being within sound.pdf

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Being within sound: immanence and listening. Dr. Bruce Mowson

RMIT / Independent scholar.

This essay considers the act of listening as situated by philosophies of immanence, psychoanalysis and

musical practices, with a view to discussing issues of sensation, experience, time and immersion. The

main body of the text consists of a subjective theoretical preface to issues of immanence with respect to

aesthetic perception, before concluding with a discussion of immanence in US Minimalism since the

1960s. The piece draws on the work of various authors, notably Gilles Deleuze, whose perspective on

immanent perception in the moment might be opposed to the historical and symbolic model implied by

Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis. The essay explores a case for a phenomenological approach to

aesthetics and composition, in which materialist concerns—that is to say sound as matter with which to

provoke (pure) sensation—are privileged over representation, where in the latter case sound and music

largely acts as a vehicle for meaning. Although not specifically focussed on the sound/image

relationship, this essay derives from my thinking about my own audiovisual practice, one of these

pieces being exhibited in the Festival. Though the discussion focuses upon sound, it has implications

for both image and sound/image relationships.

Deleuzian Immanence and Materialist Empiricism, versus the Egoistic

Signification of Lacan:

One of my key artistic concerns in recent years has been to better understand my own experience of

listening, and how this situates my compositional and artistic activities. In a quasi-phenomenological

manner I have tried to analyse the structure of my listening. I have noticed that it includes a conscious

and intentional directing of attention to the sonic, and this necessitates a lessening of attention to the

visual. This changed mode of perception alters my consciousness of my location in space, as I become

aware of the area behind me and of the topography beyond my immediate surrounds. Also changed is

my awareness of time, and perhaps the best way I can describe this is to say that I become synchronisedwith the time of my environment: when listening I experience myself as more synchronised with both

the time and space of my immediate environment, and conversely, I become less self-conscious,

because in my own experience, it is not possible to self-reflect and listen simultaneously: one engages

with the inner voice or the external world.

Going back to the reasons for enquiring about this topic, I find that my compositional activities are

compelled by my desire to create listening phenomena for myself: responding to the question “what is

it that I want to hear?” However, this question has begot another that in fact precedes it: “why do I

want to hear?” This question appears to be particularly significant in relation to experimental sound—I

am not making sound for an audience’s entertainment, or even my entertainment. Indeed, given the

marginal interest in the area, the audience for which is largely peers, it seems important to ask

questions about what is compelling about practice in this area. If composition is not to be musical

entertainment, and is to aspire to being a critical practice, then I believe it must ask questions of itself in order to be clearer about what it might be and where it might be going. Following from this, my

enquiries have a reflexive and subjective emphasis as I seek to better understand my own sonic

processes. I am not seeking to understand listening from the objectivist points of view that science may

claim to offer, for I am not wishing to stand outside of the experience of listening to understand how it

functions. Rather I have tended toward philosophical discourses that resonate with the personal,

embodied and profound nature of my own experience. On the other hand, languages of the humanities

offer a more promising, if difficult to follow path. My initial orientation has been toward

phenomenology, based on the simple premise that the term “phenomena” seems an appropriate way to

characterise listening as an occurrence that cannot be reduced to a fact or biological process, but is both

real and complex.

Through preliminary research around abstract art and phenomenology I came across the term

immanence, a philosophical position that came to prominence with the rise of materialism in the Westduring the twentieth century.

1The term literally translates as to “remain within,” and is opposed to

transcendence, which means to go beyond. In general terms, philosophies of immanence seek to



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respond to philosophical questions about the nature of existence from a materialistic standpoint. This

might involve limiting the things that comprise a life to things within the world, and this can be

contrasted to philosophies of transcendence, which describe existence via things that are beyond the

material world. An example of transcendence would be the Platonic notion of ideals, wherein things in

the world can be contrasted to ideal forms that transcend, or exist beyond, the physical plane.2

In music,

a thematic shift toward immanence can be seen in the materialism that is paradigmatic of compositional

genres such as Serialism, musique concrète and electroacoustic music. Composers in these genres oftenfocussed upon the physical characteristics of music, examining all manners of sound generation and

techniques of composition, and in general, made work that strove to be a something, rather than being

about something—the meaning of the work was in its material existence, not a text outside it. So an

immanentist approach to music might be one that focuses upon materiality, and is about its own

materiality.

Material abstraction is the style to which I am generally drawn as a composer and artist, and my own

interest in immanence comes from the standpoint of questioning what it is that I find meaningful about

material explorations in music. A key consideration of my self-reflection about my practice is that my

materialist explorations are driven by something other than just curiosity about the materials. Therefore

I have looked outside music for discussions of materiality, seeking a different way into this

questioning. One starting point has been a definition of empiricism, which “holds that knowledge

derives from the senses alone, and stresses the importance of observation and experience ininterpretation rather than theoretical constructs.”

