Sound and Affect

Voice, Music, World

Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, Stephen Decatur Smith, Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, Stephen Decatur Smith

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226758152
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

There is no place on earth that does not echo with the near or distant sounds of human activity. More than half of humanity lives in cities, meaning the daily soundtrack of our lives is filled with sound—whether it be sonorous, harmonious, melodic, syncopated, discordant, cacophonous, or even screeching. This new anthology aims to explore how humans are placed in certain affective attitudes and dispositions by the music, sounds, and noises that envelop us.? Sound and Affect maps a new territory forinquiryat the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies.The essaysinthis volumeconsiderobjects and experiencesmarked by thecorrelation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, ormachine-made;andour sonic environments, whether natural orartificial, andhow they provoke responses in us.Farfrom being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influencedand even determinedby factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience.Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices.This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect andtheemotions.

Part 1

Sounding the Political

Chapter 1

Waves of Moderation

The Sound of Sophrosyne in Ancient Greek and Neoliberal Times

Robin James

Postdemocra[cy] . . . is the perfect realization of the empty virtue Plato called sophrosune: the fact of each person’s being in their place, going about their own business there, and having the opinion identical to the fact of being in that place and doing only what there is to do there.1

The ear serves as the organ of balance, readily “making sense” of things and recognising resonances and proportions between the frequencies of sound waves—as with an octave, for example. The eye can make very accurate alignments, but has no way of telling the proportional relationships between the frequencies of light.2

Neoliberalism has a specific concept of the market, and it treats that idea of the market as the universalizable model for everything: parenting, the environment, even (biopolitical) “life” itself. As Jason Read explains, neoliberals like Gary Becker think that “everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood ‘economically’ according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit.”3 This cost/benefit calculus is characteristic of a specific type of neoliberalism, one that uses probabilist math to predict future success and maintain market equilibrium. (This contrasts with the kinds of postprobabilist or “possibilist” neoliberalisms identified by scholars such as Lisa Adkins, Louise Amoore, and Melinda Cooper, which use different types of math and aim for market disequlibrium.)4 But how does this probabilist concept of the market get translated into nonpropositional form, into a type of implicit knowledge, into a discourse or convention that works at the level of affect?

This is where “moderation” comes in. In the first epigraph, Jacques Rancière claims that “postdemocracy” (his term for what I’m calling neoliberalism)—in particular, the sorts of statistics and forecasting used in opinion polls—is a postmillennial inflection of Platonic sophrosyne. Sophrosyne is a term from ancient Greek that generally is rendered as “moderation” or “self-mastery.” Cost/benefit calculus is a kind of moderation, a historically and technologically specific type of moderation that updates ancient Greek concepts of moderation or sophrosyne to accord with the kind of probabilist, Gaussian math used by twenty-first-century economists and statisticians. Though it worked primarily as an ethical and political concept, some ancient Greek philosophers—including Plato—grounded their notions of sophrosyne in then-current notions of musical harmony as geometric proportion. Moderation brought your existence into proper proportion, such as the proportions illustrated in the Republic by the myth of the metals (gold:silver:bronze) or the theory of the divided line (visible:intelligible). Geometry was the most advanced mathematics available to Plato, Pythagoras, and other ancient Greek thinkers, but it’s obviously not the math people in the twenty-first century use to think about either economics or acoustics. Like Plato, we still think about sounds and society in terms of ratios—but instead of using geometry to determine proportionality, we use statistics to calculate frequencies and probabilities. Updating the science behind our concept of sophrosyne to reflect contemporary mathematics and acoustics, I argue that sophrosyne can help us understand how the neoliberal market works politically and ethically, especially at the level of affect. As was the case for Plato, neoliberal sophrosyne is still a kind of self-relation, and more specifically a type of self-mastery, which is modeled on musical harmony. Neoliberal market logics, in particular, Homo economicus’s cost-benefit calculus, are embodied as a type of affective self-relation modeled on sound waves. The neoliberal version of sophrosyne, additionally, belongs to what I called elsewhere the “sonic episteme.”5 Thus, just as Plato’s notion of sophrosyne was implicated in an episteme that established relations between proportion and ratio so as to project a hierarchy of subordination, neoliberal sophrosyne envelops social agents in an acoustic chamber that also establishes an order of subordination and domination, but one based on statistical and probabilistic distributions. Like Plato’s polis, neoliberal biopolitical governmentality has its rhythm and acoustic resonance (that is, it sounds both a frequency and oscillating pattern of varying intensity).

Acoustic harmony is a relationship among sound waves: frequencies (harmonics and partials) emerge from the interaction of other frequencies; signal emerges from noise. In order to have signal, there must be noise. Unlike in modernity, in which noise is destabilizing, in probabilist neoliberalism noise (or, in more market-oriented terms, risk) is beneficial—up to a point: the wrong quantity or quality could impede the emergence of healthy, successful signal. Similarly, as Jonathan Sterne has shown, over the course of the twentieth century audio engineers and architects came to understand noise as beneficial and necessary—something to be managed rather than eliminated.6 Signal/noise and cost/benefit calculations are practices of moderation. Neoliberal moderation locates the ever shifting point of diminishing returns and determines whether it is more profitable to (a) maximize everything to this asymptotal limit, or (b) crash past this point and resiliently bounce back in a whirl of shock-doctrine creative destruction.

