Let’s say that one were to read these comments while being an anti-natalist who still believes firmly in the importance of child welfare. Such a reader might want to look at how the affiliative dimensions of human cultural production–which is to say nurture, the care for the young and the establishment of linguistic, cultural artifacts–have a very real effect in determining the compositions and powers of the human body. And, regarding the widespread material need induced by contemporary oppression, one might wonder to what extent this need can be resolved through a non-genetic means of production that remains intellectual while also altering form, which is, as Gilmore describes, “the lived relations and imaginative possibilities emanating from those relationships”. Or, as I put it at the start of this essay, “bodies become stretched in various cultural directions.” And isn’t this a matter of reading?
Isn’t this a matter of reading? So how exactly is one to read? While Said’s contrapuntal metaphor is riddled with flaws and contradictions, perhaps he is onto something by including auditory metaphors in what is normally taken as a purely visual space. Perhaps we are supposed to be getting at a way of reading audibly, more than tracing visually? It seems that musicality, like chromatic difference, may represent yet another covered up bodily experience upon which one relies, one counts.
Perhaps we ought to proceed like an ethnomusicologist, who can hear the Other sing–not just speak. Maybe Said fails to fully establish such a contrapuntal reading insofar as he himself lacks something like an ethnomusicologist’s penchant for understanding the social construction of sound. His ear leads him to even greater contradictions.
In the Culture and Criticism interview, Said explains that he is in favor of a contrapuntal polyphony, a “polyphony like, in [his] own tradition, the work of Umm Kulthum. She was the most famous classical Arab singer of the twentieth century. Her forms are based upon an inhabiting of time, not trying to dominate it”. In another interview, Said is much less positive about Umm Kulthum, and uses her as an example for the very absence of counterpoint: ” [For me, it was a]lways western music. The first concert I was taken to was a concert by Umm Kulthum who was the most famous singer at the time. And it was a dreadful experience for me. I think I was 8 or 9….her songs would go on for forty, forty-five minutes. And to me there wasn’t a kind of form or shape. It seemed to be all more or less the same. And the tone was mournful, melancholic…Above all, what I missed (I realize now) what I missed was counterpoint. It’s very monophonic music…Mentally, it made you inactive–I think, I mean it’s entirely subjective. So I very early on rejected it, and began to focus exclusively on Western music.”
On the basis of concrete evidence we can contest Said’s moral claim–which he himself is quick to revoke–that Kulthum’s music is stultifying, meant to make one inactive. Virginia Danielson, an ethnomusicologist who studied Kulthum’s reception within Egypt, notes that: “Listening begins with the choice to pay attention to certain sounds rather than others. In its immediate context, listening, in Egypt, is usually participatory: audience members call out subtle compliments or loud encouragement of performers. Silence is interpreted as disinterest or dislike.”
But let’s look past Said’s inadequate treatment of Arabic music as merely trance-like, melancholic. Let’s instead focus on how Said’s ambivalence towards Umm Kulthum is yet another example of how he has inadequately determined what exactly counterpoint, qua contrapuntal reading, means to him. Is a certain number of instruments required in a contrapuntal orchestra, and is this why the small concert that focused on Umm Kulthum’s voice failed to be contrapuntal, even if it had a limited polyphony of instruments? Or is it that counterpoint does not always represent the simultaneity, the synchrony of sounds, but can be represented diachronically by the melisma of classical Arabic singing? At times, contrapuntal reading might be a diachronic melody; at others, without instrumental accompaniment, this melisma might become a droning, interminable monophony.
And then we can push Said’s criticism in other directions. Even assuming that there really is a sustained singularity that functions as a common element to Arabic music (which is a highly contentious claim), isn’t it possible for this act of sustaining a note to be desirable? What’s so bad about the trance-like submersion, perhaps melancholic, into an inarticulable feeling?
Sari Nusseibeh, in his Story of Reason in Islam, seems to suggest that this kind of singularity is geographically pertinent to Arabic culture, for “[t]he Arabian Desert had always provided a natural setting for those who sought meaning in the glory of nature and the infinitude of space.” There is a desired kind of reduction, a need to be rid of polyphony, as “[p]rophets, poets, monks, hermits, pagan sects, and simple mystics roamed the vast expanse, seeking refuge from the chatter of their communities.” More than anywhere else, “here, in silence and emptiness, they could hear the heartbeat of the world, feel the majesty of the stars.” Nusseibeh seems to argue that a serene indifference, an almost synoptic, magisterial landscape, an image of the infinite, is important for challenging the ills of (often Western) contemporary perception:
“One knows, even in today’s crowded world, how spellbinding pristine nature is. Still today, the vastness and silence of empty deserts impress nature’s majesty on those who live or journey there. One must try to picture how much more acutely this was felt by the wayfarer in times past, how the contrast between unity and difference, spatial and temporal, must have faded before his or her mind’s eye. Such collapsing of borders and categories–between earth and sky, present and past, and beholder and beheld–marks much early philosophical speculation. Under modern conditions of life, where space and time fall into smaller and shorter units–where, by any account, distances and differences seem to melt into each other more and more–this underlying coherence of the surrounding world often assumes discrete and fractured contours. But for the desert wanderer, the poet, the solitary traveler in times past, pondering the surrounding vastness, a totally different spectacle must have appeared. How much, if at all, does what one sees by day or night, scattered in time and space, possess a single essence? How much, if at all, is one human being part of the boundless expanse?”
Although, Nusseibeh has his own contradictions. Is it that mystics sustained a single note, a prayer of the undisturbed infinite? Or did they develop a rhythm, as “lonesome travelers devised their first poetic rhymes following the soft, rhythmic beats of camels treading along the undulating sands; from this soil, the finest lyric of Arabic literary tradition would grow.” Similarly, it is unclear if Nusseibeh is critiquing contemporary life for having too many differences crammed together, or for having melted, with no strong differences in a pool too muddled: “[u]nder modern conditions of life, where space and time fall into smaller and shorter units–where, by any account, distances and differences seem to melt into each other more and more–this underlying coherence of the surrounding world often assumes discrete and fractured contours.”