3Many of my own sonic works might be read in

relation to empiricism, and by using texture, excessive repetition, and immersion via loudness I have

sought to provoke “observation and experience,” rather than references to theoretical constructs. I have

also used techniques of abstraction, including negation, displacement and reduction of figurative

signification in order to frustrate the audience’s processes of reading and interpretation such as through

the application of theoretical constructs. A question that I have formed about my work, however, is

whether there can be a form of empiricism more acute than that defined above, wherein meaning might

be located in the sensory itself?

As an artist, I do not set out to create meaning, per se, but rather set out to ‘make art.’ As

artist-researcher Lesley Duxbury remarks: “the reasons for making [art] work are many and various,

however it generally materialises through ‘doing,’ through a physical engagement with materials and

often reveals the unexpected.”

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The question I put to myself as an artist is: who creates the meaning inmy own work, myself as the artist or myself as the audience for my own work? Taking this further, I

have tried, as an artist, to situate myself in the same place as the audience, and have done so via

strategies that modify and erode my presence in the art-making process. Here I am not suggesting that I

am not responsible for my works, but rather I have focussed upon working intuitively with the media to

create sensations. The artworks I have made have tended to be processed by the question of how can I

present this sensation, which I locate in the medium? My objective here, though, is not to establish the

nature of the medium, per se, but to render sensations from it for myself and for the audience.

The functionality that I am ascribing to my work can be further clarified and explored by

again returning to d’Alleva’s definition of empiricism, specifically that it: “stresses the importance of

observation and experience in interpretation rather than theoretical constructs.”5

Here we find an

overtly oppositional construction, of “observation and experience” against “theoretical constructs,”

referring to the valuation of perception over theoretical reflection. There is, however, a covertopposition in the text, wherein meaning is located in interpretation, whether it be based upon

observation and experience, or upon theoretical constructs. In relation to d’Alleva’s quote, my work

does emphasise the sensory experience and questions about how meaning might be positioned with

relation to the moment of experience, and it is for this reason that I turned to aspects of Gilles

Deleuze’s philosophy.

Deleuze’s final text, completed just prior to his death, was a short essay written with

uncharacteristically straightforward language, titled Immanence: A life. Herein he describes his

conception of how the entirety of existence, of all life and the universe, might be contained within a

singularity, and he refers to this as pure immanence. He describes this immanence as being impossible

to understand objectively, for one cannot stand outside of immanence without destroying it, and says of

it only that it is A LIFE. He illustrates this in a vignette from Charles Dickens describing how an old

man, a rascal and rogue, despised by all, falls down in the street, apparently having passed away. Acrowd forms, and everyone is concerned for him. This concern fades as he is recovers, and the man’s

life returns from being A life, for which all are concerned, to his life, an identity which many revile. I



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read this description of the shift in the onlookers as an argument for a space that is away from ego and

identity—for a period, they are witnessing A LIFE rather than the life of the rogue. I have used this

notion because of its resonance with my description of listening as an interruption of distanced self-

reflection (see below) and an expansion of engagement with the exterior world, and because I describe

this process as manifesting immanence, wherein the listener is becomes more conscious of their

existence within the world.

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze outlines a division of time into two types: Chronos, the eternal

past and future; and Aion, the moment of the present.6

The Aion is the moment of the present, which is

not the passing moment, but the instant that marks the present without actually passing. I regard this as

important to questions about listening, because of the transitory nature of sound, which exists

materially only in that moment of the present. This is subtly different to other artistic media: perhaps

the closest referent is movement, wherein motions are similarly transitory, even though bodies remain

existent. American academic Joshua Ramey explores this Aion/Chronos distinction further, and

interprets Deleuze as saying that “unless our fixation with identity or our ego is overcome, we cannot

fully actualise the potential of events which befall us.”7

I understand Ramey to be arguing for an

existence in Aion’s instant, away from that past and future that is the place of ego and identity. Deleuze

takes us into challenging philosophical territory, and my partial reading only serves to create more

questions than it answers. In referencing such a slight fragment of a discourse, I run some risk of losing

the context that gives relevance to it. However, the notions of listening that I am putting forward areformative, and without substantial contextual references, so I have used Deleuze’s fragment as marker

in the map that I am territorialising, as if to say, this is not an unknown continent, occupied only by

practitioners of music, for here lies a bridge.

