“II If you make noise it is likely that somebody else is going to hear you, this means Noise is a social activity. XI The old conception of noise was to believe in freedom, the new conception of Noise is to achieve freedom.” – Mattin – Thesis on Noise
In his recently published book Tetralogos, Laruelle proposes a transformation of philosophy into music by applying an operatic and motetic framework to account for how inventions can be made in and through philosophy. Despite the conceptual coherence and consistency of Laruelle’s approach in Tetralogos, which is not at all contested by this presentation, I attempted to think which specific aspects arise to both philosophy and noise when these two are conjoined. Laruelle insists on the possibility of thinking music as philosophy without being a philosophy of music. In the present text, we replace music with noise as a result of a process of underdetermination. And this means submitting music to the “without” method [1]. Music-without-breathing, music-without-melody, music-without-counterpoint (cf. Laruelle, 2019). Depending on how the subtraction of music’s canonical elements is articulated in forms of pieces, we can get different extensions to the very concept of music, as in the zigzag movement of abduction. As much as we use the concept of noise here mostly related to music, it is actually taken under the perspective of an unknown integrative object X [2], that involves at the same time various disciplines such as music, information theory, linguistics, social sciences, physics and technology at the very least.
“To do this I selected a particular piece (that actually is a junction of two compositions) that evokes the idea of a radical genericity all the way down: ~? (non-empty) by Gustavo Torres and J-P. Caron (2017). I’ll try to show why this is a good example of music-without-content, or at least without musical content as generally conceived. And also why it shows in an auditory manner the constructible character of a generic space that makes inventions possible, presented as a thick sonic texture.
Não-vazio is divided in 3 parts. The duration of each part was determined by the duration of each side of the vinyl disc. The duration of the cassette side is the same as 3 times the side of the vinyl, but, consequent upon the time of the side switch of the vinyl, only one side of the tape is insufficient in order to last until the end of the piece.
Thus, the cassette switches sides once. Both the materials are segregated in the mix: vinyl on the left side; cassette on the right side.”
(Torres, Gustavo ; Caron, J-P. 2017, p. 5)
On the left side of the stereo, Gustavo Torres performs ‘Record Containing the Sound of Its Own Making’, the performance involves filtering frequencies in a certain moment. On the right side, J-P. Caron performs Noisecomposition V. In ~? we are faced with superpositions of the absence of content, even if this absence is still listenable. What we hear are the sounds of recording devices, or rather, of the enabling condition of all possible recorded sounds. Tape hisses and vinyl crackles, sounds that are usually dismissed as undesirable accidents become the protagonists of the ‘music’, establishing relations with one another that cannot be measured according to standard musical criteria. In the pre-recorded version, Noisecomposition V is a musical composition that doesn’t require to be played whatsoever [3]: it is almost an experiment that allows us to test how much superimposed feedback of emptiness can two tapes handle until the moment of their disintegration. In the performance version, one can accompany the construction of audible textures produced by the very absence of content that makes it possible for any sonic content to be recorded in/by analogical devices. In the point of view of musical content, there is emptiness. In the point of view of sound, there is the audible presentation of those devices that enable the reproduction of recorded compositions.
Record Containing the Sound of Its Own Making [2014]
Gustavo Torres
Vinyl record (30x30cm)
Instructions for the recording:
Approx. 10′ per side
record it with nothing connected to the recorder input.
Guidelines for the performance:
Noisecomposition V (Performance Version)
J-P. Caron
Using a blank tape, create loops from its sound in a way as to build a gradual thickening of the texture resulting from the overlapping of it and itself. This can be done with any device which is capable of generating loops from the initial material (either a looper pedal, or a tape delay device, etc).
In the performance version of Noisecomposition V, one can effectively listen to the process of the composition of the texture (which is hidden in the pre-composed version) The performance can last forever. Or it can be interrupted by either the physical exhaustion of the performer, or the physical wearing out of the tapes, or by the destruction of the playback system due to high amplitudes resulting from the process, or when the player decides to.
January 2015. [4]
I tried to sketch the kinds of ongoing underdetermination processes in non-empty, some apply to the original compositions:
- Subtraction of music’s canonical foundations such as melody and harmony.
