetic experience contemporary art, despite the aforementioned influence of OOO, is understood to operate within the broader logic of correlationism where this subject constitutes the irreducible condition of reality. It is the relation between subject and object that determines the object as such and its significance. Where the object in question is art, art is constituted as such at the point of reception rather than production, it is made in the subjective assertion or decision that ‘this is art’. It is this indeterminacy and its contribution to a correlationist logic that Malik resists. In place of this correlationist position Malik re-asserts a kind of autonomy of art, yet this is

1 See http://www.ubu.com/papers/lewitt_sentences.html.

Repurposing Conceptualism

157

not to be confused with a return to modernist aesthetics, as the commitment to materiality and medium therein entails a primacy of sensory experience as a form of direct experience. Emphasis upon materiality is therefore an emphasis upon sensory experience that centralizes that experience and the subject of aesthetic experience. To escape this trap of aesthetic materialism that while asserting the autonomy of the art object asserts the irreducible centrality of the subject, it is rather an indifference that Malik asserts, an art that has no need of aesthetic actualization or execution, art determined as such through a purely formal set of instructions that would be indifferent to the accidents of any instance of actualization. This indifference to aesthetic actualization places knowledge of art ahead of sensory experience, prioritizing an ‘instruction art [that] need not be experienced at all, but only known, in order to be art’ (Malik 2015, 190). Accordingly it would be the instructions for execution of Sol LeWitt’s line drawings that constitute art, rather than the executed and aesthetically rendered line drawings that have the status of a kind of residual by-product. Here we find an assertion of an algorithmic art that is not reducible to its digital implementation and aesthetics. Where art is known to exist in a series of authored instructions that ultimately require no execution, no rendering into material form, we are beyond what Malik identifies as the indeterminate aesthetics of contemporary art. The orientation beyond aesthetic sufficiency and the correlational underpinnings of indeterminacy that Malik’s exit strategy entails have resonances with the current attempt to consider the limitations of immersive aesthetics which often share similar commitments as those Malik identifies as underpinning contemporary art. Yet before undertaking a wholesale evisceration of our experiential conditions it is worth considering how the proposed exit from contemporary art via instruction art is to assert a speculative futurity and avoid collapsing back into an aborted Conceptualism. While Malik asserts a commitment to a real beyond the bounds of Conceptualism, it is not clear how the example of instruction art connects to this concept of the real, rather than simply an anti-aesthetics indifferent to actualization, that might equally well be indifferent to any notion of the real. That an instruction art indifferent to aesthetic realization is ‘indifferent to you’ does not assure alignment with the real. Indifference alone is not sufficient as this indifference

158

Immanence and Immersion

may operate both ways, towards the subject and the real. The turn towards instructions alone may impose a constraint of pure Conceptualism, an art with and about concepts rather than a reorientation of conceptualism towards the real. Following the rationalist strains of speculative realism that Malik is drawn to, the return to conceptualism must consider the ‘pictorial adequacy that concepts bear to nonconceptual reality’ to avoid becoming constrained within a pure Conceptualism (Brassier 2016).2 What should be noted here is the extent to which the lesson learned from Conceptualism and manifest in Osborne’s competing definition of contemporary art as an anti-aesthetic, post-conceptual practice, is ‘the critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials’ (Osborne 2013, 48).3 Any anti-aesthetics entails an aesthetic remainder or residue. Conceptualism’s anti-aesthetics is not a complete evisceration of aesthetics but an assertion of the latter’s insufficiency. The demonstration of art’s necessary conceptuality through experiments in pure Conceptualism had the consequence of highlighting art’s ineliminable aesthetic remainder. That this remainder survived pure Conceptualism should not result in a reflexive return to aesthetic sufficiency and immersion on the grounds of pure Conceptualism’s ‘failure’, but in the necessity of critically attending to an ineliminable yet insufficient aesthetic dimension. An anti-aesthetics attending to the indifference of the real is not simply null but entailing an impoverished or minimally aesthetic depiction of aesthetic insufficiency that is unavoidable despite orientation beyond the limits of experience. Thus the evisceration of experience that Malik calls for will nonetheless leave a trace within the aesthetic register, a residual aesthetics of the void. An anti-aesthetics of instruction is not sufficient without those instructions functioning as a means of orientation around an indifferent and perhaps impervious real. Abstention from aesthetics in the name of an indifferent real risks a kind of onto-aesthetic gesture: reality is beyond aesthetics, known rather than experienced, and so this must be reflected in an aesthetic register through an abandonment of aesthetics. The reflection characteristic of onto-aesthetic

2 This concept of ‘pictorial adequacy’ is returned to in more detail below. 3 Osborne’s concept of contemporary art is discussed in more detail in the introduction.

Repurposing Conceptualism

159

conflation remains; having posited an indifferent real beyond experience, the aesthetics proper to such a conception of the real are null, a formulation that is then reflected in an anti-aesthetics of instruction art. Where we bring into question the necessity of this reflection, the indifference of the real entails an indifference to aesthetics that in refusing to collapse the real within the thresholds of experience consequently unbinds aesthetics from a necessary reflection of the real, even where this reflection takes the form of abstention. An aesthetic strategy adequate to an indifferent conception of the real would be one where the aesthetic is unbound from any fidelity to the real, any requirement to reflect or exemplify. In place of abstention we should pursue a critical engagement with the insufficiency of aesthetics, an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials, a working with and through the aesthetic in a manner attesting to its insufficiency while remaining oriented towards the real. In place of the wholesale abandonment of aesthetic experience advocated in the name of instruction art a more stereoscopic approach, a conjoining of images, entailing ‘an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials’ (Osborne 2013,  48) might avoid a collapse back into Conceptualism that obfuscates the realist impetus in a repurposing of the conceptual. The indifference of importance to Malik’s exit strategy appears misaligned; rather than an art ‘indifferent and impervious to you’, it is the task of art to aid mapping or orientation around a real that is ‘indifferent and impervious to you’ (Malik 2015, 191). This indifference is thereby unilateral, being the indifference of the real rather than the indifference of art. Acknowledging the ineliminable aesthetic dimension of art means acknowledging that art is not wholly indifferent ‘to you’ even where it takes as its subject the indifference of the real. Consequently, it is within the real rather than the art that this indifference resides. As counter-correlationist aesthetic strategies may take a number of forms the indifference of the real need not be wholly reflected in an art which nonetheless takes this indifference as its subject. What should be resisted is an ontological primacy of perception, an aesthetic sufficiency that would occlude the indifference of the real in support of correlationism. Where this indifference should impact upon aesthetics is through a refusal of aesthetic sufficiency and a refusal to constrain a concept of reality through its equation

160

Immanence and Immersion

with experience. Acknowledgement of this indifference results in a puncturing and contamination of immersion. That this immersive aesthetic be sufficiently punctured requires concept and representation to direct thought beyond the apparent and immediate, a gesture that through degrees of pictorial adequacy undoes the indeterminacy that Malik takes to be constitutive of contemporary art’s correlationism. This indifference which can be known but not felt must puncture the bubble of immersion, and the means of this puncture are the conceptual, representational and formalized means of knowing. Indifference to actualization alone is simply a reflection or mimesis of the real as ‘seen’ from an aesthetic domain, even where it is seen to be a blind spot. This blind spot has the status of the tuché or punctum that Hal Foster aligns with an eruption of the real, understood as trauma, in the work of Warhol and Richter (Foster 1996, 131–6). The appearance of imperfections in the photographic and print works of Warhol and Richter such as tears, streaks and floating flashes – opacities in the field of vision that occlude mechanically represented photographic content – expose the material process of production. The appearances of such ‘glitches’ presents the brute reality and indifference of the medium to the content impressed upon it and to any meaningfulness for the viewing subject. These blind spots, tears or punctures in the image, empty voids, are asignifying in that they present a mute and indifferent real to the viewer that is classed as affective trauma in Foster’s account, presenting the viewer with nothing, with an indifferent void, an absence of meaningful and intentional content. Where these opacities are left void, simply as blind spots, they attest to a noumenal sense of the real as that outside of representation, that of which we cannot speak and so must pass over, or repeatedly return to, in silence. Blind spots as manifestations of the real impose a phenomenological constraint upon thinking the real in that the indifferent real cannot be coherently spoken of beyond its appearance as a blind spot and the aesthetics of this appearance as such. The real as seen from this perspective is mute, incomprehensible. While such a characterization of the real befits a phenomenological disposition, this is less the case for a position courting a rational and scientific account of the real, such as that indirectly appealed to by Malik through references to a rationalist strain of speculative realism. Where the glitch, opacity or blind spot is a

Repurposing Conceptualism

161

manifestation of an incomprehensible real, in Malik’s setting of the real this void or blind spot is filled out with instructions, rather than simply void or incomprehensible. The filling out of this void with instructions represents a becoming comprehensible of the real. Yet the nature of these instructions is key to ascertaining their purchase upon a real that is scientistically construed. The tenacity of this purchase hinges upon the extent to which these instructions participate in some form of ‘picturing’ by which their conceptual adequacy to non-conceptual reality might be assessed. Where immersion presents a pre-symbolic affective immediacy, the concept alone contaminates immersion and vitiates its aesthetic sufficiency. Yet to connect this conceptual puncture of the immersive to something other than a purely aesthetic strategy, the concept that performs this puncture must have a degree of pictorial adequacy to non-conceptual reality. Katie Paterson’s Ideas (2015–) are a series of ongoing works to exist in the imagination, yet despite this imaginary status their conceptual content indexes the real. Each work in the series takes the form of a short sentence or statement. Where early conceptual works – which also took the form of sentences, instructions, lists and statements, making possible Seth Siegelaub’s catalogue-exhibitions – might have initially sought to circumvent a commercial art market through their immateriality, the exchange value of Paterson’s Ideas are enhanced through being presented in solid silver.4 Paterson’s Ideas sometimes suggest fairy-talelike whimsy, as in A place that exists only in moonlight, which demonstrates the continuation of thematic interest in the spectra of celestial bodies. Where arthistorical references are entailed, as in A beach made with dust from spiral galaxies which locates the formal aspects of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in a cosmological context, this conceptual work does not rely upon intertextuality alone, but upon our understanding of complex astronomical bodies. In The sound of the universe carved into a dot we find the continuation of an interest in phonographic inscription, and in The universe’s lights switched off one by one the overarching theme of extinction. This collection of works presents a poetics of the real drawing upon the themes of extinction and astronomical phenomena that pervade Paterson’s work. In this way Paterson’s Ideas entail