What I am proposing about the interruption of self-reflection, ego and identity during listening

has implications within psychoanalytic theory, and perhaps most specifically Lacanian theory, which

gives a very substantial explanation of subjective experience. In Jacques Lacan’s account, there is no

outside to language. The neurotic human, as opposed to psychotic or perverse human, is always within

a consciousness and an unconscious that is constituted by language. From this point of view, the notion

that listening is a cessation of identity is impossible: even though one might cease self-reflecting, one is

still constituted by and in language. Yet Lacan’s formulations stem from the point of view of the

human, and are dominated by intra-human structures. What I am seeking to argue for is a way that the

exterior world enters into the human through the activity of listening. Therefore I require a formulationof the exterior world, and Deleuze’s ambitions are to speculate more widely about the nature of the

non-human world, and of how humans adapt to that world. Again, I am reaching out to touch slender

fragments of discourses here, but my intentions are to work from aesthetics and listening, and move

slowly with those discourses. I present these references, then, to give a broad orientation to my

thoughts, and to establish starting points from which to import concepts into art for further research.

With these ideas in mind, I want to turn to references from music that relate to the notion of

immanence, with cases wherein practitioners describe instances an experience of immanence in relation

to music. What I am specifically interested in is the notion of the listener being inside the music,

allowing the interior to exterior relationship that I have described as being my area of questioning about

listening.

Immanence in Musical Minimalism Since the 1960s

In his revisionist history of Minimalist music, Early Minimalism, Tony Conrad described The Theatre

of Eternal Music, the group in which he performed, as “working ‘on’ the sound from ‘inside’ the

sound,”8

and says: “We lived inside the sound, for years.”9

The group created music around

extraordinarily sustained notes, over extended periods, at high volume. Conrad’s statements describe a

spatial-temporal location inside the sound both literally and psychologically, as the musicians focused

upon being within. The sound Conrad describes is immersive, due to the increased ability of audio

amplification to saturate acoustic space in the early 1960s. The group worked with electrical

amplification at a time when amplifiers were becoming more powerful and more affordable, and their

use of drones allowed for higher volume levels, due to the technical handling of a sustained, rather than

transient, audio signal: an amplifier can create a loud ongoing volume level through drone compared

with other shapes of sound that can be input. Increasing this volume, and further physicalising the

sound, is the phenomenon by which sustained notes can saturate the acoustic space in which they are

heard, and at a much lower volume level than other sounds, with the result that immersive affects areenhanced.



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The compositions they played centred around the extended intonation of single or dual notes,

and Conrad explains that he initially performed a ‘fifth’ interval with the singer, but after playing this

note for a month or two, suggested to the group that he sometimes play another note.10

The question of

notes and intervals was highly significant to these musicians, who held extensive discussions around

any proposed new notes. The group were highly attentive to the material with which they worked, and

at a minimal level: the group moved toward tuning systems that varied from Western standard tuning

by as litt le as a few percentage points of a frequency. Their enterprise records a process of increasingattention, leading to increasing perception, which reveals more phenomenal material, which in turn

demands further attention. Further to this, their focus upon so few sounds suggests to me that they were

less interested in expression through sound, and more interested in something they perceived in the

sound, performing a practical phenomenological and psychological survey, not articulated in

philosophy or theory but in their music.

The way that the group configured sound, through composition and in performance, might

allow them to be re-conceptualized as a machine for producing affect, which in turn opens up an

understanding of them as sensation makers rather than performers of a score or idea. This reading is

born out by Conrad’s statement:

We hungered for music almost seething beyond control, or even something just beyond music,

a violent feeling of soaring unstoppably, powered by immense angular machinery acrossabrupt and torrential seas of pounding blood.11

The degree to which Conrad achieves this desire is difficult to assess, as a split between the group’s

members has resulted in the general suppression of recordings, with the exception of publication of

Day of Niagra, released by John Cale and Tony Conrad, against the wishes of La Monte Young.12

Conrad’s own words, however, are important in documenting the subjectivity he experienced, itself a

composite of the sound in the space and the socio-temporal context: they speak of a sound that was an

engaging and powerful experience of immanence. Conrad’s desired to manifest an immanent

experience, of being in the present, can also be seen in his 1965 film The Flicker , wherein a succession

of alternating black and white frames create a flickering effect that emphasizes the physiological effect

experienced by the viewer.

