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ABSTRACT
This essay is about how artists, listeners and critics claim to hear life in a sound and how this suggestive, but hazily defined, provocation connects vast cultural circuits of production, technology and capital. I argue that claims to life in a sound also belie an anachronistic return to an early modern understanding of sound as particulate matter and suggest a technoscientific discourse in which sound and data are described in terms of one another. With a close engagement with microsounds – from Gilles Deleuze to computer music specialist Curtis Roads – this essay queries what sonic particulates are presumed to be when they are mapped onto Spinoza’s corpora simplicissima but processed through analogy synthesis or digital tools. In part, this essay tries to speak to a persistent separation of sonic materiality and auditory culture, in music and sound studies in which life in a sound cannot be thought apart from how life is subject to different kinds of extractions. With a return to Spinoza’s physics, this essay also retakes the often sloganized “no one knows what a body can do” to emphasize an ethical recomposition of the text in which to “know” must be as open-ended as “body” is typically emphasized to be.
Notes on contributor
Amy Cimini is a violist and musicologist based in San Diego, CA. Her research, teaching and performance engage twentieth-century philosophy and political thought with an emphasis on embodiment and ethics in experimental practice. Her musicological writings appear in GAMUT, Contemporary Music Review, Sound Studies, boundary2, Twentieth Century Music and The Opera Quarterly. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego and is happy to be finishing her first book, titled Wild Sound, about the musical thought of US composer Maryanne Amacher. As a violist, Amy is a founding member of chamber music collective Till by Turning and improvising duo Architeuthis Walks on Land with bassoonist and composer Katherine Young.
Notes
1 For the canonical account of this, see Goehr, The Imaginary Museum. For a recent reassessment of Goehr’s project in relation to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century mediatic forms, see Born, “On Musical Mediation”.
2 Rodgers, “‘What for me’”, 523.
3 Ibid., 523.
4 For an exemplary collection of texts, scores and schematics, see Rosenboom, Biofeedback. See also O’Brien, “Pauline Oliveros’s”.
5 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 52.
6 Rodgers, “Introduction”, 117.
7 See Lockwood’s Sound Map for exemplary projects.
8 See Maconie, “Revisiting Mikrophonie I”.
9 See Cimini. Wild Sound. For more on Amacher, also Cimini, “In Your Head”; Dietz, “Notes Without Ears”.
10 See Ceccatto, Drawn to the Sound.
11 See Parisi, Abstract Sex.
12 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 123.
13 Xenakis, “The Electronic Poem”, 24. For an expert analysis of Xenakis’ use of probabilistic methods, see Kane, “Xenakis”. See also Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Musique. For a much earlier version of this line of research, see Cimini, “Gilles Deleuze and the Musical Spinoza”.
14 Ibid., 24.
15 Ibid., 24.
16 Curtis Roads. Microsound, 65.
17 Ibid., 56.
18 Ibid., 57.
19 Ibid., 60.
20 Xenakis, Formalized Music, 43.
21 By 1640, Robert Boyle’s experiment with partly evacuated glass vessels showed that the medium of air was necessary for the transmission of audible sound. These figures shared atomistic conceptions of sound and Roads would have them set the stage for Dennis Gabor’s acoustic quanta (1940).
22 This image also appears in Cimini, “Gilles Deleuze and the Musical Spinoza”.
23 Roads, Microsound, 50.
24 See Cohen, Quantifying Music.
25 Ibid., 162.
26 Ibid., 163.
27 Gaukroger, Descartes, 69.
28 Jornik, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age: 1575–1715.
29 Descartes. Compendium of Music, 11. See also Augst, “Descartes’ Compendium of Music”, 122. Although, in the 1610s, Descartes worked on analyses of water and free fall, Augst suggests Descartes’ Compendium represents his earliest framework for “meaningful scientific experimentation”; the other studies merely analyzed extant “mechanical experiences”. Augst, “Descartes’ Compendium of Music”, 122.