4 See http://www.katiepaterson.org/ideas/.

162

Immanence and Immersion

an orientation towards the real found in the context for Malik’s proposed instructional anti-aesthetics, yet the concepts comprising the Ideas remain bound to a sense of the real in a way that Malik’s instructions might not. The Ideas remain indifferent to the accidents of actualization, yet remain bound to a cosmological and ultimately naturalistic conception of the real. The indifference in Paterson’s Ideas thereby remains unilateral, extending to aesthetic realization yet not to concepts of the real. The concepts of picturing and pictorial adequacy mentioned above are taken from Sellars and account for an isomorphism between the intellect and the real (Sellars 1963, 50–9). This isomorphism supports an ontological commitment to a mind-independent reality while providing an account of how one comes to know such a reality. This isomorphism does not entail transparent reflection and resemblance, but rather a process of encoding and representation that Sellars groups within the term ‘picturing’. Picturing should not suggest resemblance or mirroring, but rather a system of projection or encoding wherein the picture is a corrigible model of real events that has meaning only within the system responsible for that encoding. Rather than a strictly visual operation, an analogical example of picturing given by Sellars is the way in which a recorded waveform – Sellars gives the example of phonographic inscriptions, but digital sampling is equally relevant – ‘pictures’ a piece of music without resembling it. As a visual form the wave does not present to us that which is encoded in it – we do not hear the sound with our eyes – it is only within the particular physical habitus of the phonographic system that the complex information encoded in the recorded signal can be meaningfully decoded. Sellars’s account of picturing describes a relationship between the intellect or intentional order and a real, external environment independent from or indifferent to this intentionality. As such picturing is also described as a process of mapping, a process involved in the navigation of a real environment that is not reducible to internal imagination. As a cartographic procedure picturing does not directly or immediately present us with an image of this external reality but rather an encoded and corrigible representation that is isomorphic with yet distinct from the real. That there is translation and encoding in the procedure of picturing and mapping does not mean that the results of this picturing are divorced from the real in a manner that would

Repurposing Conceptualism

163

vitiate immanence and constrain us to some form of internal world whether textually or phenomenologically construed, as the outcomes of this picturing nonetheless belong to the real without resembling it, presenting a corrigible model and the terms of an isomorphic relation.5 This distinction between two orders, the real and intentional, implies a methodological rather than ontological distinction as the intellect must ultimately belong to the real order even if it does not immediately grasp it. These distinctions thereby remain immanent to the real. This picturing forms part of an exit strategy from both immersive aesthetics and Malik’s related characterization of contemporary art. The pictorial adequacy of concepts to non-conceptual reality is invoked here as a means of binding instructions or concepts, indicated by Malik as a route out of the aesthetic sufficiency of contemporary art, to a concept of the real. Such a binding at a conceptual level is necessary in asserting the unilateral indifference of the real and avoiding a collapse back into Conceptualism. Where an anti-aesthetic strategy is mobilized towards a post-correlational or scientistic realism, the unbinding of any necessity for aesthetic fidelity or reflection is thereby accompanied by a binding of conceptual content to the real. What needs to be noted here is that pictorial adequacy is concerned with conceptual rather than aesthetic adequacy to non-conceptual reality. That it is pictorial does not render it the aesthetic object of a constrained visual culture. As anti-aesthetic this adequacy is not concerned with familiarity or recognition and can accommodate aesthetic inadequacy with regard to nonconceptual reality as well as the aesthetic insufficiency characteristic of postconceptual practice. The aesthetic framing and presentation of conceptual content is unbound from any commitment to transparency or reflection of the real, as the aesthetic is of the intentional rather than real order, it is involved in a navigation and making sense of the real rather than a direct presentation of the real (see Sellars 1963, 50). While the concepts engaged may be considered in terms of their pictorial adequacy to non-conceptual reality 5 Here a resonance is intentionally drawn out between lack of resemblance or absence of reflection that picturing presents in its modelling of reality and the more abstract terms of Deleuzian ontology wherein cases of solution do not resemble their problematic conditions (see Deleuze 2004, 203). Here the terms of a mapping or picturing would be seen as cases of solution that do not necessarily resemble the real objects and events that provide their problematic conditions.

164

Immanence and Immersion

art’s aesthetic presentation of concepts need not itself reflect or seek to present an account of this reality. The unbinding of aesthetics from any requirement of fidelity to an imperceptible real that is to be known rather than felt follows a broader methodological distinction, discussed above, whereby conceptual and representational methods are considered better suited to accounting for reality than the aesthetic and affective. Where representation is maintained as an appropriate method for realism the intentional order of appearances is not necessarily confused with the objects and events of a noumenal order that in Sellars’s modified sense of this term is populated with the objects of a scientific image that might be known if not felt. Where Malik responds to a similar trajectory towards the real we find that in contrast to a phenomenological framing of the real as affective trauma Malik demands ‘concept, not feeling’; rather than mute incomprehensibility, the real that Malik demands art engage is ‘rational and formalized, not wanton and uncaptured’ (Malik 2015, 191). Manifest as a blind spot impervious to aesthetic sensibility the real nonetheless remains susceptible to formalization and capture, distinguishing it from the phenomenological manifestations of the real as affective punctum. In place of incomprehensible noumena, this appeal to the rational and formalized begins a process of fleshing out the noumenal with a scientific image. This process ‘commits us, in short, to the view that the perceptual world is phenomenal in something like the Kantian sense, the key difference being that the real or “noumenal” world which supports the “world of appearances” is not a metaphysical world of unknowable things in themselves, but simply the world as construed by scientific theory’ (Sellars 1963, 97).

7.1 Immanence and representation Adopting the orientation of a rationalist strain of speculative realism most notably espoused by Ray Brassier and the discussion of formalized, conceptual and representational methods posits a form of realism that entails rather than rejects representation as a means of knowing the real. Aesthetic experience is understood to be of the real but not a sufficient account of it. Consequently,

Repurposing Conceptualism

165

attempts to reject representation in favour of a more immediate conception of the real impose considerable epistemological constraints. This realism is thereby distinct from that found within accounts of sonic materialism that would conflate the real and experience due to a preference for immediacy and a suspicion of representation that has its origins in the oppositions of the audiovisual litany. Contrary to the materialist assertion that representation constitutes a distraction from a pre-symbolic concrete reality, a vitiating transcendence positing a difference in kind between nature and thought  – a transcendence that would posit a supernatural domain – Sellarsian transcendental naturalism, from which the brief account of picturing provided above is derived, ‘seeks to identify the general features any conceptual system must possess in order to know the nature of which it is a part’, furthermore this transcendental naturalism ‘is bound by a minimal constraint of immanence: the mind’s immanence to nature’ (Brassier 2016). The mind and its conceptual systems which entail representations are considered immanent to nature rather than constituting a vitiating transcendence that posits a supernatural other world exempt from the natural. The minimal immanence of transcendental naturalism is thereby distinct from what are perhaps more familiar philosophies of immanence asserting that what is is necessarily immanent to immediate experience, and that representation, seeing and conceptualization vitiates this immanence. Consequently it is not necessary to go beyond representation, to descend into the depths of pre-symbolic experience, in order to serve a realism or philosophical naturalism. The mind’s immanence to nature entails an immanence of conceptual and representational systems to reality, rather than the former’s transcendent vitiation of the latter. Within this formulation reality must accommodate both representation and represented within a single, immanent world. That this distinction is posited as immanent to reality does not entail contradiction, as this distinction is methodological rather than ontological, it is a distinction between the ways in which things are grasped by the mind: What is transcendentally immanent is the difference between representables and things-in-themselves, not the fusion of sensing and being proclaimed by philosophies of immanence (Bergson, Michel Henry). The transcendental difference between representables and things-in-themselves is not a

166

Immanence and Immersion

two-world theory (sensible/supersensible), but a double-aspect theory about a single, immanent world. The distinction between the sensible and the supersensible is methodological, not ontological. (Brassier 2016)

This ‘fusion of sensing and being’ mirrors the aforementioned conflation of the real and experience that occurs in materialist theories of immanence wherein matter is affectively constituted. It is this fusion or conflation that is avoided where immanence is understood in the context of a transcendental naturalism rather than affectivity. Consequently that which appears or is sensed is not all there is; subjective affectivity does not form the irreducible condition of reality from which representation distances us. Where representation finds a place within realism onto-aesthetic reflection, whereby aesthetics is required to exemplify ontology, is avoided and the real’s excess over experience – an excess arising from methodological issues rather than ontological difference in kind – is preserved. The reduction of the real to experience either as representation or pre-symbolic affectivity is avoided. Rather than an irreducible subjective affectivity, an imperceptible reality forms the conditions of subjective affectivity such that ‘what we know about our own minds cannot differ fundamentally in kind from what we know about other parts of nature’ (Brassier 2016). Such an assertion is not to displace the importance of the social and cultural through assertion of a biological determinism, but to assert the immanence of nature, that the social and cultural operate as nonlinear systems within nature rather than as instances of transcendence that attest to a supernatural domain. This assertion of the immanence of both mind and representation to nature draws upon the work of Ray Brassier, for whom the theme of extinction is of central importance to a nihilistic and unapologetically scientistic project of enlightenment. For Brassier extinction is not simply that which befalls individual biological species, but that which awaits all life due to finitude and inevitable exhaustion of the stars sustaining life. Recognition of this ‘solar catastrophe’ constitutes an ultimate assertion of our immanence to nature, rendering us subject to the same fate as all life, intelligent or otherwise, and ultimately all matter. Extinction is thereby figured as ‘that which levels the transcendence ascribed to the human ... . Thus, if the extinction of the sun is catastrophic, this is because it disarticulates the correlation’ (Brassier

Repurposing Conceptualism

167

2007, 224). Through its undoing of the correlation that would posit subjectivity as the condition of reality, the thought of extinction entails that of our immanence within nature. These themes of extinction and solar catastrophe can be identified throughout the work of Katie Paterson whose work entails the combination of a post-conceptual orientation towards the real by way of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials. The methods and conceptual orientation driving Paterson’s frequent use of sound and phonographic media takes both significantly beyond the aesthetic sufficiency of immersion to which they are often ascribed.

