Exit immersion

Abstract

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 celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through opposition to the visual. This opposition of the auditory and the visual reiterates a dubious metaphysical distinction critiqued by Jonathan Sterne [The Audible Past] under the title of the ‘audiovisual litany’, a critique that seems to have largely been tuned out or to have fallen upon deaf ears. Addressing the limitations and homogenising effects that the predominant figures of immersion and interiority have upon sonic practice and discourse, Sterne’s critique is herein developed and extended to address the ideological predisposition towards the immersive and the incarcerating consequences of interiority. A critical survey of statements attesting to the immersive nature of acoustic space and experience, taken from a variety of significant authors working in the overlapping fields of sound art, sound studies, and auditory culture, highlights the extent to which the figure of immersion has taken hold within sonic discourse and practice. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalization and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational, and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the immersive and the immanent might serve as an initial means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.

Keywords:

• Immanence
• immersion
• audiovisual litany
• interiority
• correlationism

Introduction

Immersion is the new orthodoxy.¹ 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 ‘sonic sensibility’.² To be immersed in sound frequently implies an embodied, 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 idealized interiority of immersive experience. Often coupled to this spatial immersion, to a sense of being surrounded or bathed in sound, is a temporal immediacy, a sense that ‘sound is […] immediate sensibility […] always now’.³ Immersion is thus a spatio-temporal phenomenon, an experiential unification of the present in space and time through immediate experience of a pre-critical, primordial sonic flux or vibration. What is of concern here is the extent to which the enveloping and encircling qualities of the immersive contribute to a predisposition towards interiority that has the capacity to disable critical thought and differentiation in favour of mystical unification through a figure of cosmic vibration.

The constrictions of a predisposition towards interiority, immersion, immediacy, and continuity within discourse on sound art drastically limit the scope and contemporary significance of the practice to which this discourse attends, limiting it – in the worst cases – to the domain of phenomenal appearances, vague descriptions of ‘the human condition’, and uncritical affirmations of embodiment as immediate self presence – in short a kind of myopia, an unduly conservative limitation of the scope of humanity’s epistemological capabilities. The contemporary significance I refer to here is that identifiable in contemporary art – rather than a version of medium-based modernism to which much sound art would consign itself.⁴ Contemporary art is herein understood in the sense detailed by Peter Osborne as referring to a speculative and futurally oriented postconceptual practice operating under or assuming “the critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials’.⁵ The ‘post-aesthetic poetics’ of contemporary art positions the aesthetic as necessary-expendibility, the site of a sacrificial gesture that relocates the primary locus of artistic practice from the aesthetic to the concept.⁶ Against suggestions that any requirement to consider sonic practice within the critical frameworks of a generic 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 conceptual or non-retinal orientation.⁷ 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 a field of critical discourse attending to a transmedia, transdisciplinary, or generic concept of art.

It is in the context of conceptually driven and technologically mediated artistic practice that 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 its evacuation, 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’.⁸ 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’ and demanding forms of immersive art. In what follows it is argued that the predominant discourses of interiority should be superseded if this limitation is to be surpassed in order to more adequately address the challenges of exteriority that continue to undermine the sufficiency of phenomenological, textualist, or constructivist discourses that establish an apparently insurmountable anthropic horizon or incarcerating interiority; these latter theoretical and philosophical modes falling under the rubric of what Quentin Meillassoux has called ‘correlationism’.⁹

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 ocularcentricities and the ‘hegemony of the visual’.¹⁰ It is this simplistic characterization of sonic experience according to a predominant figure of immersion that I wish to challenge in what follows. Firstly, it is necessary to outline the specific character or qualities ascribed to sonic immersivity which rest upon what Jonathan Sterne calls the ‘audiovisual litany’, a list of differences – theological in origin – between hearing and seeing or the oral and the visual.¹¹ Undertaking a kind of ideological analysis Sterne outlines an audiovisual litany that plagues not only sound studies but communication studies more broadly and can be summarized in a table of binary oppositions that make explicit the terms according to which the visual is frequently opposed to the oral or auditory (Table 1).

Table 1. The opposed terms of the audiovisual litany.