Does the sharp line between mountain and sky have a different contrast from those found in the contemporary urban landscape? A relevant analogue might be the way that chromatic difference is present within a Rothko as compared to a Seurat. Does the sparseness of the desert offer an undifferentiated infinitude, or a single, strong boundary between land and sky? Does the ancient Arabic environment stress difference more strongly than a contemporary Western context? What is stasis, and what movement? What is counterpoint? How does one achieve, represent, meaningful contrast?
Particularly problematic is Said’s apologies for his own opinion about Kulthum: “I think, I mean it’s entirely subjective.” This “subjective” aspect of musical criticism allows him to maintain auditory space as something more private, less prone to public agreement. “Privacy for me is very jealously guarded, because so out of my control is the public dimension of the world I live in, which has to do with a peculiar sensitivity and intransigence of the Palestinian situation….the music has been very much [part of my attempt to guard my private experience], because it’s a non-verbal idiom.” Reading this statement, it may be the case that Said’s musical expression is more liberating because commentators cannot extrapolate from his piano performances as they might from his written prose: “it’s a non-verbal idiom.” Or, it might be that music is not merely less volatile than politics; rather, the very kind of contestation which applies to speech does not apply to music, because agreement is impossible.
Said elaborates that “inwardness is a very, very rare commodity.” He begins to generalize this state of needing privacy, then questions that capacity to generalize–much like he questions his ability to make normative claims about music in the other interview. “I’m not sure that my case is a special case. I think it may be true of more people than we suspect….Well, I feel it. I can’t speak for others. I find it very hard to speak for others, because I’m in a strange position…” The privacy of music then offers redemption to Said, but it remains unclear if music is private because he can have a small collective of listeners who share his aesthetics, without forcing him to “speak for others”, or if it’s because the very experience of sound is something that is innately inward. In any case, “that’s why, for [him], the musical experience has been so important.”
When Said explains that music “isn’t charged and inflected in quite the ways that some of the other things [he’s] been doing have been”, I find that he may be speaking hypocritically. After all, he remarks how he has “been involved in the thick of these battles over what one says,” as well as battles over “what one can say”. And the second more enigmatic dilemma regarding “what one can say” brings to my mind Said’s comments on Swift’s secular criticism, comments which would seem to indicate that every public performance–including music–has ideological as well as aesthetic implications. Indeed, he problematizes this placid way of experiencing music, mediated through a lens of a tolerance, which dulls its musical criticism, silences strong opinions: “The result of this is that a kind of hegemony has formed[, which] has hardened performance style into a ridiculous conventionalism[,] now become the norm….It’s narcotized audiences. The thing I cannot understand is how people can sit through operas at the Met.”
So I want to agree with Said that there is an enigmatic aspect of musical criticism which seems to prohibit widespread discussion or clarity of opinion, but I still want to problematize this state of affairs–I don’t accept it as necessary or natural. Said himself remarks how he wanted to discover “the role of music in the construction of social space.” Similarly, Danielson–one of Kulthum’s biographers–remarks how “[i]nitially, [she] found the explanations and evaluations attached to Umm Kulthum’s repertory redundant to the point of seeming incomprehensible: it was as though listeners had learned the talk along with the tunes.” The importance of Danielson’s statement is that this was merely her initial state of affairs, which changed over the course of engagement with listening and with listening communities.
She explains the apparatuses which made critical appreciation of Kulthum difficult to comprehend on first exposure: “The discourse of experts is often technical in nature to the extent of being almost incomprehensible to the ordinary listener. The speech of musicians themselves is often opaque, vague, and contradictory, for the musician’s principal mode of expression is rarely speech. The talk of ordinary listeners often depends on analogies, images, and relationships for explanation of sound or feeling.” However difficult such clichés and technical jargons are to understand, their comprehension proves necessary insofar as “[t]hese aural components of social life offer a counter to the bias of the visual in the constitution of ‘social facts’ and add new dimensions to explanations of social practice.”
As another example for how the musicologist stands against a widespread favoritism, “the bias of the visual”, Danielson quotes from Stephen Blum’s “In Defense of Close Reading and Close Listening”, written on the occasion of a conference addressing future “Approaches to the Discipline” of Musicology. “We have much to learn about the ways in which people talk about the dialogues in which musicians and listeners are engaged. All of the talk relies on tropes, as Goethe recognized: ‘We think we are speaking in pure prose and we are already speaking in tropes; one person employs the tropes differently than another, takes them farther in a related sense, and thus the debate becomes interminable and the riddle insoluble.'”
In other words, when addressing the construction of social space through sound, we have to unpack a great deal of metaphors. Again, there exists “the possibility of an anthropological position, a position which attempts to identify how metaphors gain semantic valence according to worldly relationships, a position which may remain meaningful so long as these worldly relationships are shared among human bodies–even as those bodies become stretched in various cultural directions.”
When I attempted to find how critical social theory has dealt with this matter of sound, I decided to look to the figure of Theodor Adorno. He was, famously, an investigator into the phenomena of both social relations and music. Yet, I was immediately faced with ornate metaphors that resisted explanation, if any existed.
“He who crosses the threshold between the years of Beethoven’s death and Schubert’s will shiver, like someone emerging into the painfully diaphanous light from a rumbling, newly formed crater frozen in motion, as he becomes aware of skeletal shadows of vegetation among lava shapes in these wide, exposed peaks, and finally catches sight of those clouds drifting near the mountain, yet so high above his head. He steps out from the chasm into the landscape of immense depth bounded by an overwhelming quiet at its horizon, absorbing the light that earlier had been seared by blazing magma. Although Schubert’s music may not always have the power of active will that rises from the inmost nature of Beethoven, its endemic shafts and fissures lead to the same chthonic depth where that will had its source, and these lay bare its demonic image, which active practical reason managed to master again and again; yet the stars that burn for Schubert’s music are the same as those towards whose unattainable light Beethoven’s clenched fist reached out.”
