Narco-sonic Affect - Becoming Intense

Inigo Wilkins 17/12/04


Narco-sonic Affect
Becoming Intense

The history of music cannot be sundered from the practice of the ingestion of narcotics. From the primitive use of drugs in shamanic rituals to the conspicuous abstemption found in classical culture, from the covert references to marijuana in jazz, to the psychedelic effects of LSD on rock and roll, and the cybernetic conjunction of techno and ecstasy. This essay will analyse the affective conditions for the emergence of these assemblages and situate them in relation to a post-structuralist understanding.
The present ‘war on drugs’ parallels the ‘war on terrorism’ with its conservative paranoia, its irrational faith in the immutability of identity, its anticorporeal puritanism and its chronic fear of infection, and above all the impossibility of its eventual success. Anti-drug legislation as we know it today began in the U.S. with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which was largely a reaction to the growing use of marijuana by black jazz musicians, and the increasing popularity of the genre (considered dangerous non-music by the establishment) (1). It therefor has its roots in racial suppression, a fact that can be substantiated by the quotidien use by whites of hemp and opium in all aspects of life prior to this. The condemnation of intoxification by the State and its institutions (particularly the church) stretches back further than this however, and points to a fundamental opposition of the State apparatus to the perception altering capacities of certain chemicals.
This puritanical trope can be traced to the beginnings of civilization (by this I mean the constitution of the State, and the civilian) in the crystallisation of Athens under the logos of Apollo, and through the suppression of Dyonisis. Dyonisis, the god of chaos, later championed by Nietzsche, was the most important deity in the greek pantheon prior to the arborification of culture that constituted literate society. Athenians favoured Apollo, the god of order and reason, where Dyonisis was associated with the (grape)vine and all things excessive and debaucherous. Graves has shown that rather than getting barbarously drunk Dyonisian worship predominantly consisted in the careful consumption of (fly agaric or ‘magic’)mushrooms, and that the vine depicted was actually poison ivy (2) .
Socrates understood the potency of music, and based much of his philosophy on the goodness of harmony. Plato in turn considered music the barometer of a societies’ condition, and thus rejected any music that was not accompanied by lyrics (logos) which moreover should be uplifting, towards the supposed masculine principles of strength and valour, rather than emotive and feminine (3). Aristotle was more openly fascist, he was critical of Socrates’ liberal addition of the Phrygian mode to the Dorian, and beleived that this made the music too emotional and orgiastic, stating unequivocally,

‘Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited. . . when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.’ (4)

