Future Sounds

The Temporality of Noise

Stephen Kennedy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501321078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is a book about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age.

1

Critical Temporalities

In The Information Bomb (2005), Paul Virilio set out a compelling argument in relation to the task at hand here. He posed a counterpoint to Francis Fukuyama’s end of history proclamation wherein the dialectical grand narratives of modernism were regarded as having played themselves out having achieved all that they were going to achieve. He raised instead the possibility of the end of space, or of the end of geography, and of a small planet ‘held in suspension in the electronic ether of our modern means of telecommunication’ (7).¹ Virilio’s claim leads him to consider time rather than space as a means of understanding the rapid expansion and significance of the information society. He asked,

How are we to conceive the change wrought by computerization if we remain tied to an ideological approach, when the urgent need is in fact for a new geostrategic approach to discover the scale of the phenomenon that is upon us? And we need to do this to come back to Earth – not in the sense of the old earth which sustains and nourishes us, but of the unique celestial body we occupy. To return to the world, to its dimensions, and to the coming loss of those dimensions in the acceleration not now of history (which, with the loss of time, has just lost its concrete foundations), but of reality itself, with the new-found importance of this world time, a time whose instantaneity definitively cancels the reality of distances – the reality of those geographical intervals which only yesterday still organized the politics of nations and their alliances, the importance of which has been shown by the cold war in the age of (East/West) bloc politics. (8)

In making this manoeuvre, he was advocating a new kind of history, based now on the phenomenon described as ‘global time’. This was a kind of time that discontinued previous models of history with their concrete foundations, and ushered in a new kind of aspatial history that had been compressed by temporal instantaneity. Local time had been replaced by global time, and spatially reliable continents had lost their geographical foundations and were now constituted as tele-continents where distance was reduced almost to an irrelevance, and where simultaneity and instantaneity reigned. So, for Virilio, as it was for Ursula Le Guin’s Shevek as mentioned earlier, time, or more accurately the speed of transport and communications, had changed the nature of space. It had turned it inside out, making what were once localized internal concerns external and peripheral. And conversely, what were once diverse and diffused global concerns now constituted a concentrated singularity where nothing is or can be separated from anything else.

This rapid shift towards global interconnectivity meant that, in geographical terms, the real city, which for Virilio was situated in a very precise place that in turn underpinned the politics of nations, was being supplanted by the virtual city. This was a ‘de-territorialized meta-city’ that would form the basis of a new metropolitics, a politics that he thought would be identifiable by its totalitarian or rather ‘globalitarian’ character. This movement from the real to the virtual was an opening up of previously demarcated space. It was also an opening up of systems of thought that had previously created an inside and outside, order out of chaos and quiet out of noise. The aim here is to follow Virilios’s lead and let the redefined noise back in, and in doing so to further develop the idea of a kind of quantum entanglement that can be deployed to make meaningful connections among distinct geographical locations. Such connections should be capable of going beyond the representational logic of visual space, to embrace the fluid and temporal nature of acoustic space as a sonic economy wherein uniquely different and singular aspects are repeated in a universe that is configured and reconfigured constantly as Deleuze described (2008).

If finite demarcated spatial certainties, which were once the foundation of modern nation states and dominant models of economic exchange, that is to say modern political economy as a whole, are under threat, what is replacing them, or what has replaced them? Is the whole edifice of what we call ‘political economy’ so contingent on such spatial geometries and geographies as to render the concept/phrase/description meaningless in contemporary terms? Is time replacing or reconstituting space to the extent to which we need to develop entirely new modes of thinking? Virilio certainly thought so. For him temporality altered spatiality and the visual frames of reference that were used to make sense of it. But temporality itself is of only secondary concern within the framework of his thinking. He is concerned primarily with reconstituting space in the aftermath of the temporal assault. He is correct in citing the temporal as having compressed the spatial to such a significant degree as to warrant wholly new kinds of thinking, but instead of following the temporal line of argument to evoke acoustic or sonic modes of thinking, he attempts to reconfigure the visual in such a fashion so as to prolong its efficacy.

He says, ‘The more time intervals are abolished, the more the image of space dilates’ (2005: 12). As part of this process everything is illuminated and brought into view as reality, and the more it becomes subject to what he calls planetary grand scale optics. Day and night are no longer distinguishable in what is now the always visible ‘world time.’ Blinded by the light, he says, other senses must be deployed in a cosmos where optics and sonics merge. This optical–sonic motif is significant and should be approached as a proliferation of discrete and discontinuous digital elements travelling at great speed, flattening and in some cases eradicating, specific spatiotemporal dimensions to create a continuity. As such this global singularity should be acknowledged as being possessed of both continuous and discontinuous features that are present as both wave and particle, as will be discussed in more detail later.

But Virilio seems to do something quite different. Although recognizing a closing in of the duality, he imbues the visual with acoustic or sonic characteristic, rather than allowing both to exist simultaneously.