I use the concept of waves—both this image of a cresting wave, taken from the Atlanta rapper Ludacris’s 2012 video for his song “The Rest of My Life,” and the ideas of waveforms in acoustics and the similarly wave-shaped normal curve in statistics—to unpack what neoliberal sophrosyne is and how it works. In what follows, I will first discuss Plato’s concept of sophrosyne and show how this concept is grounded in the music theory of the ancient Greeks, specifically, their understanding of harmony as geometric proportion. I will then use Jacques Attali’s work on music and Michel Foucault’s late work on both ancient Greek thought and neoliberalism to first (a) establish that moderation is important to neoliberalism’s marketization of everything and then (b) show that this neoliberal concept of moderation is, like Platonic sophrosyne, grounded in a concept of harmony, but one that’s different from Plato’s geometric one. This neoliberal concept of harmony is acoustic and algorithmic. I will conclude with an example of acoustic sophrosyne, both as a structure of subjectivity and as a musical gesture: the aforementioned Ludacris song.

Platonic Sophrosyne

Sophrosyne was a common concept, and various philosophers theorized it in different ways. I focus narrowly on Plato’s understanding of it, because, as Jacques Rancière argues in the quote presented as the epigraph to this chapter, that is the version embodied by neoliberalism (what he calls “postdemocracy” or “consensus”).

Sophrosyne as a Practice

For Plato, sophrosyne is what makes citizens free: specifically, free from enslavement to the pleasures, and thus fit to be politically free from enslavement to another human master. You freed yourself from enslavement to the pleasures by following the authority of the True.7 The free man is not liberated from mastery; rather, he follows the best master of all, the truth.8 He orders his life according to the True and its logos. Just as the Logos is the “beautiful itself,” sophrosyne is, as Plato says in the Republic, “beautiful order and continence of certain pleasures and appetites, as they say, using the phrase ‘master of himself.’”9 Sophrosyne is the True put into practice; this is why Foucault calls sophrosyne an “orthos logos,” a practice of truth.

Moderate lives replicate, as accurately as possible, the order or logos of the Truth itself. This logos is proportionate. For example, Plato’s divided line doesn’t just separate the visible from the intelligible, but expresses a ratio between them, “the ratio of their comparative clearness and obscurity.”10 This same ratio, then, is what the practice of sophrosyne allows one to embody. “Acquiring moderation,” Plato writes, means bringing every aspect of your existence “in proportion as soul is more honorable than body.”11 The soul or the intelligible isn’t the main focus here—it’s the proportional relationship between soul and body; that proportion is the “logos” in soprhosyne’s “orthos logos.” Here, the proportion is to stand in the “right” relation to logos. This is why Foucault describes sophrosyne/self-mastery as “the right sense of proportion.”12

Proportion, for Plato as for the Greeks more generally, is both a ratio and a hierarchical ordering. Plato’s myth of the metals, for example, describes a proportional relationship that is both a ratio (the gold get the most responsibility) and a hierarchy at the same time (the gold are on the top).13 Thus, moderation is not just a geometric or material distribution; it’s also a distribution of authority or status. As Foucault explains,

in the individual who is sophron, it is reason that commands and prescribes, in consonance with the structure of the human being: “it is fitting that the reasonable part should rule,” Socrates says . . . and he proceeds to define the sophron as the man in whom the different parts of the soul are in agreement and harmony, when the part that commands and the part that obeys are at one in their recognition that it is proper for reason to rule and that they should not contend for its authority.14

Moderation really is about mastery, about making sure the part that should rule—the soul, the guardians—is in command. Sophrosyne, then, is the practice of embodying this hierarchical ratio. A body so ordered expresses a “harmonious” order among its parts.15 Immoderate bodies are leaky—they overflow with noise, fluids, and so on. As Ann Carson explains, “Woman as a species is frequently said to lack the ordering principle of sophrosyne,” and is thus “given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound,” often represented as “a loud roaring noise as of wind or rushing water . . . ‘she who pours forth.’”16 Moderation keeps sound waves, fluids, all that is condensed in Carson’s metaphor of running water—moderation is what keeps them in check.

Foucault’s use of musical language to describe sophrosyne—consonance, harmony—is not accidental. Plato, like many ancient Greek philosophers, explicitly modeled sophrosyne on musical harmony. Sophrosyne “bears more likeness to a kind of concord and harmony than the other virtues” because it, like ancient Greek notions of musical “harmony” is a type of hierarchical proportionality.17 If sophrosyne is modeled on musical harmony, then understanding how the ancient Greeks calculated musical proportions will help us to understand more fully their concept of sophrosyne.

Musical Harmony

There is no one theory of harmony in ancient Greek philosophy; it was actually a matter of much contention. Everybody disagreed about what the proper proportions and ratios were and how to determine them. However, this means that everyone agreed that musical harmony was “something balanced, proportional, ratio-like.”18 They also all understood proportion as something one calculated geometrically. This is why Plato says “a man experienced in geometry would . . . grasp the truth about equals, doubles, or any other proportion.”19 Ratios aren’t calculated arithmetically but derived from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• part 1. Sounding the Political
• part 2. Affect, Music, Human
• part 3. Voicings and Silencings
• part 4. Affective Listenings
• part 5. Temporalities of Sounding
• part 6. Theorizing the Affections
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index