On A Sound Body
On A Sound Body
by Ultra-red
PART I: ARTICULATION
All I want to talk about is a certain sound, and in the process
remind myself of listening. But at the moment of articulation, my subject
runs away with me. Sound slips into metaphors like "flowing" "lofty"
"constant" each approximating an agnostic's apology for his secret
faith.
At that point, the sound moves out of ear's reach; taking with it our
certainty that sound is indeed what we're discussing. Maybe it's just me,
but anytime sound becomes displaced with the rhetoric of transcendence, I
get the sense that I'm no longer contingent with the thing I wish to
consider. That is why I want to say, this early in my goings-on, that
sound has as much to do with the ear that receives it as the waves which
channel it to me. To reduce sound to metaphysics eradicates this vessel
which gives the frequencies their intelligibility. Thus, for me, sound
will always be about the body. But, can the reverse be just as true? Can
I say, with any degree of certainty' that the body will always be subject
to sound? This is the question I wish to pose to radicals- cultural,
political and sexual each and every one.
ARTICULATION: THE MOVEMENTS OF SPEECH ORGANS EMPLOYED IN PRODUCING A
PARTICULAR SPEECH SOUND, ESP. A CONSONANT. NOT NECESSARILY COMMUNICATION
OR THE TRANSFERENCE OF MEANING, BUT THAT SOUND PRODUCED BY SPEECH ORGANS.
Accompanying my interest in sound, I also hold to an equally constant
devotion to social/cultural transformation. The two commitments are
rarely in harmony. Rather, between them and their playing out through my
life, there grows a continual swell of noise. My political commitments
find little sympathy in my artistic practice. All efforts at a synthesis
produces a dissonance whose rhythm is neither constant nor regulated. Yet
I am far from persuaded to abandon the work. When taking up the position
of musician, I am compelled to ask questions along the lines of cultural
criticism, political contingency and material effects. Likewise, at those
moments of activist intervention (whether it be civil disobedience or
community organizing), I wonder about the sounds around to what extent
they contribute or hinder our work. I am comforted to know that the
dialectical oscillation between actions of sound and politics is not a
solo effort. But I must admit to being less than satisfied with much of
the results.
ARTICULATION: A JOINTING TOGETHER OF SEPARATE PARTS, OR SUCH PARTS
BEING JOINTED TOGETHER. THAT ACT OF ASSEMBLING, LINKING, ACTIVELY
RELATING AND SYNERGISTIC PRODUCTION, IN CONTRAST TO SYNTHESIS.
For most activists, the possibility of radical audio-work ends either
in the realm of propagandistic chants or the narratives of a rap session.
This is one way of saying, sound is essentially outside of consideration.
Artists, musicians and sound workers have been less restrictive in
their approach to the radical implications of their work. For this
reason, I wish to challenge my contemporaries in the fields of political
activism: any discussion of cultural resistance must consider the role of
music and noise in the movements of struggle. Yet, as far as I know, no
such history has yet been written. Perhaps it's a history that is more
the task of musicians than musicologists - or, at least as long as the
two activities are divided by academic and recording industry market
politics.
Furthermore, moving closer to the realities of cultural resistance
itself, perhaps we can boldly say that a social movement is only as
efficacious as the noise it musters. Oh, but this evokes a whole network
of complexities and contradictions. And for musicians as manufactured by
the music industry, "the music's got to flow." It is, after all, "the
universal language" which thus means music is its own transcendental
signifier - in terms of commodity circulation. At the same time (of
course), noise is nothing more than the peace disturbed, tranquility
ruptured by dissonance. In the conflation of global markets and musical
idealism, noise operates on the limits of intelligibility. It is that din
playing itself out along the boundaries of the ear. Perhaps then, we are
the ones to consider the function of noise and sound in the various
struggles which recruit us.
ARTICULATION: "ANY PRACTICE ESTABLISHING A RELATION AMONG ELEMENTS
SUCH THAT THEIR IDENTITY IS MODIFIED [TRANSFORMED] AS A RESULT OF THE
[ARTICULATORY] PRACTICE" (Laclau and Mouffe, 105).
