… Padding proprietarily through the spaces of our mutual habitation, cats travel light, but bring whole worlds in tow. …  and are, and are not, the beloved creatures we think we know.

Continuing through The Book of Symbols, eds. Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin (2010):

Dog: … He can find what we have lost in the proverbial woods of the unknown, and gain nurturance from the hunt; in some cultures he was felt to commune with the spirit world. He ahs been willing to come into our world from his wolfish ancestry with a blossoming of unconditional love and devotion often far surpassing our own. In so doing the dog has assumed a central place in countless mythologies as a guide between the worlds of life and death, known and unknown, human and animal, and symbolically between the conscious mind and the wilderness of the unconscious psyche and soul.

Cat: … Padding proprietarily through the spaces of our mutual habitation, cats travel light, but bring whole worlds in tow. … How intimately they traverse the liminal and the nighttime, gazing out from their darknesses with full-moon eyes and secret smiles. How inscrutably they preside over the rites and ceremonies of their feline rhythm of life. How they come and go as stealthily as fog; and are, and are not, the beloved creatures we think we know.

Cow: … The cow is the ultimate provider of riches. Her bull calves are the workers of the fields, her manure becomes the fertilizer, fuel and building materials for houses; her sinews and bones turn into tools, her hide is used for clothing, her milk the ultimate nourishment, making her a wet nurse for millions of people. In ancient imaginations, the cow embodied the double transformation mysteries where the mother’s blood created or built the young and then changed into milk at birth. No wonder that the cow was worshipped as the mother goddess who cares for, feeds and creates all life.

Bull: … The domestication of cattle supplied sufficient food to form stable communities. The oxen (castrated bulls), the most forceful and untiring of all draw animals, were used for plowing and harvesting, corresponding to humanity’s increased mastery of nature through the cultivation of land. This probably explains the extraordinary presence of bulls and cows in our cultural and religious heritage.

… The symbolic range of the bull is so encompassing that it is associated with all the four elements, indicating the tremendous power of nature, beyond human control. No wonder that the bull was worshipped as a divine being in most early civilizations.

Horse: … The horse is a fabulous striving power to which we aspire for good and ill. We tamed them. They came to know us. … We tied them to our plows and carts, we settled the Wild West upon their backs, and they have carried us into and through countless wars and expansive conquests.

Night-Shining White, Han Shan, 750 (from Wikipedia)

… The horse is transcendence for man. Poseidon, god of sea and quaking earth, gave the horse to mankind, but Athena of wise counsel gave us the bridle. With these gifts we have transcended the literal limits of space, time and strength by harnessing horsepower to our efforts, while in the imagination, the horse has become an even greater chthonic power animal of the cosmic beyond, magically capable of beating a hoof to bring forth springs of living water, soaring winged into the sky, driving the sun across the heavens or inspiring fear and dread as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Norse god Odin, “Swift Odin” and “Shaker,” rides his eight-legged white steed Sleipnir, gathering the dead, a ride which induced such fear in the countryside folk that they would lay fodder aside for Sleipnir as he passed, while at the end of this dark age the tenth incarnation of Vishnu as the white steed Kalki will bring forth a new world.

… Hold your horses. Phaeton could not hold his and met a disastrous death. He tricked his father Apollo/Helios into allowing him to take control of the great chariot of the sun for a day, but the horses sensed a weaker hand and tore off out of control, endangering the order of the universe. There are nightmare horses of frenetic and crazy power, horses out of control, horses running away with us, getting loose, stampeding, destroying.

