Ludic Dreaming

How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture

David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert, Eldritch Priest

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501320828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Ludic Dreaming uses (sometimes fictional) dreams as a method for examining sound and contemporary technoculture's esoteric exchanges, refusing both the strictures of visually dominated logic and the celebratory tone that so often characterizes the "sonic turn." Instead, through a series of eight quasi-analytical essays on the condition of listening, the book forwards a robust engagement with sounds (human and nonhuman alike) that leverages particularity in its full, radical singularity: what is a dream, after all, if not an incipient physics that isn't held to the scientific demand for repeatability? Thus, these studies declare their challenge to the conventions of argumentation and situate themselves at a threshold between theory and fiction, one that encourages reader and writer alike to make lateral connections between otherwise wildly incongruent subjects and states of affairs. Put differently, Ludic Dreaming is a how-to book for listening away from the seeming fatality of contemporary technologies, which is to say, away from the seeming inevitability of late capitalistic nihilism.

1

Auralneiricizing time (Listening away)

Last night, I dreamed I was a sound. The dream, in the first instance, demanded from me an expanded conceptualization of the complex circuits imbricating conscious sensation with dreamed material fluxes. The dreamed element possesses a sensory domain of its own in that the dreaming I is immediately and forever different than the I who has dreamed, herself different from the I who will have dreamed. At the same time, this doubled and redoubling I also conjoins with waking thought precisely through the perspective that their distance from one another produces—a sensation that is eerie, if not unsightly.

Thinking back, what waking thought does is to obfuscate the capacity of my dreamed sonification to intensify my experience, an intensification that operates despite this obfuscation precisely by expanding its domain beyond what I can directly perceive. And yet, the dream also persists in me, a persistence that preserves—even, and perhaps especially, in the face of the nonsensicality into which it lures my waking thoughts—a certain sensory basis of dreaming. That is, there lies an irreducible sensory reality underneath the layers of conscious thought that obfuscate the materiality of my dream by affording a certain functionality to it.

Embracing this irreducibility affirms that all dreams (including sonic ones, and ones of and by sound) are temporal processes: insofar as they enframe time, dreams generate sensibility, and they do so, importantly, before any meaningful distinction between conscious and nonconscious systems enters the scene. No longer the fruit of an instrumental reduction to waking sense, dreaming must—as the occult dream theorist Mans Hanker notes—come to “designate operations performed on a material substrate in real, which is to say experiential, time.”¹

Hennram Banks builds from this position to argue that it reaffirms the sensory basis of all events, both dreamed and waking, which is in turn to make (for him) the two-pronged claim that (first) all dreaming is fundamentally material and nonabstractable; and (second) that we must not make concessions to a symptomatic understanding of the relation between dreaming and conscious thought, but should instead focus on the material, microphysical effects of dreaming.² With respect to this second point, what Man Res Khan calls the “law of temporal finitude”—which stipulates that time is always temporalized in material processes³—ensures that the microphysical material operations of dreaming are forms of symbolization, despite taking place on timescales well beneath conscious perceptual thresholds. And indeed, dreaming in fact expands and differentiates symbolic access to the real of sensibility because it opens nonperceptual modes of access to worldly sensibility, modes that simply have no direct correlation with waking perceptual experience. After all, I dreamed I was a sound; if you can make sense of that, then I’d wager you haven’t understood my dream. I certainly can’t, and thus haven’t.

So, dreams register fluxes of the real independent of any operation of consciousness and any bodily capture or incorporation; to have dreamed, though, is to recognize the mediatic role that a body plays in shifting this event from a registration to a symbolic inscription. In this sense, we might say that if the symbolic has conventionally been thought as the province of natural language, the economy of dreams—understood materially—differentiates and variegates this symbolic by emphasizing it as a not-necessarily human material process such that what takes place is a shift from a human-centric symbolic to something like a symbolic of the real that Hanker calls a “dreamed real.”⁴

This is the case, in part, because to the extent that dreams temporalize—that is, insofar as they both take up time and take place within temporal limitations (as Khan puts it)⁵—they are, in some minimal sense, homologous with the temporalizations that characterize waking experience, and indeed that characterize experience as such.⁶ This underlying commonality between waking thoughts and dreams ensures that these distinct temporalization processes can never be simply disjoined, their massive scale differential notwithstanding. Indeed, both dreamed temporalization and thought temporalization—dreaming and thinking—belong to a larger worldly process, which means that the distinct symbolic registers they each demarcate are not exclusive of one another.