Let us append to our subject the question: can the avant-garde do no
better than offer up a protest song? Political activists are now equipped
with fax machines, computers, cellular phones, marketing networks, cable
access, even capital, but still they walk the streets chanting, "He he ho
ho, AIDSphobia's got to go." Is this the noise we have to work with? Can
our rage, our passion produce no other noise in protest? I remember that
moment when AIDS and health care activists exhausted every chant that had
been scripted, resorting to a collective moan. Raising our mouths to the
corporate towers standing over us, the moan spread through the crowd of
protesters, transforming into a sound part lament and part fury. At the
time, I found the act too ambiguous to be of any use. Collectively, we
sounded more weary than outraged. Yet, the truth could not be denied.
Organizations such as ACT UP, Puss 'N Boots and Queer Nation had lost so
many of its members to the struggles against intolerance and structural
antipathy. We were at wits end to find a place for both mourning and
militancy resulting in the repression of the former into the cathartic
value of the latter. The psychic consequence of which produced that
emotive noise. And as most militants are led by song, we had neared the
end of our strength to utter anything but such a sound. What followed the
moan has been a long period of silence. ACT UP in all the major cities
has gone underground. Puss 'N Boots and Queer Nation and other anti-
Reagan/Bush activist organizations have gone on an unfortunate
Clinton-era reprise. And yet the need for cultural and political
intervention remains as urgent as ever. Yet, picking up from where that
moan left off, the question remains, what noise is there for us to make?
As ambient artists, we believe much remains in the background calling for
articulation.
PART II: AN EARFUL OF QUARRELS
The stereo had fallen silent just moments before my writing required
an example from me. I had hoped to appropriate some sound in service of
my articulation. Having claimed that if a social movement is as good as
the noise it makes, then the opposite must not go without saying. For
this reason I pressed my ear to the stereo speakers, anticipating a sonic
transformation. On second thought, perhaps a sound refined by the hi-fi
would dictate too rigidly the path my procession would take. In an age of
digital reproduction, we are so easily seduced by the highly polished
surface - the touch of technology. Not that I can somehow locate my
process in a retro-gardist quest for sound unmediated by technology:
prerecorded, pre-amplified, pre- instrumental, pre-scripted,
pre-linguistic. Instead, I'd like to take a leap into another artistic
form altogether, still keeping the ear in mind. There is that movie
poster by Andy Warhol for Fassbinder's film adaptation of Querelle.. In
the poster, two men facing to the right are locked in the erotics of a
"spoon" position. However, instead of hand to mouth, the man to the rear
thrusts his tongue into the other's ear. Warhol shows his own hand by
coloring the tongue blood red, while the rest of the image he reduces to
a lurid blue. So extreme and obvious is the eroticism of the image that
the proximity of the tongue to the ear eliminates the possibility of
speech. The function of both organs is clearly lust. Communication as
speech has been displaced by desire; a desire producing noise and murmur.
Could this be the quarrel Jean Genet dramatized in Querelle De Breste
(1952): noise and carnality? Working ass-backwards, we turn to Warhol's
source, that scene in Genet's novel where the cop Mario seduces Querelle
- merchant marine, drug-smuggler and murder - into a fuck. When the moves
of their game bring the two men into the tableau depicted in Warhol's
poster, the element of sound overwhelms the narrative:
"Close to his ear, Querelle heard the quiet noise the saliva was
making in the detective's mouth. His moist lips were parting, perhaps in
readiness for a kiss, the tongue ready to dart into an ear and to flicker
about there. They heard the steam whistle of a night train. Querelle
listened to its rumbling, almost breathing approach. The two men had
arrived at the railroad embankment. It was dark, but the cop's face had
to be very close to his own. Again [Querelle] heard that sharp little
noise, now a little hissing and amplified by the freely flowing spittle
(205)."
I, the voyeur of Genet's drama (and Warhol's representation thereof),
am all too quickly seduced by a detective's tongue in a murder's ear.
Staring at Warhol's poster, I sense the irrefutable pull of recruitment.
That the power of a posted image is included in Genet's text gains
significance in the wake of Warhol's Querelle. An appeal drawing Querelle
himself into a compromised position. "Querelle told his companions that
he is a 'victim' of the recruitment posters! So am I, a victim of those
posters, and a victim's victim" (93) - an observation noted by Querelle's
commanding officer, Sub lieutenant Seblon of the "Venguer," written in
his journal, or prayer diary. In the dialectics of master/servant, the
Lieutenant imagines the pleasure of submission to the subordinate. He
fantasizes subjecting himself to the one subjected to the authority of
the poster. We can only imagine what that poster imagined: a finger
pointing state? What sort of poster is imagined by Warhol? Does Warhol
accept the mastery which seduces in his own poster? Positioned in a long
chain of samples, it would seem that citation signals much authority:
Querelle cites the poster, the Sub lieutenant cites Querelle's citation,
Fassbinder affords himself the privilege of citation, as does Warhol who
disseminates his own recruitment poster.