Previous symbols are here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… the Neutral plays on the razor’s edge: in the will-to-live but outside the will-to-possess …

This is from The Neutral by Roland Barthes (1978). This book is a taken from Barthes’s written notes to the course that he gave at the Collège de France over thirteen weeks from February to June of 1978. As seen in a previous post, sometimes Barthes inserts a ‘Supplement’ between the individual session descriptions. He writes about notes he’s received from students in response to the course so far. I begin with Barthes’s quote from the end of one such letter [in the original, all of the Supplement is in italics; I'm not going to subject you to that]:

… “… I believe that even your desire for Neutral, being despite itself perhaps a stance taken in front of a lack (the neutral), flirts with the game of power. Of course, no slogan has called for it until now, but, in calmly claiming this desire, you generate a watchword. To be Roland Barthes and to say “I desire the Neutral” may not impose anything except that a large part of the audience will say: “One must desire the neutral.” As if a fatal flaw subjected the neutral to discussion, to opposition, and, despite everything, fully reinserted it into an inescapable paradigm. Desire doesn’t escape recognition; it is desire that the Other recognize my own desire for neutral, and such necessity of communicating this desire cheats the game: “In order for it to be true, you should have kept it to yourself,” so to speak.”

[Barthes responds] Here’s how I take this observation:

I feel (and it’s also the opinion of the listener [quoted above]) that I don’t have to “respond,” to “reply,” which is to say, to “protest” (“But not at all, I don’t impose anything,” etc. [quoted from the letter]): that would be useless and of no interest. I receive what is said to me here as something that is said on my behalf, that I tell myself, but on the basis of which, since it is said to me by an other, I can more easily drift: the other’s speech (benevolent: and this is decisive) helps me to decenter myself, to open up onto an elsewhere of my discourse that I had not thought through: “the other thinks in my brain,” That’s true dialogue, which doesn’t need actual theater.

… the course: step by step: how to recognize the world as a tissue of aporias, how to live until death by going (painfully, pleasurably) through the aporias, without undoing them by a logical, dogmatic blow of force? Which is to say: how to live aporias as creation, which is to say, by the practice of a text-discourse that doesn’t break the aporia but floats it as a speech that tangles itself in the other (the public) lovingly (to borrow again a word from Nietzsche)? I said it (inaugural lecture) in another way: literature or writing (in which I locate myself, without any presumption of value) = the representation of the world as aporetic, woven of aporia + the practice that induces a catharsis of the aporia, without undoing it, which is to say, without arrogance.

(I realize that if I drift too complacently, soon there will no longer be a course, nothing but supplements. Supplements to nothing: that’s the ideal Neutral! Nevertheless, we will return to these figures of the Neutral which we still have to traverse for eight more weeks.)

The following is from the next session of the course:

Images of the Neutral

… Except for certain philosophers and for Blanchot, which is to say everywhere in the doxa, the Neutral has a bad press: the images of the Neutral are depreciative. Each bad image is locked into a bad adjective (once again the negative role of the adjective). Here are some of these bad adjectives: [I am picking just one to quote below]

d. Limp

Fichte (seventh lesson): disdainful description of the Skeptic who doesn’t want true knowledge:

In this fake being, limp, distended, multiple, there are a crowd of antitheses, of contradictions that live peacably side by side. Nothing in him is either distinct or separated, but everything is mixed, everything is interlaced. The men in question hold nothing for true and nothing for false, they love nothing, they hate nothing. They neither love nor hate because for gratitude, for love, for hatred, for each feeling, there must be this energetic concentration of which they are incapable, because it requires that one distinguish and separate within the diversity, and that one choose the single object of one’s gratitude and one’s affection.

Very endoxal idea that to love is to choose, to eliminate, and thus to destroy “the remainder” + assimilation of the multiplicity of desires to indecision and, from there, to softness, to the “limp” = vitalist idea: what lives is only alive if it destroys what is around itself.

[... ]

… It is not hard to see what the common ground of these bad images is. Let’s recall: historically, the “official” space of the neutral is Skepticism, i.e., Pyrrho’s disciples: Zetetics (always looking), Skeptics (examining without finding), Ephectics (suspending their judgment), Aporetics (always looking); thus, always images of failure or impotence.

→ the Neutral suffers the weight (the shadow) of grammar: = what is neither masculine or feminine, or (verbs) neither active nor passive (= deponents) = what is subtracted from genitality, what is neither virile nor attractive (feminine); we know it, mythically, endoxally, indelible infamy. → We don’t need to take sides against this image (or, then, it’s the course as such that is this opposition in its entirety; one doesn’t protest against an image, that is useless). What can be done is to drift by displacing the paradigm. → For “virility,” or for the lack of virility, I would be tempted to substitute vitality. There is a vitality of the Neutral: the Neutral plays on the razor’s edge: in the will-to-live but outside the will-to-possess …

My most recent previous post from Barthes’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

book 1, proposition 32

Previous propositions are here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… there appears to be some idea that every unwrapping is detracting a little from the value of the item.