The Athenian legacy, which was subsumed into Christianity through the Romans, and thereby transformed into a disciplinary injuncton, was a fundamental anticorporeality, a supression of rhythm, and above all repitition, in favour of melody and of course harmony. The Platonic Idea is a hierarchalisation of the original over the copy, false bodily perception is subjugated to true, unchanging, ideal forms. Foucault has said that drugs have nothing to do with truth and falsity, but are about unfolding and emerging (5). The Apollonian order brought about the gradual stifling of folk music, and the smooth space it occupied, and its replacement with the stratisfied space of the stave. Itinerant musicians who drew sonic diagramms became sedentary labourers who traced representations (6) (7). Dancing gave way to contemplation, and music was captured into the concert hall.
The view that change in music signals or even causes social transformation is one shared by Attali, who maintains that the function of music is to ward off the essential violence of ultimate equivalence, through presenting a simulacrum of ritual sacrifice (8). Music stands for order in the face of death and chaos. However, according to Attalli, new musical forms are always repudiated and considered noise (or entropy) by the established order (even Bheethoven), yet their composition is related to the emerging form of social organisation in the manner of a premonition (9).
. Music, as pure information, has two sides then, one being the reaffirmation of order, or reterritorialization as refrain, and the other being its dissolution, its escape from the code, its deterritorialization (10). Both new musical forms and states of intoxification have, since Athens, been considered causes of a breakdown in order and the warping of reason. Drugs are associated with revolutionary desire and creativity in the arts, with counterculture movements and individuals such as Baudelaire, Marcuse, and Benjamin; Rimbaud and the romantics; Burroughs and the beat generation; rastafarianism and the rebel music of reggae; punk, dub and rave.
To understand the emergence of these musical genres and their complex relationship with narcotics we must study Spinoza’s philosophy of affect, Dos Santos’ conception of rhythmanalysis, Bergson’s notion of the virtual, and Deleuze and Guattari’s radical reassemblage of their ideas.
Spinoza, who was contemporary with Descartes and his reaffirmation of Platonic dualism, expounded a monistic theory of existence. He maintained that all bodies are differentiated but adhered to some ‘common notions’ (11), and could be defined in terms of their relative motion or rest, and speed or slowness. Where Descartes began with the subject and was concerned with the adequate cause of an effect, Spinoza started from movement and mapped bodies according to their longitude (relations of speed and slowness) and latitude (capacity to affect other bodies) (12).
Dos Santos similarly placed movement at the centre of his thought, proposing that all things are rhythmic. He founded a new science devoted to the study of these oscillations and included in his personal explorations a rhythmanalysis of matter, biology and psychology. In Bachelard’s explanation of Dos Santos he uses the kinetic theory of solids, showing that the most stable structures are those in rhythmic discord. and that we consist of, and live in, ‘an anarchy of vibrations’ (13). Vibrationary energy is the elementary force of existence, and matter can only exist by the vibrations that cause that materials specific duration (14). Since the essence of time is vibration, all substance is involved in a process of transformation or becoming (15). It is interesting to note here that the hindu religion of India beleive the universe came into existence through a certain frequency of vibration or sound.
It is in these respects that Deleuze and Guattari have said ‘All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed.’ (16) It is important here not to confuse speed, which is an intensive quality (molecular and indeterminate), with movement from point to point in extensive space, which is measured, striated and molar. There are three general aspects of drugs, ‘[1] the imperceptible is perceived; [2] perception is molecularised; [3] desire directly invests the perception and the perceived.’ (17) This does not mean that we see something that is not there, on the contrary, it is movement and becoming which are otherwise imperceptible - ‘relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the threshold of perception.’ (18) Drugs enable ‘molecular microperceptions’ (19), they mark the point where ‘desire and perception meld’ (20). It is not just drugs which cause a tendency to be conscious of becoming, though, it is all artistic endeavour, and especially music, which inspires this molecularisation of desire (21). Deleuze and Guattari ellucidate a series of becomings with becoming-woman at the near end, then becoming-child, becoming-animal, and becoming-molecular, even becoming-imperceptible at the far end. (22)
It should be pointed out here that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is anti-unitary in essence. No body can be examined in isolation, or as a thing in itself, but must be considered both part of, and also composed of, an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. This is what they mean when they propose, against a vitalist or essentialist conception of humanity, an abstract machinism. ‘This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is a universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.’ (23) We must also mention their assertion that subject, object, and meaning have no unity, they are always already a crowd, a multiplicity. They are opposed to the hierarchal, binary logic of arborescence, which always sublimates effect to cause and couches everything in terms of disjunctive either/or propositions. Instead they declare that multiplicities are rhizomatic, that is: non-hierarchal, connective and cartographic rather than representative. (24)
Let us return then to primitive territorial societies and examine this correlation between drugs and music in becoming. Music is ‘often a gateway to unusual or ecstatic states’ (25), and the shamans function is to be ‘technicians of ecstasy’ (26). The use of toxins amongst shamans is primarily as an aid to inducing trance states which enable the practitioner to crawl out of the narrow space of consciousness (27) and enter the unconscious. This entails a becoming-animal specific to each shaman - ‘In every hallucinatory journey, shamans would transmute into animal form.’ (28) ‘The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction’ (29). Hallucinations do not describe something imaginary, they are the process of perception in its raw state, they consist of phosphenes, the apprehension of which are entoptic - ‘that is, they are not the result of mere visual, retinal observation, but are generated mainly in the neuronal system which includes the retinal ganglion network together with the cortical and subcortical range.’ (30)
The inducing of trance states is very much to do with rhythm, since the brain resonates at certain frequencies depending on its state. There are four categories of brain-wave activity; beta, at 14 cycles per second or hertz, is experienced during waking consciousness; alpha, 8-13 hertz, light dreaming/ meditation; theta, 4-7 hertz, sleep and advancced meditation; delta, 0.5-3 hertz, deep sleep/meditation. It is no surprise to find that most shamanic music uses repetitive drumming at a rate of exactly four and a half beats per second, the frequency that corresponds to theta and high states of meditation
It is not just the drum and the brain which emit frequencies, though, as the actual ingested substance has a rhythm too. This helps to account for the common experiences of those under the influence of one drug or another, so that ‘there exists an element of rhythm of pulsation in the imagery of Banisteriopsis intoxication, that seems more likely to be organically based than determined only by a visual and culturally moulded memory.’ (31) Certain chemical substances can then be considered rhythmic assemblages, Dos Santos calls such a group a ‘body of photons’ (32).
Thus psychoactive drugs and different forms of music together form a rhythmic assemblage, such that a musical genre, and those bodies which participate in its form can be longitudinally and latitudinally mapped. Jazz forms a rhizome with marijuana and alcohol - the Western preoccupation with melody can be correlated with liquor, which in jazz is fused with a more African tendency to priveledge rhythm, and herb. ‘Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us’ (33). Psychedelic rock forms a gang together with LSD, the speed at which they vibrate is altogether different from jazz - this is not to be confused with tempo, which is an aspect of extension, it is rather an intensive quality. We can call these different groups ‘speed tribes’.
The way that a certain genre of music reaches a critical threshold after which it transforms into another has been described by Brian Eno as ‘scenius’ (34). This relates to the fact that it is not one individual that invents the new musical form, but it emerges from a complex set of relationships to an already existing group of rhythms. We should examine here Bergson’s conception of the virtual as a field of potential that is real but not actual (35). The virtual is a realm of indeterminacy that can be actualised through chance. The new musical form is virtually present in the longitudinal and latitudinal relations of the old one. Thus the move from reggae to dub (which means double, or replicate) was an accidental discovery, which occurred due to bad singing that had to be stripped away from the instrumental track. This naked drum and bass template, or dubplate, could be manipulated to produce ‘odd perspectives and depth illusions, sound effects, unexpected noises and echoes that repeat to infinity’ (36) using the recording studio equipment which was formerly used to keep the sound clean and organised.
The concept of ‘scenius’ reprioritises the average participant in a rhythmic assemblage. A single person striking out in a new direction is of little importance unless it has an affect on the environment, unless it is copied by others, and spreads across bodies, constituting a new speed tribe. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari stress that becoming is a multiplicity, a rhizome, or a pack (37). Music is a becoming-molecule (38) that is not subordinated to the form of molecule since becoming is not imitation, resemblance, or identification; neither is it progress or regress in series. It is not evolution by filiative descent but involution by horizontal transference, an alliance that is contagious - a communicative symbiosis (39).
To comprehend this notion of contagion by alliance it is necessary to study Deleuze and Guattari’s investigation of strange attractors. Their prime example of which is the wasp orchid, and its alliance with the wasp. Neither the wasp nor the orchid can be ontogenetically defined in terms of mimicry or resemblance, they are rather in a simbiotic relationship that produces an aparallel evolution. They connect with each other by mutually independent deterritorializations and reterritorializations. (40). Another alliance they cite is that between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, this is an example not of pack contagion but of an alliance that is struck with an ‘exceptional individual’ (A41). This individual they also call the Anomaly, it is ‘a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity’ (42) and constitutes the ‘cutting edge of deterritorialization’ (43). It is therefor not an individual after all, nor a species, and designates a borderline, it is ‘linear yet multiple “teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror.”’ (44)
The involution of drugs has taken millenia. Plants developed a whole array of defence mechanisms, the most lethal of which were chemical. Some of these chemicals were reaquisitioned, reterritorialized and assimilated by other animals and by predators themselves as means of self-defence, for example the tiger moth which ingests toxic alkaloids. Animals of all kind actively use these chemicals and others for the purposes of enjoyment. Llamas eat cocaine, deer eat fly agaric mushrooms, cats love catnip, humans drink coffee - all strange attractors (45). Bateson was inceptive in understanding drugs as a complex chemical economy ‘a meshwork of reactions and syntheses connecting humans and animals with the most innocent molecular processes of plants.’ (46)
Probably the most famous drug addict of the twentieth century, Burroughs was a pioneer in the application of virology to thought, fiction and matter. His mischeivous suggestion that drugs, or junk, is a virus was an idea that quickly spread through middle class america - aggravating a paranoia that was already infectiously out of control. Burroughs ideas were greatly influenced by the scientific theories of Korzybski, who defined bodies as protoplasmic, having no real boundaries, but participating in a colloidal behaviour that is common to all matter (47). This is very similar to the philosophy of affect as we have understood it, so that according to Korzybski philosophy can cause illness, especially those which support the Platonic notion of identity.
This can be correlated with Burroughs earlier writing, and his first viral body, which is an undifferentiated gelatinous mass, displaying the quality of a radically diminished discrete materiality (obliterating the categories of location and identity, replacing them with flow and function) and absolute deterritorialization (48). The second body, the schlupping body, was inspired by his experiences with drugs and sex, and is the extreme edge of need for the other, and the will to assimilate, or reterritorialise. Inorganic junk replicates hunger for itself, usurping the body it has invaded, litterally replacing the body particle by particle (49).
It is the fusion of the first body with dianetics, the brainchild of Hubbard, founder of scientology, that produces the mutant viral body of his later writing (50). Dianetics takes the concept of the engram, which is a multi-sensory recording of experience at a cellular level on the body, from Semon, and pathogenizes it so that it is traumatic experiences which are recorded, and further that the recording surface itself is irritable. Everything is fundamentally infected, or diseased. Therapy consists, much like Freudian pschoanalysis, of playback of the traumatic recording (51). The mutant body becomes highly differentiated, technologically determinant, microbial, and transmissable not merely through ingestion but also through communication (52). Language is a virus he calls ‘The Other Half’ which lives parasitically in your nervous system - the word becomes an organism that is damaging the body. (53)
These later works were produced using the cut-up method he pioneered with Gysin. By rearranging the fragments of text he beleived he could ‘scramble the order’ of the virus (54). It was his experiments with audio and film tape using the same method that yielded the concept of playback. This is a simultaneous deterritorialisation, of the environment recorded, and reterritorialisation, of the playback environment. Like Joyce’s promiscuous words, Burroughs’ cut-up method created a space of indeterminacy where meaning could flood in, chaos opens the door to the virtual. ‘Burroughs machine, systematic and repetitive, simultaneously disconnecting and reconnecting - it disconnects the concept of reality that has been imposed on us and then plugs normally dissociated zones into the same sector’ (55)
The essential nature of the virus is replication, repitition, and recombination, a factor which can just as well be applied to language as it can to music. A certain threshold passed somewhere, the speeding up of hip-hop break-beats that caused the emergence of hardcore, for example (56), can spread around the world in much the same way as the common cold (which, noone tires of repeating, we have still not found a cure for). Attali divides the history of music into four eras, sacrifice, representation, repitition and composition. In repitition, which Attali asserts he is contemporaneous with, ‘accessibility replaces the festival. . .The sacrificial relation becomes individualized, and people buy the individualized use of order, the personalized simulacrum of sacrifice.’ (57). He further contends that ‘music today is in many respects the monotonous herald of death’ (58).
As such he concurrs with the Freudian Oedipalization that places lack at the centre of desire. Freud too, in his cocaine rhizome (59), disovered a fundamental connection between death and repitition. At first he thought that repression caused repitition, through the mechanisms of sublimation and condensation, such as a repressed trauma that is repeated in dreams in different disguises (60). In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ he reverses and qualifies that ‘the death instinct seves as the positive originary principle for repitition’ (61). Disguise then becomes an aspect of the death instinct - ‘repetition is in its essence symbolic; symbols or simulacra are the letter of repetition itself. Difference is included in repitition by way of disguise and by way of the order of the symbol.’ (62) According to Freud ‘I do not repress because I repeat. I repeat because I repress, I forget because I repeat,’ (63).
For Deleuze on the contrary repitition ‘is the emission of singularities’ (64), this is the key to understanding Nietzsche’s eternal return and the fundamental anti-dialectical nature of Deleuze’s thought. ‘If eternal return is a circle, then Difference is at the centre and the Same is only on the periphery’. (65) Number one is the original, that is Plato’s Idea, being that is identical to itself already corresponds to a problem or question (66). Number two is the same, which never corresponds to the equal or identical, but is a gathering by way of difference’ (67). Number three is the eternal return ‘it takes time out of ‘joint’ and, being itself the third repitition, renders the repetition of the other two impossible.’ (68).
Modern music is undeniably all about repitition, a fact which causes Stockhausen, and Schoenburg, unimaginable boredom. Karlheinz entreats ‘the technocrats’ to end their use of repitition, psychology, drugs, environmental music, and stop prostituting the highest form of intelligence that is music (69). Stockhausen is a fascist serialist, stuck in the structuralist grid of negativity, who by priveledging the novel and the non-identical only reinforces the lack Freud posed at the centre of desire, the bar that Saussure placed between signifier and signified. He misses the point of repetition, which creates difference and is not opposed to it, and he thereby misses the point of life.
Deleuze distinguishes between cadence, which relates to representation (the mask and the envelope), and rhythm, which corresponds to repitition. Rhythm is a variable curve, not a cycle, and is primary. (70) It is difference that is rhythmic, not repitition ‘which nevertheless produces it: productive repitition has nothing to do with reproductive meter.’ (71) Techno, jungle and garage overturn the Western hierarchy of rhythm over melody. Jungle in particular uses a heavy bass which deterritorializes the drums allowing polyrhythmic beats that function like an abstract machine (72). Polyrhythmic drumming has of course a long history in Africa, and forms a rhizome both with the various stimulants used in ritual festivities and with the social form of the primitive territorial machine. This can be seen in the practice of apart playing that is at the heart of the polyrhythmic practice. Apart playing is when several drummers create a complex dynamic space of difference in the overlaying of their repetitive beats on each others. It is a game whose aim is to avoid the crystallisation of the rhythm into unison, as such it is analogous to the primitive territorial machine which actively wards off the solidification of the State through anticipation (73)
The quintessential new musical instrument of our times is the turntable and the computer. The DJ and the laptop musician are anti-originary, anti-hierarchal, networked, recombinant, and characterised by the loop. The simbiotic relationship between music and drugs has never been so apparent. It is not without a note of caution that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe becoming both to music and drugs. They warn that perception and the imperceptible pursue each other without coupling, turning the line of flight into a coil, which swirls into a black hole - an empty, cancerous body, a line of death. (74) The becoming that is music is also dangerous since, although music is joy it has a taste for death, and is potentially fascist.