Oral	Visual
spherical	directional
immersion	perspective
affect	intellect
temporal	spatial
subjectivity	objectivity
interior	surface/exterior
contact	distance
life	death

Sterne has described how Walter Ong popularized this litany of oppositions, yet its source resides in the work of Marshal McLuhan.¹² 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’.¹³

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 ocularcentric 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 with the discrete and linear organization of space that McLuhan considered to have been initiated by the Gutenberg printing press. That 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 can be seen through a brief survey of notable texts. This survey is not intended to constitute a ‘hit list’ – as the work of the authors discussed below is clearly not reducible to affirmations of the audiovisual litany, and neither should they be thought to be unified in their positions regarding sonic experience and practice – but an attempt to highlight how the predominance of the figure of immersion has contributed to an ideology of interiority that if unchallenged risks limiting the epistemological and conceptual potency of sonic practice.

What I have been referring to as the figure of immersion is perhaps best summarized in what Bruce Smith described as the ‘O-factor’.¹⁴ While perhaps not a ‘key text’ in either sound art or sound studies, it is the simplicity with which the figure of immersion is diagrammed by Smith that makes it worth noting at the outset of this brief survey. In contrast to the removed distance characteristic of visually dominated epistemology – the linear logic of McLuhan’s visual space or typographical man – constructed within the confines of an isolated ‘viewing tower’, Smith juxtaposes the immersive presence of sound, conceived as pre-linguistic vibration or flux:

If it is Presence that this book is after, it is not the Presence of the Word, but of sound. Of sound in the larynx, in the mouth, in the bones, tissues and cavities of the skull. Of sound in the ear and in the gut. O is not about ontology, but phenomenology. It is concerned not with “voice,” but voice. O is not about metaphysics, but materialism – the materialism of the human body, of sound waves.¹⁵

In contrast to the distal, linear logic of what McLuhan referred to as visual space, Smith presents the figure O as an immersive, encircling organization of acoustic space, with the listening subject positioned on the inside of the circle. Smith’s phenomenologically oriented sonic materialism is concerned less with the significance of speech than the sensation of sound, with a kind of pre-symbolic affect that resides within the voice without being reducible to a sign, escaping or overflowing the ‘bottleneck of the signifier’.¹⁶ What is significant in Smith’s text is the repeated use of the figure O as a kind of mantra or sign representing a distinctly sonic sensibility that centres the listening subject, immersed, bathed, surrounded, encircled by propagating waves. The argument made herein is that in its encircling of the subject this sonic sensibility is as much incarceration as immersion, limiting ontology and epistemology to the somatic and phenomenological. The argument developed in the following section calls for a means of breaking this circle, a puncturing of the incarcerating interiority of immersion, a method of creating an opening in the circle so that thought might address the outside and escape the limitations of the purely phenomenological. Before entering into this critical engagement with immersion it is important to further establish the extent to which a figure of immersion has taken hold as a predominant ideological disposition within a broad range of sound-oriented practices and discourses. A good example of this can be found in Bull and Back’s The Auditory Culture Reader, an example that is worth noting as this text constitutes an authoritative overview of auditory culture and sound studies.¹⁷ While Bull and Back’s editorial introduction does not speak fully for each of the authors whose work is contained in this text – let alone the broad fields of sound studies, auditory culture, and the sonic arts – their opening remarks and observations clearly address what they see as key ideological, methodological, and cultural issues that have both aided and prohibited awareness of the auditory within a broad field of cultural studies and creative practice. It is for this reason that their comments should be taken as indicative of a broader ideology of the oral and auditory when they state that:

of the five senses vision is the most ‘distancing’ one. In vision, subject and object ‘appear’ as transparent. Implied in the objectification of the world through sight is the control of the world. Yet if, as Bishop Berkley notes, ‘sounds are as close to us as our thoughts’ then by listening we may be able to perceive the relationship between subject and object, inside and outside […] altogether differently. In its engulfing multi-directionality sound blurs the above distinctions and enables us to re-think our relationship to them.¹⁸

This issue of distance raised by Bull and Back, specifically its ascription to the visual, is particularly important when diagnosing the predominance of an ideology of immersion and interiority. I will return to this diagnosis below, but for now it is worth noting Bull and Back’s speculation on sound’s immediacy with regard to thought, a relationship that undermines and usurps the apparent transparency and discrete distinction made between subject and object, a distinction problematized by the ‘blurry’ nature of sound and sonic experience. The prevalence of an ideological disposition towards immersion and interiority can be seen in the simplest summaries of acoustic experience. In a description of sonic experience worth noting for its account of an immersive experience of sound and its reiteration of the oppositions comprising the audiovisual litany, Douglas Kahn describes how:

terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences […] Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.¹⁹

What is notable here is the assertion that enveloping aurality affirms presence and the identification of a distinction between the acoustical and ‘the frontal and conceptual associations of vision’.