30 Christensen. Rameau and Musical Thought, 77.
31 Augst, “Descartes’ Compendium of Music”, 124.
32 For an expert account of the occult retentions on Descartes’ Compendium, see Negri, Political Descartes. There, Negri addresses the character of metaphor in the Compendium and Discourse in order to outline metaphor’s univocal character in Descartes’ early work. By thinking of metaphor as univocal, I take Negri to mean that whatever is expressed through the metaphor’s terms can be predicated equally of both of them. Scotus (frequently cited as a paradigmatically univocal thinker, against Aquinas’ equivocity) makes no qualitative distinction between the human and the divine. Thus, when we say that “God is good” and that “so and so human being is good”, we mean that they are good in the same way, but in differing degrees. Negri isolates three different kinds of metaphors in Descartes that depict the pursuit of reason as: (1) walking a path, (2) building a house and (3) operating a machine. Focusing on the metaphor of rebuilding a house with a weak foundation from the Discourse, Negri asserts that reconstruction of the house is rational in the same way that it is rational to reconstruct knowledge on indubitable beliefs after discarding fallible ones. Both articulate the same need for security, thus framing mental and material project as expressive of the same kind of rationality.
33 Cohen, Quantifying Music, 123. As Descartes tells Beeckman in his letter of 24 January 1619, “if you look carefully at what I wrote on discords and the rest of my treatise on music, you will find all of the points I made on the intervals of harmonies, scales and discords were demonstrated mathematically”. Descartes, Philosophical Writings Vol. 3, 1.
34 Cohen, Quantifying Music, 123.
35 Moreno, Musical Representations, 62.
36 Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe, 484.
37 Ibid., 475. Although Descartes doesn’t theorize how knowledge is shared and transmitted as explicitly as Spinoza does in the Ethics, Reiss locates evidence for Descartes’ interest in community in his corpus itself. He writes: “What, more importantly, could we then make of his determined collection of ‘Replies’ and ‘Objections’ to the Meditations? Of earlier efforts to do the same for the Discourse and its Essays? [ … ] Their mere existence belies notions of self-sufficiency”. Ibid., 473. On Reiss’ reading, the stability of the cogito empowers the Cartesian subject to participate in rational discourse and worldly life.
38 Deleuze, Expressionism, 204.
39 See Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology.
40 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, xvi.
41 Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations”, 7.
42 Garcia, “Beats, Flesh, and Grain”, 64.
43 Fink, “Below 100 Hz”, 88.
44 Goodman, cited in Fink, “Below 100 Hz”, 89.
45 Goodman, cited in Fink, “Below 100 Hz”, 90.
46 Gaber, “God, Laws”, 52–7.
47 Hobbes, Leviathan, 7.
48 Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, 362.
49 Hobbes, Leviathan, 6.
50 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 24.
51 Ibid., 24.
52 Ibid., 28. When new objects of sense work on us, Hobbes writes, “the imagination of the past is obscured and made weak, as the voice of a man is in the noise of the day”. Hobbes, Leviathan, 8.
53 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 27.
54 Indeed, Hobbes devotes nearly a third of Leviathan explicating how this reciprocal sensory motion forms the basis of more complex voluntary endeavors towards or away from objects based on desire or aversion. As the impetus behind these foundational passions, motion grounds Hobbes’ understanding of interiority, social life and, ultimately, the process of deliberation by which we make political decisions.
55 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 23.
56 Kassler, Inner Music, 59
57 Ibid., 59, fn 37.
58 Ibid., 59, fn 38.
59 Ibid., 59.
60 For an account of the surprising staying-power of Neo-Platonic music theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Gouk, “Harmonics”.