‘Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation,’ (75)

‘Now make the machines talk’ (76)


References

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Eno, B. ‘A Year with Swollen Appendages’. Faber and Faber. 1996.
Cox, C. & Warner, D. ‘Audio Culture - Readings in Modern Music.’. Continuum. 2004,
Graves, R. ‘The White Goddess - A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth’. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1966.
Grosz, E. ‘Volatile Bodies - Towards a Corporeal Feminism (theories of representation and difference). Indiana University Press. 1994.
Kahn, D. ‘Noise, Water, Meat - A History of Sound in the Arts’. The MIT Press. 2001
Hayles, K. ‘How we Became Posthuman - Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics’. University of Chicago Press. 1999.
Foucault, M. ‘The Order of Things - An Archaeology of the Human Sciences’. Routledge. 1992.
Foucault, M. ‘Madness and Civilisation - A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’. Routledge. 1995.
Foucault, M. et al. ‘Dream and Existence’. Humanities Press International, Inc.
Foucault, M. ‘The History of Sexuality, Volume 1’. Penguin Books. 1990.
Freud, S. ‘Civilization and its Discontents’. W.W.Norton & Company. 1989.
Gray, J. ‘Straw Dogs’. Granta Books. 2003.
lya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, ‘Order Out of Chaos’ [New York: Bantam, 1984],
Lyotard, F. ‘Libidinal Economy’. Continuum. 1993.
Levy, P. ‘Collective Intelligence’. Plenum Trade. 1997.
Plant, S. ‘Writing on Drugs’. Faber and Faber. 2001.
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McLuhan, M. ‘Understanding Media’. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1964
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Reynolds, S. ‘Energy Flash’. Picador. 1998
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Information Control - The Climax of Fascism

Inigo Wilkins 26/10/04


Information Control
The Climax of Fascism

I am writing in Times New Roman on my computer about the historical developments that brought about the birth of cybernetics. Since this history must have a beginning it will start with the primitive. Primitive societies are characterized by orality. For McLuhan the invention of the phonetic alphabet was one of the most significant turning points in history, though in another sense it marks the inception of history. The interchangeability and uniformity of its parts arranged in a linear succession correspond exactly to the militarized hierarchal organisation of the Romans (1)(UMp90-). For McLuhan the visual is a cool medium, detached, extensive, as opposed to the inclusive, intensive world of orality.

“Among primitive groups the size of the community. . .is restricted by the difficulty of transmitting language. . .the great empire of Rome was possible only because of progress in roadbuilding. . .with the airplane and radio the word of the rulers extends to the ends of the earth”(2)(HuHbp.92)

The twentieth century is characterized by a revolution in communications effected through developments in the use of electricity. Virilio explains that as technologies increased speed (transport and communication), space decreased accordingly(3)(W+Cp.46). One of the first technologies to make its impact felt was the radio, a medium which McLuhan sees as ‘hot’, and thereby connective, tribal, and non-participative. Electricity amplifies the existing technologies. It cannot be seen as merely coincidental that, at this juncture in history, the outbreak of total war occurred in Europe (and soon spread to a global level). In fact Hitler himself made the observation that the conquering of Germany would not have been possible without the loudspeaker(4)(Attali Noise.p.87)

The world wars were different from previous wars in the crucial respect that the entire nation’s resources (including people) were directed towards the effort of engagement(5)(ATP p.421). These were also the first truly industrial wars where techniques of mass production were appropriated (eg the Skoda factory in Poland which was used for the manufacture of tanks) and innovated. Indeed the invention of the assembly line, and the consequent division of labour, has its roots in armaments factories. Production multiplied itself and the existing relations. Deleuze and Guattari note the ‘irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to develop total war’(6)(ATPp421)(7)


This was not just material production however, for along with new hardware came new software (ideology/methodology/programming). Structuralism was the dominant social code of this era, which saw language as a set of internal relations of negativity (signifiers) that corresponded to objects in the world (signified), including abstract objects. The structuralist approach is characterised by binary relations of distinction (man/woman, life/death) which were thought to accurately pinpoint the ontological status of an object. Nothing escapes this net of relations, rooted in literacy and the dominance of the visual, and based on lack and stasis.(8) .

‘“il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, there is nothing outside the text.’(9)(p.14 Lodge, D.)

This was the heyday of scientific and technological progress, there was widespread beleif that as the grid of differentiation became finer and finer, materiality could not resist the epistemological drive to reveal the essential ontology of all things. Despite this general agreement, there were divergent opinions, such as the opposition between essentialism and constructivism and between vitalism and machinism that we will discuss later.

Never before had the nation states been so internally unified. Not without a massive effort on the part of the government to rally support from the masses through the dissemination of propaganda. The distinction between soldier and civilian was broken down. Everyone was enlisted. This was made possible by the acceleration of the technologies of print and distribution, and by the massive social upheaval the invention of radio engendered. Reproduction (both of humans and of print) multiplied itself(10) (EoRp.17). More importantly instant communication (telegraph and radio) across long distances was suddenly possible.

Hitherto commands had been delivered directly or by courier (a hierarchal chain of command from the top down in a pyramidal structure), with the introduction of telegraph and radio(11)(Susan J. Douglas. “The Navy Adopts the Radio, 1899-1919” in M.R. Smith, Military Enterprise, p.28) however, messages were broadcast on the open airwaves (flattening of the pyramid) and consequently a whole industry of codification and code-breaking emerged. The acceleration of communication entailed the amplification of secrecy(12) (HUp112). This need was to be directly responsible for the first true computers (Turin and Von Neumann) and the birth of a new science - cybernetics. It was Wiener who coined this term following the wartime work he did in improving armaments systems, largely ballistics or guided missiles (the analogy of sender and receiver should be obvious here)(13)(WitAoIMp.40-43). It’s founding principle is the introduction of feedback into the homeostatic system.

‘feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. . .if. . .the information which proceeds backwards from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may be called learning.’(14)

Homeostasis is the principle that organic bodies are in a state of balance, and that their interreaction with the inorganic causes imbalance or tension (charge) which must be released (discharge) to regain equilibrium. This was primarily a theory of physics however Freud appropriated it as central to his psychology. In Freud’s understanding the inorganic corresponds to death and chaos. He argues that, contiguous with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all closed systems tend towards entropy (chaos)(15), all bodies eventually become imbalanced and thus return to the inorganic (ie die through internal causes) Freud called this the pleasure principle.