It is worth mentioning here that it is precisely its purchase upon the conceptual that sonic practice cannot afford to lose through associating it with a narrow 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. The threat to critical and conceptual thought that Kahn’s remarks briefly highlight, a threat posed by the predominance of immersion, can be clearly identified in Salomé Voegelin’s thoughts on the distinctive natures of vision and audition. In a statement that underwrites much of the argumentation developed throughout Listening to Noise and Silence, Voegelin describes how:

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.²⁰

This excerpt from Voegelin is striking for the clarity with which it reiterates the oppositions comprising the audiovisual litany identified by Sterne. From this list of ‘differences’ we find an idealised hearing and apparently universal ‘sonic sensibility’ constructed in accordance with a nature or metaphysics of sound in opposition to visuality.²¹ Voegelin constructs a metaphysical notion of hearing from a narrow set of contextually specific understandings of sonic experience. If the reader in anyway attends critically to sound – whether as a musician, musicologist, artist, sound engineer, acoustician, forensic scientist … – it will be immediately apparent that the qualities of sonic experience that belie the differences comprising Voegelin’s list and the audiovisual litany more generally pay little attention to the trained ear or listening as a cultural technique capable of critical differentiation or ‘audile technique’.²² As should be clear from even a cursory list of disciplines, practices, and professions that could not exist without the possibility of critical or analytical engagement with sound, it is far from clear how the ephemerality and invisibility of sound obstructs 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 Voegelin’s 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. This is presumably because listening as a trained and selective activity – even before it enters the reified professional realms of audile technique – assumes a level of criticality that would undermine Voegelin’s affirmation of sonic experience as pre-critical. In identifying a list of sonic privileges intended to relieve sound of 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 – in Voegelin’s argument – actively disables critical engagement.²³

The above passage from Voegelin is also particularly useful in its underlining of a common rhetorical device or logical imbalance that compares the medium associated with one side of the audiovisual litany’s binary oppositions with the sense associated with the other side of this list of oppositions. For example, in Voegelin’s writing sound is contrasted and opposed to vision, rather than a comparison of sound and light. Balanced comparisons of medium to medium, mode of perception to mode of perception, would again undermine the characterization of a pre-critical sonic sensibility in opposition to the criticality associated with vision; just as one cannot hear if one is not immersed in sound, one cannot see if one is not immersed in light. This same imbalanced comparison is also put into play by Christoph Cox in his argument for a ‘sonic philosophy’ that is, in accordance with the audiovisual litany, contrasted with the visual: ‘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’.²⁴ The point to be raised here is that it is sound in general that is compared to visual objects, a comparison equivalent to that made between sound and sight in Voegelin’s argument, insofar as the gaze, the act of looking, delimits the object as such through critical attention. It is surprising to come across this line of argumentation as in the same article we find a brief discussion of Schaefferian sound objects, the determination of which is constituted through critical attention, taxonomy, and differentiation, terms that fall outside of the category of the immersive to which Cox appeals in his argument for a sonic philosophy.