7.2 Extinction abounds: Katie Paterson Katie Paterson’s work draws upon the unintuitable scales that emerge from scientific disciplines such as cosmology, engaging spatio-temporal scales that see that of humanity, both on individual terms and those of the species as a whole, reduced to that of an easily missed pale blue dot. In its more domesticated, terrestrial forms Paterson’s work draws upon what Douglas Kahn has called ‘earth magnitudes’ (Kahn 2013), signals that operate on a global scale, being sent around or beyond the Earth in the production of an artwork. In EarthMoon-Earth (2007) Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is converted to Morse code which, as a radio signal, is then transmitted from the Earth, bounced of the surface of the moon and then recaptured on the Earth. The romantic genius is but a conduit for forces of nature; these transmissions return the genius’s work to the nature from which it arose. While the work of art is ‘returned’ to nature, this transmission is not carried out without alteration. The recaptured transmission is converted back into a musical score to be played by a Disklavier piano. Having been bounced off the moon, the received signal has sustained losses, with parts of the original transmission having been absorbed by the moon’s surface. The Moonlight Sonata is consequently riddled with holes, pauses and absences as a result of its transmission. These holes, pauses and silences have a status equivalent to that of the punctum identified by Foster in the work of Warhol, wherein such holes indicate an eruption of the real, an eruption that is subtractively manifest as a consuming silence (Foster 1996,

168

Immanence and Immersion

136). Distinct from the Lacanian conception of the traumatic real that Foster draws upon, the reality to which the silences puncturing Paterson’s rendition of the Moonlight Sonata attest is naturalistically construed, entailing fields and celestial bodies. The schematic form of the work constitutes a lossy, open circuit, a circuit that includes the moon and radio equipment among its list of nodes or components. The moon carries out a subtractive operation upon the signal it receives, perforating and fragmenting it before returning it to Earth. The original composition is thereby subject to a decomposition through the natural fields and objects that the schematic form of Earth-Moon-Earth comprises. Here nature takes back part of that which, according to the romantic myth of the genius, it inspired. It is through the losses and imperfections sustained during transmission that the theme of extinction running throughout Paterson’s oeuvre can be heard taking effect through the decay and decomposition that Moonlight Sonata is subject to. Both the losses sustained through transmission and the mechanistic reproduction of the resultant score by player piano foreclose any immersive potential that the sonic components of Earth-MoonEarth might have. A dispassionate and mechanistic reproduction perforated with discontinuities subtracts the work from any aesthetic sufficiency. Where the aesthetic qualities of the work are withdrawn the conceptual and schematic form of the work is asserted, a form that posits transit between a naturalized conception of the real and the ideal realm of human creativity. Subtractive in its aesthetic operations, Earth-Moon-Earth is nonetheless inscribed within a poetics of the real through which Paterson responds to themes of extinction and the ongoing Copernican displacement of humanity within the cosmos. At more extreme scales Paterson’s work has taken the form of a single grain of sand and sought to catalogue images relating to the scale of the universe, measured in billions of light years. Extending beyond the terrestrial orientation of Earth-Moon-Earth, Paterson’s engagement with extreme spatial and temporal scales cannot but engage the theme of extinction. History of Darkness is an ongoing archive of slides that present snapshots of the history of the universe, snapshots depicting locations in the cosmos that are billions of light years from Earth. The history of the universe that this archive of black slides catalogues is one prior to the existence of life on Earth,

Repurposing Conceptualism

169

indexed according to scales that are wholly unintuitable. The blackness of the images presents the absence of visible light, and so the points in space and time presented are not only beyond the scope of human imagination but inaccessible via any form of immediate perception. Here the ancestral blackness of the universe is presented as an ‘arche-fossil’ puncturing immersive and correlational circles in terms of spatio-temporal scale and any primacy of perception (Meillassoux 2009, 10). Pointing in the opposite direction, towards the distant future rather than distant past, All the dead stars maps the locations of the 27 000 dead stars that, at the time of creation, had been documented by human kind. While the mapped stars are already dead, All the dead stars presents us with the knowledge that at some point our own star will burn out, joining the exhausted stellar bodies catalogued in this archive. Distinct from the ‘Earth magnitudes’ and interstellar scales of the works described above, Inside this desert lies the tiniest grain of sand (2010) used techniques developed in nanotechnology, one of the hallmarks of human technological progress and ingenuity, to chisel a single grain of sand taken from the Sahara Desert down to 0.00005 mm. This minute grain was returned to the Sahara, forever lost among the desert. Within the context of Paterson’s other works, this painstaking exercise assigns a certain futility to humanity’s highest technical accomplishments in comparison to the scale of the universe. The loss and abandonment of this grain of sand, its minuscule scale dwarfed and rendered insignificant among a desert is equivalent to the Copernican decentralization which recognized humanity as adrift in the universe, no longer at its centre, eventually identifying ourselves, from a distance of six billion kilometres, as just one minuscule blue dot among a countless collection of stars and planets. The thought of this painstakingly produced object of a scale well beneath that of the average, naturally produced grain of sand, lost among a desert of sand is analogous to that of the Earth as just one tiny blue dot lost among a cosmic cloud. It is within this narrative of extinction, extreme scales and reality beyond humanity that we can position some of Paterson’s other works utilizing sound. As the world turns (2010) is a record player turning at the same speed as the Earth, one complete revolution every twenty-four hours, thereby taking

170

Immanence and Immersion

Figure 7.1 Katie Paterson, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull, 2007, three digital films, 1 h 57 m, film still. Photo © Katie Paterson 2007. Courtesy the Artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

four years to complete playback of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which is set upon the turntable. To the eye the turntable is static, and to the ear the music encoded in the grooves of the record remains silent, having been transposed by this alteration in speed significantly below the thresholds of human hearing.6 The record player produces a model of the Earth’s revolutions, the imperceptible movement noticeable only through noting the relative position of extraterrestrial objects such as the sun or stars. Yet beyond this analogous modelling that would play out each of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in approximate synchronicity with their occurrence on Earth, there is the further significance of Paterson’s production of a geological record. Paterson’s As the world turns prefigures the current fascination with the Anthropocene in the arts, the geological epoch in which human activity started to leave irredeemable traces within Earth’s ongoing geological record. The concept of the Anthropocene entails that of human extinction, as its premise is that the strata corresponding 6 The record player has a speed of around 0.0007  rpm, resulting in a downwards transposition of roughly 15.5 octaves. This transposition would result in A 440 having a frequency of approximately 0.013 Hz.

Repurposing Conceptualism

171

to the Anthropocene should be identifiable as such by some future non-human civilization. Where Paterson’s record player presents a model of the Earth, the record placed upon it presents a single plane, cross-section or strata, as if sliced out of the Earth, within which a record of human activity is encoded.7 As the world turns points to a reality beyond humanity in two senses, through imperceptible sound and movement attuning it with the Earth rather than the ear, and through a consignment of human culture to a strata of the Earth that will be covered over and surpassed by others. This geophonographic approach is also evident in Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull, which takes its name from three glaciers in Iceland. In this work Paterson takes sound recordings of each of these glaciers and has them pressed into records made of ice. The ice used in the production of each record is made from meltwater taken from the corresponding glacier. The ice records are then played back on turntables, the locked grooves at the end of each record causing the records to play continuously until they have melted (see Figure 7.1). During this process the sound recordings of the glaciers merges with that of the ice within which they are encoded. As a presentation of natural flows – the melting of ice into water – and sound as such, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull plays into the discourse of a sonic materialism that conceives of reality as a processual flux and flow to which a sonic sensibility – opposed to the apparent stasis and discretion of visual culture – is proper. Yet where sonic materialism identifies reality as not only being beyond representation but epistemologically occluded by representation, it is through representation that this work best addresses a non-anthropocentric conception of the real, a conception of the real to which sonic materialism also lays claim but proposes to attain via pre-symbolic and affective means. To be present, immersed in the flux and flows presented in this work as the affective elements of a pre-symbolic reality presents less than half of the story, being incapable of accounting for the work’s framing of global climate change. An account of the latter requires conceptual modelling, representation and abstractions that are considered to vitiate the immediacy of an affective sonic materialism.

7 For a further discussion of practices linking geological and phonographic practices see ‘Ur-writings: A geophonographic fiction’ (Schrimshaw 2015b).

172

Immanence and Immersion

While being present among the unfolding flows and fluxes of sound and ice presents the listener with an affectively constrained reality of sound itself, the listener must take this model of geological processes and climate change and project it into the future in order to situate the work within the theme of extinction that runs through Paterson’s oeuvre. Thus in Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull we find two levels or conceptions of reality presented, one being that of sound itself understood to be an exemplar of the flux, flow and becoming of reality beyond its consignment to conceptuality and representation, the other being that of glaciers as real, dynamic objects subject to changes in the global climate, a naturalistic conception of reality. While both pertain to levels of reality, the former is that of sensation and conditioned by the thresholds of perception, whereas the latter pertains to the reality of a global system in excess such thresholds. Beyond an auditory presentation of dynamic materiality through flux and flow, the significance of the work and its relation to a non-anthropocentric conception of reality relies upon representation, specifically that of global climate change as an unfolding extinction event. Where the initial recordings from the glacier present the listener with auditory materials within which one may become immersed, the gradual exhaustion of these sounds through the melting of the medium within which they are encoded presents an increasingly alienating experience. Once the materials have been exhausted we are left with the noise of the needle on the turntable platter. Where Friedrich Kittler equates the phonographic tracing of a cranial suture with an indexing of the real, the exhaustion of the ice in Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull results in the needle indexing a barren platter, never intended to be heard, that can be equally aligned with a conception of the real wherein the melting of ice is part of an extinction event uncovering terrain unknown to humanity (see Kittler 1999, 42–51). The insufficiency of the aesthetic content of the work calls for conceptual recuperation. As aesthetic experience of the work becomes increasingly brute and alienating while aesthetic sufficiency is withdrawn, conceptualization of the work steps into the gaps opening before us. Alienated by a withdrawal of aesthetic sufficiency the listener must call upon the conceptual and schematic form of the work to make sense of the materials presented and the work’s

Repurposing Conceptualism

173

adequacy in indexing or picturing a reality beyond the limits of perception, rather than simply the flux and affective materiality of sound itself. Thus it is the work’s counter-immersive strategy, a progressive withdrawal of aesthetic sufficiency to be compensated for through conceptual and representational reinscription, that the work pertains to a non-anthropocentric conception of reality.

8

The Stratification of Immanence

So far we have addressed a range of artistic practices utilizing sound yet presenting counter-immersive strategies that break with the terms of the audiovisual litany. Through identifying resonances with philosophical arguments these counter-immersive strategies connect to a concept of immanence entailing a broadly naturalistic conception of the real. Where immersion is considered the aesthetic manifestation of immanence, immanence is constrained within the confines of an ‘acoustic’ condition privileging affective immediacy. The following outlines how immanence may be set apart from immersion by showing how the former may entail the stratifying tendencies of ‘the visual’ while extending beyond the confines of the latter.