To describe this hefty passage as a “mixed metaphor” would be an understatement. It is entirely unclear what Adorno hopes to evoke through the contrasted themes of geology (magma, craters, peaks, mountains, cthonic depths) and vegetation, with the appearance of skeletons perhaps occupying a space between mineral and organism. The contrast between material and ethereal, matter and light, is also poorly defined, as magma is both a dark depth and a searing light, as hands and starlight occupy a shared space with one failing to capture the other. Whatever the metaphor is supposed to mean, if it truly is supposed to mean, one may notice how Adorno attempts to generate a beautiful image out of his experience of Schubert’s music. It is possible that the appeal of such images generated by musical criticism will play a greater role in determining the longevity of criticism than anything like a correspondence between the criticism and the musical expression.
Adorno himself seems to endorse the critique of any correspondence, because “[t]he criticism of all musical hermeneutics will rightfully discard any view seeing music as the poetic reproduction of psychic content.” Although, the distance between musical and lived reality is challenged, because, of course, such a critic “does not have the right to undo the link with targeted, objective truth-characters, nor to replace cheap, subjectivist acts of contemplation of art with faith in art’s blind immanence.” Attention must be paid to the concrete circumstances of expression because “[n]o art is about itself; its symbolic meaning cannot arise as an abstraction separate from its material realization.”
Nonetheless, Adorno returns to mystical metaphor, because “Schubert’s œuvre, for all its depravation more eloquent today than any other of its age, escaped fossilization precisely because it survives the passing, subjective forces of close copying.” Schubert’s music is a geological formation, but it is not a fossilization. We must endeavor to state what occurs in musical expression and yet great music will resist “the passing, subjective forces of close copying.” Adorno even seems proud of the inability to separate fossil from stone in his metaphor, because “[r]ight from its origin [Schubert’s music] never had anything other than a nonorganic, erratic, brittle, mineral existence, so deeply steeped in death that death held no fears for it.”
Why does Adorno persist in these visual metaphors at the same time that he proclaims that “[t]here is no longer any metaphor to cut a swath through the ice-crystal thicket, the jagged stalagmites, like dead leaping dragons; the bright upper world where our journey to that region always begins is little more than a way of opening up the perspective of the first and second dimensions to the third—that upper world is as thin an organic cover as the organic-dialectical sonata is to Schubert’s second formal practice.”
There seems to be a parallel between Adorno’s florid multiplication of images and “[Schubert’s] habit of blindly choosing mythological poems,” because such great music ultimately “is the most dramatic indication of the uselessness of words in this deep place where poems offer nothing but the materials, and words are incapable of breathing life into them.” Is life good or bad, and is art organic or mineral? What point is Adorno really making–that mountains are more magisterial than man, but that mankind’s music is somehow mountainous? The reader of Adorno (or the listener to Schubert, apparently) is a “wanderer [who] follows nothing but empty words into the deep, rather than their bright illuminated intention, and even his [sic] human passion becomes a means of open-eyed descent leading not to the seat of the soul, but into the tangled web of fate…It is down there that the harmony takes us, the true measure of music’s profound nature: nature is not, though, what makes sense of the profound human instinct for it, but the images of nature are allegories of the chthonic deep—as useless as allegories as are any words of poetry.”
Needless to say, I am not exactly enthralled with Adorno’s voluminous praise of Schubert, which notably fails–due to lack of more discrete exploration–to make me have a greater experience of Schubert’s music. And, as in Said’s discourse, the absence of conceptual clarity leads to problematic moral and aesthetic claims, which is particularly the case in Adorno’s essay “On Jazz.”
In that essay, Adorno seems to claim that interest in jazz is entirely motivated by ideology rather than aesthetic merit. This claim is undercut by Adorno’s inability to impart what exactly musical aesthetics are. Even bracketing this point, the essay’s critique of ideology is itself flawed. Adorno claims that “the dependent lower classes identify themselves with the upper class through their reception of jazz.” Jazz therefore comes to represent “high art” such that audiences present their consumption of jazz, want to show that they like it, even when it appears imperially denuded. Of course, one could just as easily say that classical music is more obviously linked to high art, and that jazz might represent–to some–a liberated rebellion against class conformity, a way of dealing with classicism’s rigid requirements. Adorno seems to be making an argument about tweed jackets as opposed to other suits, academics as opposed to financiers: “jazz is ‘urbane,’ and, thanks to it, the white-collar employee can feel superior when he sits with his girlfriend in a beer ha11.”
The ‘urbane’ multiculturalism of jazz is problematic to Adorno because it represents ‘primitive’ cultures, and only these ‘primitive’ “elements of jazz, the good danceable beat of the basic rhythm, are understood”. Adorno seems to detest dance music as much as Said detested the Arabic crowd’s supposedly trance-like, melancholic activity. The fact that disinterest, inactivity, is ambivalently treated by these two music critics might indicate how people have drastically different desires and expectations which they bring to bear on musical expressions, the variously timed musical rituals. In any case, Adorno considers dance music inferior to orchestral music because it has inadequate counterpoint, “all the more so because the cheap dance clubs are unable to pay virtuoso orchestras, and the mediated reproduction of the music through the medium of radio is even less impressive in its effect than a live orchestra.”
Here, Adorno’s anti-capitalist narrative takes for granted that the issue is how capitalism invests so much in supposedly “useful” bureaucracy, instead of the spiritually meaningful forms of cultivation that would include funding orchestras. Of course, an anti-capitalist narrative might contest the way that capitalism too closely assimilates price-tags to values, in its grotesque displays of wealth. One might therefore wonder whether the expense of the orchestra is itself aesthetically questionable and ideologically motivated. Or, it may be that the harmonic relation of large numbers of people within an orchestra represent a socialist triumph over the individualist free market, while jazz favors a free market competition in its estimation of individual performers.
I will be repeating myself when I say that I find Adorno’s critique of popular culture problematic, particularly to the extent that he does not identify or inculcate positive values to replace common ones. When he says that “the only melodies that find their way into the public memory are the melodies which are the most easily understood and the most rhythmically trivial”, I remember Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that “lovers of classical music may have neither awareness nor knowledge of the laws obeyed by the sound-making art to which they are accustomed, but their auditive education is such that, having heard a dominant chord, they are induced urgently to await the tonic which seems to him the ‘natural’ resolution of this chord, and they have difficulty in apprehending the internal coherence of music founded on other principles.”