The sonic medium of pre-critical immersion that Cox describes as ‘anonymous sonic flux’ can also be found in the work of Frances Dyson who describes sound as ‘the immersive medium par excellence’.²⁵ This anonymity and primordiality yields a discursive space for the retention or preservation of the mystical through a deferral of critical attention and an unwillingness to name the object of study explicitly. We have already seen an account of the blurriness ascribed to sound by Bull and Back,²⁶ but it is in Dyson’s work that this is escalated to the extent that a sonic sensibility and the immersive qualities of McLuhanesque acoustic space become myopic.²⁷ Work that sets out to redress an imbalance that has led to a neglect of the sonic results in accounts that, through the criterion of primordial pre-criticality, consign the sonic to the vague, imprecise, ambiguous, anonymous, and blurry. A specifically sonic sensibility thereby comes to stand for a tuning out, a wilful blurring or lack of focused attention, conceptual vacuity engendered through methodological imprecision rather than something inherently resistant to critical investigation in the nature of sound itself. The extent to which the ascription of pre-critical primordiality and blurry anonymity to sound maintains a space for re-mystification is most explicit in Dyson’s work, which presents the clearest alignment of immersion with illusion, re-mystification and a spiritualisation of media,²⁸ an alignment that explicitly bears sound in mind as a means of accessing ‘primordiality via vibration’.²⁹ Dyson describes immersivity in accordance with a McLuhanesque notion of acoustic space connected to ‘the spirito-acoustic trope of vibration’³⁰ and, more broadly, ‘the cosmic vibration of life emitted from all things both animate and inanimate’.³¹ While these statements can be put down to a vitalism, esoteric peculiarity, or theological orientation that is not the primary object of critique here, in a statement that falls directly within the scope of my immediate concern for the critical potency and epistemological efficacy of sonic practice Dyson claims the ‘nature’ of sound to be ‘ontologically vague and semantically imprecise’.³² Yet this is only wilfully the case and has less to do with sound as event, object, or phenomenon than the tendency towards a re-mystification of experience via a notion of immersion that relies upon ‘ontologically vague and semantically imprecise’ descriptions of sound to support its claims. As mentioned above, one does not need to look far for discourses and practices that provide the precision and specificity that sound allegedly evades, the most obvious cases being acoustics and psychoacoustics but also the multitude of disciplines falling under what Sterne has called ‘audile technique’, which broadly describes the critical application of a trained ear – thereby encompassing music and the sonic arts as well as the sciences.³³

The point of this brief survey is not to expose these arguments for the specificity of a sonic sensibility as simply futile because ocularcentricity is to be considered phantasmatic, false, or overrated, but rather as an attempt to show that opposition to the ocularcentric cannot come via a championing of the underdogs of the sensorium, especially where this championing is founded upon a severely underdeveloped account of the capabilities of critical listening or audile technique. Nor is it my intention to claim that looking and listening are essentially equal in terms of their cultural standing. Rather it is my intention to claim that opposition to the ocularcentric should not seek to elevate sensorial underdogs – hearing, smell, taste, touch – towards the establishment of a mystical or ‘lost’ sensorial equilibrium or common sense – as was McLuhan’s aim – but rather to reintroduce the question of the centrality of sensoriality and immediate experience in general, critiquing arguments based upon the ‘hegemony’ of one sense over another as part of a wider critique of phenomenology in general. Attempts at championing a specifically auditory culture defined according to qualities excluded by the ocularcentric pays the high price of further consigning listening to the margins of culture, downplaying the ear’s integration into the infrastructure of rationalism and reason, and a diminishment of the conceptual potency of sonic practice.

The dangers of attempting to define an auditory culture or sonic sensibility in opposition to the apparent components of visual culture is highlighted by Jonathan Crary who points out that ‘the centrality of a “hegemony” of vision within twentieth-century modernity no longer has much value or significance at all’.³⁴ What is of significance is, following Crary, not so much intrasensorial vicissitudes or the hegemony of the visual – the latter being the principal concern of the audiovisual litany – as a broader and more complex issue of individuation – addressed through strategies of isolation, separation, and (dis)empowerment that affect the senses and the directing of attention more generally. 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. In contrast to the stability and certainty that Voegelin, for example, ascribes to vision in accordance with the audiovisual litany, Crary provides a historical account of how since nineteenth-century developments in physiology and optics vision has been considered ‘faulty, unreliable’ and ‘arbitrary’,³⁵ developments initiating a broad cultural move ‘outside of a stable circuit of visuality to an arrangement in which neither eye nor objects in the world can be understood in terms of fixed positions and identities.’³⁶

According to Crary, experimental research carried out throughout the nineteenth century indicated how it is not only hearing which is ‘full of doubt’,³⁷ but the reliability of the given and of embodied empiricism more broadly that has progressively lost its grounding in certainty. Where the doubt that Voegelin ascribes to auditory perception is shown to have spread to the senses in general, it is the centrality of given experiences and the sufficiency of phenomenological ‘images’ that are called into question. With this in mind, the undermining of intrasensorial oppositions founded on their apparent qualities of linearity, certainty, objectivity, and so on, causes the sensorial terms of the audiovisual litany to give way or defer to broader terms, shifting from intrasensorial vicissitudes – specifically those of the auditory and the visual – to the nature of the relationship between the rational and the sensorial – a shift often assigning the former to the visual and the latter to the oral columns of the audiovisual litany.