‘In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and destroy the meaningful’(16)(HUp17)

This was offset against the first law of thermodynamics which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. For Freud this was the postponement of unpleasure through controlled discharge (only in a womb) leading to reproduction (filiative pleasure). He called this the reality principle. This is a male approach to sexuality, based on climactic fullfillment, which is now widely considered homoerotic and mysogynistic. Women were problematic for Freud since they did not succumb to the ascendency of these principles but constantly evaded them. They represent the uncontrolled flow (hysteria), the leaking of fluids, which he identifies with the inorganic, and beleives must be warded off.

It is thus a fundamental aspect of consciousness to ward off the onset of entropy through controlled discharge. In Freudian terms this is the function of the ego (the unconcious being entropic), in terms of the (mechanical/electronic) system it is the progammed control mechanisms. In politics it is the state.

‘Overcoding is the essence of the State. . .:the dread of flows of desire that would resist coding, but also the establishment of a new inscription that overcodes, and that makes desire into the property of the sovereign, even though he be the death instinct himself’(17)(AOp.199)

Never before had the state monopolization of violence been so efficient, so industrial. With the emergence of fascist and communist dictatorships state control had never been so total. Censorship and propaganda (control of information flow) were a part of everyday life. The new technology of film, it’s ability to create simulacra (18)(WIAMp188), and the immersive audio-visual space it offered was enthusiastically put to use. The ideal of fascism was racial purity (selective control of ‘fluid’ resources), superiority of the dominant (conservation of patriarchal lineage and hierarchy), discipline and self-control (homeostasis).

Shannon and Weaver’s work on information theory demonstrated a correlation between neural functioning and information exchange which transcended the contemporary dualism of materiality and information. Culture and information can then not be seen as mediating between power and nature, and the binary oppositions of essentialism and constructivism, machinism and vitalism, break down. Weiner agreed that information should be seen as a signal that was differentiated from other signals by probability, and not as a representation of fixed meaning. This was consolidated by the work of Gibbs who stated that the uncertainty of initial conditions implies the uncertainty of their outcome. Information then came to be viewed as a pattern distinguishable from its opposite - entropy, or noise. The ability to transfer information was then calculable on the basis of a signal to noise ratio.

While In Europe and the East the despotic control of information prevailed the West championed democracy and freedom of information. These correspond, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to the two poles of capture of the state - the despot and the jurist. Never before had the two poles resonated at such an intensity.

The theory of hegemony invented by marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci while incarcerated under the regime of mussolini? recognised that the repression of the masses was effected not just by the state but through the masses themselves and their willing complicity in the capitalist structures of power. Louis Althusser explains this by the concept of interpellation, which is the subjects entering into the space of the first person pronoun ‘I’, and the consequent entering into of the hierarchal relations of language with the consequent alienation that this entails, Althusser saw no way out of this (it has been argued that the resulting tension caused him to murder his wife). Deleuze and Guattari call this subjectification, and see it as one of the principle forces of stratification(19)(ATPp.130). Subjectification is not an essential characteristic of language, only one assemblage of it, moreover they make the radical assertion that the state precedes language(20)(ATPp429). Stratification is the crystallisation of flows of desire, their assemblage into arborescent structures of hierarchal power relations.

‘The principle strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection.’(21)(ATPp.134)

As I mentioned earlier this period was marked by the ascendency of science, (if we apply McLuhan’s tetradic analysis we could say that science obsolesced religion and, later, went into reversal with chaos theory and quantum physics, retreiving holistic spiritualism)(22)(GVp.10) a term which Freud insisted should be applied to psychology. Science would here mean a system which pinpoints the truth of mattter in a grid-like manner analogous to the structuralist dogma. This view of science, which D+G call royal science, is predicated on the homogenous time of the clock, and the homogenous space of the metric standard.

‘The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous time’(23)(EoRp.21)

Isabelle Stengers on the other hand had a much more dynamic conception of the scientific process, whereby scientific code did not signify or represent materiality in a one way process but actively explored and fabricated it in a movement of constant change. She called this the enculturation of science.

Maxwell showed that the movement towards entropy could be indefinitely postponed through what he called negentropic forces. Both Weiner and Freud conceived of organic life as islands of negentropy amid a sea of chaos and death(24)(HUp.21). Weiner applied this principle to language also, speech being ‘a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion’(25)(HUp92) Shannon opposed this by arguing that the more unexpected a message was, the more information it conveyed. Information is thus probabilistic and entropic, not the reverse. In this case entropy is a positive force of production, not the death engine but the flow of continual self-organisation. The indeterminacy of language then becomes a productive force, as is recognised by poststucturalists such as Derrida.

For Foucault power does not repress but produces relations, it is rather the body which self-regulates in order to ward off the entropy of the excluded. The apparatus of control (such as the school or church, both of which enforce submission to a rigid code of temporality)(26)(Zerzan J.p13) is a hegemonic system of self regulation based on the repression of uncertainty, the dread of death. The fascist dread of flow leads to the production of death(27)(PEFp62). We produce our own repression by reproducing the power mechanisms that crush desire and perpetuate fear of flow (28)(PEFix).

‘To code desire - and the fear, the anguish of decoded flows - is the business of the socius,’(29)(AOp.139)

Theweleit’s critique of Freudian assumptions demonstrates that the homeostatic model of fascistic desire is just one configuration of what D+G would call desiring assemblages. Theweleit maintains that fascistic desire is not simply a historical occurrence, but rather is immanent in all relations. Pleasure is seen as a biocultural assemblage directed against the productive force of desire, such that the pleasure of murder (Althusser’s discharge) is the satisfaction of the interrupted leak.

D+G fundamentally oppose the oedipalisation of the world that Freud effected, they see it as another manifestation of the biunivocal relations that place the subject in a double-bind and crush desiring production.(30)(AOp.116) Points of deterritorialization and lines of flight are the means by which desire escapes this repression (eg. masochism)(31) (AOp.115). Instead of Marxist resistance to the structures of power (which is complicit in the macropolitical arborescence) D+G encourage a micro-politics of desire, they call for a desiring-revolution which rejects ‘anthropomorphic molar representation’(32)(AOp295) and favour becoming ‘n sexes’(33) (AOp295).

This is consistent with Stengers notion of biocultural mutation (34)(Order Out of Chaos p.14) and with Bateson’s critique of the homeostatic model. He demonstrates that the body itself is a vector of entropy, and suggests a dynamic of environmental exchange and self-production on the microscopic level which he calls reflexive. This defines the movement from homeostasis to autopoiesis. The movement of time is irreversible yet through it we pass thresholds where a mutation occurs in the biocultural formation(35)(PEFp.215). Time is not linear and progressive however, since the past, obviously, exists within the present (times new roman), the present acts back on the past (altering our perception of it), and the future acts back on the present (by anticipation or reverse causality). Time is a plane of consistency, composed of haeccicities or singularities and becomings, such as the event 1923, or yesterday (36)(Foucault concurrs with this). These coexist in a patchwork of relations in the abstract machine, composed of a thousand plateaus.

‘All history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession’(37) (ATPp.430)

‘Desire does not “want” revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants’(38)(AOp.116)



References

(1)‘Understanding Media’. p,90. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1964.
(2)Weiner, N. ‘The Human Use of Human Beings’.p92. Da Capo Press. 1950.
(3)Virilio, P. ‘War and Cinema’. p46. Verso 1989.
(4)Attali, J. ‘Noise’.p.87. University of Minnesota Press 2003.
(5)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.421. Athlone Press 2003.
(6)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.421. Athlone Press 2003.
(7)“mass reproduction is the reproduction of the masses, or the mass man. Mass production with its standardaized, interchangeable parts constitutes a fascism of everyday life” (Zerzan, J. Elements of Refusal.p.17. Left Bank Books.)
(8)“Freud in his ‘Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad’, comes increasingly to use the metaphors of a writing machine and text to explain the apparatus of the human psyche”(Derrida, J. ‘Writing and Difference’. p.199. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London. 1981)
(9)(p.14 Lodge, D.)
(10) Zerzan, J. ‘Elements of Refusal’p.17. Left Bank Books.)
(11)(Susan J. Douglas. “The Navy Adopts the Radio, 1899-1919” in M.R. Smith, Military Enterprise, p.28)
(12)‘The Human Use of Human Beings’.p112. Da Capo Press. 1950.
(13)De Landa, M. ‘War in the Age of intelligent Machines’.p40-43. Zone Books 1993.
(14) “It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analagous attempts to control entropy through feedback.”(Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.26.Da Capo Press. 1950)
(15) “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to destroy the meaningful; the tendency as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.”(Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.17 Da Capo Press. 1950)
(16)Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.17 Da Capo Press. 1950
(17)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.199. Athlone Press
(18)De Landa, M. ‘War in the Age of intelligent Machines’.p188. Zone Books 1993.
(19)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.130. Athlone Press 2003.
(20)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.429. Athlone Press 2003.
(21)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.134. Athlone Press 2003.
(22)McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. ‘The Global Village’ p.10. Oxford University Press. 1992.
(23) Zerzan, J.
(24)Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.21 Da Capo Press. 1950
(25)Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.92 Da Capo Press. 1950
(26)Zerzan J. ‘Elements of Refusal’ p.13. Left Bank Books.
(27)Agamben, G. in ‘The Politics of Everyday Fear’ ed. Massumi, B. p62. University of Minnesota Press.1993.
(28)Massumi, B. ‘The Politics of Everyday Fear’. xi. University of Minnesota Press.1993.
(29)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.139. Athlone Press
(30)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.116. Athlone Press
(31)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.115. Athlone Press
(32)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.295. Athlone Press
(34)Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos [New York: Bantam, 1984], p.14
(35)Virilio, P.in ‘The Politics of Everyday Fear’ ed. Massumi, B. p215. University of Minnesota Press.1993.
(36)(Foucault concurrs with this - Foucault, M. et al. Dream and Existence. Humanities Press International, Inc. p.23)
(37)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.430. Athlone Press 2003.
(38)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.116. Athlone Press