This is an active (wave) optics, replacing in a thoroughgoing way the passive (geometric) optics of the era of Galileo’s spy-glass. And doing so as though the loss of the horizon-line of geographical perspective imperatively necessitated the establishment of a substitute horizon: the artificial horizon of a screen or a monitor, capable of permanently displaying the new preponderance of the media perspective over the immediate perspective of space. (14)

Having flattened time and space into a continuous universe, false discontinuities are introduced as markers of perspective and aids to orientation. The rapid proliferation of this artificial vision, this virtualization as Virilio calls it, has been brought about by the contraction of geographical distance that in turn was ‘brought about by the temporal compression of instantaneous telecommunications’. The result was that the world had been split into two – between the real and the virtual – and to understand it Virilio moves towards a stereoscopic–phonic approach. ‘As with stereoscopy and stereophony, which distinguishes left from right, bass from treble, to make it easier to perceive audiovisual relief, it is essential today to effect a split in primary reality by developing a stereo-reality, made up on the one hand of the actual reality of immediate appearances and, on the other, of a virtual reality of media trans-appearances’. (15)

Here Virilio moves tantalizingly close to a sonic approach before once again returning to visual and appearances. His stereoscopic proposal, although it serves to reinforce the real-virtual dualism, does so in a way that at least raises the possibility of simultaneous reception and a merging of the real and the virtual to create a singular phenomenon, even if is not sufficiently developed. As a concept stereoscopy can be explored and further extrapolated with reference to Wilfrid Sellars whose ideas will be set out in detail shortly.

The proliferation of these new kinds of optics served to bring light everywhere, eradicate the shadows, and re-energize that which had previously been hidden. They also served to predict the future to some degree: ‘Since a picture is worth a thousand words, the aim of multimedia is to turn our old television into a kind of domestic telescope for seeing, for foreseeing (in a manner not unlike present weather-forecasting) the world that lies just around the corner’ (16).

This means that a traveller who is well prepared can access a picture of what a place is going to be like before they get there. But in terms of predicting future events in any really meaningful way it is less useful. It is possible to get an accurate picture of a place that one is yet to inhabit, but this is a static representation that relies on resemblance and the likelihood that it will not have changed significantly when one actually gets there. But it tells us little of the unfolding nature of events that occur before you arrive, and nothing of the events yet to occur as repetition. Hence the premonitory characteristics of such optics are limited. And although Virilio invokes an interesting four-dimensional approach, this book wants to ask what might be at stake if we invoke the fifth dimension? Can we ever know ‘the world that lies just around the corner’? To do so will mean thinking in a way that is not bound by visualization. Virilio’s is a linear idea of prediction, one that lays out the future along a representable timeline. I am more interested in a non-linear universe that is unpredictable and that at best can be known in terms of the likely repetition of certain patterns.

Virilio’s concentration on optics is interesting in relation to the introductory discussions around continuity and discontinuity as expounded by Bergson and Bachelard and the need for continuous discontinuity that draws on the wave particle duality that allows the discrete nature of the digital to also demonstrate the fluid characteristics of a wave, which in turn calls for the use of noise and sound as analogical devices suitable for explaining digital complexity. But his failure to fully embrace the sonic as a means of understanding digital temporality means we must draw on other sources to provide the secure ground on which a sonic methodology might rest.

What is required is a reconstituted approach to noise and sound as historical phenomena that can account for contemporary conditions. In developing such an approach, it is important to challenge the dichotomy of nature and science that too often places noise, and by association sound, in the former category. Such dichotomous and dialectical approaches regard noise and sound as natural permanent and unchanging, although technology is seen as a human and cultural phenomenon that is historical in so far as it is always changing. For Jonathan Sterne, sound takes its place in the technological realm (2003). It is a very human, cultural category that is historically contingent rather than temporally fixed. As such it is not constrained by the phenomenological privileging that leads to theological tendencies in Western thought. Such a tendency led Jaques Derrida to reverse the ontological privilege in favour of writing, a move that for Sterne was unnecessary. For Sterne, it is not a question of audio or visual but of placing to the fore the role and significance of sound as both a driver of history and as historically contingent. Building on Sterne’s work, it may be possible to develop a mode of thinking that uses noise, sound and vibration, as organizing principles without recourse to a metaphysics of presence. That is, without falling back into the visual and to writing as both Heidegger and Derrida did.

A metaphysics of presence assumes a direct engagement with experience that is immediate, visceral and ‘natural’, whereas writing implores a critical detachment – a removal to a distance that affords intellectual contemplation. Sterne challenges this notion. He has carried out a detailed assessment of the historical conditions out of which sound technologies emerged. In The Audible Past, he plots the trajectory of sound technologies and assesses their impact. As a result of these technologies, he says: ‘The voice became a little unmoored from the body, and people’s ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Critical Temporalities
• 2 Noise and Political Economy
• 3 Remembering the Future: 1977–2017
• 4 Continuous Discontinuity: A Non-Linear History of Noise
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page