- Subtraction of any musical content, as it is conceived in the context of recorded music.
- Subtraction of musical instruments as understood by the common sense. Pushing the boundaries of the common conception of ‘instrument’.
- Subtraction of phenomenological representations in favour of a procedural, ‘skeletal’ approach to sounds and the practice of recording sounds.
- Subtraction of the necessity of human (as a biological species) agency for executing the algorithm. “The performance can last forever”.
- Subtraction of a determined temporal duration of a (non)musical work (amorphic frame).
Following Mattin in his “Noise as Device”, we can identify (1) a social and non-individual approach to noise and (2) three levels of production of subjective awareness through noise. The first aspect can be signalized through the stated importance of seeing noise as the producer of a medium in which social interactions happen. However, the articulation of signs in the form of pieces of interaction does not aim at communication as generally conceived. Instead, noise establishes a domain of sociality whose goal is to disrupt expectations, taste, previous correction criteria and recognizement. In the last instance, the goal is to disrupt the very established coordinates that institutes the trivial equivalence between individual and subject. Such an ultimate goal leads us to the question of the production of awareness.
The first level of production of awareness by noise is described simply as “awareness”. This level is purely phenomenological, constituted by the absolute immersion in sound by the individual listener. The listener sees sound as pure sensory material, and establishes with it an idiosyncratic and allegedly private relation.[5] And then we have the second level: awareness as. This is a context-sensitive level, where the production of awareness does not happen if the noise is not placed in relation to cognitive and conceptual elements that go along with it. It doesn’t make any sense unless one strives to reconstruct a semantic layer (formatted by the context) to the sound. At this level, noise involves not only the perceptual dimension but also a conceptual one.
We can see non-empty as an example of the third level: noise that produces “an awareness of the mechanisms that produces an awareness”:
“This last level is the most transformative because it makes you reconsider your relationship not only to the context but also with the mechanisms that you have in order to deal with this context. This inevitably would not just be about aesthetic experience but questioning what experience is, how it’s produced; but more importantly, how subjectivity is produced.” (MATTIN, 2015, p. 99)
Non-empty is music but at the same time is a device to produce estrangement, one that does away with the aestheticism in favour of an algorithmic manipulation of those devices and mechanisms that pave the way to musical/sound appreciation. The usual background is on the foreground and we are left with the impression that it must be considered as content. But the tape hisses and vinyl crackles are already accidentally present in any blank tape or vinyl. However, in non-empty we’re left only with the phantasmagoric recordings of the functioning devices appearing in an order prescribed by the ‘scores’. We have a sonic presentation of the frame of any other sonic presentation recorded by analogical devices, just the frame. The manipulation of frequencies and the coordinates provided for producing the tape loops are arbitrary and characteristic of the performance itself, it could be otherwise. What these ordained and contingent manipulations really do is direct our attention that the only thing that is being manipulated is the form itself: the ‘background’ noise produced only by the recording mechanisms submitted to frequency filters and juxtaposition. At the linguistic level non-empty marks the existence of a syntax devoid of semantic substance, and it’s eeriness brings the question of how we can think of a non-empty subject, deflated and guided by the formal priority of a syntax and the mechanical formation of the subjective apperceptive apparatus. Left-side and right-side, vinyl and tape, differ in their degrees of syntactic indeterminacy and material constitution of the mechanisms.
Here the estrangement is introduced through the idea of the recording device as the only musical instrument, as the loop-pedal or tape-delay both function as a means for indefinitely folding the sound produced by the recording device. Two different performances of the composition can only timbristically differ due to the difference in the material constitution of the devices used, and in the choice of which fragments of the tape will be looped and juxtaposed to one another. Non-empty plays with the question posed by Mattin; not directly by thematizing how subjectivity is produced, but indirectly by suspending the predicate ‘empty’ to that seeming sonic emptiness that is always embedded in any analogically recorded music. Non-empty shows us the malleability of the constitutional order that allows experience to emerge, the malleability of a (non)empty space that accommodates sonic inventions without ceasing to be a sonic invention. Therefore, non-empty is one of the best examples of noise that provokes the awareness of one’s very possibilities of awareness, the problem of the Transcendental par excellence.