8.1 Immanence contra immersion Contrary to readings of Deleuze that prioritize or render teleological the destratified, deterritorialized and so on, stratification of – or within – immanence is a recurring theme throughout Deleuze’s work. The interleaving of instances of transcendence within an absolute immanence can be seen at the heart of Deleuzian ontology, specifically in the relations between the virtual and actual or the less well-known but equivalent dyad of problems and solutions. In Difference and Repetition we find the virtual defined as a field genetic conditions or source of generative potential described in the terms of a ‘problematic Idea’ (Deleuze 2004, 203). In this context the ‘problem’ is not to be thought in a pejorative sense but as a field or collection of genetic elements that form the conditions of production. The problem is therefore a ‘positive’ or productive site of generative potential that falls within the virtual side of Deleuze’s

176

Immanence and Immersion

ontology. Solutions to this ‘problem’ constitute the components of Deleuze’s conception of the actual: apparent, possible, qualitative and identifiable reality. A crude example of how this fits into Deleuzian realism is to consider sound as the problem to which the ear and eventually listening emerges as a solution. Keeping in mind the equivalence of problems and Ideas in Deleuze’s terminology, both referring to a virtual field of genetic elements and generative relations, Deleuze describes how ‘the Idea of colour, for example, is like white light which perplicates within itself the genetic elements and relations of all the colours, but is actualised in the diverse colours with their respective spaces; or the Idea of sound, which is also like white noise’ (Deleuze 2004, 258). As diverse colours constitute solutions to the problematic Idea of light, colours that are actualized through the selective yet passive synthesis of the eye that responds only to a specific bandwidth of frequencies, differing ears and the sounds they yield constitute differing solutions to the Idea or problem of sound, with the human ear forming a solution and concrescence of sound within a bandwidth of roughly twenty to twenty-thousand Hertz. What we refer to as sound, that bandwidth of frequencies to which the human ear responds, is only a partial solution to the problem of noise. The ear emerges as a partial solution within noise as the virtual field or problematic Idea of sound. The immanent problem is incarnated or embodied within cases of solution – cases of solution that need not resemble or exemplify their problematic conditions. The problematic Idea remains in excess of its actual solutions, not being exhausted by any single solution, and so the problem of sound remains in excess of its actualization through the ear, not being reducible to what is heard. Through its virtuality the noise of the problematic ‘Idea of sound’ constitutes the source of a generative potential to which diverse sounds constitute actual solutions. Having rendered the abstract terms of Deleuze’s ontology a little more specific, and identified the equivalence between the well-known virtual–actual dyad and the perhaps less known problem–solution dyad, we can now address how this dyad describes a relation between immanence and transcendence at the heart of Deleuzian ontology. Outlining the relative transcendence of problems and solutions Deleuze describes how the problem is at once both transcendent and immanent in relation to its solutions. Transcendent, because it consists in a system of ideal liaisons or

The Stratification of Immanence

177

differential relations between genetic elements. Immanent, because these liaisons or differential relations are incarnated in the actual relations which do not resemble them and are defined by the field of solution. (Deleuze 2004, 203)

Here the problem, as the virtual term, is the expansive term that by virtue of its excess over cases of solution constitutes an instance of relative rather than absolute transcendence. The immanent relation between problems and solutions means that transcendence could also be ascribed to the solution which is differentiated from the problematic conditions that accommodate it. In relation to instances of solution the problem is transcendent insofar as it constitutes the genetic conditions or field of potential from which and in relation to which solutions emerge as such. The problem transcends the solution in so far as it remains in excess of its solutions. Returning to a sonic example, noise – as the name given to the field constituting the generative potential of all sound – remains in excess of the heard, imperceptible in its totality from any one instance of solution, from any one instance of listening. Where the problematic Idea of sound remains imperceptible it transcends any single actualization of the sonic. The problem is nonetheless immanent to the solution in which it is partially incarnated. The ear emerges as a solution within the otherwise imperceptible problematic Idea of sound, a concrescence incarnating a particular bandwidth of the noise of this problematic field; the solution is a partial solution but in this partiality it is nonetheless immanent. As a partial solution and selective operation of passive synthesis the solution instantiates a transcendence from its problematic conditions, yet only a partial and relative transcendence occurring within a field of absolute immanence. Differentiation, distinction and relative transcendence is thereby accommodated within Deleuze’s concept of absolute immanence. What we also find in Deleuze’s account of relative transcendences within immanence is an affirmation of non-resemblance or rejection of the necessity of reflection that has resonances with the resistance to onto-aesthetic conflation presented above. Virtual or genetic elements are incarnated within actual solutions which ‘do not resemble them’ (Deleuze 2004, 203). Within Deleuze’s ontology there is no necessity for aesthetic actuality to resemble or exemplify ontological or virtual conditions as the actual solution cannot

178

Immanence and Immersion

but embody or incarnate its immanent ontology. Where reflection and resemblance is enforced a conflation of aesthetics and ontology, an ontoaesthetic confusion, occurs wherein the qualitative solution is taken to be identical with its conditions. Reality is thereby truncated within the thresholds of possible experience. That solution need not resemble or reflect its problem avoids this truncation and preserves the excess of the real beyond experience or actualization. Sound need not resemble the problematic conditions to which it emerges as a qualitative solution. The lack of resemblance between problem and solution, virtual and actual, preserves the excess of the former over the latter; as the solution is only a partial solution it neither reflects nor resembles its conditions. This excess of the virtual problem over the actual solution is equivalent to that described above in terms of reality’s excess over experience and appearance. It is again necessary to indicate that this excess is not one of an ontological difference in kind positing supernaturalism, as these differentiations nonetheless unfold within absolute immanence, but rather an excess arising out of epistemological and methodological issues. Consequently the Idea can be known if not experienced, it can be an object of knowledge if not one of aesthetics, subject to formalization if not intuition. While the noise constitutive of the virtual conditions of actual auditory solutions or qualitative effects may remain imperceptible, falling outside of the bandwidth of embodied perception, these virtual conditions may nonetheless be accessed via other methods and subject to formalization and modelling. While Deleuze’s later work will attempt redress a deterministic or hierarchically genetic conception of virtuality, we nonetheless find accounts of relative transcendence within immanence in later works, such as What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) wherein planes of immanence are situated or interleaved within ‘THE plane of immanence’, within absolute immanence. In an analogy befitting a further sonic extension Deleuze and Guattari describe how ‘concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 36). Here the plane of immanence has the status of a fundamental or carrier that provides the ground or basic material that will be complicated through modulation or multiplication, adding information, diversity and identifiable timbral characteristics. Distinctive characteristics

The Stratification of Immanence

179

arise atop a fundamental or carrier which nonetheless remains immanent to them. Through modulation and multiplication these waves become capable of taking on specific identities, characters and distinctiveness, of conveying information and participating in representation. Such operations entail a relative transcendence with regard to a grounding wave that nonetheless remains immanent to them. Rather than pursue further analogy with sound synthesis and waves in general, the status of this ‘single wave’, this carrier or fundamental as analogically related to a plane of absolute immanence should be clarified. The pursuit of immanence is ultimately a pursuit of the absolute. The plane of absolute immanence is not a philosophical concept but the prephilosophical ground of philosophy. It is upon this ground that philosophy creates its concepts. Absolute immanence is that which captures everything, leaving nothing remaining, permitting no ontological excess that would vitiate immanence. But what is this plane of immanence that subtends conceptuality? If absolute immanence is the condition rather than product of conceptual activity it must be identified in a different register or order of existence, without positing irreducible transcendence. Deleuze and Guattari state that concepts presuppose, relate or refer to the plane of immanence as a form of ‘nonconceptual understanding’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 40). This nonconceptual understanding is a form of pre-symbolic experience, a depth to which one descends through a form of pharmacodynamic experimentation, sensory distortion or hallucination that through a ‘transcendent exercise’ would reveal ‘intensity in itself ’, sensation on its own terms not directed to any object (Deleuze 2004, 297). Where this methodology is suggested as a means of attaining absolute immanence, Deleuze and Guattari submit to a form of immanence that we have been trying to escape, one that renders everything immanent to pre-symbolic or affective experience. It is through this fusion of sensing and being in a non-conceptual understanding that we find sign of a resurgent vitalism informing Deleuze’s later claim that ‘a life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss’ (Deleuze 2005, 27). Against this equation of immanence and life, the above account of the plane of immanence as that which concepts presuppose as a form of non-conceptual understanding should be supplanted with a concept of

180

Immanence and Immersion

immanence more capable of ‘capturing everything’ beyond a domain of nonconceptual affectivity and intuition, a plane of immanence as a non-conceptual reality to which concepts refer through differing degrees of pictorial adequacy. Non-conceptual reality in place of a non-conceptual understanding or intuition is considered a more adequate delimitation of a plane of immanence capable of ‘capturing everything’ in that its openness to an expansive scientific image refuses to limit itself to a domain of intensive sensation that would constrain immanence to a form of affective vitalism, however impersonal this may claim to be. This realism identifies non-conceptual reality as the physical condition for non-conceptual experience and understanding, and through this accounting for the physical conditions of non-conceptual experience identifies a more expansive and therefore adequate plane of immanence. The scale of this inclusive and expansive conception of immanence renders it beyond the scope of experience, as that which can be thought if not felt. If immanence is equated with a plane of impersonal affective experience or intuitive understanding this would suggest an immanence to that which experiences or understands, thereby vitiating absolute immanence: ‘Immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent  ... whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent to Something, we can be sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 45). Rather than the intensity of experience or sensation itself it is in the physical conditions of this experience, conditions which in themselves are devoid of experience or understanding, that we find a more adequate plane of immanence as that which is immanent only to itself, that within which all instances of relative transcendence emerge rather than in relation to which something is immanent. This is considered more adequate in that it is to a nonconceptual reality that is itself devoid of experience and understanding that we seek the base conditions of possibility for experience and understanding. Where relations within a philosophical system are relations of one thing to another, then the philosophy is described as one of transcendence as the relation of a to b requires their distinction at some level; where these relations are in something then the philosophical system is one grounded in immanence, wherein a is in b and/or vice versa. That a and b remain distinguishable while

The Stratification of Immanence

181

encapsulated within each other permits a degree of relative transcendence within an immanent system. That immanence should be characterized by this relationality or belonging in explains the temptation to render immanence aesthetically as immersion (see Noys 2014, 173, 182). Where a philosophy privileges a naturalistic realism this being in is ontological rather than aesthetic; one is in nature even if one does not experience nature immediately, beyond the localized nature of one’s own experiences. The immanence that captures everything within a single system or world is not necessarily immanent to experience, being defined at an ontological rather than aesthetic level, for which it provides the conditions. Where immanence entails assertion of one’s being in the absolute, nature, this being-in does not necessarily entail experience of immersion but existence in nature or the absolute. As being is an ontological issue, one cannot but be in and there is no necessity for this to be reflected at an aesthetic register that is subject to the training and technique permitting distinction, differentiation, analysis and so on, states that are thought to vitiate the experience of immersion. One may be in at an ontological level yet instantiate transcendences at an experiential, aesthetic and epistemological level. This plane of absolute immanence that captures everything is one of two senses in which planes of immanence are deployed in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). In addition to the plane of absolute immanence discussed above, we find discussion of more localized systems of immanence that are posited by ‘great philosophers’: ‘In the end does not every great philosopher lay out a new plane of immanence, introduce a new substance of being and draw up a new image of thought, so that there could not be two great philosophers on the same plane?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 51). In Kant and Husserl, for example, we find immanent philosophical systems, yet in both instances this immanence is immanent to a subject rather than an immanence in itself. For Deleuze and Guattari this equates the subject with the plane of immanence which nothing escapes, rendering the subject an irreducible and universal condition of reality. In being immanent to something, this something reintroduces ontological transcendence, vitiating immanence. Where philosophers posit differing planes of immanence upon which they construct systems of concepts, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to

182

Immanence and Immersion

contain or capture these localized systems or planes of immanence within a plane of immanence that constitutes their ground. This is ‘THE plane of immanence’ that captures all other localized systems of immanence that in remaining immanent to something constitute instances of transcendence. We will say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. It is the base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane that does not succeed in thinking it. It is the most intimate within thought yet the absolute outside – an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world: it is immanence, ‘intimacy as the Outside, the exterior become the intrusion that stifles, and the reversal of both the one and the other’ ... . Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and not-internal inside. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 59–60)