Another composer who has made Minimalist drone music is Eliane Radigue, who uses

sustained synthesiser tones. Her music departs from the general nature of drone music in its embrace of

variation, evidencing a structure resembling sentences and phrases, rather than the eternal singular

letter or word, as enunciated in the work of La Monte Young and to some extent Tony Conrad, Phill

Niblock and Alvin Lucier. While Radigue shares their interest in close, even heightened attention to the

sound of the sound, it is her exploration of continuum and variation that are of interest here, as it can be

interpreted as manifesting a particular state of immanence for the listener. In the liner notes for the CD

publication of works from her Trilogy de la mort series, Radigue explains that when composing, she is

developing with sound what she calls “sense.”13

She says that she works on the “inside” of the sound,

and “pays a lot of attention to what the sound is actually telling me,” and does not “compel a sound to

go in the direction that would be the most suitable for me.”14

Working in these ways, Radigue works in

the fashion that Deleuze commends, working toward Aion, the instant or the timeless present, away

from Chronos, the past and future of identity and ego. She describes her process of creating and mixing

sounds with the metaphor of weaving threads together, which gives an impression of almost “flawlesscontinuity.” This approach produces a sense of continuum, which is a sequence in which adjacent

elements are not perceptibly different though the extremities are distinct, as the sound subtly and

gradually transforms: not a progression of stages, but an ongoing process. As a result it is difficult to

identify individual events, stages, places or syntax across the piece, and in a particular way the listener

might be understood as being situated within the piece, and denied a place outside it.

Within my own practice, I have moved from working with sound and composition to

focussing upon listening. In my most recent work, I have constructed a type of swing, which

incorporates a dual pendulum mechanism that makes its motion unpredictable, as a counterweight

moves the swinger, and in response is itself moved, which causes further movement of the swinger, and

so on. This mechanism allows movement in all three axes—up/down, side-to-side, back and forth—and

brings the subject’s attention to their bodily orientation, activating the inner ear, which provides

feedback to the body about changes in position over time. The sensation produced is similar to being on

the ocean, and one has the sense of riding great swells though one is only moving a few centimetres.

The inner ear contains the labyrinth: three fluid filled tubes, related to each of the three axes, and the



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work offers the subject an experience of this unseen but crucial part of their body, drawing attention to

how it is operated upon by gravity and connects our interior with the exterior world. In this way, the

work gives a quite literal experience of immanence, by directing the listener to the physical world,

emphasising the embodied aspect of existence. I regard this as being paradigmatic to my music practice

and its historical location with respect to Minimalism since the 1960s, as an apotheosis of the urge to

explore the physicality of sound. Philosophically, then, my work continues a discourse about

subjectivity that locates the human in their present time and space, not in isolation, but always withinsomething larger than our self.

BibliographyAll online materials accessed Aug 2008.

Anon., “Eliane Radigue [interview],” Prism-Escape, edn #4 (Paris: no date) <http://www.digital-

athanor.com/PRISM_ESCAPE/article_usc103.html?id_article=121>.

Conrad, Tony, ed. and liner notes to John Cale et al, Inside the Dream Syndicate: Volume I: Day of Niagara

(1965), sound recording (NY: Table of the Elements, 2000).

Conrad, Tony, ed. and liner notes, Early Minimalism: Volume I, sound recording (NY: Table of the Elements,

2002).

D’Alleva, Anne, Methods and Theories of Art History (London: Laurence King, 2005).

Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on a life (NY: Zone, 2005).

—— [1969] The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (NY: Columbia UP, 1990).Duxbury, Lesley, “The Eye (and Mind) of the Beholder,” in Lesley Duxbury et al, eds, Thinking Through

Practice: Art as research in the Academy (Melbourne: RMIT, 2007), pp. 17-27.

Smith, Daniel, Immanence, in John Protevi, ed., The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh

University Press, 2006).

Ramey, Joshua, Gilles Deleuze and the Powers of Art, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Philadelphia: Villanova

University, 2006).

Radigue, Eliane [1973], Adnos I-III, sound recording (NY: Table of the Elements, 2002).

Radigue, Eliane, “Kyema” [from Trilogy de la mort ] and “Intermediate States,” sound recording (NY:

Experimental Intermedia, 1990).

Williams, James, Immanence, in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2005).

Young, La Monte, “On Table of the Elements CD 74 Day of Niagara April 25, 1965” (10 Jul 2000), on the MELA

Foundation website (NY), <http://www.melafoundation.org/statemen.htm>.

Endnotes

1Smith, p.303; Williams, p. 125.

2According to Platonic theory, any object one encounters in the world is an imperfect or partial version of an

absent, abstracted and idealised object. For example, any chair one might encounter in real life can be related to an

abstract or perfected “chair,” which would only exist in virtual space, and which would in its essence sum up all of

the qualities of “chairness” we associate with specific chairs. This is what Plato would calls “the archetype.” —

Editors’ note.3

D’Alleva, p. 12.4

Duxbury, p. 17.5

D’Alleva, p. 12.6

Deleuze, Logic, pp. 61-65.7

Ramey, p. 99.8 Conrad, ed., Early Minimalism, p. 20.9

Ibid, p. 24.10

Ibid, p. 21.11

Conrad, ed., Inside, unpaginated.12

Young.13

Radigue, “Kyema.” 14

Anon, “Eliane.”

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