Being within Sound.pdf
Transcript of Being within Sound.pdf
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Being within sound: immanence and listening. Dr. Bruce Mowson
RMIT / Independent scholar.
This essay considers the act of listening as situated by philosophies of immanence, psychoanalysis and
musical practices, with a view to discussing issues of sensation, experience, time and immersion. The
main body of the text consists of a subjective theoretical preface to issues of immanence with respect to
aesthetic perception, before concluding with a discussion of immanence in US Minimalism since the
1960s. The piece draws on the work of various authors, notably Gilles Deleuze, whose perspective on
immanent perception in the moment might be opposed to the historical and symbolic model implied by
Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis. The essay explores a case for a phenomenological approach to
aesthetics and composition, in which materialist concerns—that is to say sound as matter with which to
provoke (pure) sensation—are privileged over representation, where in the latter case sound and music
largely acts as a vehicle for meaning. Although not specifically focussed on the sound/image
relationship, this essay derives from my thinking about my own audiovisual practice, one of these
pieces being exhibited in the Festival. Though the discussion focuses upon sound, it has implications
for both image and sound/image relationships.
Deleuzian Immanence and Materialist Empiricism, versus the Egoistic
Signification of Lacan:
One of my key artistic concerns in recent years has been to better understand my own experience of
listening, and how this situates my compositional and artistic activities. In a quasi-phenomenological
manner I have tried to analyse the structure of my listening. I have noticed that it includes a conscious
and intentional directing of attention to the sonic, and this necessitates a lessening of attention to the
visual. This changed mode of perception alters my consciousness of my location in space, as I become
aware of the area behind me and of the topography beyond my immediate surrounds. Also changed is
my awareness of time, and perhaps the best way I can describe this is to say that I become synchronisedwith the time of my environment: when listening I experience myself as more synchronised with both
the time and space of my immediate environment, and conversely, I become less self-conscious,
because in my own experience, it is not possible to self-reflect and listen simultaneously: one engages
with the inner voice or the external world.
Going back to the reasons for enquiring about this topic, I find that my compositional activities are
compelled by my desire to create listening phenomena for myself: responding to the question “what is
it that I want to hear?” However, this question has begot another that in fact precedes it: “why do I
want to hear?” This question appears to be particularly significant in relation to experimental sound—I
am not making sound for an audience’s entertainment, or even my entertainment. Indeed, given the
marginal interest in the area, the audience for which is largely peers, it seems important to ask
questions about what is compelling about practice in this area. If composition is not to be musical
entertainment, and is to aspire to being a critical practice, then I believe it must ask questions of itself in order to be clearer about what it might be and where it might be going. Following from this, my
enquiries have a reflexive and subjective emphasis as I seek to better understand my own sonic
processes. I am not seeking to understand listening from the objectivist points of view that science may
claim to offer, for I am not wishing to stand outside of the experience of listening to understand how it
functions. Rather I have tended toward philosophical discourses that resonate with the personal,
embodied and profound nature of my own experience. On the other hand, languages of the humanities
offer a more promising, if difficult to follow path. My initial orientation has been toward
phenomenology, based on the simple premise that the term “phenomena” seems an appropriate way to
characterise listening as an occurrence that cannot be reduced to a fact or biological process, but is both
real and complex.
Through preliminary research around abstract art and phenomenology I came across the term
immanence, a philosophical position that came to prominence with the rise of materialism in the Westduring the twentieth century.
1The term literally translates as to “remain within,” and is opposed to
transcendence, which means to go beyond. In general terms, philosophies of immanence seek to
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respond to philosophical questions about the nature of existence from a materialistic standpoint. This
might involve limiting the things that comprise a life to things within the world, and this can be
contrasted to philosophies of transcendence, which describe existence via things that are beyond the
material world. An example of transcendence would be the Platonic notion of ideals, wherein things in
the world can be contrasted to ideal forms that transcend, or exist beyond, the physical plane.2
In music,
a thematic shift toward immanence can be seen in the materialism that is paradigmatic of compositional
genres such as Serialism, musique concrète and electroacoustic music. Composers in these genres oftenfocussed upon the physical characteristics of music, examining all manners of sound generation and
techniques of composition, and in general, made work that strove to be a something, rather than being
about something—the meaning of the work was in its material existence, not a text outside it. So an
immanentist approach to music might be one that focuses upon materiality, and is about its own
materiality.
Material abstraction is the style to which I am generally drawn as a composer and artist, and my own
interest in immanence comes from the standpoint of questioning what it is that I find meaningful about
material explorations in music. A key consideration of my self-reflection about my practice is that my
materialist explorations are driven by something other than just curiosity about the materials. Therefore
I have looked outside music for discussions of materiality, seeking a different way into this
questioning. One starting point has been a definition of empiricism, which “holds that knowledge
derives from the senses alone, and stresses the importance of observation and experience ininterpretation rather than theoretical constructs.”