THE plane of immanence is that which captures all other planes. Where planes of immanence are philosophically and conceptually constituted they are grounded in THE plane of immanence which constitutes their nonphilosophical conditions. As non-philosophical THE plane of immanence is defined elsewhere, for which the contenders presented herein have been a pre-symbolic register of affective experience or a physical reality as studied by contemporary science. That THE plane of immanence is described as ‘the absolute outside’ indicates its expansiveness, its capacity to capture everything. In trying to locate this absolute plane in accordance with contemporary ontological discourse it is that broadly physical reality studied by contemporary science that presents the most expansive delimitation and description of this outside, most promising in its attempt to capture everything. Alternatively, as the nonthought within thought we might think of this plane in the transcendental empiricist terms of sensation itself, as the intensive preconditions of thought, yet in attempting to rise to the challenge of absolute immanence the net must be cast wider in accommodating ontological discourses that account for the conditions of sensation. This plane must include the physical conditions of thought, the opaque matters and processes

The Stratification of Immanence

183

enabling a thought. This broadly physicalist perspective is considered more promising certainly than assertions of the primacy of an irreducible affectivity which must ultimately dismiss the existence of imperceptibles, of that which remains beyond any possible experience, as calculational devices useful only in describing the reality of experience rather than the existence of a mindindependent or indifferent reality. While delimiting an absolute outside THE plane of immanence also accounts for the most intimate of interiorities. It is the foldings of this absolute plane of immanence that give rise to such interiorities, constituting exterior conditions that foldings render as regional interiorities. This formation of interiorities through folds in THE plane of absolute immanence is analogous to the rolling-up and unrolling of concepts through a wavelike motion mentioned above. Corresponding to the ‘extimate’ topology of the plane of immanence, the embedding of interiorities within an absolute outside is accompanied by an internalization of exteriority (Miller 2008). This seemingly paradoxical plane is both the most intimate of interiorities and the most distant of exteriorities. It is more distant than any external world insofar as this is the external world that we readily perceive and objectify through cultural techniques of perception, a world that while external is nonetheless familiar. It’s distance is due to its alien unfamiliarity, being so far from everyday experiences, from anything that we might recognize within the confines of quotidian perception. The internal worlds that THE plane of immanence subtends are those experiences of subjective interiority; it is considered deeper in that it provides the conditions for those subjective interiorities. It is within or upon THE plane of immanence that these localized instances of transcendence constitutive of interiority and exteriority occur as the products of folds, rolls or contractions of the absolute. A maximally expansive conception of immanence is presented in transcendental naturalism: nothing is outside of nature. Within this immanence there remain methodological distinctions that, from the perspective of a philosophy whereby method and matter are confused within an affective continuum, may constitute relative instances of transcendence. These instances of transcendence may comprise acts of ‘seeing’, to draw upon that which Henry thought to vitiate affective immanence, or listening where this is understood as a culturally determined audile technique, in contrast with the physiological

184

Immanence and Immersion

capacity for hearing or feeling sound. Transcendental naturalism accommodates methods of representation, conceptualization and formalization, while asserting the immanence of such methods to nature. These distinctions or transcendences are relative transcendences within immanence, they constitute the ‘stratification of immanence’ (Brassier 2016) from within, differentiation as an event internal to reality rather than imposed upon it from without. Accordingly these instances of transcendence are understood as epistemological or methodological acts that break with immediacy, an analytical act of seeing or listening for example, rather than an ontological transcendence. As instances of stratification or transcendence within immanence, immanence is maintained, yet this ontological immanence is not reflected at the level of experience as an aesthetics of homogeneous immersion that stratification would vitiate. As an absolute outside THE plane of immanence is shown to be in excess of experience, in excess of the interiorities that its ripples, foldings and contractions constitute. It is through this excess, that identifies THE plane of immanence as the immanent conditions of experiential interiority, that absolute immanence is asserted at the expense of a sufficient aesthetics of immersion.

8.2 Beyond the circle In drawing to a close this argument it is worth setting out once again a summary of immersive aesthetics in order to reframe the target of this critique. Immersivity presents us with the ability to enter and occupy an artwork that is understood to be an enveloping environment rather than a distant object. This envelopment constitutes a multi-sensory sphere of experience. The intimacy of this immersive sphere sets immersive aesthetics apart from a narrowly defined ‘visual’ culture to which the distant and linear are often considered proper. In contrast to this distal and linear orientation of the visual the intimate and omnidirectional orientation of the immersive has been considered proper to a notion of acoustic space. This notion of acoustic space was set out by McLuhan and taken up as a defining characteristic of auditory culture, a culture that would seek to mirror ontological aspects of the medium to which it most readily attends, an apparently immanent merging of

The Stratification of Immanence

185

matter and method. The closing of this distal gap which collapses everything within the apparent immanence and immediacy of experience is achieved through overwhelming affectivity and proximity that exploits the possibility of addressing individuals at a physiological level. Where critical distance is diminished through an overwhelming affectivity that principally addresses the subject at a physiological level, the intensity of this affectivity has the politically problematic ‘power of immersion to deprive the human subject of the right of decision’ (Grau 2003, 110).1 This capacity for decision must be reclaimed through a critical vitiation of immersion and illusion partly carried out through a refocusing on the mediation occurring in the apparently immediate. Immersive aesthetics emphasizes presence, the immediate quality of being present. This is less an experience of being in the presence of an artwork from which one is separate, basking in its aura, than the experience of having a constitutive function within an artwork. As an experience of being present within, the experience of immersion is one of being centred. This centredness may be spatial in the sense of being in a ‘sweet spot’ between an array of loudspeakers, screens and so on, but also in the sense that the work is only completed through one’s experience of it, that it is at the point of reception that the work is done. Wherever one’s body is within space it is always the centre of an unfolding experience that is ultimately constitutive of the artwork, or at least its completion. Through this centring of the subject of an aesthetic experience the immersive participates in the aesthetic sufficiency that Malik identifies as supporting a correlationist logic within contemporary art (Malik 2015, 186). As a dimension of artistic practice there has been a co-evolution of the techniques required of an immersive aesthetics and those of illusion (see Grau 2003; Crary 1992). Where illusory techniques undermined the certainty of apparently immediate perception and foregrounded the synthetic operations of perception, a scepticism consequently induced in the perceiver finds an aesthetic conclusion in immersion, an experience of a pure, intimate and immediate interiority. Where external reality as immediately perceived is

1 See Sonic Warfare (Goodman 2010) for further discussion of political ambiguities involved in exploiting this physiological affectivity.

186

Immanence and Immersion

brought into question through a foregrounding of perception’s synthetic mediation, a withdrawal into the sufficient aesthetics of auto-affective interiority easily follows. Consequent to this withdrawal is a sense that experience itself is the ground or condition of reality rather than conditions external and impervious to immediate experience. It is precisely this siting of the real in aesthetic and affective experience which finds support in an immersive aesthetics privileging immediacy beyond or anterior to representation, that has been subject to critique herein. While foregrounding the synthetic operations of perception has the critical effect of directing thought towards internal, affective or physiological conditions, such a focusing of thought should not be allowed to collapse into a sufficient aesthetics or irreducible correlationism. In contrast to this reflexive withdrawal the highlighting of perceptual mediation may also engender critical attention to differing means of presentation, differing forms of mediated observation, representation, modelling, formalization and their varying degrees of adequacy to a reality in excess of and indifferent to experience. Accordingly, the extent to which methods of representation and formalization can present exit strategies from a hermetic interiority of immersion have been sought out through artistic and philosophical practice in an attempt to attend to a concept of the real that remains irreducible to perception and affective experience. Entailing mediation and broad notions of writing and inscription these methods of representation and formalization participate in an evacuation of the aesthetics and metaphysics of presence upholding the sufficiency of immersion. The experience of immersion is one of embodied presence that focuses more on the constitutive role of the receptive subject than the presence of a singular and original artwork – the latter posits a relation to the artwork whereas the former posits a productivity within an artwork and so projects a plane or image of immanence. The decomposition that this mediation enacts within the embodied presence constitutive of immersive aesthetics is comparable to that which reproduction was described as having upon the aura and authenticity of artworks in the work of Walter Benjamin. Aura can be summarized as a unique presence in time and space, the authenticity of an original (Benjamin 1992, 216–17). Where mediation accelerates auratic decay, immersive aesthetics seeks to mitigate this decay by reinstating auratic

The Stratification of Immanence

187

envelopment not around an original and external object but around the viewer as the site of authenticity. Where this authenticity has historically been associated with singular artworks, under the immersive and ‘acoustic’ conditions of contemporary art this aura and authenticity is less due to the unique spatio-temporal presence of an artwork than the spatio-temporally unique self-presence of the beholder. Aura shifts from the originality of the work to the originality of the experience under the acoustic and correlational conditions of much contemporary art. The degradation of an original object’s aura through reproduction shifts auratic authenticity from object to experience. The immersive’s effect of creating a feeling of centred and immediate presence is not the presence of an original object but a self-presence in the artwork as enveloping but incomplete environment. Where the intention of the work is immersion, it requires a subject to be immersed, as it is in the relation between subject and artwork that the artwork is completed. Each subjective encounter with the artwork becomes a unique moment of completion in which the work is formed, thus aura is formed anew in the correlation of the artwork and its ultimately constitutive beholder. There is once again a need to enact a degradation of the aura in order to critically question the consequences of the centralization of an immersed beholder that experiences a loss of critical distance and a diminished capacity for decision. Where the degradation of the work’s auratic authenticity took place through the reproduction and removal of an original, where the aura is ultimately constituted through the felt presence of the beholder the reproduction responsible for a degradation of aura must be identified as taking place within the apparent immediacy of the encounter. To continue its critical function, reproduction must follow the shifting site of auratic production from work to encounter. Reproductions occurring within the apparent immediacy of the encounter take the form of conceptualization and the syntheses of perception, both of which constitute selective reproductions and representations of reality. The foregrounding of the conceptual and physiological conditions of perception draw critical attention to the occluded mediation that remains active in the apparent immediacy of the immersive encounter. Analogous to what Benjamin identified in mechanical reproduction, we find in conceptuality another agent of auratic decay, instantiating a degradation of the sufficiency of presence, aesthetics and