If the Universe is at stake in the generic being of man or the quantum in its genericity, we pass from the ontological difference of the Dasein which is an onto-logical structure too narrow and worldly to a larger structure adapted to contemporary science since the human being is capable of both genericity and quantum. (LARUELLE, 2019, p. 293)
By posing decoherence as the basis for the Transcendental, Laruelle locates the origin of the problem of experience in the order of things: a decoherence between the Universe (quantum) and the generic. The Kantian schematism as the mediation between the faculties of imagination and understanding is, for Laruelle, already inserted in a macroscopic and physical framework. We therefore require magnifying glasses not just for the multiple disciplines, to delve into the differential and interstitial zones of the generic space; but also for the Transcendental, to at least have a glimpse of it’s real constitution and conditioning by quantum decoherence. If we could represent the look through the magnifying glass by means of noise, the sonic outcomes of executing the aforementioned noise compositions could be a good example. But the contrary movement is also crucial.
Decoherence as the genesis of the transcendental precedes schematism in the order of the real process because quantum precedes the macroscopic schema or conditions it, but schematism precedes decoherence in the order of the construction of knowledge. (LARUELLE, 2019, p. 295)
If the quantum dimension does not secure the possibility of a fixed hierarchy of available schemas, those schemas must be constructed taking into account, but also in spite of the radical indeterminacy of the Real. The dyad giveness / given-without-giveness engenders foreclosure and irreversibility, so the relation between the two cannot be instantiated through discovery, because what we discover are already inventions: axiomatic inventions that put certain things in movement. Foreclosure doesn’t entail an “anything goes”, but marks a necessity of cunning and rigorous axiomatics informed by the Transcendental as a contingent (by?)product of a primordial decoherence: one that gives rise to possible fictions that allows us as subjects to surpass the seeming necessary conditions for being a subject, for example, being a subject qua individual. In other words, fictions function as a vector that, by (tele)transporting us from one point of the real to another, make us realize the inherent genericity in which we already inhabit and construct at the same time. Noise can therefore be seen as a (non)musical means for producing fictions: “To use noise as a device would be to use it’s alienating potential to produce fucked up experiences that would make us question ourselves as subjects. If it reaffirms yourself as subject (I get it or I like it) this would not be noise as device.” (MATTIN, 2015, p. 100).
The secret that the Black Universe [6] is for us can be described as that which makes possible that a certain coherent set of axioms when put together can gain traction and from there turn into an artefact capable of promoting changes in reality. We cannot a priori draw any satisfactory criteria of rightness for how we are to pass from the quantum level (decoherence) to the macroscopic level (transcendental subject/schematism). Just as quantum decoherence is a result of the interaction of non-isolated quantum systems, noise is an inevitable result of the non-isolation of euphonic sounds [7].
Under the lens of the processes (quantum and generic) that produces subjectivity, noise is a sonic medium for vectorial experimentation. The seeming strangeness produced by incoherent scientific axiomatics due to its malfunctioning cannot be seen as equivalent to the cacophony of noise. Noise presents us cacophony as a seeming sonic malfunctioning or incoherence, but from the point-of-view of knowledge construction and subjectivity formation it is an important device for reminding us that invention necessarily must delve into strangeness and weirdness in order for us to produce a truly collective posture in building our own ways of living. Sameness, not only in regard to content but also to form, is the radical enemy of emancipation. Strangeness must be navigated with a trained vision to the risks worth taking, whose adequate training must not be centered in the individual, for even this idea is just a contingent formation in the generic space that we always already invent and inhabit as subjects. By pushing the boundaries of intelligibility towards directions not yet prescribed, noise guides us to the realization of invention as the core of forms of life.