… This is something the human hand must do, and only loving care enables us to perform such troublesome manual tasks to the very end.

This is from Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation and Power in Japan and Other Societies by Joy Hendry (1993):

… It is … thought to be polite to wrap a single-page letter in a plain sheet of writing-paper … For example, when my son’s passport had to be left behind at the travel agent’s office for a correction to be made to a visa, it arrived a few days later in an envelope big enough to hold a foolscap folder. This envelope opened, I drew out a slightly smaller one, sealed again but with nothing written upon it. Opening this one, I found yet another smaller sealed envelope inside, again with nothing written on the outside. My son’s passport was to be found inside. On another occasion I received some photographs by post. The number of envelopes was the same as with the passport, but the photographs were then further sealed inside a plastic packet inside the smallest envelope.

Another expression of the value of wrapping in a Japanese view is to be found in the way precious objects are stored. Unlike many Western collectors, who display the objects of their interest in a glass case, or in some other visible location, the owners of precious objects in Japan are quite likely to keep their things well hidden away. If a visitor should express an interest, he or she will be treated to an often deliberately slow and careful unpacking process. Pots, for example, may be folded first in silk or some other soft material, then placed in a purpose-built box, itself often a work of some art, and the box may even be wrapped again in paper or some other substance.

Indeed, some artefacts may be enclosed in multiple boxes. The Kizaemon tea bowl, described and discussed in an essay by the folk-artist Söetsu Yanagi, is apparently considered to be the finest in the world. Yanagi had been wanting for years to see the bowl, and some element of suspense is communicated in Bernard Leach’s English adaptation of his work. ‘It was within box after box, five deep, buried in wool and wrapped in purple silk.’ One aficionado of ceramics told me that a collector’s best pots are kept for only a very few eyes, since there appears to be some idea that every unwrapping is detracting a little from the value of the item. Thus a visitor may gauge his status in a collector’s house by the number of pots he is shown.

… Kunio Ekiguchi explains in the introduction [to his book on gift-wrapping] that ‘the concept of wrapping, tsutsumi, is not limited to the function of packaging. It plays a central role in a wide variety of spiritual and cultural aspects of Japanese life.’ He reiterates the element of care involved in noting that just as one helps a friend into a coat carefully and courteously, a gift should be wrapped tenderly and conscientiously. ‘In Japan,’ he asserts, ‘it is said that giving a gift is like wrapping one’s heart.’

… Hideyuki Oka takes the line that traditional forms of packaging are dying out in this modern industrialized age, and he laments their ‘slippage back into the mists of history.’ He sees this as a serious loss of human love in a world where taking the time and trouble to create a beautifully wrapped object is seen as ‘inefficient and unproductive.’

Even though the object to be wrapped may be no more than a small confection, someone who truly wants to please, who wants it to taste even more delicious, will go to great trouble to wrap it carefully by hand … This is something the human hand must do, and only loving care enables us to perform such troublesome manual tasks to the very end.

… In practice in everyday life in modern Japan an enormous number of beautifully wrapped gifts change hands for a large variety of different ostensible reasons, but the wrapping process may have very little connection with the notion of human love. As Mauss was at pains to demonstrate, gifts which are in theory voluntary, are often subject to strict bonds of obligation, and Japan is no exception to this rule. [Jane] Cobbi makes an important point when she notes that the hedonistic perspective — ‘une notion de plaisir’ — associated with the French word cadeau is not generally the same in the case of Japanese gifts, and elsewhere there may even be entirely inauspicious associations. People wrap gifts, or, more often in today’s world of department stores, have them wrapped, because this is the appropriate way to present them. Without wrapping, the gift would fail to carry the message as properly intended, and the procurement and delivery of the gifts one is obliged to present may indeed by a very time-consuming and troublesome activity.