188

Immanence and Immersion

experience. Where the immersive seeks to efface mediation towards a pure phenomenological experience, it is the various means of reproduction, evident mediation and active conceptualization that artistic practice entails that can be utilized to render art once again ‘useless for contemplative immersion’ (Benjamin 1992, 231). Immersion principally pertains to an aesthetic order, founded upon the experience of a constitutive self-presence. Immersion presupposes an immersed subject. While immersion projects an image of immanence wherein everything is built upon the foundations of a primordial, pre-symbolic experience, this image of immersive immanence is necessarily immanent to a subject who has this experience. Necessarily immanent to a subject the experience of immersion posits another localized plane of immanence, an instance of transcendence hermetically sealed yet nonetheless grounded in ‘THE’ plane of absolute immanence as the pre-philosophical ground of all such localized planes. This absolute immanence is to be understood as principally referring to the ontological grouping of all things, the ability to ‘capture everything’ within a single absolute plane of existence. As such a plane of immanence is immanent only to itself, and not to a subject, this absolute plane of immanence remains indifferent to experience. In its orientation beyond representation sonic materialism pursues immanence, yet its plane of immanence is conflated with a concept of matter determined by the thresholds of possible experience. Method and matter are both conflated and constrained within an affective continuum. Accordingly sonic materialism pursues the immanence of a pre-symbolic subjectivity to a affective-material continuum thought beyond and inaccessible via symbolic means. Where immanence is that which, due to its expansive inclusivity, can be thought if not felt or experienced symbolic methods should not be excluded from methodological considerations in the pursuit of immanence. If we are to accept the challenge of immanence, where the ‘best’ immanence is that which is the most expansive and inclusive, the most capable of capturing everything, we have a system or plane of immanence that can be thought if not felt due to its excess over the limits of possible experience. Consequently a system of immanence is attained at the expense of a sufficient aesthetics of immersion. The immersive allure of a sufficient aesthetics is to be abandoned as it constrains

The Stratification of Immanence

189

immanence within the limits of possible experience, rendering immanence immanent to the subject or individual that has this experience. A relative plane of immanence is thereby made to stand in for absolute immanence. A concept of immanence adequate to a non-anthropocentric reality cannot be grounded upon experience, wherein everything must be positioned within experience for immanence to be maintained. A more expansive and inclusive conception of immanence that includes the imperceptibles of the scientific image is posited in excess of experience, and despite experience. Accounting for this immanence that is ontologically asserted despite experience is carried out through formalized, conceptual and representational means. Accounting for immanence in this way has the consequence of vitiating the sufficiency of immersive aesthetics. A sufficient immersive aesthetics can be represented diagrammatically as a closed circle. This circle encloses a region of absolute immanence and forms a plane of immanence that internally renders everything immanent to an aesthetic sensibility, a sufficient aesthetics. Contrary to the circle which constitutes a region of immanence, a relative plane, the absolute plane extends outwards in all directions. This expansiveness distinguishes it from the localized region of interiority within which experience unfolds temporally and to which immanence can appear as immersion. Where the circle forms a region of interiority, a fold within immanence, within which experience as temporality takes place, the absolute plane of immanence is that which cannot be ‘experienced as temporality but only thought’ (Peden 2014, 225). Accordingly the pursuit of immanence must make certain methodological choices that do not exclude certain practices on the grounds that their implication of formalization and representation detract from the immediacy of immanence. That the interiority of the immersive circle is produced via a folding in the absolute outside of pure immanence means that immersive interiority is always perforated by the intimate immanence of the absolute outside that constitutes its conditions. This abstract formulation, at a more concrete level, entails that the internality of subjective experience depends upon external conditions, both in an inter-subjective sense and a pre-individual sense that is not reducible to an affective flux that presupposes an organic body but

190

Immanence and Immersion

physical conditions in the most expansive sense. These physical conditions and diverse forms of exteriority form the immanent and intimate conditions of subjective interiority as they are incarnated within such interiorities while remaining their external conditions. When we take into consideration these conditions the apparent sufficiency of the immersive circle is seen to be riddled with holes due to its grounding in a stratified yet absolute immanence, an absolute outside. That the qualitative irreducibility of immersive experience is constructed from the quantifiable intensity of sound not as an irreducible subjective experience but as a strata of immanence is seen and occasionally felt in the infraesthetic aspects of Canell and Vitiello’s work, who, through making explicit the excess of sound beyond its qualitative renderings or solutions, produced by the ear implicate quantitative intensity within their poetics. As an aspect of ontology this intensive quantity cannot but be implicated in all sound works, works that cannot but embody the ontology of their materials. It should also be noted that the seeing of sound in these instances is not a synaesthesia, as there is no sonorous quality to equate with a visual quality, only an intensive quantity of displacement to observe within the broader schematic form of the artwork. While it may be seen, the excess of sound and signal beyond auditory experience thereby has a distributive rather than unifying effect; rather than a synaesthetic unity the identification of the limits of experience and consequently of real events beyond has a fragmentary and distributive effect that cracks open the aesthetic sufficiency of the work which must then take on a schematic form that groups together its disparate real, conceptual and affective elements. Works drawing attention to the excess of real events beyond immediate experience frame ontological conditions in ways that many works do not, yet beyond this exemplification of ontology it is the mode of engagement that such an implication forces that is significant. Where the frequency of a movement crosses a threshold that renders it imperceptible to the ear yet apparent to the eye, imperceptible from the perspective of a unified and continuous qualitative experience and identifiable as a quantifiable, countable oscillation and displacement the limits of audition are once again identified, the thresholds of experience, and the persistence of real events beyond. The aesthetic experience of the work becomes insufficient, perforated through this identification of gaps

The Stratification of Immanence

191

or cracks in experience. The identification of this insufficiency indicates the persistence of real events beyond immediate experience and so the work bears some degree of pictorial adequacy to non-conceptual reality. This commitment to non-conceptual reality forms a single node within the overall schematic form of the work which is not reducible to an exemplification of ontological conditions. This ontological implication of a non-conceptual reality within the schematic form of the work introduces the unilateral indifference of the real, preventing this schematic form from collapsing back into a conceptualism where the work itself is bilaterally indifferent to aesthetic realization and nonconceptual reality. This unilateral indifference is identified within the real rather than the work itself. Where the work indicates the persistence of real events beyond immediate experience through an opening onto the unilateral indifference of non-conceptual reality, it is the diverse operations of thought rather than affective experience that become the most adequate methods for locating and understanding the externalizing operation of the real within the schematic form of the work.

8.3 Immanence and an ethics of exteriority Immersion, constituting its own localized, internal plane of immanence, ultimately occludes absolute immanence through the projection of a sufficient aesthetics as its ground, truncating reality within the thresholds of possible experience. Absolute immanence requires acknowledgement of the insufficiency of aesthetics, an opening or perforation of the immersive circle, in accounting for a reality that persists in excess of experience yet remains immanent. Identifying the insufficiency of aesthetics becomes a countercorrelational gesture where this insufficiency is augmented by a conceptual orientation indexing the real to differing degrees of pictorial adequacy. Experience thereby occurs within this world, reality or plane of absolute immanence, without defining or exhaustively delimiting it. Where the dynamic reality of this immanent world is of concern an immersive aesthetics provides epistemological impedance to adequately considering its extent. A proposed descent beneath the signifier to a primordial affective reality posited

192

Immanence and Immersion

by the sufficient aesthetics of immersion takes us further inside the interiority of the immersive circle rather than allowing us to explore its boundaries and limitations. Attending to absolute immanence requires a diversified set of methods that embraces representation and formalization as means of supplementing the insufficiencies of aesthetic and affective methods. This expanded set of methods yields an expanded concept of reality within which we might locate ourselves in pursuit of an ecological ethics.2 If the ‘supreme act of philosophy’ is to show that absolute immanence ‘is there, unthought in every plane’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 59–60), we seek to also locate artistic practice within such a plane, a practice acknowledging that this absolute plane, equated with the pre-philosophical grounds of an indifferent real, ‘is there’ and consequently being able to navigate the real more adequately. This is considered a superior position to the absolutization of aesthetic immersion and the correlationism it entails as such a position is assumed to the detriment of an ecological ethics informed by our best means of knowing the real within which such an ethics operates. The challenge that absolute immanence puts to immersion is that it be understood as perforated, rendered insufficient through the retention of a capacity for critical distance and the necessity of methods that the immersive narrative of aesthetic and affective sufficiency would seek to render invalid and irreal abstractions. A broadening of our concept of reality, through the adoption of methods more adequate to it, is required if we are to navigate and orient ourselves in relation to the defining and interlinked existential challenges of our time. The grounding of a concept of reality upon auto-affective, subjective interiority should not provide solace from such challenges and their urgency. An extension of the concept of reality beyond the immediate assumes the challenge of a progressing Copernicanism which continues to decentre human subjectivity in the face of an indifferent reality. Artistic practice can be understood as a site of experimentation modelling the impact of these conceptual challenges upon the subject and culture at large. This experimentation explores the effects of

2 This notion of an ecological ethics should be understood in an expanded sense, not limited to tackling industrial pollution, for example. This expanded notion of an ecological ethics assumes at least the three of Guattari’s ecological registers: the environmental, social and subjective (see Guattari 2000).

The Stratification of Immanence

193

adopting a concept of reality that continues to decentre human subjectivity within a plane of absolute immanence. Such experiments – to identify only those addressed herein – include exploring the limits of sensory experience as a synthesis of interiority that has only limited adequacy to a non-conceptual or noumenal reality; the modelling, mapping and representation of a cosmic contingency giving rise to human existence; the inter-subjective consequences of an internalization of such decentring concepts of exteriority, presenting the subject with the possibility of its own extinction. Through these artistic projects we are confronted with a conceptualization of reality in excess of that given to experience. That one cannot but be immersed in the world at an ontological level does not require that this immersion be reflected at an aesthetic level that is consequently rendered sufficient, encircling and isolating the immersed subject from consideration of its constitutive exteriority. There is then a need for a critical approach to the immersive that does not shy from allowing the vitiating force of conceptualization and representation into the circle of immersion, an internalization of exteriorities that ultimately undoes this circle, foregrounding its permeability, insufficiency and extimate relation to an immanent outside. A critical immersive practice entails immersion without aesthetic immediacy or sufficiency, without the conflation of image or sensorial event and reality. A critical immersive practice presents the insufficiencies and contingencies of an immersive aesthetics as a synthetic product rather than as irreducibly given or foundational. This entails acts of distanciation within immersion that reintroduce a space or capacity for critical distance, thought and action. A critical approach to the immersive identifies that the reality of experience is not an exhaustive experience of reality.

References Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London and New York: Continuum. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. Illuminations. London: Fontana Press. Bergson, Henri. 2005. Key Writings. Edited by John Mullarkey and Keith Ansell Pearson. London and New York: Continuum. Bonnet, François J. 2016. The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Brassier, Ray. 2003. ‘Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle’. Radical Philosophy 121: 24–35. Brassier, Ray. 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brassier, Ray. 2016. ‘Transcendental Logic and True Representings’. Glass Bead 0. http:// www.glass-bead.org/article/transcendental-logic-and-true-representings/?lang=enview. Brassier, Ray, Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant. 2007. ‘Speculative Realism’. Collapse 3: 307–449. Bull, Michael, and Les Back, ed. 2003. The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford and New York: Berg. Canell, Nina et al. 2016. ‘Nina Canell’. Bomb Magazine, August. http:// bombmagazine.org/article/0390714/nina-canell. Charlesworth, J. J. 2014. ‘Mark Leckey’. Art Review Summer. https://artreview.com/ features/summer_2014_feature_mark_leckey/. Coole, Diana. 2010. ‘The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh’. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 92–115. Durham: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana. 2015. ‘From Within the Midst of Things: New Sensibility, New Alchemy, and the Renewal of Critical Theory’. In Realism, Materialism, Art, edited by Suhail Malik, Christoph Coxa and Jenny Jaskey, 41–6. Berlin: Stenberg Press. Cox, Christoph. 2003. ‘Return to Form: Neo-Modernism in Sound Art.” Artforum, November, 67. Cox, Christoph. 2009. ‘Installing Duration: Time in the Sound Works of Max Neuhaus’. In Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Peace Beacon, edited by Barbara Schröder Lynne and Cooke Karen Kelly, 113–32. New Haven and London: DIA Art Foundation.

196

References

Cox, Christoph. 2011. ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’. Journal of Visual Culture 10 (2): 145–61. Cox, Christoph. 2013. ‘Sonic Philosophy’. Artpulse 4 (16). http://artpulsemagazine. com/sonic-philosophy. Cox, Christoph. 2014. ‘Seeing Is Not Hearing: Synaesthesia, Anaesthesia and the AudioVisual’. In Art or Sound, edited by Germano Celant, 93–8. Milano: Fondazione Prada. Cox, Christoph. 2015. ‘Sonic Thought’. In Realism, Materialism, Art, edited by Suhail Malik, Christoph Cox and Jenny Jaskey, 123–9. Berlin: Stenberg Press. Cox, Christoph, and Suhail Malik. 2016. ‘A Questionnaire on Materialisms’. October, Jan. MIT Press, 26–28. doi:10.1162/OCTO_a_00243. Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crary, Jonathan 2001. Suspensions of Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 2006a. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Tarmina. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles. 2006b. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles , and, Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Tomlinson Burchell. London and New York: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Drever, John L. 2015. ‘Topophonophobia – the Space and Place of Acute Hearing’. In Hearing Landscape Critically: Music, Place, and the Spaces of Sound. http:// research.gold.ac.uk/11601/. Dyson, Frances. 2009. Sounding New Media, Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley : University of California Press.

References

197

Erlmann, Veit. 2010. Resonance and Reason: A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone Books. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Foster, Hal., ed. 1998. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press. Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. London and New York: Continuum. Henriques, Julian. 2003. ‘Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System’. In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Les Back and Michael Bull, 451–80. Oxford: Berg. Henry, Michel. 2008. Material Phenomenology. New York: Fordham University Press. Henry, Michel. 2009. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. London and New York: Continuum. Hill, Jonathan. 2006. Immaterial Architecture. London and New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 2012. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund. 2013. Logical Investigations. International Library of Philosophy, v. 2. Taylor & Francis. Kahn, Douglas. 2013. Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitudes in the Arts. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Kane, Brian. 2007. ‘L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction’. Organised Sound 12 (1): 15–24. Kane, Brian. 2015. ‘Sound Studies Without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn’. Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (1): 2–21. Kerslake, Christian. 2002. ‘The Vertio of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence’. Radical Philosophy 113 (May/June): 10–22. Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2009. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London and New York: Continuum. Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2013. Against Ambience. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kurokawa, Ryoichi. 2016. The Double Negative. in discussion with Jade French. http:// www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2016/03/a-hypnotic-outer-space-experienceryoichi-kurokawas-unfold-reviewed/.

198

References

Leckey, Mark. 2013. ‘The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things’. E-Flux. http:// www.e-flux.com/announcements/32857/the-universal-addressability-of-dumbthings/. Lord, Beth. 2011. Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Malik, Suhail. 2015. ‘Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art’. In Realism, Materialism, Art, edited by Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and Suhail Malik, 185–91. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 2006. ‘Inside the Five Sense Sensorium’. In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 43–52. Oxford and New York: Berg. McTaggart, Ellis J. 1908. ‘The Unreality of Time’. Mind 17 (68): 457–74. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2009. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London and New York: Continuum. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993. ‘Eye and Mind’. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, 121–49. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2014. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2008. ‘Extimity’. The Symptom 9. http://www.lacan.com/ symptom/?p=36. Moore, Brian. 2008. An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing. Bingley : Emerald. Morgan, Frances. 2015. ‘Recursive Frame Analysis’. The Wire, December. http://www. thewire.co.uk/in-writing/columns/frances-morgan-mark-fell-recursive-frame-analysis. Mullarkey, John. 2006. Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Neuhaus, Max. 2000. ‘Sound Art?’ http://www.max-neuhaus.info/soundworks/ soundart/SoundArt.htm. Noys, Benjamin. 2014. ‘The Art of the Absolute: Relations, Objects, and Immanence’. Angelaki 19 (1): 173–85. Oliver, Julian, Danja Vasiliev and Gordan Savicic. 2011. ‘THE CRITICAL ENGINEERING MANIFESTO’. https://criticalengineering.org/. Orlie, Melissa A. 2010. ‘Impersonal Matter’. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 116–36. Durham: Duke University Press. Osborne, Peter. 1999. ‘Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy’. In Rewriting Conceptual Art, edited by Jon Bird and Michael Newman, 47–65. London: Reaktion Books.

References

199

Osborne, Peter. 2010. ‘Infinite Exchange: The Social Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Philosophy of Photography 1 (1): 59–68. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All. London and New York: Verso. Pasnau, Robert. 2000. ‘Sensible Qualities: The Case of Sound’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 38: 27–40. Peden, Knox. 2014. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavailles to Deleuze. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Samuels, A. J. 2013. ‘“I Actively Try Not to Prompt the Audience to Share My Enthusiasm”: An Interview with Mark Fell’. Electronic Beats. http://www. electronicbeats.net/an-interview-with-mark-fell/. Schrimshaw, Will. 2012. ‘Any Place Whatever: Schizophonic Dislocation and the Sound of Space in General’. Interference: Journal of Audio Culture 2. http://www. interferencejournal.com/articles/a-sonic-geography/any-place-whatever. Schrimshaw, Will. 2013. ‘Non-Cochlear Sound: On Affect and Exteriority’. In Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle, 27–43. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Schrimshaw, Will. 2015a. ‘Exit Immersion’. Sound Studies 1 (1): 155–70. doi:10.1080/2 0551940.2015.1079982. Schrimshaw, Will. 2015b. ‘Ur-Writings: A Geophonographic Fiction’. Leonardo. doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01075. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963. Science, Perception and Reality. London and New York: Routledge; Kegan Paul. Smalley, Denis. 1997. ‘Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes’. Organised Sound 2 (2): 107–26. doi:10.1017/S1355771897009059. Spinoza, Benedict de. 1955. The Ethics. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2011. ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’. Canadian Journal of Communication 36 (2): 207–25. Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. London and New York: Continuum. Voegelin, Salomé. 2014. Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Zahavi, Dan. 2016. ‘The End of What? Phenomenology Vs. Speculative Realism’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (3): 289–309. doi:10.1080/096725 59.2016.1175101.

Index Anselmo, Giovanni 62 absolute 17, 19, 25, 32, 42, 52, 54, 177, 179, 181–3, 189–90, 192 acousmatic 35–6, 38, 50 acoustic 13, 32, 38, 40, 74, 82, 145 condition 4, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 33, 100, 102, 107, 144, 175, 187 condition and correlationism 87 space 1, 7, 8, 14, 35–7, 102, 144–5, 184 active synthesis 90 actual 16, 20–2, 45–6, 73, 96, 157, 160, 162, 175–8 affect 2, 6–9, 12–18, 20, 25, 27–32, 37, 39, 51–4, 57–8, 60–6, 71–2, 74, 77, 79–84, 88–9, 102–5, 109–23, 125–32, 135–6, 138–42, 145, 148–9, 152–3, 156, 160–1, 164, 166, 171–5, 179–86, 188–92 auto- 17, 20, 29, 37, 57, 60, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88, 103, 104, 105, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 128, 132 ambisonic 36, 39 analogue 84–5 ancestral 126, 169 anthropocene 170, 171 anthropocentrism 4, 18–9, 33, 93, 113, 125, 128–30, 132–3, 135, 155, 171–3, 189 architectonic 37 assemblage 54, 57, 62, 65–6, 71–2, 74 astrophysics 145, 148–9 atavism 142 audile technique 10, 12, 37, 89, 91–2, 117–18, 131, 183 audiovisual litany 6–7, 9–15, 17, 20, 25, 32, 51–3, 55, 58–9, 74, 93, 99, 112–13, 117–18, 121, 124, 127–9, 131, 133, 135, 144, 147–8, 152, 165, 175

aura 84, 185–7 auraltypical 89 Bain, Mark 60, 61, 68 Barry, Robert 5, 73, 132 becoming 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 65, 118, 126, 128, 130, 131, 172 -sound 18, 111, 126 Benjamin, Walter 186–8 Bonnet, Francois 66 Brassier, Ray 15, 32, 51, 97, 98, 106, 125, 164, 166 Canell, Nina 65, 70–4, 190 circle 8–9, 14–15, 24–5, 32, 35–6, 38–41, 43, 75, 79–81, 83, 85, 88, 147, 169, 189, 190–3 climate change 107, 171–2 common sense 45, 106–7, 111, 144–54 conceptual 7–9, 12, 15, 18, 20, 25, 30–2, 43, 46, 55, 70–1, 73, 89–90, 103–5, 109–14, 122, 125, 127–31, 133, 135–6, 138–41, 143, 148, 152–3, 155–65, 168, 171–3, 179–80, 182, 184, 187–93 art 4, 5, 15, 33, 73, 132, 157–9, 191 post- 3, 4, 61, 132, 167 contemporary 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 14, 15, 80, 90, 91, 106, 111–12, 137–8, 142, 156–8, 160, 163 art 3, 4, 5, 70, 132, 140, 156, 185, 187 science 30, 33, 182 contingency 100, 114, 120, 121, 193 Copernican 143, 168, 169, 192 correlationism 6, 10, 13–15, 19, 25, 32, 65, 75, 90–1, 93–5, 97, 99, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 111–13, 122, 124–8, 138–43, 152–7, 160, 166–7, 169, 185–6, 187, 191–2 post- 93, 111, 129, 135, 163 cosmos 106, 107, 168

Index Cox, Christoph 3, 11, 48, 111–13, 115–16, 118–19, 121–9 cultural technique 7, 9–11, 92, 96, 110, 183 cymatic 77 data digital 83–4, 145, 148, 149, 151 sense 44, 114, 128 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 19–23, 25–31, 38, 43–6, 50–4, 63–5, 115, 140, 152, 163, 175–9, 181 Derrida, Jacques 78–83, 85, 88 diagram 55, 71–3, 151, 189 digital conversion 84 drone 37, 39–40, 48, 59–60, 110, 147, 150 Drumm, Kevin 110 Duchamp, Marcel 5 duration 47–51, 53–5, 61, 69, 131 dynamic materiality 21, 53, 55, 58, 61–3, 65, 70–1, 73, 115, 131, 136, 172, 191 dystopia 107 ecological 19, 143, 192 electroacoustic 35–7, 147 embodiment 2–3, 8, 62, 83, 89–90, 101–4, 106, 129, 132, 137, 141, 147–8, 176, 178, 186 emotion 27, 58, 63, 114–15, 122 encounter 2–4, 32, 45–6, 92–3, 99–104, 113–14, 120, 139, 141, 149, 187 epiphenomenal 96, 98, 140 epoché 92, 94–6 Erlmann, Veit 11–13, 145 ethics 19, 143, 192 exteriority 5–6, 13–15, 17, 20, 22–6, 28–9, 32, 51, 54, 57–61, 77–83, 85, 87–8, 93, 96, 99–100, 102, 104, 113, 117–23, 126, 132, 138–9, 182–3, 190, 193 extimate 183, 193 extinction 161, 166–70, 172, 193 familiar

22, 39, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 145, 148, 163, 165, 183 Fell, Mark 32, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 54, 55 flux 2, 7–9, 18, 24–5, 54, 58, 109–11, 118,

201

122–3, 125–7, 130–1, 137, 171–3, 189 force 12, 22, 26–8, 37, 45–6, 57–8, 61–3, 66, 70–1, 73–5, 85, 114, 118, 126, 167, 190 formalization 30, 32, 64, 107, 140–1, 145, 148, 152–3, 155–6, 160, 164, 178, 184, 186, 189, 192 Foucault, Michel 26 functional 20, 52–4, 57, 61–2, 65–6, 67, 70–4 given

5, 10, 19, 21, 23–4, 44, 46, 49, 66, 75, 94, 98, 105–6, 111, 116, 118, 128–9, 133, 135–6, 139–40, 144, 148, 152, 193 Guattari, Felix 16, 23, 30, 50–4, 65, 115, 178–81, 192 hegemony, of vision 4, 6, 11, 77, 113, 117, 126, 127, 144 Henry, Michel 15, 17–18, 20, 24, 90, 104, 107, 112, 116–22, 127–8, 183 homogeneity 2, 17–18, 51, 77, 91, 125, 128, 131, 184 Hume, David 23–8 Husserl, Edmund 15, 90–3, 95–9, 101, 104, 105, 112, 116, 140, 181 immanence absolute 19, 22, 28–32, 175, 177–84, 188–93 THE plane of 30, 178, 182, 183, 184 imperceptible 46–7, 62, 65–71, 73–5, 98, 135, 137, 138–9, 141, 152, 164, 166, 170–1, 177–8, 183, 189–90 impersonal 130, 131, 180 impoverishment 12, 21, 57, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70, 73, 79, 158 inaudible 32, 41, 60–1, 63, 65–6, 68, 70 indeterminacy 3–4, 37, 70, 89, 114, 156, 157, 160 indifference 13, 44, 84, 93, 95–8, 157–60, 162–3, 183, 186, 188, 191–2 infraesthetic 57, 61–3, 65, 190 infrasonic 60–1 inhuman 93, 119, 128 installation 1, 36–9, 55, 60, 66–7, 83–4,

202

Index

89, 102, 146–7 insufficiency 3, 11, 40, 70, 132, 158, 159, 163, 172, 190–3 intensity 20, 30, 46–7, 58–66, 68, 70, 179–80, 185, 190 intensive quantity 20, 27, 54, 57, 62, 63, 65, 68, 70, 74, 82, 87, 190 intentional listening 65, 90 matter 92–3 object 38, 92, 94 quality 92, 93 intentionality 11, 15, 24, 38, 61, 64, 71, 85, 91–5, 99, 101, 103–4, 114, 116–17, 121, 124–6, 128–9, 133, 141, 160, 162–4 interiority 2, 5–7, 9–10, 13–15, 19–20, 22–6, 28–9, 32, 51, 54, 59–60, 77–81, 83–5, 87–8, 100, 102, 117–19, 122–3, 145, 183–4, 185–6, 189–90, 192–3 Julius, Rolf

sonic 4, 8–9, 28, 33, 64, 93, 107, 109, 112–17, 119–23, 124–32, 135, 138–9, 165, 171, 188 speculative 127 transcendental 130 Matthews, Kaffe 89 Meillassoux, Quentin 6, 14–15, 25, 98, 121–2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 90, 99–107 modelling 44, 64, 99, 100, 107, 111, 126–7, 133, 139–40, 143, 148, 162–3, 170–2, 178, 186, 192–3 morphological 5, 73, 132 Mullarkey, John 16, 21, 22 Nakamura, Toshimaru 59, 61 natural attitude 90, 93–7, 104, 107, 140 naturalism 27, 29, 95, 98, 118, 127–9, 139–40, 152, 156, 165–6 transcendental 183, 184 Neuhaus, Max 3

65–7, 70

Kane, Brian 109–10 Kant, Immanuel 118, 164, 181 Kirkegaard, Jacob 59–60, 64 Kittler, Friedrich 64, 81–2, 85, 87, 172 larval 31 Leckey, Mark 142, 143 lifeworld 101, 120–1, 143, 145, 148 linguistic turn 15, 92, 109–12 López, Francisco 35–6 Lucier, Alvin 62, 66 McLuhan, Marshall 1, 7, 8, 36, 144, 184 Malik, Suhail 3, 4, 156–64, 185 manifest image 5, 45, 98, 105, 106, 136–43, 149, 152 materialism 27, 80, 119, 124, 128–9, 135, 137–8 aesthetic 157 affective 8 new 80, 91, 130–2, 137, 140 non-anthropocentric 93 phenomenological 4, 123, 130, 139 physicalist 123 realist 127

object-oriented ontology 97–8, 156 onto-aesthetic 101, 104–5, 109–11, 129, 139, 158, 166, 177–8 ontotheological 77–8 otoacoustic 59, 64 outside 14, 17, 19, 20, 24–9, 31–2, 51, 54, 57, 63, 79–80, 82–3, 85, 87, 115, 123, 138, 150, 155, 160, 178, 182–4, 189–90, 193 Paterson, Katie 132, 135, 161–2, 167–172 phenomenological matter 111, 120–2 phenomenology 1, 6, 8–9, 14–15, 20, 25, 32–3, 36, 38, 47, 61, 63–6, 69, 75, 77, 80, 82, 87, 90–101, 104–7, 111–13, 116–18, 120, 22–133, 135, 137, 141, 148, 160, 163–4, 188 affective 15, 141–2 anti-realism 91 immersive 107 material 107, 112–13, 115–22, 125, 127, 133, 135, 139 sonic-material 121 phonography 82, 84–5, 87, 161–2, 167, 172 geo- 171

Index physics 10, 23, 27, 122–3 poetics 65–6, 69–70, 119, 161, 168, 190 post-digital 85 postconceptual 3, 4, 132, 158, 167 pre-objective 103–5 pre-symbolic 7–9, 12, 31, 52–3, 103, 107, 110, 114, 130, 137, 139, 140, 152, 161, 165, 166, 171, 179, 182, 188 pre-philosophical 29–30, 188, 192 presence 2–3, 5, 37, 59, 60, 74, 77, 79–81, 83, 85, 89, 102–3, 123, 145, 147, 150, 152–8 metaphysics of 83, 85, 186 self 3, 5, 78, 81, 187, 188 primordial 2, 8–9, 100–11, 114, 131–2, 137, 188, 191 problem 151, 163, 175–8 psychoacoustics 32, 43, 64, 100 Ptolemaic 37, 115–16 punctuation 65, 72 quality

1–3, 46–7, 50–1, 55, 59, 61–3, 65, 68, 73, 77, 92, 100, 147, 185, 190

Radigue, Eliane 110 realism 4, 13, 15, 18–20, 29, 32–3, 38–40, 43–4, 46, 60, 66, 70, 73, 75, 80–1, 85, 87–8, 90, 93, 95, 97–9, 101, 105–7, 109–13, 115–21, 124–9, 132, 135–6, 140–4, 152–3, 156, 158–73, 178, 180–4, 186–7, 189–193 Deleuze 21, 25, 176 direct 93–8, 117, 152 naturalistic 81, 90–1, 115, 124, 127, 129–30, 133, 136, 138–40, 143, 155, 181 sonic 38, 109–10, 113–4, 118–9, 126, 130 speculative 97–8, 140, 156, 158, 160 reduced listening 49–50, 63–4, 117, 133 reduction 47, 49–51, 53–4, 57, 64, 81–3, 85, 130, 166 phenomenological 38, 50, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 116, 117, 122, 124, 125 quantitative 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 82, 87 transcendental 92, 95

203

representation 8, 17–9, 21, 27, 30–3, 45, 49, 63–65, 82, 93, 95, 99, 103, 105, 109–14, 122, 125–33, 135–7, 139–41, 144, 152, 155, 160, 162, 164–6, 171–3, 179, 184, 186–9, 192–3 Scarfe, Dawn 86–7 schematic 55, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 151, 153, 168, 172, 190, 191 science 4, 29, 30, 33, 94, 116, 120–1, 126, 129–30, 140–1, 143, 148–9, 182 -art 136, 140, 143, 145, 148, 149 scientific image 5, 98, 100, 105–7, 135–6, 138–41, 143, 152–3, 164, 189 scientism 81–2, 98, 100, 127, 145, 148, 161, 166 Sellars, Wilfrid 5, 15, 25, 97, 106, 136–42, 152, 162, 164–5 sensory distortion 32, 46, 64, 179 Shepard tone 40–2, 47–8, 54 Siegelaub, Seth 161 simplification, prodigious 50–4, 57, 62, 68 Smalley, Denis 35 sound art 2–5, 7, 15, 20, 77, 116 sound object 47, 49–50, 58, 92, 112 soundscape 30, 102 spatiomorphology 35–7 spectromorphology 35 stability 9, 27–8, 55, 70, 100, 120, 123, 126, 136, 137 Sterne, Jonathan 6, 7, 77, 78, 87 substance 16, 82–3, 85, 181 subtractive 45, 69–70, 80, 82, 85, 167–8 surround sound 2, 35, 145, 147 synaesthetic 67, 144–5, 147, 190 synthesis 24–5, 43, 45–6, 50, 53, 58, 99, 100, 122, 193 active 90 passive 24, 43, 122, 176, 177 sound 36, 39, 60, 89, 90, 142, 179 timbre 49–50, 53 transcendental empiricism 32, 38, 43–7, 64, 130, 140

204 Turrell, James 84, 89 unilateral 148 indifference 159, 162–3, 191 univocal 124–5, 129 virtual 20–2, 27, 46, 175–8 reality 1, 21 Vitiello, Stephen 65, 68, 70, 190

Index Voegelin, Salomé 9, 14, 112, 113, 116, 118–22, 128 voice 79, 80, 83, 142 wave field synthesis 36, 39 Young, La Monte Zahavi, Dan

110

90, 97–8