Bourdieu’s point is that the aesthete of one tradition may fail to acknowledge the extent to which their cultivation is not an intentional, artistic creation so much as an accumulated habit, “[t]he repeated perception of works of a certain style encourages the unconscious internalization of the rules that govern the production of these works. Like rules of grammar, these rules are not apprehended as such, and are still less explicitly formulated and capable of being formulated”. (And we would do well to remember the extent to which habit and surprise impact the experience of joy according to Silvan Tomkins’s theory of affect.)
Adorno’s invectives against the culture industry are therefore prone to hypocrisy, as is the case when he describes how, despite being formulaic and trivial, “[h]its cannot be ‘made,’ and therefore the theoretical prerequisites necessary for their success could not be adequately specified.” For this reason, we might find a host of strange occurrences, such as when “Capri, one of the biggest hits of the recent past, was put out by a small producer after the more important ones had rejected it, and it supposedly made its way on its own.” Still, somehow, the music was not an endogenous and fulfilling expression of human desire, but was merely the trap of market forces: it only “supposedly made its way on its own.” Some other limiting force was at work.
Adorno himself struggles to identify this force, because “[i]f one asks jazz specialists for the reasons behind the great success of a hit, they will respond – and the greater their business smarts, the more enthusiastic they will be in their response – with depraved magical formulations taken from the vocabulary of art: inspiration, the concept of genius, creativity, originality, mysterious forces, and other irrational justifications….But this irrationality represents not so much a suspension of social determination as something which is itself socially determined.”
Can’t I say the same regarding Adorno’s irrational devotion to Schubert? Though Adorno claims that his experience is universal, I don’t share in his use of the first-person plural: “Schubert’s music brings tears to our eyes, without any questioning of the soul: this is how stark and real is the way that the music strikes us. We cry without knowing why, because we are not yet what this music promises for us. We cry, knowing in untold happiness, that this music is as it is in the promise of what one day we ourselves will be. This is music we cannot decipher, but it holds up to our blurred, over-brimming eyes the secret of reconciliation at long last.”
The “irrationality” that Adorno has in mind might be somewhat more understandable if we consider how Adorno thinks that jazz has a particular relationship to dancing, and dancing to sex. “The pace of the gait itself–language bears witness to this–has an immediate reference to coitus; the rhythm of the gait is similar to the rhythm of sexual intercourse, and if the new dances have demystified the erotic magic of the old ones, they have also– and therein at least they are more advanced than one might expect–replaced it with the drastic innuendo of sexual consummation.”
There is an extent to which Adorno’s treatment of jazz could more fruitfully be used as an analysis of sexuality in commerce than as a study of music, or even of jazz. When Adorno writes that “[t]he ‘sex appeal’ of jazz is a command: obey, and then you will be allowed to take part”, we might be dealing with a psychoanalytically insightful treatment of the way that, as a political strategy, popular culture instills and enshrines sexual desire. The Media-Superego says that sex is forbidden, that to engage in sex is to achieve rebellion; Adorno questions this, wonders if there is something ideological at play in this estimation of sexuality. Doesn’t sexual desire keep the babies coming, make people willing to engage in all that bourgeois wife and kids family stuff? Does the supposed “rebellion” of the couple in the beer hall allow the system to function even better, to consume even more?
From such a perspective, sex seems to be a weakness that the system exploits, rather than a means of rebellion. And because Adorno considers jazz to comprise consumerist sex appeal par excellence, “[t]he decisive intervention of Jazz lies in the fact that this subject of weakness takes pleasure precisely in its own weakness; almost as if it should be rewarded for this, for adapting itself into the collective that made it so weak, whose standard ills weakness cannot satisfy.” There is an extent to which sexual activity amounts to nothing more than following the old script, obeying orders, mechanically reproducing life, so that the one “who reproduc[es] [jazz] music is permitted to rug at the chains of his boredom, and even to clatter them, but[ ]cannot break them.”
Sex feels like it is an individual mode of expression, perhaps romantically tied to a soulmate. But the interchangeability of the script–the script is traditionally boy-meets-girl, but even contemporary non-gender-specific examples of partner-seeking may be just as programmatic–reveals that sex is not in fact a form of individual artistic expression, or of rebellion against a systemic sea of indifference. In the moment, sexual desire feels instantaneous, spontaneous, improvisational; from a distance, it is cyclical.
“The scope of the ‘hot’ elements [of jazz] extends from the artfully executed improvisation via the ‘break’ and mock beats to the elemental component, the syncopation which seems to stumble out of the basic rhythm. The maintained beat is contrasted to it as the normative standard. These can lay a greater claim to being the subject of jazz than does its archaic rudiment, the couplet; individual contingency is embodied in their excess departures from the norm. This jazz subject is inept and yet is inclined toward improvisation; it is contrasted as Self against the abstract superimposed authority and yet can be exchanged arbitrarily. It lends this authority expression without softening it by this expression- in this way it is paradoxical.”
In other words, I want to accept Adorno’s sense of urgency, urgent because culture determines the body’s capacity to act on itself–and I even want to accept, with my own anti-natalist perspective, the way that culture has to create ways that the body can act on itself in ways that are not heteronormative or procreative. But, I don’t want to accept Adorno’s position that jazz is ‘primitive,’ which has blatant racist implications against the genre’s confluence of American, Caribbean and African diasporic origins.
Even according to Adorno’s aesthetic criterion (or what I am interpreting as Adorno’s main criterion), jazz music could hardly be considered as a purely sexual expression, and often enables new modes, even meditative modes, by which the body can act on itself. Although, even if jazz were just dance music, it remains to be seen whether dancing is truly just a sexual act of conformity, or if it may be a way of generating spiritual meaning(s).