3Many of my own sonic works might be read in
relation to empiricism, and by using texture, excessive repetition, and immersion via loudness I have
sought to provoke “observation and experience,” rather than references to theoretical constructs. I have
also used techniques of abstraction, including negation, displacement and reduction of figurative
signification in order to frustrate the audience’s processes of reading and interpretation such as through
the application of theoretical constructs. A question that I have formed about my work, however, is
whether there can be a form of empiricism more acute than that defined above, wherein meaning might
be located in the sensory itself?
As an artist, I do not set out to create meaning, per se, but rather set out to ‘make art.’ As
artist-researcher Lesley Duxbury remarks: “the reasons for making [art] work are many and various,
however it generally materialises through ‘doing,’ through a physical engagement with materials and
often reveals the unexpected.”
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The question I put to myself as an artist is: who creates the meaning inmy own work, myself as the artist or myself as the audience for my own work? Taking this further, I
have tried, as an artist, to situate myself in the same place as the audience, and have done so via
strategies that modify and erode my presence in the art-making process. Here I am not suggesting that I
am not responsible for my works, but rather I have focussed upon working intuitively with the media to
create sensations. The artworks I have made have tended to be processed by the question of how can I
present this sensation, which I locate in the medium? My objective here, though, is not to establish the
nature of the medium, per se, but to render sensations from it for myself and for the audience.
The functionality that I am ascribing to my work can be further clarified and explored by
again returning to d’Alleva’s definition of empiricism, specifically that it: “stresses the importance of
observation and experience in interpretation rather than theoretical constructs.”5
Here we find an
overtly oppositional construction, of “observation and experience” against “theoretical constructs,”
referring to the valuation of perception over theoretical reflection. There is, however, a covertopposition in the text, wherein meaning is located in interpretation, whether it be based upon
observation and experience, or upon theoretical constructs. In relation to d’Alleva’s quote, my work
does emphasise the sensory experience and questions about how meaning might be positioned with
relation to the moment of experience, and it is for this reason that I turned to aspects of Gilles
Deleuze’s philosophy.
Deleuze’s final text, completed just prior to his death, was a short essay written with
uncharacteristically straightforward language, titled Immanence: A life. Herein he describes his
conception of how the entirety of existence, of all life and the universe, might be contained within a
singularity, and he refers to this as pure immanence. He describes this immanence as being impossible
to understand objectively, for one cannot stand outside of immanence without destroying it, and says of
it only that it is A LIFE. He illustrates this in a vignette from Charles Dickens describing how an old
man, a rascal and rogue, despised by all, falls down in the street, apparently having passed away. Acrowd forms, and everyone is concerned for him. This concern fades as he is recovers, and the man’s
life returns from being A life, for which all are concerned, to his life, an identity which many revile. I
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read this description of the shift in the onlookers as an argument for a space that is away from ego and
identity—for a period, they are witnessing A LIFE rather than the life of the rogue. I have used this
notion because of its resonance with my description of listening as an interruption of distanced self-
reflection (see below) and an expansion of engagement with the exterior world, and because I describe
this process as manifesting immanence, wherein the listener is becomes more conscious of their
existence within the world.
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze outlines a division of time into two types: Chronos, the eternal
past and future; and Aion, the moment of the present.6
The Aion is the moment of the present, which is
not the passing moment, but the instant that marks the present without actually passing. I regard this as
important to questions about listening, because of the transitory nature of sound, which exists
materially only in that moment of the present. This is subtly different to other artistic media: perhaps
the closest referent is movement, wherein motions are similarly transitory, even though bodies remain
existent. American academic Joshua Ramey explores this Aion/Chronos distinction further, and
interprets Deleuze as saying that “unless our fixation with identity or our ego is overcome, we cannot
fully actualise the potential of events which befall us.”7
I understand Ramey to be arguing for an
existence in Aion’s instant, away from that past and future that is the place of ego and identity. Deleuze
takes us into challenging philosophical territory, and my partial reading only serves to create more
questions than it answers. In referencing such a slight fragment of a discourse, I run some risk of losing
the context that gives relevance to it. However, the notions of listening that I am putting forward areformative, and without substantial contextual references, so I have used Deleuze’s fragment as marker
in the map that I am territorialising, as if to say, this is not an unknown continent, occupied only by
practitioners of music, for here lies a bridge.