Eastern Affect - Noise and Silence

inigo wilkins 27/10/04

Eastern Affect
Noise and Silence

Before embarking on an analysis of the music I have chosen to discuss I would like to set the scene, as it were, by relating some of the concepts that are vital to an understanding of it.

The history of western thought is characterised by a preoccupation with the static, visual object, with linear history, geometry and the logos. Eastern thought is, on the contrary, concerned with the dynamic of flows, the sonic environment and resonance, with cyclical history or rythym, arithmetics and the nomos. (1) This is not to say that the state and stratisfication are a western invention, nor that nomadic turbulence does not exist in Europe, since both are forms of organisation immanent to all societies. Rather it is to focus on the differences in the collective forms of enunciation, or regimes of signs that are to be found in each locale. The Western, ‘civilised’ world is often seen as originating in Greece with the supposed emergence of democracy, and with the rational discourse that centered round such figures as Plato and Aristotle.

‘Aristotle assured his readers that the sense of sight was “above all others”, the one to be trusted’(2)

In one of Plato’s most famous episodes he describes a dream which functions as an allegory that sums up his view of human/mortal perception. In it the chained inhabitants of a cave watch the play of shadows cast by a fire on the wall, convinced that this is life (perhaps in his prescience he saw the modern tyranny of the TV). This is a striking image, and one which demonstrates the dominance of the visual in Platonic thought, since a natural awareness of acoustics would enable any of the incarcerated to clearly perceive the spatial dimensions of the cave and its entrance, or rather exit. Of course this is only an allegory and is not designed to withstand a material analysis, however it is intended to relate the idea that reality as we perceive it is only a dim reflection of the absolute forms (i.e. justice, truth etc.) which are supposedly eternal and unchanging, and therefor immobile and silent.

‘It is almost as if the great acheivements of Western philosophy and science were produced in a huge anechoic chamber. Myriads of books were written in silent rooms and silent libraries.’(3)

The Socratic ideal is pure contemplation, uninhibited by the weakness of the body and the untrustworthiness of sensory perception, we ‘see through the eyes, [Plato] insisted, not with them’(4). This is the beginning of a current of anticorporeality which runs through all western philosophy, which is continually grappling with the problem of the relation between subject and object. A relation which is exemplified by the visual sense, ‘the eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy. Their enigma is that they not only can see but are also able to see themselves seeing’(5). In visual space there is always distance between the subject and object, the subject is detatched and uninvolved in the perception of discrete, often static objects. Acoustic space, on the other hand, is fluid, mutable, curved or spherical, and entails non-linear relations of superimposition and resonance. This critique of western thought is called anti-occularcentrism. One of the strongest advocates of which is Marshall McLuhan.

McLuhan shows that primitive, tribal societies prioritise the oral, with stoytelling and singing at the heart of their culture, they live in an acoustic space and are ahistoric and intensive rather than linear and extensive. This can be seen in the Innuit conception of transubstantiation where ancestors are materially coexsistent with their living relations, and speak to them through what we would call auditory hallucinations (see the film Atanarjuat).’. The invention of the phonetic alphabet in Graeco-Roman times ushered in a new age where the visual claimed dominance. The introduction of the alphabet superceded the tribal mode of inscription which was ‘magically discontinuous’ (6) and ideogrammic. A form of writnig which still exists in the orient. In fact even western religious, pre-literate lore priveleges the aural, where we ‘hear the word of God’, these expressions are vestiges of a time of sonic dominance. The alphabet facilitated mass literacy, complex social bureaucratic organisation, militarisation, the expansion of the Roman empire and the translation of information from other cultures.

The technology of alphabetic writing is thus central (and centralising) to Greek philosophy and by extension western thought and music. In Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of Plato he discovers a logocentrism and principle of exclusion or repression at the heart of the Socratic dialogue. This is exemplified by the duality of meaning in the word pharmakos which means both poison/cure and pharmakon which relates to the structure of society and to the elements of it which are formally outside it (i.e. slaves, beggars, the disabled or deformed, women and children). In his vision of a philosophical utopia Plato spends some time delineating the kind of music which should exist in such a perfect world. He is resolutely anti-instrumental (since this relates to the body and dancing) and accepts only music which accompanies words(logos), and then only those which praise military heroism (certainly not the kind of emotive ballads he sees as feminine and hysterical).

The first peice of music I would like to discuss is an example of the court music of Japan called gaguku which ‘fused influences from Korea, India and China during the seventh and eighth centuries’(7). The first thing one notices when listening to this is the time structure or abscence of one. Fundamental to an appreciation of gagaku is an understanding of the Japanese word ‘“ma” which signifies “interval” in time and space’ (8). This is not to be confused with the western concept of a counted ‘rest’ (whose oppsing term is work; ‘”free action” in a smooth space and “work” in striated space(9)) between one note and another, as Ooka Makoto writes:

“If you think of “ma”
as something between one thing and another,
you’re wrong.”(10)

Pierre Boulez distinguishes between two types of ‘space-time’ in musicology, the smooth and the striated. Counter-intuitively, it is the striated which is homogenous and the smooth space is composed of heterogenous elements. Classical music is almost always striated, whereas nomadic folk music usually exists in a smooth space.

‘In the simplest terms Boulez says that in a smooth space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one counts in order to occupy. . .The smooth is a nomos, whereas the striated always has a logos, the octave, for example.’(11)

This becomes a fundamental opposition in D+G’s array of terminological devices, and relates to all fields in a transdisciplinary manner. Logos and striation pertains to the state or city (polis), jurisdiction, coding, (also decoding, and overcoding) and homogeneity, whereas nomos refers to the smooth space of the desert or steppe, territorialisation and deterritorialisation, and heterogeneity. This difference is exemplified by the relation of the Western game of chess, as opposed to the Eastern (japanese) game of Go.

‘The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it’ (12)

The social form of the desert is of course nomadic, which we might readily associate with constant movement from place to place, however, again contrary to popular conception, movement is not an attribute of the nomad. It is in striated space that one moves from point to point, and it is an essential function of the state to organise points, to halt the flow of goods or people, levying taxes, selecting and excluding. Nomads on the other hand create lines of flight between points(13), by speeds and slownesses - they are characterised by rhythm rather than meter. This is not the rhythm we find in classical music, or striated pop, which is measured; it relates instead to the heterogeneous space-time of music like gagaku and the work of John Cage.

‘rhythm is never the same as measure. . .[it] relates to the upswell of flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.’(14)

‘Percussion music is revolution’(15)

Movement relates to the visual, to extensive Euclidean space; geometry, boundaries and the noumenological object; as speed relates to intensities, rhythm, tactile, sonorous space, arithmetic and a coexistence becomings.(16) Another way in which we can understand the concept of ma, and of smooth space-time is D+G’s concept of the rhizome, which is ‘an acentred nonhierarchal, nonsignifying system’(17), like a map rather than a tracing. Theirs is an anti-representational philosophy of affect. In the Western classical tradition musicians trace the score (acoustically represent the striated visual code), directed by the ascendent conductor who reads the text, builds tension, and releases it climactically. As in a narrative the music generally begins harmoniously, moves into dischord, and then resolves itself in harmony.

