The Sonorous, the Haptic and the Intensive

Abstract

In a recent discussion of his work, the Australian composer David Chesworth described his Melbourne-based sound installation 'Proximities' as an example of 'disturbed space'. (1) Conceived by Chesworth and his collaborator Sonia Leber as 'a sonic corridor of human voices', 'Proximities' is a soundscape built up from the artists' recordings of the singing voices of people from fifty-three Commonwealth nations now living in Australia. The work is situated on the William Barak Bridge (a broad pedestrian bridge near the centre of Melbourne, named after a leading nineteenth-century Aboriginal painter and activist) and allows its visitors to hear the sounds of the city alongside those of the installation. The sounds of the installation, moreover, are evenly distributed throughout space, via computer-fed speakers along both sides of the bridge, in a manner directly opposed to that of the concert tradition, where the listener is seated before a performing group. Does this 'disturbed space' constitute the disruption of a natural condition--the postmodern composer's typically transgressive attempt to work against the natural orientations of the human body? This would certainly seem to be the case according to one particularly dominant strain of postmodern theory, which insists that we perceive the world through always already ordered systems and that there can be no experience or event outside these systems. (2) This particular strain of postmodern theory, which we may broadly characterise as the deconstructive approach, would present a distanced, critical and oppositional perspective with respect to its object of study (in this case, music). Theory, in this acceptation, would thus constitute a continuation of the transcendentally ideal turn of Kantianism: (3) we cannot know things as they are in themselves, it would argue, for we always experience the given world as other than, or in relation to, ourselves. There is no unmediated reality or event; the world is always lived and experienced as this or that determination of being, in relation to our own point of view. The 'sense' of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus appear to lie in a reaction against the history of art itself: in its refusal, for example, both of the staging of the musical work of art and of the recorded piece that may be repeated through time. (4) This position may be productively contrasted, however, with another, equally postmodern sense of theory: that to be found in the vitalist, expressivist and intuition-oriented philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Resolutely refusing a pre-established world of relations, systems and points of view, this theoretical enterprise aims instead to experience the differential power of life in its very potential to constitute relations. According to this perspective, music would not constitute a referential system: we would read or hear music not as it relates to a system of signs always already given in advance but, rather, according to its capacity to transform bodies, organs and territories. This 'sense' (5) of Chesworth and Leber's soundscape would thus enable a distinctly positive understanding of the postmodern, in which the transformation of the system (the preestablished organisation of sound) would disturb the form of content, enabling bodies to be affected in ever new ways. (6) There would be not so much 'a' musical work, which may be heard from various distances or points of view, as a distribution of sound that is each time different depending on the situation of the visitor, with every position generating its own discrete network of sound relations. (7) This essay aims to explore and defend the sense of this second postmodern theoretical approach to music. Only if we think beyond the first sense of theory as a critical relation to life and experience, we argue, will we able to encounter the force of music. Music is not one system among others (akin to the formal systems of language in the narrow sense); rather, it is only because there is musicality--which Deleuze and Guattari variously refer to as the 'refrain' or as 'rhythm' (8)--that more narrowly formal linguistic systems are themselves possible. …