We could remember how negatively Levinas regards dancing (as well as laughter), and remember also Fred Moten’s response to the racist denigration of dancing: “In a pivotal series, Moten supposes that ‘[a]t the bar you [yes, you, you reader of philosophy, you supposedly ‘rational’ person] tap your foot, secretly, inside your shoe, for now,’ but then ‘[i]n the club, in the gap, in the band, you get a sudden hump in your back,’ such that there exists in you a ‘body writing what will write on it, a new kind of kick or some kind of kicking played out by a thousand twangling instruments, like a mobile ensemble of banjos.'”
While there are aspects of Moten’s argument that are highly amenable to my own, there is an also a large extent to which Moten wants to deny the capacity to ascribe reasons for behavior. Moten’s response to the racist denigration of Black culture seems to argue that everything is dancing. He values the “‘philosophical realization that being tends towards escape, in a fugitive process of animation,’ an animation that comprises ‘the anatopographical bearing of the trace that holds off every insistent arrival and every irreducible departure’; all of which will let free ‘being’s essential run toward fugitivity’.”
I don’t accept the claim that understanding the cause of behaviors will always constrain them; indeed, I think it may be part of corporeal liberation, creating new ways of acting on the body, of making-the-body or making-the-body-move. Furthermore, while I agree that it is critically and historically appropriate to analyze texts and performative acts from Black people, and to note how much bodily movement is at play in everyday accounting, there is an extent to which Moten seems to essentialize, to fuse the two together. What I have noted as chromatic difference, the bodily movement at play in generating the visual capacity to count, Moten describes abstractly as “the break” or “the cut”, and sometimes seems to equate this with blackness itself. Is Moten’s argument that black people, black performers, have greater access to the covered up movements of the body? If so, is this the result of historical oppression, or of some genetic trait? In either regard, the generalization makes me squeamish, seems distasteful, because it privileges a certain genetic-cultural position.
“She [Hartman] allows us to ask: what have objectification and humanization, both of which we can think in relation to a certain notion of subjection, to do with the essential historicity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance?…What does this disturbance of capture and genesis give to black performance?…” “[T]he temporal condensation and acceleration of the trajectory of black performances, which is to say black history, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of history…[T]he animative materiality—the aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force—of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of human being (which would necessarily bear and be irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity)….[T]he resistance to enslavement that is the performative essence of blackness (or, perhaps less controversially, the essence of black performance) is a being maternal that is indistinguishable from a being material…[T]his book is an attempt to describe the material reproductivity of black performance and to claim for this reproductivity the status of an ontological condition.”
Moten’s treatment of black performance as something materially handed down might be a matter of historical contingency, as Hartman seems to describe, or it might be a matter eugenic and matrilineal. He somewhat purposefully obfuscates the divide, and his rhetoric is itself in search of obfuscation: “[he] want[s] to talk about music, not as that which cannot be talked about but as that which is transferred and reproduced in literature as a function of the enabling disability of the literary representation of aurality.” But the danger of this approach is its proximity to Adorno’s; Moten’s absent-minded proliferation of images may itself lead to problematic positions.
It seems that Moten’s “enabling disability of the literary representation of aurality” can refer to how musical objects generate images: music’s inability to exist as a corresponding visual object is what enables the capacity for literary imagery evoked, not demanded, by the sonic experience. “If the sensual dominant of a performance is visual (if you’re there, live, at the club), then the aural emerges as that which is given in its fullest possibility by the visual: you hear Blackwell most clearly in seeing him—the small kit, the softness and slow grace of his movement; or Cecil most clearly in the blur of his hands. Similarly, if the sensual dominant of the performance is aural (if you’re at home, in your room, with the recording), then the visual emerges as that which is given in its fullest possibility by the aural: you see Blackwell most clearly in hearing the space and silence, the density and sound, that indicate and are generated by his movement; or Cecil most clearly in sound’s anticipation of dance at, to, and away from the instrument. These are questions of memory, descent, and projection. The visual and the aural are before one another.”
I can resonate with Moten’s description of a sonic experience that generates an image, particularly when “you’re at home, in your room, with the recording”. I can imagine the position of a singer, in much the same way that, should my ear be placed to the wall, I might develop a staging of characters, might know how I would direct the dialogue of an eavesdropped conversation. But maybe this would be orchestrating my own performance of the sound; as Moten writes, I hear “Cecil most clearly in sound’s anticipation of dance”, imagining my own choreography. I look forward, but my ear is to the window. I hear the rain and there is a picture unfolding to the side of my sight. To protect me from heard and unseen missiles, or perhaps to catch hidden prey, sound carries vectors, directions–and these are obviously spatial, visual objects. But such my synesthesia (and perhaps the synesthesia of others?), that I cannot fully believe Moten’s claim: I do not perceive my senses as chiastic, so sound is not to image as image to sound.
What is at stake is to decipher what precisely is entailed in the aural, not merely to multiply literary images in its place. We ought to be careful with our words. But, as Moten explains it, writing is a matter of “[r]epression and amplification.” Visual imagery often connotes “[t]he repression of the knowledge of the hole”, the hole of microscopic interstitial minutiae missed in each image. But this form of repression “is shadowed by another,” the “repression of the knowledge of the whole”, which is more obviously evoked by sonic expression: “a repression of amplification, of sound and, most especially, of abounding, in the sense that Derrida employs, where the whole expands beyond itself in the manner of an ensemble that pushes conventional ontological formulation over the edge.” Where does Derrida employ this sense? With what words does he evoke them? We do not know, but Moten continues, unconstrained.
Moten likely has in mind a visual hole, what we cannot see, and therefore “[t]he hole speaks of lack, division, incompleteness”; whereas, the amplitude too great to hear is a sonic, speaking experience, such that “the whole speaks of an extremity, an incommensurability of excess”.
Moten’s rhetoric is immediately undercut if we imagine an effulgent image, or a sound too distant to reach us: the audible field can be lacking in space, the visual can be overbearing in expression. Either way, his emphasis is on the inability to translate or understand: “For now it’s enough to try to think the whole—as it has been formulated and identified, in a certain kind of poststructuralist thought, as a necessarily fictive, problematically restrictive, completeness—in its relation to and difference from the whole whose incompleteness is always also a more than completeness.”
We might also discredit Moten’s theory of performance if we consider how sound’s, or music’s, capacity to generate a visual image is heavily reliant on one’s prior experience of witnessing the sound performed. In other words, I can picture percussion because I have seen a tambourine, have watched people hit the drums. The increasing use of digital music means that there will arise greater numbers of sonic experiences whose instrumental origins are non-visualizable. The inability to visualize sound, or to sonify images, would suggest that there is a need to better understand music on its own terms; ironically, we need to see the limits to our visual metaphors.
That being said, let’s wager a visual analogue. It seems that the voice may be to music as fashion is to painting. I mean to say that there is a particular quality that images take on as they start to approximate the form of the human body. I have in mind something like Sam Gilliam’s argument, displayed through his work, where a painting acquires additional character from the way that it is draped. When the cloth is not pressed flat by glass and frame–when the fabric is allowed to fold, to introduce depth, a play of shadow and light–the colors are more complexly experienced. Now imagine a painted cloth draped over an arm, the way that the image will acquire a new associative and experiential character as it shifts from flat, to parabolic, eventually cylindrical.
The development of digital music has perhaps not moved in such a direction, like the painting slowly draped over the body. Instead, digital music has developed like a dress that turns into a painting, that unfurls, acquires new topological features as it travels centrifugally–distorted, warped, moving away from the body, as digital music distances itself from the voice, which often serves as its origin.
There is a way that the everyday appearance of the human figure will obviously play a deterministic role in figurative art; in turn, art, even abstract art, will itself play a role in the way that the human figure is dressed. The beatboxer testifies to the intrusion of music, of instrumental performance, into the voice, just as fashion, in abstract or figurative prints, enters the performance of the body.
But the point is that one’s prior experience of the body, by witnessing the performance of other bodies, plays a role in experiencing even those sensations that are strongly non-human, or non-figurative. It is hard not to see a saddle when exposed to a three dimensional inflection point, which the mathematicians call a saddle point, so that the pelvis shapes the terms of even advanced mathematics.
As one distances oneself from the body’s sound or its images, the correlation between sound and image, the translation of one to the other, will become harder to manage. So there remains a need to understand sound on its own terms. I can understand why the increasing volume of a voice might evoke the image of a widening mouth, but this does not tell me what the qualities of the voice are on non-visual terms.
So what is the deal with sight, anyway? Why is there, as Danielson notes, “the bias of the visual in the constitution of ‘social facts'”, which precludes certain “dimensions to explanations of social practice”? Why does visual experience predominate our language, and how can we phenomenologically alter this state of affairs?
In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests that phenomenology might prove a route for identify the textures of experience, and texture will quickly return us to the matter of knots discussed previously, for the need of infants to develop, to differentiate themselves from their environment: “That is, perception is more strictly tied to the local stimulus in its mature state than in its early state, and it conforms to the theory of sensation more for the adult than it does for the child. Perception is like a net whose knots progressively appear more clearly.” Even if it is beginning to get us toward the understanding of perception, Merleau-Ponty’s visual metaphor is itself limited, and emblematic of the traditional approaches towards phenomenology.
In a relatively recent work, Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay argues that French intellectuals of the latter half of the last century have deeply questioned visual metaphors, for reasons that only have some, severely limited, merit. While there is much of Downcast Eyes that I may regard as questionable, Martin Jay’s approach is admirable, novel, in its mixture of medical, anthropological and philosophical texts. Although, it remains possible–perhaps even probable–that the use of medical and anthropological texts may sideline abstract questions.
As Jay explains, “[t]he infant, it is sometimes argued, experiences a synesthetic confusion of the senses without vision fully differentiated from the rest. Smell and touch [but not sound?] are apparently more functionally vital than sight at this very early stage of development.” These vulgar senses are eventually overcome, in time, “[w]ith the maturation of the child,” whereby “the superior capacity of the eyes to process certain kinds of data from without is soon established.” Again, Martin emphasizes that certain senses are too close, that vision, in contrast, relates to the sensation “from without”.
Jay does not question the head’s position as the center of experience, nor vision’s principal role within that center. “[I]t is no surprise that our ordinary language, indeed our culture as a whole, is deeply marked by [vision’s] importance.” If the eye often occupies the center of our linguistic and phenomenological experience, this is simply because they comprise the most sensitive organ: “Having some eighteen times more nerve endings than the cochlear nerve of the ear, its nearest competitor, the optic nerve with its 800,000 fibers is able to transfer an astonishing amount of information to the brain, and at a rate of assimilation far greater than that of any other sense organ. In each eye, over 120 million rods take in information on some five hundred levels of lightness and darkness, while more than seven million cones allow us to distinguish among more than one million combinations of color.” Jay’s inclusion of the material conditions of the body is important, but one must be cautious lest the shock and awe of such incredibly large numbers replace qualitative questions with quantitative ones. One cannot simply say that a sense is more important because it occupies a larger portion of the brain than another, because this sidelines the question of what the brain is actually doing within that area, how it generates experience, and how different areas of the brain might generate drastically different experiences, even seemingly minuscule ones.
It is also worth questioning the notion, which Jay endorses, that “[t]he eye is also able to accomplish its tasks at a far greater remove than any other sense…” This buys into a too-frequent belief that seen objects do not enter the body as do the object one touches or even hears. Admittedly, touch might literally permit certain pathogens into the body, but often it functions like sight or sound, where a sense organ takes the form of, parallel to, an object sensed.
Jay does not give sufficient attention to the critique of vision, not as the functioning of eyeballs, but as the supposed representation of certainty, fixity. “Despite the frequent characterization of vision as atemporal and static, the eye can only do its job by being in almost constant motion.” And hence the whole problematic of knots in Levinas’s and Derrida’s philosophies, themes which, I would argue, are central, but which are excluded from Jay’s analysis.
As a result of not looking into knots, Jay takes for granted, to a significant extent, the fixity of vision. But he himself notes the need for knots, given “the permeability of the boundary between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ component in what we call vision. Although perception is intimately tied up with language as a generic phenomenon, different peoples of course speak different tongues. As a result, the universality of visual experience cannot be automatically assumed, if that experience is in part mediated linguistically. Natural science, therefore, itself suggests the possibility of cultural variables, at least to some degree. It implies, in other words, the inevitable entanglement of vision and what has been called ‘visuality’–the distinct historical manifestations of visual experience in all its possible modes.”
Jay seems to have missed the point, that every landscape is painted–in time, through space–with a hair. He trusts the vista.
“That perhaps an outsider can bring it more fully to the surface is the justificatory assumption of this study, which aims not only to reveal the extent of this hidden discursive content, but also to probe its implications in a critical way.
In holding on to such a hope it will be quickly realized that the author is betraying his sympathy for one of the targets of the discourse in certain of its bleaker moods. That is, I remain unrepentantly beholden to the ideal of illumination that suggests an Enlightenment faith in clarifying indistinct ideas. To make matters worse, I will employ a method that unapologetically embraces one of the anti-ocularcentric discourse’s other major targets, a synoptic survey of an intellectual field at some remove from it…
To these charges let me plead guilty, but with extenuating circumstances. First, as I’ve tried to argue elsewhere, the traditional intellectual historian’s tool of synoptic content analysis, when complicated by a healthy distrust of reductive paraphrase, is indispensable in making sense of the past. For it expresses a certain cautious optimism about the potential for a communicative interaction between the historian and his subject matter–the fusion, as Hans-Georg Gadamer would optimistically put it, of their horizons. Horizon is of course itself a visual metaphor, if a less totalizing one that synopsis…Even when partial horizons are fused, no absolute God’s-eye view above the fray is possible.”
But how, exactly, do they get fused?
Is it a combination of the senses? The overlap of sounds, perceived simultaneously? How to see the present, without covering the past? When is the truth disclosed? How?
I often worry that these questions are so impossible as to be useless in everyday life. What would happen if I took this mentality, like a dog on a leash, and went for a walk? If I left the library, and let these ideas encounter the everyday world, brought such questioning to bear on popular culture?
“Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more films,” Bong Joon-ho said, upon receiving an American award for the year’s Best Picture, Parasite. It was a remarkably well-phrased admonishment, with a great deal of rhetorical density. To discuss walls and barriers in an American political context under Trump’s reign is to immediately, even if unintentionally, evoke nativist attitudes that preclude intercultural difference. Reducing the problem of cultural and linguistic translation to a one-inch wall is a fittingly visual remark from a great cinematic mind. So what is, exactly, the obstructing force of subtitles, diminutive as they are?
It is noteworthy that subtitles are an addition, therefore extrinsic and detracting, to the filmic narrative. Joon-ho’s statement says as much, given that subtitles are treated as a barrier to the experience, and not a part of it. Subtitles, when they are intentionally included, i.e. appear even when closed captioning is off, are used to grant information to the audience, even as the film’s sound–by means of language, volume or quality–indicates that the information is not sonically accessible or decipherable for the character(s).
So what exactly happens, when subtitles are on the screen, and why do most films refrain from using them? One aspect gets into the whole dichotomy between watching and reading, media and prose. Even as the literary critic has been, for many decades, suspicious of cinema’s popular appeal, the cosmopolitan film-watcher has lorded, maintained classist status, over the monolingual moviegoer.
If there are bifurcations in access to education, such that those who are well-educated read more quickly than those who cannot afford the vernacular of leisure, then this may explain why some audiences trip over the 1-inch hurdle, get lost as they cannot read at a pace sufficiently approximate to the rate of speech. This problem may explain why cinema distrusts subtitles in the search for a universal language. Even as the pictographic image inherently leads to greater bifurcations, multiplies its interpretive possibilities in both positive and negative directions, there is some consistency, where viewers are able to generate visual interpretations at similar rates. So, while the author has (normally) a great deal of control over the order in which a text is read, the rate will vary greatly.
It is also worth noting that, when they are used, subtitles provide access to only some features, and are not used to control, prime, or direct the audience’s visual experience of the film. Words are rarely used as cinematic symbols: directors have avoided the storybook method of diegesis, where illustrations and text accompany each other.
Indeed, there may be no greater hallmark of the bad dancer than the one who acts out the words of a song. This parody of interpretive dance, which more closely resembles pantomime, drunk charades, may be critiqued for its lack of creativity. So we might wonder again, about lyricism, where phenomena–particularly phenomena of different senes–are supposed to resemble each other, but not too closely. In thinking of the way that the body’s movement, expresses language, I cannot but think of sign language. Although, even as some sign interpreters are incorporated into concert performances, there remains a difference between sign language and dance. In thinking of how dance, art, or language is supposed to evoke reality in a relatively abstract, not-too-literal way, we might look at the practice where it is deeply significant to receive a sign name from someone within the Deaf community.
In thinking of how the Deaf community can instruct our understanding of language, traces, and art, we might note how the Deaf experience of cinema has relied on the 1-inch barrier of subtitles. We might also think of recent films such as Coda or the Sound of Metal, and think of how these films play with the structures of cinema–through subtitles and the absence of sound. At least part of the effect of such alterations is to force non-Deaf audiences to think not only of the depicted realities of Deaf people, but also how their experience of film and film history has excluded Deaf people. In other words, both subtitles and Deaf audiences evoke questions regarding movement of one’s eyes across a pictographic and cinematic object, as well as the way that consciousness processes stimuli from alternating senses.
We might also linger on the phenomena of dance. To collate the experience of dance with what we have already said of painting, I could turn to Degas. While I had known Degas as a painter of ballet, often of young girls in distended tulle, and difficult postures, I have come to realize on a recent trip to the museum that he was also a sculptor. And the sculpture as the curators of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would argue, is deeply instructive for the understanding of Degas’s paintings.