But what of Genet, where is he positioned in this chain of samples?
Thanks to Sartre's hagiographic study of Genet, we all too quickly assume
Genet's mastery over his own text - even as the overproduction of subject
positions deftly undermines any such privilege of authorship. If we
examine carefully the operation of antagonisms - or doubling, to use
Sartre's term - we notice a fierce resistance to totalizing power even in
the midst of its own pageantry. Querelle is praised for his beauty, his
purity of intention, the completeness of his murderous crimes in the same
pages that divulge the murderer's quest to be dominated and betrayed.
Locked in combat, Querelle is doubled in the figure of his brother who is
reflected back in the figure of Gil and so forth, all the while posing
new linkages, renewed breaks and contradictory homologies. If, as I said
earlier, sampling becomes a site of authority it is also along this chain
where authority is ruptured. Should anything be established in the
proliferation of subject positions, it is the failure of any one
authority to fix those positions and stabilize those linkages within a
total schema.
No one individual can lay claim to their identity, particularly if we
understand identity in terms of fixed relations. Identities begin to
resemble trajectories through social relations, rather than unified
objects around fixed relationships. For Genet, the mode of this
trajectory is always sex. Sex and transgression - be it theft, betrayal
or murder. The law becomes nothing more than the field on which this orgy
of splitting subjectivities plays itself out. In much the same way as
common sense becomes the field unearthed by the sound of a cop's tongue
in a murderer's ear. Suddenly their cooperation is exposed and common
sense is ruptured.
I cannot keep away from this example the presence of the state. Mario
was a cop, not a good one, and one certainly operating beyond the bounds
of the law, yet a cop nonetheless. (I could say, all the more.) It would
be problematic to draw too complete an analogy from this scene,
particularly in my own efforts. However, the fact that the man on top in
the drama is a detective only draws out the political nature of Genet's
scene. To restrict myself to a tongue in an ear (or pointed finger on a
poster), puts me in danger of ignoring the background of this text. The
cop is that background; coming up from behind. It is from hence that my
strategy emerges. In his book, Rhythm and Resistance, Ray Pratt considers
the possibility of a sound whose sonic nature is political resistance.
Pratt writes: "Whether a form is genuinely oppositional or serves as an
effective means of resistance depends upon context." If I take my context
to be a police state (which in Los Angeles is not an unreasonable
consideration), my conclusion is clearly a challenge to make noise. "In
the contemporary United States," writes Pratt, "sound itself is
oppositional. It creates a new space, reinforcing within each person the
possibility of an assertively oppositional posture before existing social
reality, but also . . . imposing a new order in sound on a context once
oppressively closed" (210).
And it all began with a poster. A fantastic image of a cop driving
his tongue into the ear of an unscrupulous naval soldier while the sound
of a train advanced in darkness. And mixed with this soundtrack, the
crackle of a watering mouth and the sound of power splitting, dividing
over the shoulders of desire. This is what is meant when authority is
shown to be complicit in the very transgression it seeks to destroy -
implicated in the destruction of its very charge: the construction of its
own power. I can only imagine the sound such bodies make.
PART III: A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS
I can only imagine the body such sounds make. Picking up on the
tracks of my subject, the subject of sound, I'd like to remind myself of
the question which initially conducted this contemplation on a sound
body: the articulation of noise useful for political resistance. As Ray
Pratt emphasizes in Rhythm and Resistance, the search for tactical noise
is predicated on familiarity with context. In my efforts, the question of
sound presumes a lengthy discussion on the precise nature of the objects
for change. Yet does my situation always so clearly articulate itself? I
am not so sure. For this reason, I would like to defer the identification
of situations. Rather, I prefer to begin my articulation ass-backwards,
asking first what are my agencies of change? What sound bodies can be
made available to me? I begin this way due to my own lack of surety
around objects. At the same time, to suggest a pitch-perfect sound in
reply would less than satisfy. Or satisfy too completely - deafeningly.