A movement analogous with the Hegelian dialectic, and the progressive historicity at the core of Western culture. Eastern music like gagaku is on the contrary played by a small group who are trained vigorously in the art of determining the singularity of that sound in the moment. Traditionally the blind have often played gagaku. Ma is not a written measurement but functions like a plateau. This is a term D+G took from Gregory Bateson who describes Balinese culture as a constant pasing of thresholds, of heterogeneous fields of intensity, or plateaus, a social system much more akin to feminine desire than the phallocentric, Freudian western model of homeostasis, where the accumulation of tension results in discharge and a return to equilibrium(18).

We can hear this in track 2, called Ketjak Dance, which is a Balinese adaptation of a hindu myth about Hanuman, the monkey God, who represents the strength and agility of the body. The corporeal and affective world of acoustic space is celebrated in this visceral, polyvocal chant, their voices phasing in and out with each other reminds one of the frog chorus and the patterns of turbulence that emerge from them. The other famous music of Bali is the gamelan, which when payed, usually in a gamelan orchestra, produces an audible tone as well as an ultrasonic high frequency sound. Though the high sounds are barely audible the frequency travels through us, and resonates our body, in the same way a low bass does in dub music for example, Other asian instruments, like the Indian sitar, also produce overtones, and it is the skill of the musician to control both tone and overtone. This is acheived through affective response, or being aware of the body with the body.

Where classical music uses harmony and discord to represent order and entropy Gagaku produces haeccicities as lines of flight which escape measurement and flee between points, which transcend the triangulation imposed by the despotic coding of the logos by producing antiproduction.

‘In the West chords tend to colour a melody and drive it on by setting it in situations of tension which require release, in music terms, by setting up chord progressions. . .The chords of the sho, however, do not serve this function. Rather they “freeze” the melody.’(19)

In the first track, John Zorn plays with Satoh Michihiro, on an album entitled Ganryu Island. This is the site of a famous, quasi-mythical duel between the legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi and Kojiri Sasaki. Here Zorn plays the kind of reeds traditionally used in gagaku and other japanese music, while Michihiro battles with tsuguru shamisen. Shamisen is a kind of guitar-like instrument with a long, thin, fretless neck and four loose strings, played with a large, stiff, triangular plectrum, resembling a car window scraper. The materiality of the instrument is deliberately exaggerated. Similar to the biwa (an oriental lute) its construction is based on the ‘active inclusion of noise in its sound’(20), an aesthetic diametrically opposed in the design of western instruments, which ‘in the process of development, sought to eliminate noise’(21)Toru Takemitsu explains this purposeful awkwardness by the concept of sawari, which refers to ‘a part of the neck of the biwa, then extends its multiple meanings into aesthetics by denoting touch, obstacle, even menstruation. . .Inconvenience is potentially creative’(22).

In his radical cultural history on the political economy of noise, Attali proposes that noise is the always excluded element of music. This is an idea that comes from information theory, where noise is that which disrupts the transmission of the message (23), this is called entropy and is analogous to death in the Freudian appropriation of homeostasis conceptualised as the pleasure principle. Attali goes further, however, proclaiming that noise is a simulacrum of murder and ritual sacrifice, and that music is the organisation of noise. A fundamental function of the socius is then to ward off essential violence (entropy) through the organised reenactment of death that is music (discharge).

‘Noise is a weapon and music, primordially, is the formation, domestication, and ritualization of that weapon as a simulacrum of murder.’ (24)

Attali’s theory of music as a channeler of violence is compelling, and his association of musical harmony with social order, and the confluence of nature is substantiated both in the West (Plato’s Republic), and the East. As Ssu-ma Ch’ien says ‘Music honours harmony. . .and is in conformity with heaven’(25). Attali divides the history of music into four phases, which he calls sacrifice, representation, repetition, and composition. Though he understands these as being in a relation of virtual coexistence, he still falls into the western preoccupation with categorisation and progessive historicity that he is ostensibly critisizing. He claims to present an antioccularcentric view of history yet his citations are predominantly eurocentric, and he remains entangled by the eye, and the situationist critique which partakes of the structures it attempts to resist.

‘First music - a channelizer of violence, a creator of differences, a sublimation of noise, an attribute of power - creates in festival and ritual an ordering of the noises of the world. Then - heard, repeated, regimented, framed, and sold - it announces the installation of a new totalizing social order based on spectacularity and exteriority.’(26)

Furthermore, his knowledge of contemporary popular music is, like D+G, scant; he follows Adorno in the pompous rejection of pop as mass-produced low-brow commodity; his understanding of the impact of electricity on music is naive; he conceives of it as a historical climax using the homeostatic model when he should notice that it has multiple layers and is rhizomatic and vortically autopoietic (self-assembling).

‘The modern musician says nothing, signifies nothing, if not the insignificance of his age, the impossibility of communicating in repetition’ (27)

Before the rise of fascist military despotism Japan was a largely agrarian society. Cut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of years it had kept many of its traditional ways (and still does) but the electrification of the world was nowhere more rapid and total than here. Many, like novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, ‘deplored the progressive forces that were flooding electricity into Japan’s old world of muted tones, of materials that blotted up sound and light.’(28) Many others wholeheartedly embraced the new technology. Takemitsu was one such. In 1948 he had a revelation concerning the musical potency of everyday sound, and began making music concrete, innocent of the activities of Pierre Schaeffer et al. Anticipating the theories of Michel Chion he worked with many of the great Japanese directors of the time, including Kurosawa (who says ‘Real sound does not add to the image, it multiplies it’(29)) and Teshigahara, obsessively poring over the sound recordings and splicing them with fragments of found sound, such as Presley, setting the precedent for modern sampledelia. One of their greatest collaborations is ‘Woman of the Dunes’, a film which explores the conflict between the Western scientific beleif in control and structure, and the older Oriental acceptance of nature as flow.

‘was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn’t unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop.’(30)

R, Murray Schafer takes the western progressive homeostatic view that the world is becoming noisier, that the pastoral sonic environment was an idyll of nature, and that the post-industrial soundscape is an ugly confluence of banging machinery, amplified voices cut off from their sources (which he calls schizophonic) and, above all, flatline hums. Pierre Shcaeffer classes listening in three camps; semantic (listening for meaning); causal (listening for spatial origin); and reduced (listening to the sound as sound). Chion proclaims reduced ‘has the enormous advantage of opening up our ears and sharpening our powers of listening’ (31), a practice which artists like Fransisco Lopez (who makes his audience wear blindfolds), and Toshiya Tsunoda (who records the noise of airplanes) support. (32)

The fourth track is a collection of samples from japanese popular media, mostly TV advertisements, including some which function as jingles, or ear-worms. This is sonic branding, the corporate name is associated with a sound and then fired through a TV directly into your brain and body. Some of the most displeasing, ugly noise one could wish to hear. These sounds permeate our environment everywhere, especially in cities like Tokyo. As John Cage says we cannot escape this noise, however, ‘When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.’(32a)

As I stressed at the beginning of the essay West and East are not mutually exclusive entities, there has always been a flow of goods, people, information and culture between them. They are self constructing biocultural assemblages. The advent of instant communication has amplified the flow, however, and the East has affected, and is affecting, the West and vice versa in the manner of a productive conversation. This widening of the sphere of music to incorporate all sounds and the soundscape is also at the heart of the work of Cage and others in the easternized western world.

‘Ives, Debussy, Russolo, Varese, Schaeffer and Cage all pioneered the use of ‘music’ to make us coscious of the life and sounds outside the accepted musical-social environment.’ (33)

Cages’ approach to music, and his use of silence stems from an interest in the East, after visiting a Zen garden in Japan he wrote a peice based on its structure of fifteen stones. Cage himself says that ‘without my engagement with Zen . . .I doubt whether I would have done what I have done.’(34). That there is no silence, of course, is a fact that Cage is well aware of, for even in an anechoic chamber you can hear your own blood and brain frequencies, and in a concert hall you can hear a lot more. The work of Cage and Feldman incorporated the sonic environment as part of the music, in the same way that the japanese word shakkei describes a garden which incrporates the landscape around it (such as a mountain).(34)

References

(1)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.388.Athlone Press 2003.
(2)McLuhan, M. ‘Media Research. Technology, Art, Communication’ p.39. G+B Arts International 1980
(3)Shafer, R.M. in ‘The Auditory Culture Reader’ edited by Michael Bull and Les Black. p.35. Berg. 2003
(4)Jay, M. ‘Downcast Eyes’ p.27 University of California Press 1994
(5)Ibid, p.21
(6)McLuhan, M. ‘Understanding Media’ p.91Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1964.
(7)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p254. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(8)Ibid, p41.
(9)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.490.Athlone Press 2003.
(10)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p41. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(11)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.447.Athlone Press 2003.
(12)Ibid, p.353
(13)Ibid, p498
(14)Ibid, p364
(16)Ibid, p.381-2
(17)Ibid, p21
(18)Ibid, p22
(19)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p254-5. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(20,21,23)Ibid, p.129
(23)Attali, J. ‘Noise’.p.26. University of Minnesota Press 2003.
(24)Ibid, p.24
(25)Ibid, p.60
(26)Ibid, p.23
(27)Ibid, p.114
(28)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p127. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(29)Ibid, p.136
(30)Ibid, p.142
(31)Ibid, p.16
(32)Ibid, p.17
(32a)Cage, J. ‘Silence’ p.3. Marion Boyars Publishers. 2004.
(33)Nyman, M. ‘Experimental Music. Cage and Beyond.’ p.103. Cambridge University Press. 1999.
(34)Cage, J. ‘Silence’ xi. Marion Boyars Publishers. 2004.