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. Accordingly, we might adopt Veit Erlmann's terminology and say that the opposition of the auditory and the visual is also an opposition of resonance and reason. 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 of the visual but something to which the senses in general might both contribute and be subjected to. Erlmann has provided a historical study of the interplay of reason and resonance in the production of modern subjectivity, with resonance indicating the centrality of aurality to his study.³⁸ 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 concepts, and so it is historical accounts attesting to the interplay of resonance and reason that concern Erlmann. This is summed up in Erlmann’s coining of the term ‘reasonance’, summarizing the Cartesian ‘project of reconciling resonance with reason’.³⁹ For Erlmann resonance has exercised a ‘benign yet indomitable rule’ over listening,⁴⁰ its constant threat of undermining of the autonomy and freedom of thought highlighted in the platitude that we are ‘lacking earlids’,⁴¹ permitting sound to enter, establish, or force unfree connections via sympathetic resonance. It is this force, the circumventing of rational 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 conscious 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, unfree, and affective force with pre-symbolic existence is undoubtedly a primary characteristic of 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.

While we can, against the audiovisual litany, show the auditory’s capacity for criticality, conceptualization, and reason through brief recourse to audile technique, reference to Crary shows how the apparent certainty and objectivity of vision that authors such as Voegelin ascribe to it 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’.

Immersion and correlation

I would now like to go into a little more depth regarding the aforementioned ideology of interiority and immersion and the extent to which it constrains thought within a sphere of possibility bound by an anthropic horizon. Specifically I would like to briefly address a broad conceptual and philosophical architecture assumed in support of immersion. This is to be carried out by presenting what has in recent years become an influential critique of ‘correlationism’. This term has been popularized by Quentin Meillassoux, who states that:

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.⁴²

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’.⁴³ It is the constitutive power of the relation that produces both subject and object, the relation thereby having primacy over both. This relational primacy posited by correlationism resonates strongly with recent thinking on sonic experience, such as the opening statement of Brandon LaBelle’s Background Noise: ‘sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational […] it leaves a body and enters others […] it seemingly eludes definition, while having profound effect.’⁴⁴ Here we see the almost customary ontological blurring of sound in addition to an explicit statement of its intrinsic relationality which finds a home in the correlational positing of a primacy of relations. 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 of 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. It is, in attempting to make explicit the critical connection between certain arguments within sound studies on the one hand, and philosophical critiques of correlationism on the other, that the figure O taken from Smith⁴⁵ and assumed as a figure representing the ideology of immersion and interiority predominant within sound art and related discourses can be thought to defer to what Meillassoux calls ‘the correlationist circle’.⁴⁶

There are two principal components constraining correlational thought to the interior of an anthropic horizon: phenomenology and the linguistic turn – the latter including what Hal Foster has referred to as textualism, and Coole and Frost as constructivism.⁴⁷ Both components have been previously highlighted in the work of Wilfrid Sellars whose critique of correlational logic constitutes a precursor to that of Meillassoux. In combination with the ‘major schools of Continental thought’, Sellars includes British and American philosophies of ‘“common sense” and “ordinary usage”’,⁴⁸ thereby including what is broadly referred to as the linguistic turn within his critique of ‘correlational induction’.⁴⁹ Accordingly, we cannot hope to escape phenomenological consignment to interiority through what Seth Kim-Cohen has called non-cochlear sonic art, which argues for the assumption of a rigidly textualist or constructivist understanding of conceptual art and its application to the sonic as a means of circumventing a ‘phenomenological cul-de-sac’.⁵⁰ While Kim-Cohen’s work is valuable for its provision of an argument against the prevalence of the phenomenological, immersive, and the ambient in sound art, his 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.