Instead of offering up a noise that will quiet my inquiry once and
for all, let me learn from the elaborate steps necessary in the process
of articulation. After all, electronic musicians, musicians working
within the electronic medium, the role of process is critical. The
processed sound is my articulation. Even at that moment, identification
swiftly slips into mutation and realignment. I bring myself to a reminder
of one definition of articulation: "any practice establishing a relation
among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the
practice" (Laclau and Mouffe).
There is that interview with the late Sun-Ra sampled by the Grid on
their 456 album (1993) where the great cosmic-bop master calls for a
"sound music." In a culture mitigated by managed sensibility, Sun-Ra
proposes that in addition to a "sound mind" and a "sound doctrine," such
a music would merge a utopian vision with a music governed by neoplatonic
laws of self-unity set in resistance to the domination of racist
ideologies. But can resistance be articulated within such a place as
utopia? In other words, what resistance can be articulated in a music of
metaphysical ontology? In the parlance of many electronic musicians, from
John Cage to Wendy Carlos to Kraftwerk, "sound music" becomes pure sound.
The achievement of pure sound can only be accomplished when the means of
transmission, of generation, are totally eliminated from the heard.
However, to the dismay of many purists, the wasted channels have a
tendency to return from their exile. I could say, pure sound is haunted
by its discharged matter. All sound, from glossolalia whispered in a
paramour's ear to the frequencies of an electronic oscillator, suffers
the remains of transmission. Whether the sound is generated by human
subjects or celestial bodies slowly turning in their gaseous robes, all
wavelengths are haunted by the presence of their absent vessels.
If anyone should have familiarity with ghosts it would be the
Futurist. According to the Italian Futurist, F. T. Marinetti, a sound
body is the "life spirit purified." Purified of body. The Futurist claims
that this sound body is nothing less than a universal machine: an
exploding display of words in freedom. Words blasted from mime and
gesture. Words without corporeality, expulsed from the domain of
materiality. Hence the Futurist writes: "The word must be recharged with
all its power hence an essential and totalitarian word which in Futurist
theory is called 'word-atmosphere.'" Several things strike us about this
conception of a "sound body." First, we would like to check out further
the process of "recharging" the word: to what account is the word
reapplied; what debt renewed? This is a question vigorously resisted by
the Futurist who sees in his work only its freedom from the past, not its
indebtedness. The second question stems from our own work as musicians of
ambient sound. For artists of background noise, the link intimated by
Futurist theory between totalitarian "word- atmosphere" and the sound
body raises a particularly crucial problematic. In its immateriality, its
pure essence, what differentiates the sound body from that body of power,
above death, above labor, above difference: what other than Fascism is
the sound body?
For the Futurist, there is no viable other, only objects for
elimination.
Which raises the spectre: how is it possible for an ideology to
eliminate its waste when its ideal body possesses no organs?
In the history of revolutionary art, the Futurists were not the only
moderns to conceive of a thing I call a sound body. In a
radio-performance never to have been aired in his life-time, French poet
Antonin Artaud called his particular formation "a body without organs."
Composed after Artaud's nine year incarceration in an insane asylum, and
only one year before his death, the radio-play, "To have done with the
judgment of God" broadcasted the poet's life-long quest for a passage out
of physical existence. For Artaud, radio and its channels of "pure
sound," posed the possibility of "true freedom." This had been a subject
of Artaud's poetics as early as 1927. In his critique of the Surrealists
shortly after their alliance with the French Communist Party, Artaud
responded to the alliance by issuing his renunciation of all things
physical, from the political to the "endless pain and misery in the
charnel house of myself" (140). This self- abnegation was bound to his
belief that artistic practice merged with specific political action
vulgarized what the Surrealists represented. Am I, like Artaud, in search
of a body without its inner workings ("organ" from the Greek "body
works"), removed from any contiguity with political action but reduced to
pure essence: pure sound? A body beyond the production of waste, beyond
the designs of death? Is the sound body above shit?