Tracklisting

1)‘Natsu Matsuri’. Zorn, J.+Michihiro, Satoh. . ‘Ganryu Island’
2)Ketjak Dance. Music from the morning of the world. The Balinese Gamelan
3)+. Ryoji Ikeda.+-
4)’Nihon Victor’. Otomo Yoshihide. ‘The Night before the Death of the Sampling Virus’.
5)‘Tsuru no Sugumori’ Gagaku,koto,shakuhachi and shamisen.

The Sound Crystal

Inigo Wilkins 23/03/05

The Sound Crystal

I have chosen to sound out or synthesise , rather than look at or analyse, a film by Werner Herzog, called ‘Heart of Glass’ . My aim is to investigate the sonic architecture of a short section of the film in relation to the Deleuzian conception of the movement-image and the time-image; to demonstrate the comparitive lack of rigor in the audio-visual lexicon of Michel Chion; and to outline Deleuze’s reinterpretation of Bergson’s monistic philosophy of images, particularly the idea of the time-cystal, and his assertion that ‘[i]n this film Herzog has set out the greatest crystal-images in the history of the cinema.’(2)
The first section of the film introduces us to the main character, Hias. We see only his back in the misty mountains, and hear the entrancing sound of a yodelling choir together with the stochastic shimmering of high frequencies that we later find is the (future) sound of ten racks of ruby glass on their line of flight over the border. We then hear his disembodied voice, which has all the formal properties, according to Chion’s schema, of a complete acousmetre (3).
The voice begins to intone prophetic poetry and, at a certain point of intensity, the voice becomes what Chion calls ‘textual speech’(4), that is it appears to control images we see by uttering them. Chion considers this a development from intertitles, or due to the encounter of the cinema with literature, I would rather posit a materiality of vibrations or vocogenesis . The visual image of gushing water imbricated with the somnifacient voice and non-diegetic music by legendary krautrock band ‘Popul Vuh’ are deliberately intended to be hypnotic.
Actually Hias is the only character in the film, excepting the glassblowers, who isn’t in a hypnotic trance. Herzog himself hypnotised all the actors (most of whom are untrained villagers) and taught them their lines under the effect, often allowing them freedom of imagination by merely making suggestions. It is in multiple senses then that Herzog’s film is metallurgical (the working of singularities following the flow of matter) rather than hylomorphic (the clay and the mold). Their altered state is clear by the glazed look in their eyes, their focus is diffused as on an indeterminate space, their gestures are aberrant, their voices are somnambulous.
To understand Deleuze’s extravagant comment regarding Herzog’s crystals we must grapple with the engineering controls of his time machine. Deleuze’s cinema philosophy is an example of transdisciplinary intervention, it is critical of the established consensus of film studies based on the triad of Saussure-Marx-Lacan , and instead reappropriates the Bergsonian concepts of the actual and virtual, using a Piercian semiotics such that ‘all thought is in signs’(7)and all images and signs are ‘fundamentally deterritorializing figures’(8), he demonstrates an awareness shared by Stengers of the transversal evolution of different assemblages (social, technical) in symbiotic relations(9).
Deleuze separates cinema into two distinct phases in the evolution of the medium, the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image corresponds to early cinema such as Buster Keaton, but also to contemporary popular action films like ‘Terminator 3’ and animations like ‘Robots’. It is dominated by the body moving through space, and the sensory-motor schema that inform its perception. Deleuze’s construction of this category is directly informed by Bergson’s three theses on movement.
Bergson calls the belief that movement is composed of static instants ‘the cinematographic illusion’(11). Though film ostensibly consists of 24 static photgrammes per second, it is the invisible unrolling motion of the apparatus - the intermediate image - which gives us movement, that is the transition or interstice between one photogramme and the next in a continuity. Deleuze argues that the movement-image is then a mobile section.
The transition from the movement-image to the time -image, beginning in post-war European avant-garde cinema, indicates a metamorphosis in the manner that signs and images are apprehended, and a transversal evolution of the social image of thought (13). That is, the dominant model of thought in the first half of the twentieth century subordinated time to movement - following the universal mechanistic laws of Newton science made time an ‘independent variable’ (14) and thereby reduced it to ‘a sequence of instantaneous states linked by a deterministic law (what Deleuze calls “any-instant-whatevers”.(15)
The advent of the time-image coincides with the overturning of this logic in the arts and sciences; quantum mechanics demands a qualitative, co-determinate temporality (not merely quantitative and mechanistic) - a circumstance which finds expression in the cinematic medium.
Deleuze rejects the film studies approach, typified by the work of Christian Metz, which reduces cinema to text and its images to a grid of negatively derived significations much like structuralist linguistics (17). He also dismisses Eisenstein’s feeling that cinema is like an internal monologue (18). Instead he maintains that the movement-image, through the joint processes of specification and differentiation, comprises an amalgamation of visceral sensation, irreducible to language, that consists of actual matter (19) he calls signaletic material.
The section of the film I would like to focus on is the killing of the masters’ maid, an episode that begins with ‘Tony the Harp’ catatonically staring upwards into space as he plucks a rhythmic/melodic refrain that is anempathetic (21) and reminiscent of the menacing sweetness of the mechanistic music box, or the tragicomedy of the fairground. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that though the refrain is pre-eminently territorial, it also has other functions, and ‘passes into other assemblages’ (22) - it is the coverging point of three forces; chaos, terrestrial, cosmic (23). They insist ‘the Cosmos itself is a refrain, and the ear also’(24).
Deterritorialization occurs with the release of a machine that opens the territorial assemblage onto the interassemblage (25). The power of sound to affect directly the qualitative temporality of the audio-visual continuum is exemplified by the ritornello. ‘Music molecularises sound-matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing nonsonorous forces such as Duration and Intensity.’(26) The refrain is in fact ‘a prism, a crystal of space-time’(27).
At first the harp has a reverb which lends it warmth and emotion. The point of audition then changes to the adjoining room where the sound of the harp contains less reverb. We then hear the insane laughter of the master’s father this time with a reverb that makes us want to escape, it is a deeply disturbing sound, partially acousmatic, it functions like emanation speech (28), as Herzog says it is like an ‘extension of dialogue’(29). It seems odd that so much has been written about the scream in film but so little about laughter.
For Chion the scream is the pivotal instant in film, such that the whole trajectory of certain films, all its lines of convergence, centre on this point in time with no duration, the gushing forth of a-signifying vibration, ‘the unthinkable inside the thought. . .the indeterminate inside the spoken. . .unrepresentability inside representation’(30). He proposes that it is its placement in time that is of utmost importance. In this instance the (acousmatic then de-acousmatised) scream occurs at an anomolous juncture and is strangely objectless, it is a pure sonic event, a sound crystal(31), uncoupled from the image it wanders the screen, then mirrors itself. The sound-image is nomadic and relates to place or topology, the optical-image is territorial(32), stratisfied, and historical(33).
I readily concur with Chion’s claim that the scream is a ‘rip in time’(34) however his explanation of the overridingly feminine nature of the scream as due to ‘the “black hole” of the female orgasm, which cannot be spoken or thought’(35) is essentialist, as is his belief that the male cry delineates territory, and is willed, contrary to the female which concerns limitlessness and is ‘like the shout of the human subject of language in the face of death’(36) His gender stereotyping of the male shout as ‘centrifugal and structuring’(37) and the female scream as ‘centripetal and fascinating’(38)is grotesquely reductive. His proposal that de-acousmatization is a striptease whose endpoint is the phallic abscence of the female genitalia(39) is anti-corporeal and triangulated(40). Just as disturbingly essentialist is Brophy’s claim that the scream is an ‘ero-sonic moment’ or aural cum shot(41).
The laugh is also at the edges of language, a stuttering, centripetal force, on-off-on-off, it is the compulsive actualisation virtualisation process of the smallest circuit of perception-recollection. This particular laugh sounds like a vast resevoir of virtuality, a great collection of repressive machines, teeteringly perched on a thin membrane of actualisation and spilling into the void, seeping like a schiz-flow of urine or sunlight.
The privileging of the scream is a social machine which is constructed through the apparatus of the cinema itself, and which derives a great deal of its power from the fissure between the soundtrack and image . In fact the scream is only an extreme example of the speech act as resistance(44), the incommensurability of the sonic and optical(45), and the free indirect relationship between them(46).
Heautonomy is a concept introduced by Kant implying not only mutual autonomy within a unified structure, but also an interval of indeterminate nature between them. Deleuze’s use of the word, in reference to the audio-visual, covers several ideas that Chion has expounded in less rigorous terminology; his assertion that there is no soundtrack(47), the concept of added value(48), and his prized acousmetre(49). Chion’s acousmetre erroneously focuses attention on the ontological status of the schizophonic voice, the notion of faciality and probe-heads that Deleuze and Guattari developed is thus far more interesting. The paucity of Chion’s philosophy is most apparent not only in the oedipalization of the voice but also in his treatment of the off-screen as a spatial realm, where in Deleuze the ‘hors-champs’ is actual and actualizable, but the Whole is neither actual nor spatial, it is virtual and temporal(53).
The time-image may be either visual or auditory, and is formed by its estrangement from sensory-motor extension, it is a-centred and abberant(54). A visual time-image is called an op-sign whereas a sonic time-image is called a son-sign, and is equivalent to Schaeffer’s reduced listening(55) - Chion, however, opposes it to two other modes; causal and semantic; and therefor creates a cerebral, contemplative, and negatively defined practice, whereas with Deleuze the time-image is positively determined by its entry into a circuit with the virtual, and by its direct presentation of time.
The time-image enters into large circuits, as set out by Bergson, such as recollection-images, dream-images and world-images, however it only becomes a crystal-image when it oscillates on the smallest internal circuit with its own virtual image. This oscillation is caused by the reciprocal presupposition of the actual and the virtual (58), by their exchange around a point of indiscernability (not to be confused with the indistinct). This endless displacement has three aspects - the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque, and the seed and the environment(59).
Perception always involves this double action of liberation and capture, where the present splits into the actual perception which passes or dies; and the virtual recollection which is preserved and retains the seed of life(60). It is this elemental schism in time, this paradoxical coalescence of the actual and the virtual, which we apprehend in the crystal(61). The crystal is a stage(62), the film within the film is a mode of the crystal-image(63), as is the actor ‘beholding himself playing’(64).
For Deleuze there are two dimensions of musical time; the gallop, which expedites the passing of presents and ushers in death; and the ritornello, which is the ontogenetic retrocession of the past(65). Deleuze argues that the crystal-images of Renoir are complete because they allow one of these tendencies to leave on a line of flight, the passing present escapes and only the preserved past remains. Those of Fellini on the other hand incorporate everything in a continuous expansion that causes the passing present to become a ‘danse macabre’(67).
The scene which interrupts the death of the girl contains a section where a farmer dances with the dead body of another peasant to the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. This instrument has a continuous bawdy drone with multiple overtones and rhythmic pulsations, it is the gallop that accompanies the movement of actualisation, the death-dance. It is antithetical to the harp with its clear succession of distinct pure tones - the refrain that preserves (the dead girl is ‘cooling’(68) like freshly wrought glass).
Pure recollection, which is virtual and luminous, is to be distinguished from the recollection image, which is actual and opaque. The former, which is preserved in a layer or sheet of time, acts as a magnetizer for the latter which derives from it. In dreams, and in the appreciation of art, film, music and literature we ‘constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them. In this way we extract non-chronological time.’(69) We may say then that ‘Heart of Glass’ is meta-cinematographic and crystalline since it is ‘precisely a story of magnetism, hypnotism’(70) and also that ‘hypnosis. . .reveals thought to itself’(71).