61 Ibid.
62 Kassler, Inner Music, 102.
63 Ibid., 102.
64 Hobbes, “Elements of Philosophy”, 366.
65 Nadler, Spinoza, 104.
66 See Burgers, The Lute.
67 Rombouts, Singing Bronze: A History of Carillon Music.
68 Green and Butler, “From Acoustics to Tonpsychologie”, 248–9.
69 Frijhoff and Speis, Dutch, 590.
70 See Burgers, The Lute.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Gouk, “Harmonics”.
74 See Kravitz and Werner, “The Silence of Maimonides”, 179–201.
75 Ibid., 190.
76 Burnham, “Form”, 897.
77 Darcy and Hepokoski, Elements of Sonata Theory, 283.
78 Macherey, In a Materialist Way, 130–3.
79 Garrett, Spinoza’s Theory, 78–82.
80 Spinoza, Ethics, E2P13L3. References follow the standard abbreviations for Spinoza’s Ethics: E for the Ethics, Arabic numerals for the five parts, P for Proposition followed by the proposition number. S for Scholium, D for Definition, L for Lemma, C for Corollary. This locution “reason of motion and rest” appears in a few different forms in the secondary literature on Spinoza. Lloyd, Spinoza, retains the Latin ratio, referring to bodies as constituted through ratios of motion to rest. I find this valuable because it implies that the body’s identity lies in the comparative relation between the upper and lower thresholds of its abilities. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze opts simply for “relation”. Some refer to this set of parameters as a “proportion of motion to rest” (see Gabbey, “Spinoza’s Natural Science”). Gabbey, in particular, points out that Spinoza’s argument for the universal interaction of ratio of motion to rest lacks a quantitative foundation and is therefore mathematically unintelligible (Gabbey, “Spinoza’s Natural Science”, 169).
81 Ethics, E2P13L3, A”, Definition (the complete text):
when a number of bodies [ … ]. whether of the same or of different size [ … ] so move, whether with same degree of different levels of speed, so that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they composed an individual which is distinguished from the others by this union of bodies.
82 E2P13L3. Here is the complete Demonstration:
Bodies are singular things which are distinguished from one another by reason of motion to rest and so must be determined to motion or rest by another singular thing, namely by another body, which either moves or is at rest. But this body also could not move or be at rest if it had not been determined by another to motion or rest, and this again (by the same reason) and by another and so on to infinity.
83 The complete Vincennes quotation: Deleuze, “Lecture Transcripts”, 5–6:
For Spinoza, the individuality of a body is defined by the following: it’s when a certain composite or complex relation (I insist on that point, quite composite, very complex) of movement and rest is preserved through all the changes which affect the parts of the body. It’s the permanence of a relation of movement and rest through all the changes which affect all the parts, taken to infinity, of the body under consideration. You understand that a body is necessarily composite to infinity. My eye, for example, my eye and the relative constancy of my eye are defined by a certain relation of movement and rest through all the modifications of the diverse parts of my eye; but my eye itself, which already has an infinity of parts, is one part among the parts of my body, the eye in its turn is a part of the face and the face, in its turn, is a part of my body, etc. [ …] thus you have all sorts of relations which will be combined with one another to form an individuality of such and such degree. But at each one of these levels or degrees, individuality will be defined by a certain relation composed of movement and rest.
84 Garrett, Spinoza’s Theory, 83.
85 Ibid., 79; Spinoza, E2P22C1; Spinoza, Short Treatise, Appendix 11.15.
86 Garrett, Spinoza’s Theory, 78.
87 Ibid., 78.
88 When a moving body strikes a resting body, for Spinoza, a number of things can happen. If the resting body cannot “give way”, then the moving body continues to move in the same direction at an angle equal to that of the angle of incidence. That same resting body might be set into motion by a body with a different nature.
89 For Deleuze’s eloquent account of the body’s dual moral and epistemological liabilities as related to the dualism’s fraudulent balance between acting and suffering, see Deleuze, Expressionism, 225–9.
90 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 48–9.
91 Spinoza, E2P13, Dem.
92 See Casarino, “Marx Before Spinoza”.
93 See Garber, “A Free Man”.
94 Spinoza, E2P29S.
95 Ibid.
96 Deleuze, Spinoza Practical Philosophy, 54.
97 Duuglas-Ittu von, “Spinoza on Admiratio”, n.p.
98 Rosenthal and Melamed, Spinoza’s, 237.
99 Sonic Field, “Infinite Sound”, n.p.
100 Ibid., n.p.
101 Ibid., n.p.
102 Demers. Listening, 74–80.
103 Helmreich, “What Was Life”, 671–96.
104 Povinelli, Geontologies, 20. The literature questioning the extension of Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics into the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is vast. In a most basic sense, it bears keeping in mind that Foucault’s project was rooted in the emergence of the European state with little attention to the colonial and postcolonial context in which that emergence was both buttressed and contested. For a focused account of relevant responses, see Povinelli, Geontologies, 1–25. More broadly, contemporary experience includes concerns about life and health that exceed the state’s political form, involving international agencies, nongovernmental organizations and private corporations. Pace Rodgers, “Introduction”, how these forms of power – sovereign prerogative, discipline and biopolitics – require further genealogical and ethnographic elaboration. For an account for how this elaboration might take shape in relation to ethnographies of US technoscience, See Helmreich, “What Was Life”, 671–96.
105 See Cooper, Life as Surplus.
106 Parisi, Abstract Sex, 77.