Immanence and immersion

What I would now like to briefly explore is the extent to which steps towards an escape from the homogenizing constraints of the immersive might begin with a two-stage process of separating and supplanting immersion with immanence. Against the audiovisual litany’s privileging of sensory receptivity or ‘passive synthesis’ over conceptual activity or ‘active synthesis’, the immersive qualities inculcating this preference for passivity are to be distinguished from and replaced with the immanence of rationality.⁵¹ Immanence needs to first be separated from the aesthetics of immersion before it can be assumed as a concept capable of circumventing phenomenological impasse. What I would like to emphasize is that in dethroning the experience of immersion within sonic practice we should not do away with the concept of immanence. In separating immanence from immersion we will begin examining the former’s capacity to dislodge the latter and its hold over sonic practice and notions of acoustic space towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy. Rather than being bound to immersive experience, the form of Deleuze’s concept of immanence will be outlined to show how it exceeds and punctures the bubble of immersion through its transpiercing of individuality. The unbinding of a philosophy of immanence from immersive aesthetics aims at uncovering a concept of immanence more able to address what are often abstract, counter-intuitive and non-phenomenologizable aspects of the real.

Immersion and immanence have been considered intimately related, with the former considered the aesthetic of the latter. A good example of this relationship can be found in Benjamin Noys’ recent article wherein it is claimed that ‘immanence immerses in order to exceed specification or determination’.⁵² This binding of immanence and immersion by way of aesthetic experience should by now have a familiar ring to it, as the exceeding or avoidance of specification and determination that Noys highlights is equivalent to the evasion of identification, criticality, and objectification frequently ascribed to the sonic. Noys goes on to note how the achievement, link to, or experience of immanence ‘cannot be extricated from its theological supplement’.⁵³ What binds immanence to this theological supplement is the aesthetic – the notion of a link to, achievement, or aesthetic experience of immanence – and so the unbinding of immanence from aesthetic experience must be achieved if we are also to excise its theological and mystical register.

It is unfortunate that the confusion of immamence and immersion has been encouraged by Deleuze and Guattari – the former being the source of one of the predominant – if not the clearest – contemporary texts on immanence.⁵⁴ We frequently find descriptions of what could be referred to as immersive aesthetic experiences throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, a good example of which describes characters that ‘do not perceive but have passed into the landscape and are themselves part of the compound of sensations’.⁵⁵ Here we only need to swap the landscape for the soundscape to derive a statement constituting a concise summary of what is often referred to as a specifically acoustic 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 ⁵⁶

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 experience – a procedure engendering the aforementioned theological supplement.

Where we are concerned with crossing the horizon, puncturing the bubble of immersion, and breaking with the correlationist circle, rather returning red-eyed from vertiginous, pharmacodynamic experimentation at the edge of the world,⁵⁷ we find that it is only the rational or reasonable – less the respectable, perhaps – that provides the means for surmounting that initial horizon. It is in these kinds of passages that Deleuze and Guattari hinder the development of a radical immanence by binding it too strongly to the aesthetic, resulting in a qualitative reduction and singular localization or phenomenologization of immanence, derailing the broader Deleuzian treatment of immanence as immanent only to itself, and not to a subject who experiences it. By returning to Deleuze’s own writing – with a scalpel – we are able to extricate a form of immanence emptied of its qualitative residue and unbound from the immersive. In this sense we perform a Badiouian operation upon Deleuzian immanence, aiming at ‘evacuating immanence of every residue of phenomenological substance’.⁵⁸ This extrication is not, however, entirely straightforward, as Deleuze’s own writing on immanence remained embroiled in affirmations of ‘complete bliss’ that only exacerbate its theological resonances.⁵⁹ For now limiting our considerations to the contents of Deleuze’s Pure Immanence, one of the more concise definitions of what Deleuze refers to as a plane of immanence or transcendental field is to be found in that statement that:

Were it not for consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, because it 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.⁶⁰

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 the audiovisual litany, principally ‘acoustic’ rather than ‘visual’ in terms of its organization of space and blurring of distinctions between subject and object. What eludes the transcendence of subject and object is the transcendental, which for Deleuze is synonymous with immanence. Deleuze goes on to tightly bind immanence to not only blissful experience but vitalism, assuring a mystical or theological resonance:

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.⁶¹

The notion of a plane of immanence is useful in extricating the form of immanence from its aestheticization as blissful experience – an experiential state related to the ambient form of immersive practice that has recently concerned Seth Kim-Cohen.⁶² Where experience singularizes and localizes immanence the notion of a plane of immanence or transcendental field undoes this localization allowing it to collapse back into a more general and expansive form, a form that can also be found in Deleuze’s writing beyond instances of its aestheticization.⁶³ This expansive, distributive or trans-individual form of immanence is clearest when Deleuze outlines immanence in terms of the generic vitalist concept of ‘a life’, a life that is not reducible to a single individual but as something common to or running through an entire crowd or battle field – drawing upon his reference to the writing of Alexander Lernet-Holenia.⁶⁴ This notion of being run through by a life is key here as, while Deleuze will talk of an engulfing immanence, we also find descriptions of the immanence of a life as that which transpierces us, that which runs us through.⁶⁵ In a brief discussion of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, Deleuze describes how it is the desire to sustain the life that both runs through and is contained within a dying individual that elicits the assistance of onlookers, rather than the desire to sustain the individual person or personality, for whom there is little love or affection.⁶⁶ It is the life in general rather than the particular person that is of interest, as it is the generic notion of ‘a life’ that constitutes a common, vitalist, transcendental field or plane of immanence that extends beyond the individual. It is this vital life force that exceeds and runs through a nonetheless wicked individual as ‘in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him’: the blissful experience of immanence.⁶⁷ As something transpiercing, distinct from, in excess of, yet immanent to the individual, the form of immanence shifts from or undoes the immersive circle opening it out to form a line that transpierces us: immanence is that which transpierces rather than immerses.

It is the vitalist notion of ‘a life’ as well as the coupled experience of bliss as a qualitative characteristic of immanence that must be excised in order for us to be left with the empty form of immanence as expansive, running through the individual yet remaining irreducible to and unbound by the singular instance of individuality or personality, something akin to an ‘immanent objectivity’ that can be know through reason if not experienced via the ‘latency of phenomena’.⁶⁸ It is in extricating the form of immanence from its qualitative aestheticization that its generic, empty, and expansive form is uncovered. Emptied of its vitalism and unbound from its aestheticization, ‘the transcendental field then becomes a genuine plane of immanence that reintroduces Spinozism into the heart of the philosophical process’,⁶⁹ yet this is ‘Spinozism as a rationalist alternative to phenomenology’ attesting to the immanence of rationality over vitalist notions of a life or experience of divine bliss.⁷⁰

Despite Deleuze’s own tendency to fill out the form of immanence with certain, often spiritual, qualities – specifically bliss – the extrication of immanence from immersion contributes to a breaking of the circle that entraps us, restrains conceptual development, and homogenizes propositions made in the context of sonic arts and culture. In extricating immanence from immersion and stressing its contiguity with the rational, the conceptual is privileged over intuitive or aesthetic experience in a manner concomitant with the post-conceptual conditions of contemporary art – from which sound art should not seek exemption through medium specificity. This post-conceptual situation is characterized by an acknowledgement of the failure of absolute or pure conceptualism in art manifest in an ‘anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials’, thereby acknowledging the necessity if not the sufficiency of the aesthetic in orienting thought beyond phenomena towards concept and idea, enabling a thinking of exteriority beyond the experience of immersive interiority.⁷¹ Accordingly, the privileging of the conceptual over the aesthetic does not entail the eradication of the latter by the former but a reorientation of thought and practice that surmounts the constraints imposed by a phenomenological predisposition that is most ardent in celebrations of the immersive.

Notes on contributor

Will Schrimshaw is Lecturer in Music and Sound at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK. His research and teaching are focused on sound, materialism and realism in the arts, sound synthesis and algorithmic composition. He is the author of Immanence and Immersion: On the Acoustic Condition in Contemporary Arts, forthcoming with Bloomsbury. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally as well as appearing in Leonardo: Journal of Arts, Sciences and Technology, Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture and Artnodes: Journal on Art, Science and Technology.

Notes

1. While our immediate concerns are with the extent to which this is true in the field of sound art, it can be argued that this is also the case within a broader field of artistic practice most notably in the work of James Turrell but also in the work of artists such as Mark Leckey whose recent mantra has been: ‘I don’t want to look at things, I want to be in them’ (Charlesworth, “Mark Leckey”).

2. Voegelin, Listening to Noise.

3. Ibid., 169.

4. In “Return to Form”, Christoph Cox has referred to this tendency in sound art as neo-modernism.

5. Osborne, Anywhere Or Not At All, 48.

6. Ibid., 33.

7. Cox, “Beyond Representation,” 157.

8. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, 6.

9. See Meillassoux, After Finitude. A discussion and brief explanation of correlationism will be provided in the following.

10. Cox, ‘Beyond Representation,” 157.

11. Sterne, Audible Past, 15.

12. Sterne, “Theology of Sound.”

13. McLuhan, “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium,” 49.

14. Smith, The Acoustic World, 3. The subtitle to Smith's text is ‘Attending to the O-factor’.

15. Ibid., 29.

16. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 4.

17. Bull and Back, The Auditory Culture Reader.

18. Ibid., 4–5.

19. Kahn Noise, Water, Meat, 27. Emphasis added.

20. Voegelin Listening to Noise, xi–xii. Emphasis added.

21. Ibid.

22. Sterne, Audible Past, 137.

23. At a recent conference on curating sound art Julian Henriques, in a statement echoing Smith's O-factor (Smith, The Acoustic World) and aggravating McLuhan’s notion of acoustic space through re-centralization, pinpointed the threat to critical thought that an ideology of immersion and interiority poses by affirming what he understood to be the Ptolemaic world of sound, at the centre of which we find the listening subject.

24. Cox, ‘Sonic Philosophy."

25. Cox, Sound Art. Dyson, Sounding New Media, 4. My concern here is not with Cox’s interest in realism and materialism, an interest that I share, but with the willingness to maintain vagueness exemplified in the use of the term anonymous, which appears more an unwillingness to name and anatomize rather than an inability.

26. Bull and Back, Auditory Culture Reader, 4–5.

27. Dyson, Sounding New Media, 117–18.

28. Ibid., 107–115.

29. Ibid., 5.

30. Ibid., 88.

31. Ibid., 99.

32. Ibid., 5.

33. Sterne, Audible Past, 87–99.

34. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 3.

35. Ibid., 12.

36. Ibid., 87.

37. Voegelin, Listening to Noise, xii.

38. Erlmann, Resonance and Reason.

39. Ibid., 64.

40. Ibid., 115.

41. Cox, Sonic Philosophy.

42. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.

43. Ibid.

44. LaBelle, Background Noise, ix.

45. Smith, The Acoustic World.

46. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.

47. Foster, Return of the Real, 166. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 19–27.

48. Sellars Science, Perception and Reality, 8.

49. Ibid., 7.

50. Kim-Cohen, In the Blink, xix.

51. Active and passive synthesis are discussed at length throughout the second chapter of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, 90–163. Briefly, passive synthesis includes pre-subjective habits, organic receptivity, and processes, while active synthesis encompasses memory, subjectivity, and the capacity for conceptualization. The point of labelling the former passive synthesis indicates that it is not intended to be thought of as simply or strictly receptive or simply passive, as the realm of habit of passive synthesis entails synthetic production.

52. Noys, Art of the Absolute, 173.

53. Ibid., 175.

54. See Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 25–33.

55. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 169.

56. Ibid., 41.

57. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 297.

58. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 135.

59. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 27.

60. Ibid., 26.

61. Ibid., 27.

62. Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience.

63. Here we might also consider the distinction between relative planes of immanence and ‘THE’ plane of immanence found in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?, yet limitations on space prevent discussion of this distinction which would require more extensive exposition. See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 51, 59–60.

64. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 29.

65. It is unfortunate that there is not space here to enter into a discussion of how this transpiercing is explicity linked to sound in Deleuze and Guattari. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 383–84.

66. Ibid., 28.

67. Ibid., 28.

68. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 30–31.

69. Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 28.

70. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 19.

71. Osborne, Anywhere Or Not At All, 48.