… music itself, in order to be music, plays on the sonorous resources of bodies that are struck, rubbed, plucked, and it plays them.
… Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance?
This is from Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007):
… This profound disposition — arranged in fact, according to the profundity of a reverberation chamber that is nothing other than the body from end to end — is a relationship to meaning [sens], a tension toward it: but toward it completely ahead of signification, meaning in its nascent state, in the state of return [renvoi] for which the end of this return is not given (the concept, the idea, the information), and hence to the state of return without end, like an echo that continues on its own and that is nothing but this continuance going in a decrescendo, or even in moriendo. To be listening is to be inclined toward the opening of meaning, hence to a slash, a cut in un-sensed [in-sensée] indifference at the same time as toward a reserve that is anterior and posterior to any signifying punctuation. In the spacing out of the opening [entame], the attack of sense resonates, and this expression is not a metaphor: the beginning of sense, its possibility and its send-off [coup d'envoi], its address, perhaps takes place nowhere but in a sonorous attack: a friction, the pinch or grate of something produced in the throat, a borborygmus, a crackle, a stridency where a weighty, murmuring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.
… there is only a “subject” (which always means, “subject of sense”) that resounds, responding to a momentum, a summons, a convocation of sense.
As conditions for moving “toward music,” Nancy proposes the three below (the square brackets in the following are in the original):
– to treat “pure resonance” not only as the condition but as the very beginning and opening up of sense, as beyond-sense or sense that goes beyond signification;
– to treat the body, before any distinction of places and functions of resonance, as being, wholly (and “without organs”), a resonance chamber or column of beyond-meaning (its “soul,” as we say of the barrel of a cannon, or of the part of the violin that transmits vibrations between the sounding board and the back, or else of the little hole in the clarinet . . . );
– and from there, to envisage the “subject” as that part, in the body, that is listening or vibrates with listening to — or with the echo of — the beyond-meaning.
… (To play music is to make it sound, and its sense is in its resonance [its composition is subjected to it, or destined to it]. But music itself, in order to be music, plays on the sonorous resources of bodies that are struck, rubbed, plucked, and it plays them. One can say of music that it silences sound and that it interprets sounds: makes them sound and make sense no longer as the sounds of something but in their own resonance. … )
… Perhaps we never listen to anything but the non-coded, what is not yet framed in a system of signifying references, and we never hear [entend] anything but the already coded, which we decode.
… Timbre can be represented as the resonance of a stretched skin (possibly sprinkled with alcohol, the way certain shamans do), and as the expansion of this resonance in the hollowed column of a drum. Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn, just such a hollow column over which a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume and revive resonance? A blow from outside, clamor from within, this sonorous, sonorized body undertakes a simultaneous listening to a “self” and to a “world” that are both in resonance. It becomes distressed (tightens) and it rejoices (dilates). It listens to itself becoming distressed and rejoicing, it enjoys and is distressed at this very listening where the distant resounds in the closest.
That being the case, that skin stretched over its own sonorous cavity, this belly that listens to itself and strays away in itself while listening to the world and while straying in all directions, that is not a “figure” for rhythmic timbre, but it is its very pace, it is my body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul.
My most recent previous post from Nancy’s book is here.
-Julie