It is true that a gift wrapped by hand in home-made paper may in certain circles carry a special message of love in today’s Japan, as it may have in times past, but a gift entirely unwrapped may carry the same message. Indeed, many of my Japanese informants explained to me that the formal wrapping of a gift expresses a certain distance in a relationship, so to leave a present unwrapped is a way of expressing intimacy.

… Iwao Nukada, the author of a comprehensive book in Japanese devoted to the subject of wrapping, goes into much more detail about the variety and meaning of wrapping in Japan. He discusses the way in which wrapping has developed aesthetic, religious, and magical qualities over and above the original functional ones, as well as becoming subject to strict rules of etiquette and courtesy. He too couches these developments in the context of a scheme of cultural evolution or civilization (something akin to that of Norbert Elias), providing a plethora of examples from different historical periods to support his view, which dovetails with the notion of value placed on refinement and restraint outlined by Ekiguchi. To be able to wrap things properly becomes a measure of refinement and civilization which is applied within Japanese society, but also by implication since Japan is supposed to be so advanced in this respect, as a way of giving Japan an edge over the rest of the world in cultural achievement.

Nukada further divides types of wrapping into three: the wrapping of goods, which has been the focus of this chapter, the wrapping of the body, and the wrapping of space. In subsequent chapters, we will be considering Nukada’s second and third types, but we will also turn to examine the notion of wrapping in a wider context which includes language as a form of wrapping. On the whole his theory about refinement applies there, too. It is a phenomenon by no means peculiar to Japan, and it is in considering this type of wrapping that we will find ourselves most comfortably in an area which lends itself to cross-cultural comparison.

My first post from Hendry’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… Perhaps all magical objects are knottings together of objects and the subjects that conjure with them.

This is from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). Today’s paraphernalia (my choice) are Cards and Knots:

… There seem to be certain kinds of objects whose mission is to embody the powers of flatness, which we may identify as the tabulating power of abstracting and reshuffling the world. Such objects are always characterised by the duality of being objects that bring the world together into one place even as they are also objects in the world. They are outside the world which is also outside them. The most powerful, and the most widely disseminated, of the objects which undergo this oscillation is the card. Let us say that cards are the apotheosis of the flat, and the tabulating power that it gives.

The card has been at the centre of the automatic processes that govern the modern world. …

[ ... ]

… We are often told that the distinguishing feature of the human hand is its opposable thumb, and more specifically the fact that the thumb and index finger can be pressed together, enabling all kinds of actions from turning screws to the flipping of coins and the stitching of lace. The two dimensions of depth and length of the card both seem to figure this opposable relation. Held between finger and thumb, the thinness of the card is a minimal membrane, an all-but-nothing, that seems to be nothing but the difference between front and back, recto and verso. Held by its edges, the card suddenly reveals its spring and resistance, its unsuspected kinetic energy and coiled violence.

… Playing cards are … magical partly because they are meaningless in themselves; their power only comes from the signs they carry, and the meaning of those signs in relation to other signs. The meaning of the playing card is in part its arbitrariness, its flatness, its lack of intrinsic life or meaning, the fact that no card means anything on its own. Its flatness signifies this dry semioticity. Its life comes from contingency and adjacency, from what occurs when it is laid next to another card.

On to Knots:

… A knot is the magical image of time turned upon itself. There is an important difference between a knot and a loop, bow or circle. For these latter merely mark or suspend time, open up a nook or epoch in time, a passage of time in which time can appear not to pass. But a knot does more than merely remit the onward pressure of time, for it also turns it against or back into itself. A loop slackens the tension of ongoing time, but a knot makes that tension strive against itself, so that, the more one pulls on the two sides of a knot, the tighter it gets, time coagulating into space and space becoming ever more charged with time.

… The knot concentrates a power of unloosing, disperses a power of retention. The knot is a figure for the logical difficulty of paradox not because it simply makes the paradoxical relation plain or lays it open to view, but because it is itself paradoxical and self-confuting. A knot is a figure that offers to help us grasp all at once the idea of something that can neither quite be pulled apart or pull itself together. It is implicated in what it signifies.