Notes:
[1] cf. Anne-Françoise Schmid. Last Fiction 2019: Future is a cut, “Without” is not a lack. https://tripleampersand.org/last-fiction-2019-future-cut-without-not-lack/
[2]
It is an object that cannot be characterized in our standards. (…)This is the whole problem of the interdisciplinary products of contemporary science, which are no longer only complex – there is convergence on them of various disciplinary perspectives -, but integrative – this convergence only exists locally, they are non- synthesizable. With these “X” objects, which I call “integrative objects”, we go from the unknown (…) to the non-synthesizable. (SCHMID, Anne-Françoise. 2018. p. 213)
[3] In an unpublished paper called “Música Afundamental”, Bernardo Girauta mobilizes a Pythagorean apparatus to account for a specific anti-foundationalist conception of music that is indifferent to the presence of audible sounds, but nevertheless does not respond to a previously given idea of equilibrium or measure. Instead it is the very frictional relation of music and world that mutually creates the possibility of having consistent criteria of measuring in the broadest possible sense. The following quote was translated by myself:
The relationship between music and the world is preserved, but the sonorous grounds that allow music to be what it is are dispensed with. Thus, music and the world become concepts to be investigated starting at the very friction that produces them in one another, and no longer through the mediation of a third concept, that of harmony, which guaranteed at the same time the stable identity of music and the world. This relationship is perhaps better understood if we begin to look for it not in a cosmology supported by the measured and ordered constellations of the skies, but in the complexity and speed of the dense, dark and unknown oceans below us. (GIRAUTA. 2020, p. 11)
[4] Compositions available in the booklet available in downloading the album at: https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/n-o-vazio-m-p-s-s-t-n-g-g-c-o-p-p-g
[5] The example given by Mattin is the harsh noise wall project Vomir, whose only member is also the author of the now unavailable HARSH NOISE WALL MANIFESTO. A brief excerpt is quoted in Noise as Device: “The individual no longer has any alternative but to completely reject contemporary life as promoted and preached. The only free behavior that remains resides in noise, withdrawal and a refusal to capitulate to manipulation, socialization and entertainment.” (VOMIR, ‘HNW MANIFESTO’): http://www.decimationsociale.com/app/download/5795218093/Manifeste+du+Mur+Bruitiste.pdf (accessed 17 th May 2015).
[6] Cf. François Laruelle. On The Black Universe: In the Human Foundations of Color.
Metaphorically, the One can be understood as “dark matter” exempt from the articulations of meaning, strategies or illuminations given by philosophy towards understanding. Smith alludes to this metaphor by illustrating “the sense of darkness as the essence of identity”. Brassier, in turn, will call the identity of the One a “de-phenomenologized conception of the real”, outlining it as “non-conceptual immanence that simultaneously determines and suspends philosophy”. The term “conceptual” means what is involved in a network of meanings or a set of interrelated terms. The negation of this sense is correct for the immanence of the One, it indicates that its syntax will not satisfy the concatenations of logic, nor does it correspond, for example, to the Deleuzian “plane of immanence” that Laruelle considers another “concept of Being”. The One is indifferent to the logical conditions given as an assumption of existence. (GUIMARÃES, Aquiles. 2021. p.9)
[7] “In the history of western music noise has always been put aside but it always comes back because it actually exists in the essence of western music (i.e. in the tone). In a recent conference on noise where this section was first presented, Ulrich Krieger, explained very well how “the tones that we actually hear contain some noise because a mathematically perfect tone would actually sound strange to our ears.”” (MATTIN, 2015, p. 95)
Works Cited
Anne-Françoise Schmid. Last Fiction 2019: Future is a cut, “Without” is not a lack. &&& The New Centre for Research and Practice, 2020. Available at: https://tripleampersand.org/last-fiction-2019-future-cut-without-not-lack/
Anne-Françoise Schmid. Les régimes génériques de l’enseignement. RBECT: Revista Brasileira de Ensino de Ciência e Tecnologia. v.11, n.2. Curitiba, 2018.
Aquiles Guimarães. A Sintaxe da Imanência: O Transcendental no Pensamento de Laruelle. Unpublished Master Thesis, UFRJ: Rio de Janeiro, 2021.
Bernardo Girauta. Música Afundamental. Unpublished Paper, 2020.
François Laruelle. Tetralogos. Cerf Éditions: Paris, 2019.
Gustavo Torres, J-P. Caron.~Ø (não?-?vazio) m?.?p?.?s?.?s?.?t?.?n?.?g?.?g?.?c?.?o?.?p?.?p?.?g. Seminal Records, 2017. Available at: https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/n-o-vazio-m-p-s-s-t-n-g-g-c-o-p-p-g
Mattin. ‘Noise as Device’. in: Rab-Rab. Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art. Issue 02. Volume B. Helsinki, 2015.