Footnotes

1 ‘Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgement; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).’ (1)
2 ‘Heart of Glass’ is based on a story by Herbert Achternbusch, a lesser known figure of New German Cinema, a genre made famous by the works of Wenders, Fassbinder and fellow Bavarian anarchist Herzog. His novel is inspired by the writings of a kind of eighteenth century Nostradamus from the same locality.
3 Contrary to Chion’s criteria his subsequent de-acousmatization in the following scene does little to reduce the power of his omniscience.
4 ‘In metallurgy. . .the operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualititive deformation or transformation overspills the form’(5)
5 A threesome in whose name film is reduced to identification, we would rather say, as Shaviro does, that ‘the subject is captivated. . .touched by - drawn into complicitous communication with - the passive. horrific, and yet strangely attractive zombies’(6)
6 The first of which states that ‘movement is distinct from the space covered. The space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible. . .whilst movement is indivisible’.(10)
7 the eye’s ‘retention of virtual images’(12)
8 ‘This is what happens when the image becomes time-image. . .The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where the immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future. . .The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time.’(16)
9 ‘a signaletic material which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). . .It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically.’(20)
10 ‘The sound image is born, in its very break, from its break with the visual image. There are no longer even two autonomous components of a single audio-visual image. . .but two ‘heautonomous’ images, one visual and one sound, with a fault, an interstice, an irrational cut between them.’(42) ‘movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence. . .time is by nature. . .the impossibility of an equivalence’(43)
11 ‘Sometimes the abstract machine, forces flows into signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of arborescence and holes of abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable “defacialization,” it frees something like probe-heads (tetes chercheuses, guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favour of veritable rhizomes, and steer flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight.’(50)The gaze is secondary to the black hole of faciality (51) the face is ‘the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen’(52).
12 ‘The relation, sensory-motor situation – indirect image of time is replaced by a non-localizable relation, pure optical and sound situations – direct time image. Opsigns and sonsigns are direct presentations of time.’(56)
13 ‘the opsign finds its true genetic element. . .[when it] crystallizes with its own virtual image, on the small internal circuit. This is a crystal-image’.(57)
14 ‘Everything that has happened falls back into the crystal and stays there: this is all the frozen, fixed, finished-with and over-conforming roles that the characters have tried in turn, dead roles or roles of death, the macabre dance of recollections’(66).


References

Herzog, W. ‘Heart of Glass’ DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment
(1)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.343.
(2)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p75.
(3)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.21
(4)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.224
(5)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.410
(6)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.53
(7)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.39.
(8)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p39.
(9)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.264.
(10)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 1- The Movement-Image’. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. p.1.
(11)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 1- The Movement-Image’. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. p.1.
(12)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.51.
(13)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.7.
(14)Bergson, H. ‘Creative Evolution’. Dover Publications, Inc. Mineola, New York. 1998. p.336.
(15)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.19.
(16)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.125.
(17)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.11.
(18)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.29.
(19)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.28.
(20)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.29.
(21)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.7.
(22)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.325.
(23)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.312.
(24)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.347.
(25)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p333.
(26)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.343.
(27)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.348
(28)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.177.
(29)Herzog, W. ‘Heart of Glass’ DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment. Director’s Audio Narrative.
(30)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.77.
(31)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.90.
(32)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.255.
(33)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.258.
(34)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.73.
(35)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.73.
(36)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.78.;
(37)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.79.
(38)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.79.
(39)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.27
(40)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. Athlone Press. p258.
(41)Brophy, P. ‘I Scream in Silence: Sex, Death and the Sound of Women Dying’ in Cinesonic the World of Sound in Film. AFTRS.p63.
(42)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.251.
(43)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.77-8.
(44)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.254.
(45)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.256.
(46)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.261.
(47)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.39.
(48)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.5.
(49)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.17.
(50)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.190.
(51)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.171.
(52)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000.p.168.
(53)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.48+52
(54)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.38
(55)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.29
(56)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.41.
(57)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.69.
(58)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.69.
(59)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.71.
(60)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.92.
(61)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.81.
(62)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.71.
(63)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.77.
(64)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.79.
(65)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p93.
(66)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.87.
(67)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.91.
(68)Herzog, W. ‘Heart of Glass’ DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment.
(69)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.123.
(70)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.123.
(71)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p125.

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