I am not the first to bend an ear to Artaud's radio-play. In their
study of late-capitalism, Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
appropriate "the body without organs" as a figure for desire as the
"non-place of counter-production." They define this counter-production as
the site less labor of desire - excesses directed against boundaries. I
return to the sphere of sound, specifically the sound body and reexamine
its potential as that corpus of desire's materiality, counter-productive
to any unifying/totalizing force which may bring me near "pure sound." By
materiality, I mean the function of sound in opposition to its fixed
place. There is that approach to music which reduces sound to topography:
the music which takes us somewhere. Thus, ambient and experimental music
are limited to vapid utopianism lacking both the specific access points
on the political level, but also turning sound into some sort of pure
experience meaning everything to everyone. It is against this sort of
vulgar use of transcendentalism that both Artaud and the Futurists were
reacting - the pure magic of art as defined by the liberal bourgeoisie.
Taking a cue from the project of Deleuze and Guattari, I would rather
focus on the function of sound, its practices of corporeality and
spatiality, as transmitted by desire.
Stemming from the contradiction between "a body without organs" and
its counter-productive desire, the sound body calls for an autopsy. There
had been a period when writing "energy" was enough to evoke a sound body.
Sharing its origins with "organ" in the work "energos," the site of work,
"energy" seemed to encapsulate the function-ness of sound. By
destabilizing the place of work, "energy" suggested that sound was
inextricable from its channels of production while at the same time
restricted from being a totalizing force. Thus, it seemed to me, sound
became the dialectic of material specificity and utopian introjection.
Ignorant of the history of the electric body - a history written in the
contradictory passages of modernist manifestos - I breathed life into my
phantasm. Its first words were a terror to me: "there is nothing more
useless than an organ" (Artaud). I then transformed my project: no longer
a new word for body, naively written "energy." But a new conception of
energy: in a word, "body." This transformation has opened to me the
entire realm of material processes and relations, the proliferation of
political spaces. Strategically interjecting a self into the very network
of power relations - a field sometimes called culture, by others named
the political. The body subjected to that network has been the site of my
resistance: energy incorporated. My transmission, my action as a
trans-sister: transference resister.
Ultra-red is a collective of humans who live in LA and are involved
with the ambient music club Public Space.
1 This essay originally appeared in Contact, 'zine of the Los Angeles
ambient/electronic music club Public Space. For more information on
Contact and Public Space, write to 1680 North Vine Street, Suite 1118,
Los Angeles, California 90028, tel 213.486.4536 or fax 213.466.5121.
2 The sentiment of this statement, written in July of 1994, seems
presient given the current efforts to mobilize resistance to the
"Contract with America" of the Republican congress.
3 Alternative repetitions of the Querelle poster paints the
background either green or white. The tongue remains some hue of red or
reddish orange.
4 For a discussion of Genet's own "failure" to communicate, a reading
proposed by Sartre and later affirmed by Bataille, see Jacques Derrida,
Glas (1974), trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 215ff. Derrida approach to
Genet, analogous in many ways to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a form
of anti-work, argues with the judgment of "failure" as defeat. For
Derrida, Genet rejects the Oedipal triangulation of work but rather
engages desire as a refusal to communicate. A similar thesis is expounded
in terms of a specifically non-phalocratic homosexual practice of desire
in Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire(1972), trans. Daniella Dangoor
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
5 In the film, Fassbinder has both Querelle's brother Roger and the
character Gil played by the same actor.
6 Significantly for our own study of sound and desiring bodies,
Jacques Derrida's discussion of Genet in Glas takes places in a larger
study of resonance within the sphere of Absolute Knowledge. For a
background on the relationship between Derrida's text and Genet's own
writings, see Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books,
1993), pp. 564ff.
WORKS CITED
Antonin Artaud. Selected Works(1976). Editor Susan Sontag. Berkeley,
California: University of Berkeley Press, 1988.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1972). Trans. Robert Hurley, et al. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Jean Genet. Querelle (1953). Translated by Anselm Hollo. New York:
Grove Press, 1974.
Michael Kirby and Victoria Ness Kirby. Futurist Performance (1971).
New York: PAJ Publications, 1986.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics New York: Verso, 1985.
Ray Pratt. Rhythm and Resistance: The Political Uses Of American
Popular Music(1990). Washington, DC: Smithosonian Institution Press,
1994.
Jean-Paul Sartre. Saint Genet: Actor aqnd Martyr (1952). Trans.
Bernard Fretchman. New York: George Braziller, 1963.
Edith Wyschogrod. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral
Philosophy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.