Experiencing Music and Visual Cultures

Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis

Antonio Cascelli, Denis Condon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429582233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Bringing the research of musicologists, art historians, and film studies scholars into dialogue, this book explores the relationships between visual art forms and music. The chapters are organized around three core concepts – threshold, intermediality, and synchresis – which offer ways of understanding and discusssing the interplay between the arts of sounds and images. Refuting the idea that music and visual art forms only operate in parallel, the contributors instead consider how the arts of sound and vision are entwined across a wide array of materials, genres and time periods.

Contributors delve into a rich variety of topics, ranging from the art of Renaissance Italy to the politics of opera in contemporary Los Angeles to the popular television series Breaking Bad. Placing these chapters in conversation, this volume develops a shared language for cross-disciplinary inquiry into arts that blend music and visual components, integrates insights from film studies with the conversation between musicology and art history, and moves the study of music and visual culture forward.

Part I

Setting the scene

1Synch: scenes of implication

Alessandra Campana

A collective volume on the interactions of “Music and Visual Cultures” may appear to be a diplomatic affair, bringing around a negotiating table by way of that middle “and” scholars with complementary specializations: those trained in looking and those trained in listening.¹ But that has not at all been the case here. If those famous Martian anthropologists were to find this volume, they would doubtlessly catch the enthusiasm and sophistication with which that “and” has been articulated by all the essays here. That middle “and” is crucially the terrain of encounters mediated by institutionalized discourses, such as, for instance, musicology and visual studies. Perhaps then the issue can be tackled by asking how musicology can make itself listened to. On the one hand, several disciplinary configurations within the humanities, more versed in the often-recondite discourses of theory, cannot or do not want to listen, especially to musicology. Visual studies in particular may still appear determined to keep their ears shut, impermeable even to sound studies' recent contribution to theory. On the other hand, musicology's eagerness to engage with theory and contribute to broader conversations in the humanities is often seen, both from within and without the discipline, as a kind of disciplinary envy, falling short of a viable interdisciplinary contribution because of its tendency toward a wide-eyed application of theoretical soundbites.

This essay attends to the question of the “and” as the thematic core of this volume, and asks what musicology can do, still, for the study of “visual cultures.” More to the point, it asks how a discipline trained in, or that cultivates listening can contribute to the discourses of the visual, discourses that still largely shun aurality. In recent years several threads in the humanities have redefined the centrality of sound and of listening – its practices, histories and politics. This essay tries to activate these discourses on listening in the presence of theory, ever steeped in a silent glare. Can musicology listen or listen anew to the scenes of theory, retracing its metaphorical paths in order to open up relations between “figuring” and “sounding?” What if, in the way of an experiment, we attend to the scenes of theory for their theatricality, that is, as products of imaginaries and practices that are always already of/in sound, and not just as pantomimes, forcefully silenced by a scrutiny that endeavours to free the eye in order to see more, to see better. The task then is to unmute theory's scenes and reinstate their sonorous dramaturgy. This essay's opening section is therefore occupied with the “sounding” of a theoretical vignette – Althusser's famous scene of interpellation – a vignette which in fact stages a precise dramaturgy of implication by way of listening and seeing. The connection of sound and image is enacted by way of a turning back, that uncontainable gesture that interpellates the subject-as-listener and -as-viewer. The rest of the essay will explore other famous scenes of sound-image synchronization: scenes that stage synchresis and synchronicity, the spatiality of music and the temporality of images, and where the turning back implicates “sounding” with the usual “figuring,” while it constitutes always already political spectators.

Interpellation/implication

The second part of Louis Althusser's much quoted 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” tackles the matter of the formation of the subject in ideology, what he terms interpellation, by way of a “theoretical scene” or “little theoretical theatre.”²

Here is the passage:

I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere 180-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by “guilt feelings,” despite the large numbers who “have something on their consciences.”³

The voice of authority uttering “hey, you there,” presumably heard and listened to above all and despite other sounds and voices on the street, is also a voice whose sound prompts one to turn. This turning around is precisely the gesture that for Althusser confirms tautologically how the individual is interpellated as subject in ideology.⁴

But if not “explained solely by ‘guilt feelings',” why would one feel compelled to turn? Or, to put it differently, isn't this turning around but activated by sound, a sound that is attended to and that had already bound the hailer with the one hailed, before and besides the words uttered and heard? Like Orpheus, Althusser's individual-as-subject is the one who cannot help but look at the source of the sound – who or what is hailing or whistling.⁵ To look back then is to trace the trajectory of the sound back to its source and cause; it is to map a voice onto a body, and to ascribe that body with an intention. Note the blocking of the scene: the sound arrives from behind, an elsewhere external to the field of vision, and it has always already happened. The gesture of recognizing oneself as the one addressed is instantiated in a particular spatio-temporal dimension: behind and in the immediate past, in a space inhabited just a moment before. The willingness to recognize oneself in that call is performed as an act of translation of that spatio-temporal configuration of externality (behind/past) into co-presence (in front/present). Hence the “‘transformation’ of the individuals into subjects” happens precisely in that spatial and temporal gap between the hailing and the turning back, and it happens as an act of matching of the sound of the voice with its source, or to put it otherwise, as an act that synchronizes listening with looking, the listened to with the looked at.

The passage quoted above is followed by an afterthought of sorts, where the prose returns once again to the scene in an effort to clarify:

Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: “Hey, you there!” One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e., recognizing that “it really is he” who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.⁶

Preoccupied that his vignette aptly demonstrates the “always-already-happened” of interpellation, the author has to disavow the transformation staged by his primal scene. That is, by invoking simultaneity, this paragraph downplays that movement in time which made his theoretical scene a theatrical representation of the everyday eventness of interpellation. The last two sentences in particular, after that “but in reality,” ensure that the scene just described again, functions still as illustration of a theory founded on the very impossibility of a before and after. Like Medusa's gaze, here the process of abstraction stops the “little theoretical theatre” dead, to safeguard the “reality” of theory. Before and after are folded into each other, into a still “one and the same thing,” while the space of the encounter (the square, the street) suddenly turns into a sort of green screen, abysmally nothing/nowhere yet always already something.

In an influential essay from 1993 entitled “Beyond Interpellation,” Mladen Dolar, with the intent of salvaging what was still crucially “uncomfortable” in Althusser's work, observes that both the theory of Ideological State Apparatuses and the formula of interpellation are organized by the idea of “the clean cut.”⁷ Interpellation implies a break⁸ and so does the theory of ideology:

If we take Althusser's argument as a whole, it appears that there is also a clean cut between the two parts of Althusser's theory of ideology. Roughly speaking, there is a break between his insistence on the materiality of state apparatuses on the one hand, and interpellation on the other – between exteriority and the constitution of interiority. How exactly would materiality entail subjectivation? Why would interpellation require materiality? … One could say that materiality and subjectivity rule each other out: if I am (already) a subject, I am necessarily blinded in regard to materiality. The external conditions of ideology cannot be comprehended from within ideology; the institution of interiority necessarily brings about a denial, or better, a disavowal of its external origin. … Thus one must face an either/or alternative: either materiality or subjectivity; either the exterior or the interior.⁹

In response to the impasse of such either/or, Dolar performs a virtuosistic re-reading of Althusser with Jacques Lacan.¹⁰ He connects the end product of interpellation, the illusorily autonomous subject, with what psychoanalysis takes as point of departure, that is, precisely what the constitution of the subject leaves out. The remainder of subjectivation is in fact that residual, unprocessed trace of the external within interiority: “the point where the innermost touches the outermost, where materiality is the most intimate.”¹¹

But, again, what if we pay attention to sound. Dolar's response to the Althusserian impasse is reported here also because it is somewhat predisposed to listening. Its emphasis on the space of intimate materiality, where the external and internal touch offers a felicitous “opening to the register of the sonorous,” to put it in a recent beautiful formulation.¹² It can be contended in fact that such a space of intimate materiality was already there, constituted by sound. Listening to the hailing is also always already contingent to the space and time of the encounter, as a resonance and co-vibration of self and other, of interior and exterior.

Synchronization then is not just a technological trick, masking the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual and the aural.¹³ More than that, it is taken here as the articulation of implications, whereby the very constitution of audio-vision as a simultaneity of discreet streams is what hails ideological subjects. The following scenes dwell on this turning back as a way in which the aural and the visual are articulated: like a trope for that “and” of the book's title, synchronization affords the opportunity to attend to the aesthetics and politics of subjects, implicated within that very conjunction and simultaneity.

Synchresis/synchronicity

But what if the one turning around discovers something unexpected as the source/cause of the “hey, you there!”? Like in Dr. Mabuse's Testament, the voice could as well be from a “master,” postmortem, and originate from a loudspeaker, generically addressed at anybody who cares to listen to it, to be interpellated by it. Or what if Orpheus turns around at the noise behind him to discover not Eurydice but, say, the very stage-hand in charge of producing that noise.¹⁴ That is to say, what if we take issue with that inevitability that is usually assigned to synch, with that unacknowledged presupposition that in audio-visual media the dash in between stands for a necessarily closed causal relationship. This argument is hardly new and has been promulgated with great flair over the course of the last 40 years by some of the founding fathers in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Setting the scene
• PART II Voice as presence and absence
• PART III Beyond borders
• PART IV From silence to sound and back
• Index