If I give you the names, only, of Degas’s paintings, you may already begin to understand the pattern, or theme, I intend to address: “Woman rubbing her back with a sponge,” “woman stretching,” “and “dancer looking at the sole of her left foot.” One will, of course, notice, beyond the re-occurence of women as the perpetual object of Degas’s art, that the sculptures all display the body most taut, stretching. The woman reaching for the most elusive spot of her back might recall us to the phenomenon of tension, that Derrida evokes with knots, threads and tangles, and which occurs in the sensations of muscle fibers, is fleshly. The medium of sculpture may be even more amenable to the evocation of this bodily sensation when we think of how the sculptor negotiates with gravity. Degas attempts to create a balanced sculpture in much the same way that the dancer attempts to stay upright. The rise of the foot induces a shrug in the shoulders, either a circle, with hand and toes meeting, or a dive, with nose facing hell and one’s heel pointed to heaven. Perhaps such moments occur so early in the wobbly days of childhood that we have forgotten them. But to calibrate balance is to feel, always, a pull in opposed directions.
One may want to push this theme of embodiment further, and wonder if Degas was merely misogynist, cupping clay breasts out of desire to fondle the female form, or whether the choice to continually make women in art was part, also, of a questioning process, open to the Other’s subjectivity. Motivated not to feel breasts–to feel, as a being with breasts.
If one thinks, then, of this fleshly sense–then does Degas imagine that the dancer’s body is lighter in a way that cannot be defined on the scale? Is the choice to make the dancer a child related to an idea about the supposed lightness of youth, energized as it is? Does the feminine represent, to Degas, lightness and hence he chose to depict girls? Or does femininity represent heaviness, a certain bodily cost–both oppressive and corporeal–inherent to woman’s fertility? These speculations are perhaps unanswerable (I don’t actually care what Degas’s answers would be), and they are taking us far afield of the inquiry into corpuscular sense.
But that is the point. The visible field, still far from immediate, is immediately accessible in ways that corpuscular sense is not. I am trained, or perhaps neurologically programmed, to see the pointed finger as an indication, and not as an invitation to pose, to stretch (or imagine the stretch of) my own muscle fibers. And so a host of questions are not necessarily evoked for viewers of Degas, even if they may remain as possible questions.
And how do we share such experiences, anyway? When do I feel the other’s gesture as embodied, rather than symbolic? Well, the neuroscientist will likely say that it depends on the activation of “mirror neurons”. We might compare the visceral difference of seeing the blue of a frostbitten toe or of a painted flower.
I will try to wager a personal example. When romantically or sexually engaged with another person, it is entirely possible that those features which initially enticed us disappear. Now this statement could be taken as a general lament of the fact that objects of desire are no longer as satisfying to us when they are finally in our reach, that something neurotic within us always wants more or other than what is present. It could be a statement about the difference between idealization and realization, how people are much less perfect than we would want them to be. But, I actually have something quite different in mind, something much more literal.
I mean the fact that I am attracted, deeply, to faces. A symmetrical face. The totality of two cheeks, two glittering eyes. A nose and a mouth. Across the room, one can see these things in their entirety. Yet, this very face that I want to kiss, when I approach it for that very kiss, loses its quality; it becomes flounder-like. One of Picasso’s distorted faces. A single-eye, a nose. I may not even see the mouth. Perhaps this is why it is customary to close one’s eyes when kissing, and not for some romantic need to focus one’s senses entirely on the kiss, as Einstein purportedly said “anyone who can drive safely while kissing is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”
Similarly, romance films use oscillating camera-angles so that we always have both performers’ full faces in a scene of dialogue. Pornographers, too, oscillate between the presentation of genitals, asses and faces–and even the presentation of specific body parts attempts to retain some symmetry, whatever absurd positions and camera-angles required by the director. And so, too, in the performance of sex, there are specific fetishes for its staging–like wanting to be looked at by someone who is performing fellatio, fucking in front of mirrors that allow one to better see an act from a distance even as one is in it–which would seem to indicate a desire to see a partner’s full face or personage, a desire that is unmet in the physical proximity of sex acts.
Now I have never spoken of how I might be, slightly, disappointed by my proximity to the very person I desire. First, for the obvious fact that it would be quite rude to speak of this to a romantic partner. After all, what is it that they could do about it? Isn’t this just my own neuroticism, unable to experience attraction in what should be a highly arousing experience?
Perhaps because I feel ashamed of my inability to experience the full intensity of joy, gratitude, pleasure–whatever term one wishes to describe the presence of the beloved–I have tried to think about the privilege of seeing another in partial form. Laying side-by-side, craning one’s neck–I cannot see the full body of my bedfellow. Instead, I find myself next to a landscape of forms, such as the line from shoulder to hip. Indeed, this landscape of the partial body might explain a common habit of human beings to name mountain ranges after prone, “sleeping ladies“; not just because these mountains look like people, but because dormant bodies become landscapes.
It’s a strange feeling seeing someone you love speak another language. Not fully disconnected, but certainly more passive. Some part of your relation to them switches off. It’s like watching a movie with subtitles, the way you’ll let the actor’s words wash over you, as you wait for the subtitles. And if you wake from this stupor, and are able to realize that you were under its spell, you will realize that what characterizes your relationship to the people you love, their way of mattering to you, is that their words carry a sense of urgency that no movie could have. There is room here to talk about love and meaning, in that only love could grant importance to the futility of human speech. Room to wonder if we only ever love our loved ones when their words are able to be so urgent to us–not merely to say that we should be more attentive, but to ask if, when our sense of urgency is dulled by habit, mundane repetition, that dullness is an indication that distance is needed for the heart to grow fonder–that love must take a break, if it hasn’t already.
But is it even such a sin to view a lover as a movie star–waiting for the translation to roll in? Isn’t there a way that this more passive looking is more appreciative, the way that we admire art? Do I hear the voice better when I don’t know the words, when there’s nothing for me to say back, like seeing a conversation unfold from the kitchen window, as I wash dishes? Is it possible that there is a kind of love that happens in silence at a distance, the way that certain moments fall into memories, fall so snugly that we can recognize them as memories even as they occur? I am sick in bed, cannot laugh or leave, there is the sweetness of something on my lips, I am vaguely floating, light streams in, time loses its fixity as dreams flow in and out, eyelids droop, and the wordless pleasure of convalescence makes waiting painless.
What would music sound like if a sunset had never been heard?
Or is it more beautiful to believe that there is something within us that is untouched by sound, a pure auratic color–and also that which cannot be disturbed by light, cannot be shown, a tremor invisible?