The point is that there is not just a fuzziness to the dreaming/thinking divide, but also a certain impossibility of thinking: dreaming is and must be felt by bodies before (and as a condition of) being thought. A sound dreamed me that night I dreamed I was a sound, such that a body is dreaming’s object of address prior to the claim that it is mine. One crucial consequence of this direct address to a pre- and de-composed body is a suspension of the valuative category called meaning, and with it, of the possibility to hierarchize dreams (be they sleeping dreams, waking dreams, daydreams, or thoughts).

I dream all the time, but on the night in question I dreamed I was a sound. And a dream about sound—even if it is also a dreaming sound—is never just about sound. As Steven Connor argues, “human language for replacing sonic deficit seems to call for entities outside the experience of sound.”⁷ Moreover, it is in the character of sound to operate parasitically: to amplify, modulate, resonate, tune, and so forth, rather than to proceed ex nihilo to the nihilo of meaningful thought. And this is the sense in which—weirdly and wonderfully—the dream as sound is also a procedure of grammatization to precisely the extent that it resists the very force of that procedure. Remember (from Kittler) that to grammatize is to spatialize, to symbolize, and ultimately at its core to contain nonperiodic functions within periodic ones; every coding does this, Kittler argues, “from the alphabet up to digital signal manipulation.”⁸

My sonic dreaming seems (on the one hand) to resist this, at least insofar as its auralneiric sensibility lays a certain claim to operating in and as the linear temporal flux of the real, a claim that is attested to by the absolute radicality of sound as a subject. On the other hand and at the same time, the opposite is also true: precisely the laying claim to unmediated access—the force of the gambit, in the very gesture through which it appears as such—captures in advance through its mark-making the nonperiodic flux, the uncapturability, to which it paradoxically attests. And, of course, we can recognize that this apparent symmetry—the weighing of an unmediated real against its grammatization—is itself nested within the grammatical: is itself caught up in the always-already of a technical inscription that endlessly delays its encounter with, and ceaselessly differs from, the real to which it allegedly attests.

And indeed, as I think through my dream—volte-face—and try to articulate it, I feel this force acting on me, pushing me away from the dream as such toward the more general operational procedures of dreaming, which is to say, toward the conditions under which a reality is dreamed. And this isn’t surprising, really: the generic is powerfully seductive in its appearance as the systematic. Faced with my dream’s facelessness—immersed in the total singularity of the echo chamber of having been a specific sound in my dreams, of having been this specific sound that I of course (as the sound, and not a listener) couldn’t hear—I’m left helplessly caught in the sea of a generic, which is to say, systematic description that (like all descriptions) is equally a prescription. The more powerfully I feel the nonperiodic, the more deeply it has tattooed me (period).

This condition, as it subtends the operationality of sounds, has been extensively technicized. Sound offers a particularly robust invitation for thinking difference operationally since to hear a sound is, in one sense, to hear as constant something that is nothing but difference in action.⁹ That is, in an important (though not exclusive) sense one hears changes in air pressure rather than air pressure itself, and it is absolutely the case that the “steadiness” of a held pitch refers to its audible periodicities rather than to something that is spatially fixed.

Kittler’s much-discussed account of the gramophone as an appeal to the real is perhaps the best-known description of this operationality as it relates to technical recording apparatuses, but his later discussion of Fourier analysis—recently taken up by Mark Hansen—is more apropos here because the sound technologies that stem from it collapse the distinction between recording and synthesis. That is, in the same way that Hansen will argue that twenty-first century media refocuses “the function of computational media from storage to production,” Fourier analysis instantiates a shift from recording to synthesis (or, more precisely, to an expanded notion of production that is inclusive of recording and synthesis).¹⁰

In the case of sound, Fourier analysis essentially means that any sound can theoretically be synthesized with a degree of fidelity equal to the fidelity of the “captured” audio by transforming the time-domain waveform of the original sound into a series of frequency-domain waveforms that are played back in succession. Leaving aside the problematic ontological assumptions that this approach assumes, in its collapsing of recording and synthesis into a single operation this approach has the obvious technical limitation that appears in all simulational economies: it requires a potentially infinite number of oscillators that are capable of being controlled at an infinitely fine grain with immediate responsiveness.¹¹