What I am proposing about the interruption of self-reflection, ego and identity during listening
has implications within psychoanalytic theory, and perhaps most specifically Lacanian theory, which
gives a very substantial explanation of subjective experience. In Jacques Lacan’s account, there is no
outside to language. The neurotic human, as opposed to psychotic or perverse human, is always within
a consciousness and an unconscious that is constituted by language. From this point of view, the notion
that listening is a cessation of identity is impossible: even though one might cease self-reflecting, one is
still constituted by and in language. Yet Lacan’s formulations stem from the point of view of the
human, and are dominated by intra-human structures. What I am seeking to argue for is a way that the
exterior world enters into the human through the activity of listening. Therefore I require a formulationof the exterior world, and Deleuze’s ambitions are to speculate more widely about the nature of the
non-human world, and of how humans adapt to that world. Again, I am reaching out to touch slender
fragments of discourses here, but my intentions are to work from aesthetics and listening, and move
slowly with those discourses. I present these references, then, to give a broad orientation to my
thoughts, and to establish starting points from which to import concepts into art for further research.
With these ideas in mind, I want to turn to references from music that relate to the notion of
immanence, with cases wherein practitioners describe instances an experience of immanence in relation
to music. What I am specifically interested in is the notion of the listener being inside the music,
allowing the interior to exterior relationship that I have described as being my area of questioning about
listening.
Immanence in Musical Minimalism Since the 1960s
In his revisionist history of Minimalist music, Early Minimalism, Tony Conrad described The Theatre
of Eternal Music, the group in which he performed, as “working ‘on’ the sound from ‘inside’ the
sound,”8
and says: “We lived inside the sound, for years.”9
The group created music around
extraordinarily sustained notes, over extended periods, at high volume. Conrad’s statements describe a
spatial-temporal location inside the sound both literally and psychologically, as the musicians focused
upon being within. The sound Conrad describes is immersive, due to the increased ability of audio
amplification to saturate acoustic space in the early 1960s. The group worked with electrical
amplification at a time when amplifiers were becoming more powerful and more affordable, and their
use of drones allowed for higher volume levels, due to the technical handling of a sustained, rather than
transient, audio signal: an amplifier can create a loud ongoing volume level through drone compared
with other shapes of sound that can be input. Increasing this volume, and further physicalising the
sound, is the phenomenon by which sustained notes can saturate the acoustic space in which they are
heard, and at a much lower volume level than other sounds, with the result that immersive affects areenhanced.
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The compositions they played centred around the extended intonation of single or dual notes,
and Conrad explains that he initially performed a ‘fifth’ interval with the singer, but after playing this
note for a month or two, suggested to the group that he sometimes play another note.10
The question of
notes and intervals was highly significant to these musicians, who held extensive discussions around
any proposed new notes. The group were highly attentive to the material with which they worked, and
at a minimal level: the group moved toward tuning systems that varied from Western standard tuning
by as litt le as a few percentage points of a frequency. Their enterprise records a process of increasingattention, leading to increasing perception, which reveals more phenomenal material, which in turn
demands further attention. Further to this, their focus upon so few sounds suggests to me that they were
less interested in expression through sound, and more interested in something they perceived in the
sound, performing a practical phenomenological and psychological survey, not articulated in
philosophy or theory but in their music.
The way that the group configured sound, through composition and in performance, might
allow them to be re-conceptualized as a machine for producing affect, which in turn opens up an
understanding of them as sensation makers rather than performers of a score or idea. This reading is
born out by Conrad’s statement:
We hungered for music almost seething beyond control, or even something just beyond music,
a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery acrossabrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood.11
The degree to which Conrad achieves this desire is difficult to assess, as a split between the group’s
members has resulted in the general suppression of recordings, with the exception of publication of
Day of Niagra, released by John Cale and Tony Conrad, against the wishes of La Monte Young.12
Conrad’s own words, however, are important in documenting the subjectivity he experienced, itself a
composite of the sound in the space and the socio-temporal context: they speak of a sound that was an
engaging and powerful experience of immanence. Conrad’s desired to manifest an immanent
experience, of being in the present, can also be seen in his 1965 film The Flicker , wherein a succession
of alternating black and white frames create a flickering effect that emphasizes the physiological effect
experienced by the viewer.