The knot is the image of life itself, with man as the anastomosis of spirit and body, in which, as in John Donne’s ’The Ecstasy,’ is ‘knit / That knot, which makes us man.’* The dissolution of death is the untying of that knot.

… In a sense, the power of the knot is precisely that it images the empty self-relation of that which comes into being in turning or reflecting on itself, and is thus twin to the self-conjuring cogito. A knot is not so much a magical object in itself, as a magical form, or the precipitate of a magical practice. It is a way of doing magic with, and imparting magical possibility to, more mundane objects — laces, ribbons, hankies, wires and hair. Indeed, the definition of a magical object I offered earlier, as something that helps us credit our own powers to invest objects with magical powers, has something characteristically involuted and knotty about it. Perhaps all magical objects are knottings together of objects and the subjects that conjure with them.

[*Donne's lines are actually "Because such fingers need to knit / That subtle knot which makes us man,"]

My most recent previous post from Connor’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… We have arrived. The door opens. We don’t go in. Someone leaves through the door. Who is it? …

Last post from The Parasite by Michel Serres (originally published in 1980):

… History in general as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites move about.

… The  noise heard at the door temporarily stops the rats from eating the leftover ortolans. Why is it always the rats’ point of view? Why don’t we think of what happens to the host? He never sees that there are rats there. The door opens: no one is there. The table is immobile and the obscurity is quiet. Nothing has happened. The host closes the door and goes back to bed. The noise starts again, the noise of chewing, history. He gets up again. He opens the door suddenly. There will never be any rats.

The observer makes the observed disappear by bringing along his noisemakers. His sandals make the floorboards creak. He told his wife that he was going to see what was going on.

People always talk about the light that is indispensable for seeing and observing. Even Maxwell’s demon needs this light.

People hardly ever talk about the noise attached like a string to the tongue, indispensable for speaking; people hardly ever talk about the signal attached to the sign. Noise of the mouth, of the teeth, of the lips, so close to the repulsive noise of the eater.

[illustration from Wikipedia]

… Intuition speaks silently or speaks softly enough so as never to scare things, to tame them a bit. Oil the door and silence one’s steps to surprise the rats a bit before they leave. Perhaps film them among the bones and scraps. But only parasites have this genius for being invisible.

… The observer is perhaps the inobservable. He must, at least, be last on the chain of observables. If he is supplanted, he becomes observed. Thus he is in a position of a parasite. Not only because he takes the observation that he doesn’t return, but also because he plays the last position.

… From the beginning, we have moved from discourse to discourse, either written or told; we have gone from box to box; each is empty and contains the following; the explanation or the reading goes from implication to implication; we are out of breath, waiting, in suspense. Finally the black box is there, finally the true one, the true banquet, that of the gods, no longer that of ideas or of genres/genera, no longer that of allegories, of figures of style or speech, of useless words, but the banquet, where one really drinks the drink of immortality, where good really wins, where love is finally love and no longer a punishment, where wine is not drink for illusions and hangovers, but where ambrosia finally gives the invariability of what is. We have arrived. The door opens. We don’t go in. Someone leaves through the door. Who is it? The door itself. They made fun of us. The only information that comes out of the black box is that there is a channel through which information passes. The only message that comes out of the path is that there is a path by which messages pass. A thread comes out of the box. The only thing that passes in the channel is the name of the channel.

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… The “pleasure” afforded by the artwork, according to traditional doctrine, always also contains a hint of malicious joy, indeed of scorn, directed against the vanity of seeking access to the world through reason.

… the artist is … struck by the order that emerges from his own hand in the course of a rapidly changing relationship between provocation and possible response, problem and solution, irritation and escape.

Continuing through Art as a Social System by Niklas Luhmann (2000):

… In a manner that is matched neither by thought nor by communication, perception presents astonishment and recognition in a single instant. Art uses, enhances, and in a sense exploits the possibilities of perception in such a way that it can present the unity of this distinction. To put it differently, art permits observation to oscillate between astonishment and recognition, even if this requires worldly media such as space and time as a means of securing continuity. This is not a matter of indulging in the automatic recognition of what is already known — the kind of pleasure produced by the “culture industry” that was so arrogantly rejected by Horkheimer and Adorno. Rather, the pleasure of astonishment, already described in antiquity, refers to the unity of the difference between astonishment and recognition, to the paradox that both intensify one another.

