“Things begin to speak by themselves”: Pierre Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell and the epistemology of sound

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of this critique. While Kane argues that Schaeffer’s recourse to myth, coupled with his adoption of Husserlian phenomenology, leads to a closure of his inquiry and a failure to accommodate the contingency of his position, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell brings into focus an open-ended, motivating phenomenological problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity that runs through his thought. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, this paper considers the epistemological significance of this moment in Schaeffer’s thought, suggesting a “problematic” account of the myth of the seashell that puts Schaeffer into conversation with contemporary work in epistemology.

KEYWORDS:

• Pierre Schaeffer
• myth
• phenomenology
• sound objects
• Gaston Bachelard

Acknowledgement

My thanks to Johan Nystrom, Sam Ridout, Patrick Valiquet, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Brian Kane’s (2014) treatment of acousmatic listening provides the most thorough explication of this position, but aspects of it can also be found in Kahn (1999), Kim-Cohen (2009), Chinn (2020), and much other contemporary writing on Schaeffer. Regarding Schaeffer’s own time, Patrick Valiquet richly details the intellectual and philosophical context of Schaeffer’s work on the Treatise on Musical Objects, and quotes Michel Chion in noting Schaeffer’s lack of concern with “psychoanalysis, Marxism, [or] other current disciplines”, with Schaeffer thus “not count[ing] on fashion to carry” the Treatise (2017, 260). In situating Schaeffer’s thought in terms of the simultaneous emergence of poststructuralism, James Steintrager and Rey Chow also tacitly point to Schaeffer’s inattention to this work (2019, 8–11). Being out of step with the day’s trends would not be an issue in itself, but, as Steintrager and Chow note, departing from phenomenology was a major motivating force behind poststructuralist thought (2019, 9). A set of critiques of phenomenology on the basis of naïveté or essentialism were prominent at this time, and these continue to be heard in recent interpretations of Schaeffer. Yet history has shown phenomenology to be more resistant to critique than this 1960s moment suggested (see Alloa, Chouraqui, and Kaushik 2019, 2–5), and re-evaluating Schaeffer’s engagement with phenomenology thus remains a potentially fruitful path.

2. For example, Kane’s influential critique of the “ontological turn” in sound studies could be viewed as concerning a decoupling of the subjective and the objective (2015).

3. In this respect the thoughts I outline here may be read alongside the “acoulogy” that Michel Chion (2016) in particular has developed following Schaeffer’s coinage. Chion’s approach diverges from Schaeffer’s universalism towards a broadly deconstructive approach, and considering “the myth of the seashell” promises to clarify why Chion nevertheless continues to find Schaeffer to be a rich resource for thinking about sound.

4. “Notes sur l’expression radiophonique” was written in the same year as Schaeffer’s “radiophonic opera” La Coquille à planètes, and in his 1970 collection Machines à communiquer is placed under the heading “Le mythe de la coquille” (Schaeffer 1970, 89). See Dack (1994) and Nadrigny (2013).

5. The aporia that Chinn (2020) finds in Schaeffer’s sound object, as well as in Walter Benjamin’s aura, seems to me an aspect of the legacy of Kant’s aesthetics, premised on instances where the determinate judgements of the transcendental subject do not seem to be able to account for what we perceive, demanding instead a non-conceptual reflective judgement. Indeed, as Robert Ryder suggests, Benjamin is on such terrain when he himself considers the relation between seashell, sound, and memory (2007; Helmreich 2012-13). The seashell as an, at least at first, undetermined object of inquiry that suggests a distinction between ways of viewing the world will be a thread running through my discussion here.

6. This statement could be understood to refer either to musique concrète never leaving its foundational stage, or to a more fundamental failure regarding any attempt to overcome a universally valid truth of music: that the language of music is the language of the scale. There is a sense of Schaeffer vacillating between these positions, and it seems to me there are aspects of both in his self-deprecating remarks.

7. While I have referred to, and owe much to, Christine North and John Dack’s recent translation of the Treatise (Schaeffer 2017), all translations are my own. It should be noted that the edition of the Treatise cited is a 1977 update, with an additional “Penultimate Chapter” by Schaeffer inserted from page 663 onwards.

8. For Schaeffer’s fully developed account of his historical musical context, see the “Preliminary” chapter to the Treatise (1966, 15–38).

9. Kane aptly describes Schaeffer’s journals as documenting an “improvisational ontology” (2014, 15).

10. There is a desire here to bridge what Gilles Deleuze calls the “wrenching duality” of Kantian aesthetics, a duality between the experience of determinate objects of the understanding and the kind of undetermined objects we experience through art (1990, 260). Such a desire is also behind ontological reflections in the phenomenology of art, as in the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007).

11. At this point in Schaeffer’s writings the specific compositional method of musique concrète is largely supplanted by a syncretic research programme concerning musique expérimentale. See Palombini (1993a) for an illuminating interpretation and contextualisation of this essay.

12. Schaeffer puts this distinction in vivid terms: “The first will say that everything is language; there is no question of a direct relationship between subject and object. The same old relativist arguments: the use of an object by man is nothing but a convention. The others, turning their backs on the former, allowing that one informs the other, will plug the human body into a galvanometer and will start to treat man like a frog” (2012, 158).

13. Schaeffer stresses that when discussing sound a continuity between disciplinary approaches cannot be assumed, and may not be possible or even desirable (1966, 160; Chion 2016, 196). Some recent discourse on transdisciplinarity, and notions such as “transdisciplinary objects” and “transdisciplinary problems” (Osborne 2015), seems apt to the way Schaeffer deals with sound, although applying this term to the Treatise would be anachronistic. While no easy translation thus offers itself, it is important to bear in mind that Schaeffer emphasises both disciplinary specificity and potentially transformative exchange.

14. Schaeffer himself suggests that he encountered Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the late 1950s (Pierret 1969, 123).

15. My formulation of this debate owes much to Bell (1998).

16. It is in marked contrast to Kane’s reading of Husserl that Husserl maintained a complex relationship to realism, and with this a complex relationship to contemporary realist thought. See Zahavi (2017, 33, 170).

17. There has, however, been important recent work that places Merleau-Ponty’s thought in closer proximity to the abstractions associated with science and mathematics than has often been supposed of it. See Matherne (2018).

18. The contrast between Bachelard’s phenomeno-technology and Schaeffer’s own rejection of any technological specificity to his research project could be a fruitful line of further inquiry. See Teruggi (2007) and Gayou (2007).

19. Such a notion could help us better understand what Patrick Valiquet describes as the “historically specific ‘listener function’, a bundle of auditory relationships and knowledge about audition that circumscribes aural subjecthood in terms proper to French intellectual life in the 1960s” to be found in Schaeffer’s Treatise (2017, 257).

20. Simon O’Sullivan’s reflections on “myth-science” are illuminating on the notions of fabulation and the fabulous (2016).

21. There is more to pursue regarding the Gurdjieffian discipline that plays a role in Schaeffer’s self-deprecation. In Schaeffer’s case at least this discipline seems to present itself as an external, and destructive, form of self-critique. The question arises of what position Schaeffer would have come to if he were able to produce a self-critique on a more immanent or reflexive basis.

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Iain Campbell

Iain Campbell is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Edinburgh, and is currently serving as a postdoctoral research assistant on the project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Bio-Politics at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. He received a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London in 2016, with a thesis exploring experimental practices of music and philosophy in the work of John Cage and Gilles Deleuze, and he has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including parallax and Deleuze and Guattari Studies. He is an associate member of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy, and is part of the editorial board of Evental Aesthetics.