Another composer who has made Minimalist drone music is Eliane Radigue, who uses
sustained synthesiser tones. Her music departs from the general nature of drone music in its embrace of
variation, evidencing a structure resembling sentences and phrases, rather than the eternal singular
letter or word, as enunciated in the work of La Monte Young and to some extent Tony Conrad, Phill
Niblock and Alvin Lucier. While Radigue shares their interest in close, even heightened attention to the
sound of the sound, it is her exploration of continuum and variation that are of interest here, as it can be
interpreted as manifesting a particular state of immanence for the listener. In the liner notes for the CD
publication of works from her Trilogy de la mort series, Radigue explains that when composing, she is
developing with sound what she calls “sense.”13
She says that she works on the “inside” of the sound,
and “pays a lot of attention to what the sound is actually telling me,” and does not “compel a sound to
go in the direction that would be the most suitable for me.”14
Working in these ways, Radigue works in
the fashion that Deleuze commends, working toward Aion, the instant or the timeless present, away
from Chronos, the past and future of identity and ego. She describes her process of creating and mixing
sounds with the metaphor of weaving threads together, which gives an impression of almost “flawlesscontinuity.” This approach produces a sense of continuum, which is a sequence in which adjacent
elements are not perceptibly different though the extremities are distinct, as the sound subtly and
gradually transforms: not a progression of stages, but an ongoing process. As a result it is difficult to
identify individual events, stages, places or syntax across the piece, and in a particular way the listener
might be understood as being situated within the piece, and denied a place outside it.
Within my own practice, I have moved from working with sound and composition to
focussing upon listening. In my most recent work, I have constructed a type of swing, which
incorporates a dual pendulum mechanism that makes its motion unpredictable, as a counterweight
moves the swinger, and in response is itself moved, which causes further movement of the swinger, and
so on. This mechanism allows movement in all three axes—up/down, side-to-side, back and forth—and
brings the subject’s attention to their bodily orientation, activating the inner ear, which provides
feedback to the body about changes in position over time. The sensation produced is similar to being on
the ocean, and one has the sense of riding great swells though one is only moving a few centimetres.
The inner ear contains the labyrinth: three fluid filled tubes, related to each of the three axes, and the
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work offers the subject an experience of this unseen but crucial part of their body, drawing attention to
how it is operated upon by gravity and connects our interior with the exterior world. In this way, the
work gives a quite literal experience of immanence, by directing the listener to the physical world,
emphasising the embodied aspect of existence. I regard this as being paradigmatic to my music practice
and its historical location with respect to Minimalism since the 1960s, as an apotheosis of the urge to
explore the physicality of sound. Philosophically, then, my work continues a discourse about
subjectivity that locates the human in their present time and space, not in isolation, but always withinsomething larger than our self.
BibliographyAll online materials accessed Aug 2008.
Anon., “Eliane Radigue [interview],” Prism-Escape, edn #4 (Paris: no date) <http://www.digital-
athanor.com/PRISM_ESCAPE/article_usc103.html?id_article=121>.
Conrad, Tony, ed. and liner notes to John Cale et al, Inside the Dream Syndicate: Volume I: Day of Niagara
(1965), sound recording (NY: Table of the Elements, 2000).
Conrad, Tony, ed. and liner notes, Early Minimalism: Volume I, sound recording (NY: Table of the Elements,
2002).
D’Alleva, Anne, Methods and Theories of Art History (London: Laurence King, 2005).
Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on a life (NY: Zone, 2005).
—— [1969] The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (NY: Columbia UP, 1990).Duxbury, Lesley, “The Eye (and Mind) of the Beholder,” in Lesley Duxbury et al, eds, Thinking Through
Practice: Art as research in the Academy (Melbourne: RMIT, 2007), pp. 17-27.
Smith, Daniel, Immanence, in John Protevi, ed., The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh
University Press, 2006).
Ramey, Joshua, Gilles Deleuze and the Powers of Art, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Philadelphia: Villanova
University, 2006).
Radigue, Eliane [1973], Adnos I-III, sound recording (NY: Table of the Elements, 2002).
Radigue, Eliane, “Kyema” [from Trilogy de la mort ] and “Intermediate States,” sound recording (NY:
Experimental Intermedia, 1990).
Williams, James, Immanence, in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005).
Young, La Monte, “On Table of the Elements CD 74 Day of Niagara April 25, 1965” (10 Jul 2000), on the MELA
Foundation website (NY), <http://www.melafoundation.org/statemen.htm>.
Endnotes
1Smith, p.303; Williams, p. 125.
2According to Platonic theory, any object one encounters in the world is an imperfect or partial version of an
absent, abstracted and idealised object. For example, any chair one might encounter in real life can be related to an
abstract or perfected “chair,” which would only exist in virtual space, and which would in its essence sum up all of
the qualities of “chairness” we associate with specific chairs. This is what Plato would calls “the archetype.” —
Editors’ note.3
D’Alleva, p. 12.4
Duxbury, p. 17.5
D’Alleva, p. 12.6
Deleuze, Logic, pp. 61-65.7
Ramey, p. 99.8 Conrad, ed., Early Minimalism, p. 20.9
Ibid, p. 24.10
Ibid, p. 21.11
Conrad, ed., Inside, unpaginated.12
Young.13
Radigue, “Kyema.” 14
Anon, “Eliane.”