… The imaginary world of art offers a position from which something else can be determined as reality — as do the world of language, with its potential for misuse, or the world of religion, albeit in different ways. Without such markings of difference, the world would simply be the way it is.

… Only within a differentiated distinction between a real and a fictional, imagined reality can a specific relationship to reality emerge, for which art seeks different forms — whether to “imitate” what reality does not show (its essential forms, its Ideas, its divine perfection), to “criticize” reality for what it does not want to admit (its shortcomings, its “class rule,” its commercial orientation), or to affirm reality by showing that its representation succeeds, in fact, succeeds so well that creating the work of art and looking at it is a delight. The concepts of imitation/critique/affirmation do not exhaust the possibilities. Another intent might address the observer as an individual and contrive a situation in which he faces reality (and ultimately himself) and learns how to observe it in ways he could never learn in real life. One thinks here particularly of the novel. The novel is an imitation that, rather than referring to reality directly, copies one imaginary reality into another such reality.

… The artwork commits the observer to fixed forms. Within the context of modern communication, however, this constraint leaves room for applying the formally established difference between imagined and ordinary reality in multiple ways. Because it embeds its forms in objects, art need not enforce a choice between consensus and dissent, or between an affirmative and a critical attitude toward reality. Art needs no reasonable justification, and by unfolding its power of conviction in the realm of perceptible objects, it demonstrates this. The “pleasure” afforded by the artwork, according to traditional doctrine, always also contains a hint of malicious joy, indeed of scorn, directed against the vanity of seeking access to the world through reason.

… In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique. Here, what we learn to observe is the inevitable and ineradicable rule of difference.

… Unlike philosophy, art does not search for islands of security from which other experiences can be expelled as fantastic or imaginary, or rejected as a world of secondary qualities or enjoyment, of pleasure or common sense. Art radicalizes the difference between the real and the merely possible in order to show through works of its own that even in the realm of possibility there is order after all. Art opposes, to use a Hegelian formulation, “the prose of the world,” but for precisely this reason it needs this contrast.

This leads us back to the ancient topic of astonishment, which affects not only the observer of art but also the artist. The observer may be struck by the work’s success and then embark on a step-by-step reconstruction of how it came about. But the artist is equally struck by the order that emerges from his own hand in the course of a rapidly changing relationship between provocation and possible response, problem and solution, irritation and escape. This is how order emerges from self-irritation, which, however, requires the prior differentiation of a medium of art to decide that this order differs in its stakes from what occurs elsewhere in reality.

My most recent previous post from Luhmann’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… He was listening to the speech of the everyday … — the speech of temporal eternity saying: now, now, now.

This is from the beginning of The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot (1993; originally published in 1969). He heads his introductory chapter with quotes from Nietzsche:

“Because, for us, something might appear in the heart of the day that would not be the day, something in an atmosphere of light and limpidity that would represent the shiver of fear out of which the day came?”

Speaking is a fine madness: with it man dances over and above all things. (Nietzsche)

Now to extracts from Blanchot’s text:

… You know very well that the only law — there is no other — consists in this unique, continued, universal discourse that everyone, be he separated from or united with others, be he speaking or silent, receives, bears, and sustains through an intimate accord prior to any decision; an accord such that any attempt to repudiate it, promoted or willed always by the very will of discourse, confirms it, just as any aggression makes it more sure and any arrest makes it endure. — I know. — You know, then, that when you speak of these interruptions during which speech would be interrupted, you do speak of them, immediately and even in advance returning them to the uninterrupted force of discourse. …

[ ... ]

… He was listening to the speech of the everyday, grave, idle, saying everything, holding up to each one what he would have liked to say, a speech unique, distant and always close, everyone’s speech, always already expressed and yet infinitely sweet to say, infinitely precious to hear — the speech of temporal eternity saying: now, now, now.

How had he come to will the interruption of discourse? And not the legitimate pause, the one permitting the give and take of conversation, the benevolent, intelligent pause, nor that beautifully poised waiting with which two interlocutors, from one shore to another, measure their right to communicate. No, not that, and no more so the austere silence, the tacit speech of visible things, the reserve of those invisible. What he had wanted was entirely different, a cold interruption, the rupture of the circle. And at once this had happened: the heart ceasing to beat, the eternal speaking drive stopping.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… The line can draw a boundary between musical sound and noise by being the threshold at which too much of the world is detected. In this way the line is a sonic buffer, a silencing device.

This is from Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn (1999). As I noted in my first post from this book, this material can be read as analogous to photography (after a sonic to visual translation):

… Within the history of Western art music, noises were not intrinsically extramusical; they were simply the sounds music could not use. The determination of extramusicality rested not in a hard and fast materiality but in the power of musical practice and discourse to negotiate which sonorous materials will be incorporated from a world of sounds, including the sounds of its own making, and how.

… Although increasingly alienated from one another, acoustics and Western art music were both in the business of determining what was music and what was noise. Sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they did not, but even in disagreement they were usually complementary. Two lines played an important role in this determination — the graphic line, whether visible or figurative, inscribed by hand, mind, machine, and nature, and the conceptual dividing line between noise and music, between sound and musical sound.

The line between sound and musical sound stood at the center of the existence of avant-garde music, supplying a heraldic moment of transgression and its artistic raw material, a border that had to be crossed to bring back unexploited resources, restock the coffers of musical materiality, and rejuvenate Western art music. To make extramusical material musical, the sounds of the world were processed in numerous ways. First, the sounds of the world were to be themselves categorized, explicitly or implicitly, into referential sounds and areferential noises, such that a noise could be incorporated into the areferential operations of music. … Second, these privileged noises of the sphere of extramusicality would align themselves with already existing musical attributes and elements, such as dissonance, timbre, and percussion.

[paragraph break added here by me to make this easier to read online] Third, these noisy correspondences within music were emphasized as themselves bearing traces of the world of true extramusicality; this was the basis of what I call the practice of resident noises. Fourth, sounds were technologically selected or manipulated to render them suitable as musical material, as in phonographic practices such as musique concrète, and finally, sounds were processed through the operations of aurality, a feature of John Cage’s dictum to hear sounds in themselves. The underlying presumption of all these was that the nature of music was sonic, thereby the importation of worldly sounds into music meant diminishing or eradicating sounds that were too significant. Most important, this process displaced significance to music itself, such that the most common way to make noise significant was to make it music, but by doing so the significance of sounds was rendered insignificant.

Resolve against the mimetic ran up against the changed conditions of aurality in the latter half of the nineteenth century represented most significantly by phonography, the mimesis machine that incorporated all classes of sounds. … Phonography was associated with a number of crucial developments: it foregrounded the parameters of a sound and all sound, presented the possibility of incorporating all sound into cultural forms, shifted cultural practices away from a privileging of utterance toward a greater inclusion of auditon, placed the voice of presence into the contaminated realm of writing, and linked textuality and literacy with sound through inscriptive practices. The promise of phonography, before and after the actuality of the phonograph, added another player to older discourses and practices based on musical technologies, and when it pointed more toward the production and not the reproduction of music, phonography necessarily invoked the world of all sound. The pressure of worldly sound brought to bear on musical practice was exacerbated in the 1920s with the marked development of auditive technologies and institutions — particularly improvements in microphony and the phonograph and the development of sound film — as practiced within music, radio, and cinema. It was within this complex that dramatically new approaches to sound began to materialize.

To make my way through the entanglements of Western art music, noise, and phonography, I concentrate on the inscriptive practices involved through the concentrated figure of the line. The line can draw a boundary between musical sound and noise by being the threshold at which too much of the world is detected. In this way the line is a sonic buffer, a silencing device. The line can also inhere the world of all sound, the most familiar instance being the intensification of the world packed into the jagged phonographic line, replaying what it has heard to make the world thicker with sound. Or the line can do both, remaining within music or demarcating music from the world while being suffused with its own plenitude.

My most recent previous post from Kahn’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Previous bloopers are here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/