Sonic Thinking Read online

  Meier taught at Leibnitz University Hannover, Germany, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany, as well as at Stony Brook University, New York. She also worked as a curator for contemporary art at the Kestnergesellschaft Hanover, Germany. Her book Die Tiefe der Oberfläche (The Depth of the Surface): Lynch, Bacon, Deleuze has been published by Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin, Germany (2013).

  Lasse-Marc Riek (born 1975 in Germany) uses different forms of expression in his production methods. His works are interdisciplinary and can be conceived as groups of works of both visual art (action and conceptual art) and sound art. His art of sound can be described in terms such as acoustic ecology, bio acoustics and soundscapes. Here, Riek uses acoustic field recordings, storing them with different recording media, editing, archiving, and presenting them in different contexts.

  Since 1997, he has operated internationally with exhibitions, releases, concerts, lectures, workshops, awards, and projects and given guest performances in galleries, art museums, churches, and universities. He has made contributions in the public media as well as in podcasts and received scholarships and artist-in-residence programs realized in Europe and Africa. Since 2003 he is founding member of the audio publishing company Gruenrekorder, focusing on soundscapes, field recordings, and electro-acoustic compositions, and in this function, dealing internationally with artists and scientists.

  www.lasse-marc-riek.de and www.gruenrekorder.de

  Sebastian Scherer completed his MA in Art History and American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2010. He subsequently taught International Journalism at the University for Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. Since 2011 he works as a scientific assistant for the American Studies department at Goethe University, where he teaches classes on American Avant-garde Music, the Electronic Frontier, and American Landscape Painting and Photography. His research interests include sound-studies, modern and contemporary art, music, and film, as well as audio-engineering, and American countercultures. Currently he is working on his PhD project on the artistic strategies of Christian Marclay.

  Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen as well as Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the author of a generative theory of artifacts in three volumes: Das aleatorische Spiel (2000), Heuristik (2005), and Intimität und Medialität (2012). His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, on a historical anthropology of media, and on sound in popular culture. He serves as founding editor of the “Sound Studies”-book series and as curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. His recent publications are: Sabotage! (ed., 2013), Gespür (2014), American Progress (2015), and Sound as Popular Culture (ed., 2016).

  Achim Szepanski was born in Karlsruhe and studied Sociology in Frankfurt/Main. During the 1980s and 1990s he founded electronic music labels such as Force Inc., Mille Plateaux, Ritornell, Position Chrome and forcetracks. He wrote essays about Adorno, Marx, Deleuze|Guattari, Laruelle, etc. His latest work contains a trilogy of novels (Saal 6, Pole Position, and Verliebt ins Gelingen) and theoretical work. In 2014 he published with Laika the first two volumes of Capitalization (Vol. 1—Marx Non-Economy; Vol. 2—Non Economy of Contemporary Capitalism). The third volume, Der Non-Marxismus: Finance, Maschinen, Dividuum was published in 2016.

  Jakob Ullmann was born in 1958 in Freiberg in Saxony, studied church music and organ in Dresden (with Hans-Jürgen Scholze), took private lessons in composition with Friedrich Goldmann in Berlin, and in 2005 completed his DPhil (with Hannes Böhringer) in Braunschweig. Since 2008 he is professor for composition, musical notation, and music theory at the Musikakademie der Stadt Basel, Hochschule für Musik.

  Jason Wallin is Associate Professor of Media and Youth Culture Studies in Curriculum at the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he teaches courses in visual art, popular culture, and cultural curriculum theory. Jason is author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life (Palgrave Macmillan), co-author of Arts-Based Research: A Critique and Proposal (with Jan Jagodzinski, Sense Publishers), co-editor of Educational, Psychological, and Behavioral Considerations in Niche Online Communities (with Vivek Venkatesh, Juan Carlos Castro, and Jason Lewis, IGI Press), and co-editor of Deleuze, Guattari, Politics and Education (with Matt Carlin, Bloomsbury). Jason is assistant editor for the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Routledge).

  1

  sonic thinking—An Introduction

  Bernd Herzogenrath

  I would like to start with a set of resonances. First of all, a resonance on the word “resonance”—on the one hand it means something like “echo,” or “reverberation,” on the other hand, the word “reason” is somehow hidden in “resonance.” The French verb résonner makes this resonance even stronger—one might even be tempted to invent the word re[a]sonance here.

  Thus, a kind of knowledge is involved here. A kind of thinking—maybe not what we would call rational thinking, but a kind of thinking nonetheless. As the Polish philosopher and mathematician Józef Hoëné-Wronski has it, as quoted by Edgar Varèse: “Music is the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound” (Varèse 1966: 17). Music as the becoming-body of the knowledge of sound—sound thinking.

  Again, also this knowledge that sound is, has a highly interesting resonance in its “wordhood” in French: connaître—knowledge as a process of “being-born-with”—this could mean that this knowledge, this thinking, this re[a]sonance, that sound is not a knowledge about the world, coming to you only in retrospective reflection, but a thinking of and in the world, a part of the world we live in, intervening in the world directly.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, in his unpublished early notebooks, dating from the period of his Unfashionable Observations (1872–3), relates the true philosopher to the scientist and the artist as listener: “The concept of the philosopher … : he tries to let all the sounds of the world reverberate in him and to place this comprehensive sound outside himself into concepts” (19[71], 115); whereas the artist lets the tones of the world resonate within him and projects them by means of percepts and affects. So, here, sound-art practice becomes research and philosophy, and vice versa.

  Rainer Maria Rilke, in his 1919 essay “Primal Sound” (Urgeräusch in the German original) described an experience he had as a young boy, when introduced to a phonograph for the first time, seeing how the needle produced sounds out of grooves in a wax cylinder, grooves that the recording of actual sounds had put there in the first place. Years later, while attending anatomical lectures in Paris, Rilke connected the lines of coronal suture of the human skull to his childhood observations—“I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!” (2001: 22). From this incident, Rilke derives the following “experimental set-up”: “The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has—let us assume—a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally—well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?” (23). Rilke’s obvious answer, is, of course, noise, music—sound! Probing further, Rilke asks himself, “What variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?” (23).

  In a letter, Rilke specifies this idea. Writing to Dieter Bassermann, Rilke speculates on “set[ting] to sound the countless signatures of Creation which in the skeleton, in minerals … in a thousand places persist in their remarkable versions and variations. The grain in wood, the gait of an insect: our eye is practiced in following and ascertaining them. What a gi
ft to our hearing were we to succeed in transmuting this zigzag … into auditory events!” (2007: 391–2).

  The project “sonic thinking” aims to serve two interconnected purposes: on the one hand it wants to develop an alternative philosophy of music that takes music seriously as a “form of thinking” (and that might revise our notion of what “thinking” means). On the other hand, it aims to bring this approach into a fertile symbiosis with the concepts and practices of “artistic research”: art, philosophy, and science as heterogeneous, yet co-equal forms of thinking and researching (and let me point out that we are using the concept of “artistic research” not in the meaning of art being a handmaiden subordinate to [and evaluated by] parameters of the sciences [a highly debatable practice], but more as a mediaphilosophical praxeology—artists [in this case: sound artists] thinking with and through their medium [in this case: sound]).

  The debate about the sphere of sound is presently fought with high intensity. The emerging field of research “Sound Studies” is primarily discussed in the humanities and social sciences—the “Acoustic Turn” is tackled with the means of cultural sciences and semiotics. These disciplines are however based on foundations that could not be more alien to music (or sound, noise—the “sonic field’). Deeply rooted in one of the major strands of western philosophy, the concepts of cultural studies and especially semiotics are based on what Gilles Deleuze calls “image of thought,” dependent on the metaphysics of being, representation, and identity. Accordingly, a (passive) nature, matter, etc., is “informed” extrinsically, a substance affects existence, the subject organizes (the objects of) experience, progress determines the course of history, etc.

  On the other hand, how Hans Jonas, among others, has demonstrated in his groundbreaking essay, “The Nobility of Sight” (1954) these foundations of western existential philosophy are in turn rooted in the ubiquity of a “visual regime”: a hierarchy of senses was established, in which the eye almost inevitably was declared the origin and foundation of all philosophy—central categories like “[in]finity,” “distance,” “abstraction,” and “objectivity,” are indebted to the intrinsic sensory qualities of visual perception. Since the twilight of the nineteenth century the consequences of this hierarchization of the senses (and the “supremacy” of the eye) are discussed with increasing intensity. In his treatise about the origin of tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche tried to regain the “aural culture” of the old, pre-platonic Greeks, and in a later note he hinted at the revolutionary implications for our culture, which a reorientation away from the eye towards the ear would trigger: “Images in the human eye! This governs the entire nature of the human being: from the eye! Subject! The ear hears sound! An entirely different, marvelous conception of the same world!” (19[66]: 25). Here Nietzsche is congruent with the bigger part of twentieth-century theoretical reflection, that deems the prioritization of the visual sense as the original sin of western thinking.

  As Jonas further explains, the concept of “simultaneity”—and eventually of “identity”—is an effect of the visual regime: visual perception constitutes a “co-temporaneous manifold … at rest” (1954: 507), the sense of hearing however “construct[s its] perceptual unities out of a temporal sequence of sensations” (ibid.). Thus the eye suggests the notion of a permanent existence we would not have, if we could merely resort to “time-senses” (like hearing and feeling).

  Music and sound, however, can also be considered the “other” of this ontology of being and the visual regime—ephemeral, a time-art, non-visual. So what could be the nature of a “sound thinking”? Initially one would have to oppose (or accompany) the predominant discourses in sound studies to a philosophy that is process-orientated: an ontology of becoming, not of being, which recognizes entities as events and contingent actualizations of virtual potentiality, as a flow consisting of “variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds … phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or … of acceleration and rupture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3–4); an “alternative” philosophical lineage, which relies on thinkers like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze. This perspective transforms “givens” with a preset and stable taxonomy of particular functions and agencies into “a construction site of exploration and connection” (Cox 2003: 3).

  From this vantage point, the rigorous division between aesthetics and research (and the likewise rigorous division between the various related [academic] disciplines, e.g., “art” and “science”) can no longer be seriously upheld.

  Deleuze is also interested in “the relations between the arts, science, and philosophy. There is no order of priority among those disciplines” (1995: 123) for Deleuze. Whereas science involves the creation of functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, and art involves the creation of blocs of sensation (or affects and percepts), philosophy involves the invention of concepts. According to Deleuze|Guattari, philosophy, art, and science are defined by their relation to chaos. Whereas science “relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference” (1994: 197), by creating definitions, functions and propositions, art, on the other hand, “wants to create the finite that restores the infinite” (197). In contrast, “philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency” (197).

  Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes and resonances between them” (1995: 123)—that is, to pose the question of their ecology.

  As Deleuze specified in one of his seminars, “Between a philosophical concept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ … these are privileged moments” (“Image Mouvement Image Temps”).1 These moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond representation and categorization.

  The hiatus of art and research is the result of the idea of a linear process ranging from invention|concept (mental) to design (material realization). This however does not do justice to the complexity of the matter: mental and corporeal processes and interactions as well as “implicit/tacit/practical knowledge” become relevant on all levels, for all decisions. As Martin Tröndle has pointed out, conceptual cognitive and manual affective activities go hand in hand, the sensual examination of the material and emotional reactivity is also of highest importance. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their idea of the “artisan” (rather than the “artist”): “It is a question of surrendering to the [materiality], then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form on matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos” (1987: 408).

  The mind is tightly embedded into the interplay between body, environment, and matter. This is the quintessence of Embodied Mind Philosophy. Alva Noë, one of its originators, even takes it a significant step further: for him the mind evolves from the movements of the body in its environment—the mind is not a substance that could be simply located within the confines of our skull. Consciousness is not “something that happens in us, like digestion”—it is rather “something we do … a kind of living activity … the ways in which each of us … carries on the process of living with and in response to the world around us” (2009: 7).

  Embodied Mind Philosophy, I argue, can stimulate a fertile resonance with the concept of artistic research: the artistic practice is here not (only) understood in terms of the finalized work of art (work-aesthetic), but rather in regard to the practices and strategies of artistic production (production-aesthetic). The process of the emergence of a work becomes the center of attention. Artists comprehend this process as the phase of examination or evolution of a work. With this shift from the work to artistic research comes also an altered handling of the work itself. It has become a medium of insight, at the latest
since twentieth-century’s Modernity (cf., e.g., Clement Greenberg). The work materializes knowledge—beyond the aesthetic experience it facilitates comprehension of the world. Making art then means, initially programmatically in general, to explore something with the specific means of art, to discover something about the world. This entails that art does not solely comprehend itself as a medium of representation and that artistic production does not solely revolve around questions of depiction. This alleged reduction of the artistic to a mere tool serving questions of content, turns out to be an actual extension far beyond self-occupation and the function of representation. The artistic position does not ignore the dimension of aesthetic experience; it rather collaborates with it and perceives it as a mode of negotiable understanding.

  Not to be mistaken: it is not that art morphs into science. Art and science are rather poised in a force field of “mutual becoming.” As Julian Klein has noted, “[a]rtistic experience is an active, constructive and aesthetic process, in which mode and substance are fused inseparably. This differs from other implicit knowledge, which generally can be considered and described separately from its acquisition” (2010: 4)—(cf., e.g., John Dewey, Michael Polanyi, Gilles Deleuze, etc.). The reflection of artistic research occurs on the plane of artistic experience itself. This neither excludes an interpretation on a descriptive plane, nor a theoretical analysis on a meta-level. It is however a false conclusion to assume that reflection is only possible from the exterior: artistic experience is a form of reflection. And affect-driven artistic production can arrive at more singular thought-positions than purely rationally organized philosophical systems of thought.

  In the [American] musical avant-garde of the twentieth century these perspectives of music as a contraction of forces, currents, and speeds, coalesce with the notion of music as thinking, music as research—again, the “corporealization of the intelligence that is in sound” (Varèse and Wen-chung 1966: 17). Varèse did not describe himself as a composer, or musician, but rather as “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities” (18). Without any interest whatsoever in traditional categories like melody, pitch, or form, Varèse turned to sound itself, the exploration of tone, timbre, and volume.