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Abstract
When Blanchot sketches the obscure space of the other night, he describes it primarily in terms of sound. The vocation of the other night, the domain of inspiration, which is approached because it promises to enable artistic works but ultimately puts them at the utmost risk, turns out to be one’s own “eternally reverberating echo.” In my article, I want to trace how such nocturnal sounds are articulated in works of art across different media, especially by staging breath. Echoing Blanchot, these works indicate how hearing the night and hearing breath, the sound of physical inspiration, coincides with hearing what constitutes the respective work’s medial and material bases. In Virginia Woolf’s novels Jacob’s Room and The Waves, an impersonal, neutral narrative voice resounds in a “murmur of air,” “tremulous with breathing,” spreading darkness across space and time. The visitors’ exploration of Kimsooja’s installation To Breathe: Bottari ends in a completely dark anechoic chamber where visitors start hearing their own breath. By creating this uncanny moment of hearing one’s own respiration as an external and disembodied sound, the spatial installation points to what essentially determines it: the bodily movements of the participants. “Nightmarket,” a track by Burial, is a labyrinthine soundscape consisting mainly of muffled whispering, rustling, crackling and audible breath. Through the acoustic proximity of the recorded breath and the vinyl crackles, the track evokes its own medial constitution and history: it displays traces of the organic basis of voice as well as the analogue medium in the digital.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
abbreviations
| abbreviations | ||
| BC | = | The Book to Come. |
| SL | = | The Space of Literature. |
Notes
1 Stumbling does refer to the feet’s work, but in contrast to sighing and groaning, it is not necessarily a sound.
2 Autophony is not limited to a heightened perception of one’s voice and breath. In an article about a musician affected by autophony, one can find a striking resonance with Kafka’s beast in the burrow:
he thought he heard a mouse rustling about in the walls. Putting down his book, he rose from bed to inspect for rodents but each time he stopped to listen, the noises stopped as well. Finally he realized the disturbing truth: There was no mouse. McLeish was hearing the sounds of his own eyes, as they moved back and forth across the pages of his book. (Danner)
3
The Eustachian tube is closed at rest and is actively opened only under controlled conditions during respiratory rest in the nasopharynx. If the Eustachian tube is opened outside this limited range of time, there is a pathological communication between the nasopharynx and the tympanic cavity. This pathological communication causes an intermittent or constant transfer of pressure fluctuations from the pharynx towards the middle ear. (Dornhoffer et al. 23)
4 Thus, already this brief account of hearing from a medical perspective shows that Lacan’s and Dolar’s claims uncritically affirm some of the prejudices about how the auditory sense differs from the visual that Jonathan Sterne compiled in The Audible Past: “hearing involves physical contact with the outside world, vision requires distance from it” (15).
5 In this essay, Blanchot focuses especially on “the impersonal ‘He.’” However, his reflections can be expanded to instances where the narrative voice makes itself heard in forms other than this “He.”
6 I discuss Kimsooja’s To Breathe: Bottari along with a brief reference to Blanchot’s notion of inspiration in another context in my article “Breathing Machines: Inspiration and Interdependence in Contemporary Art Installations.”
7 In The Space of Literature, Ann Smock translates désoeuvrement as “inertia” or “lack of work” (see “Translator’s Introduction” 13). I chose to add the French term, which in English contexts is known primarily as “unworking,” in the citation for clarity’s sake.
8 This is not exaggerated: before being allowed to enter the pavilion, the visitors have to sign a paper which reads as follows:
Please note that some installations in the exhibition contain strong reflective light effects as well as dark spaces. Therefore, the pavilion is not appropriate for visitors suffering from claustrophobia, panic disorder, tachycardia, dizziness or epilepsy (seizure disorder), etc. The decision to enter is each individual’s personal responsibility.
9
It’s about being on a night bus, or with your mates, walking home across your city on your own late at night, or being in a situation with your girlfriend or boyfriend, or coming back from a club, or putting tunes on an [sic] falling asleep. If your [sic] well into tunes, your life starts to weave around them. (Fisher, “Burial”)
10
Wire: Your music seems to be about the after effects of Rave, about never actually experiencing it. / Burial: I’ve never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it [ … ] I don’t know if it [i.e. Rave] exists any more at all. A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and hear something in the tune that makes me feel sad. (Ibid.)
11 It would not be the first time Burial integrated material from the Alien movies into his music: he used parts of the Alien 3 soundtrack for the opener of the album Untrue. In an interview, Burial also mentions “My favourite sound in the world is the motion-tracker from Aliens” (“Burial Interview”).
12 Burial stresses that the Terminator movies were influential for his music: hearing his brother’s rave records “was like when you first saw Terminator or Alien when you’re only little. I’d get a rush from it, I was hearing this other world” (Fisher, “Burial”).
13 In his reflection on the increasingly popular use of digital sound-effects imitating the defective noises – the pops, hisses, clicks or crackles – involuntarily produced by older media like the tape or vinyl, Stan Link claims that “noise evokes origin” (39); “by palpably undermining the transparency of its medium, noise foregrounds a sensation of provenance in recorded sound. We hear an origin, even if not an original one” (40).
14 Vinyl crackles have become a popular sound-effect used widely in contemporary recordings – from electronic music to mainstream pop. “We now have some very high-tech means to achieve ‘lo-fi’ ends,” Stan Link observes when commenting on the retro hype haunting today’s music (35).
15 See Burial’s comments about the rave scene:
Maybe the feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn’t as artificial, self-aware or created by the internet. It was more rumour, underground folklore. No mobile phones back then. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those ravers were at the edge at [sic] their lives, they weren’t running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from them. In club culture, it all became like super-clubs, magazines, trance, commercialized. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone, now there’s less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. (Fisher, “Burial”)
16 In his discussion of the temporality of Burial’s self-titled debut, Mark Fisher also outlines a very plausible dimension of futurity: Burial’s music
suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach. Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and, most keeningly – what could still happen. The album is like the faded ten year-old rag of a kid whose Rave dreams have been crushed by a series of dead end jobs. (Ghosts 98)
17 It is important to differentiate between the rave-tracks that Burial samples – which are available because they are rendered durable on the respective recording media – and the rave culture of the 80s – which is irretrievably gone. When I refer to the unremembered past, I mean the loss of the underground rave-nights that Burial laments.