It is the computational solution to this limit—to the technical limit of requiring infinitude—that Hansen highlights through his reading of Kittler’s account of the “Fourier integral.” In essence, the Fourier integral substitutes the innumerable and nonperiodic possibilities of real numbers (numbers such as π, for example) for the formal infinitude of wave spectra and thus, as Hansen notes, allows for the inscription of “the flux of real numbers independently of any human-oriented symbolic.”¹² That is, the Fourier integral enables periodization of the nonperiodizable precisely and paradoxically by substituting the material innumerability of real numbers for the formal infinitude of the Fourier series. The Fourier integral thus produces an analysis that adheres to Khan’s law of temporal finitude (because it is temporalized in the materiality of real numbers), but that does not diminish in fidelity at finer scales since it uses real numbers that are nonperiodic. Thus, as Hansen puts it, “the hard time introduced by Fourier integrals inscribes time as periodicity and thereby introduces irreversibility through a ‘physical’ or ‘material’ symbolization that has no need for any human contribution.”¹³

At stake for Hansen here—and this will ultimately lead us back to our discussion of dreaming, if (again, but differently) away from my having specifically dreamed I was a sound—is a certain privileging of microtemporalities over macro-scale time-consciousness when it comes to operationalizing the broader stage of worldly sensibility. That is, these technologies approach the real asymptotically (as Hansen notes), and it is his wager that such an approach technically expands contact with worldly sensibility—much as is the case with dreaming for Hennram Banks.

And indeed, we can often hear the weirdness of this expanded computational topology by reiterating its operations in a relatively closed loop, as has been the method of any number of glitch artists who repeat a computational process—the actual, material process of computation—in order to accrue the material differences that come with the algorithmic temporality of computation and that are obscured in the human-scaled, spatial, algebraic representation of computation as considered in its informational aspect. However, while such undertakings bring microscale operations to consciousness, this is not what Hansen is interested in with respect to twenty-first-century media’s access to microtemporality. Instead, his project is to show not only that human subjectivity is a “complex operational overlap of time-consciousness with [both endogenous and environmental] microtemporal events,”¹⁴ but more importantly that the operational overlap that is human subjectivity is composed “through and as part of … a broader worldly sensibility, itself also in continual production.”¹⁵ Put simply, the task for Hansen isn’t so much to reveal the hidden microtemporal operations of digital media as it is to learn how to “experience qualitative (sensory) intensity without [my emphasis] it being fully integrated in and subordinated to unified higher order perceptual experience.”¹⁶ That is, if the “automated multivariate calibration” that Richard Coyne (just a few years ago) called one of the “elusive goals of pervasive digital media”¹⁷ is now a fait accompli, this means that the microtemporal has become independently addressable and manipulable such that we can dissociate sensibility from “the ‘how’ of experiencing.”¹⁸ To quote Ted Hiebert (perversely out of context, which is to say, perfectly in context), we can praise nonsense into existence.¹⁹

For Hansen, the limited example of the Fourier integral stands in for computational processes more generally, and specifically furnishes “a non-anthropocentric basis for theorizing our contemporary coupling with computational processes that operate beneath our perceptual and sensory thresholds.”²⁰ That is, by understanding the relatively comprehensible operations of Fourier analysis, we can begin to gain purchase on the far more speculative domain of microtemporal and distributed technical systems.

This is particularly potent for thinking about my dream that I was a sound (and indeed dreaming in general, and having dreamed) because the same logic expands to reveal the occulted operations of dreaming. That is, we can understand dreaming itself as a kind of integral for the analyses performed in and by waking thought, and waking thought is operationally inclusive of computation (as I’ve argued earlier). As an integral, though, dreaming offers the important additional dimension of having shed the alibi of coding innumerability numerically (as the Fourier integral does). The dream that I had of being a sound wasn’t firstly mediated through my human sensory apparatus, after all, but rather through and as sensibility itself (as Hanker argues).

The distinction thus introduced—the shedding of computation’s numerical alibi—is crucial, because it nests computation within dreaming. That is, Hansen shows that the consciously accessible figure of the Fourier integral gestures toward a radically expansive worldly sensibility that is constitutively in excess of human sensory apparatuses, and that works via a not-necessarily human symbolic economy of numerability. By this same logic, then, we can leverage Hansen’s bringing to sensibility of this radical exteriority—the relativizing work of language itself—in order to gain tentative purchase on the further expansiveness of dreaming’s a-numerable economy. It’s something of a dream come true.

Of course, thinking about such a radical expansion of dreaming alters the dreaming itself: as Hanker insists, “the act of dreaming a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Auralneiricizing Time (Listening Away)
• 2. Nietzsche in B-flat: Attuning to the ’pataphysics of data
• 3. Absolute Ventriloquy (or, Earing the Senses)
• 4. Psycho(tic)acoustics
• 5. The sound of both ears oozing: Chasms, collapses, and phono-digital networks
• 6. Motivational dreamers and the ’pataphysics of exploding heads
• 7. Imaginary magnitudes and the anoriginal hypocrisy that vanishes in the meantime
• 8. We are Lesion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint