Petra Klusmeyer
FIGURE 1: FRAMES 1-24
SOUND/NON-SOUND
In the brief text that follows, I invite you to think about the notion of sound and non-sound. Consider this to be an experiment or provocation—either term applies. This is an attempt to explore what happens when nothing does; or in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Nothing happens, and yet everything changes” (1991/1994, p. 158). To proceed, let’s summon up the image of a darkened gallery space in which we come upon a 16 mm film projection that shows a single 14-second take in continuous repetition (see Fig. 5). The film loop is silent, however, the projector emits a whir of sounds caused by the engine’s fan and film-carrying mechanism—mainly, celluloid fluttering along the spools. I want us to pay attention to the in-between, the gap, the grid, the threshold from one fraction of a second to another; one single frame to another (see Fig. 1); sound to non-sound. Take this as an exercise, a meditation to conjure the between of the in-between, what I call ‘middling with/in the event’.
For this we look to Figure 1: Frames 1-24. Here we see a series of twenty-four images, a digital transfer from the first second of the film loop, that is, the first 24 single frames from a total of 366 frames. The layout allows us to read the images from left to right, top to bottom; or, let the eyes scan across the page, thus sensing the surface, not merely cognizing it. We feel the horizontal tilt across the plane. We grasp a body of water that emerges from a (visual) plateau, to then drop downwards. We intuit the frozen dynamism of a cascade, albeit captured at a point
in time, it continues to vibrate the binary complex of 0’s and 1’s. Also discern the flow of thresholds; the rhythm composed of frame 1-gap-2-gap-3-gap-etc. The apparent continuity made of cuts and bits; abstracting the sounding (throbbing) second into a flow of discontinuities. This presents a semblance of a sonic event; it is and yet
isn’t—at least not in the sense of being perceived or heard by an ear (human or non). Though the throb or pulse is felt—only just so, nonconsciously tingling the body and mind: “Vibrations do not disappear, but dissipate, echoing all the while, for energy is conserved. Sounds spread out, they become less and less contracted, they fuse, but they still remain” (Evens 2005, p. 14); indeed, their energy of vibration causing a quiver in each droplet of water (any medium as a matter of fact) seemingly forever. A quiver, a ripple immanent to the rhythm-surface, twenty-four frames per second, inclusive of the gaps between—sound and non-sound?
Semblance is not an (auditory) illusion; nor is it phantasmagoric—some kind of apparition that belongs to the imagination alone. Brian Massumi (2011) suggests that a semblance makes the virtual appear; put this way, “When a semblance is “seen,” it is virtually seen” (Ibid., p. 18). Here, when a semblance is ‘heard’, it is virtually heard. It is a listening-through to the incorporeal dimension of the sonic, the energetic broadband of the flux from which a sounding event actualizes, say,
as the clamorous roar of a waterfall or the quiet whisper of a leaf’s descent onto its surface. Let’s follow the trajectory of the amber-colored leaf as seen in Figures 2 and 3. Before noticing the leaf itself, we take in a series of images, again of select fi lm frames as well as lines and shapes; nearly hieroglyphic, we may attempt to decipher a meaning—given that ‘meaning’ is inscribed in the sign (still image, graph, shape, color, etc.) as energy is transcribed into matter (and vice versa). In other words, meaning equals energy, as energy equals matter—as the latter two are known to be interchangeable modes of the same reality. To decipher or to read is then not an act on the side of the subject but rather a conglomeration of forces from which the interpreter emerges. Consider this experiment as exemplar: think of the notion of sound/non-sound. To do so, that is, to engage in contem- plation of the paradox, I endeavor to suggest that we fi rst confront it halfway; not a thinking-of but a thinking-in: we look to the forward slash (marking a diff erence and a sameness of the terms), thus the middling instant, the between. ‘Th inking’, following Deleuze, “is not a natural exercise but always a second power of thought, born under the constraint of experience as a material power, a force” (Semetsky 2010, p. 92). Listen-through to the leaf’s passage from the top of the image down, down it falls. Encounter the leaf’s fl ight along the arrow’s path. What do you hear now?
‘I’ hear neither stream nor leaf; I feel the downward pull as the leaf’s earthbound fall. I tried; do not try, don’t think but ‘be-ware’ and listen-through and -inwards, eventually (middling with/in the event). What do you hear now?
“The event is coextensive with becoming, and becoming is itself coexten- sive with language” (Deleuze 1969/1990, p. 8). In Deleuze, “paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit” (Ibid, p. 9). Sound forward slash non-sound designates a sliding back and forth along the limit of comprehension, or rather, ‘prehension’ (a term coined by Alfred North Whitehead to denote a noncognitive ‘feeling’, “a purely immanent potential power, […] or pure ‘affection’ before any division into form and matter” [Robinson 2010, p. 124]). It is through experience (the eye ‘seeing-feeling’, the ear ‘hearing-feeling’—inhale-gap-exhale-gap-inhale-gap-etc.) the rhythmic skid on-the-grid and off-the-grid. We submerge in-
side-out, outside-in and above, below the ‘material-discursive’ force-field (cf. Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012; Barad 2003); Figure 4 resembles all there can become and still is not: the event “eternally that which just happened and which will happen, never that which is happening” (Deleuze 1969/1990, p. 8).
We behold the remnants of a graph, depicting air pressure over time: the unsound sound (wave); signs undone and restated, constructing the complexity of
the very darkest plane. This perplexion of the between affords an experiential event that escapes common ground and gives way to unheard-of frequencies. Here we are, everything happens on the edge between matter and matter as it comes to matter; “between things and propositions” (Ibid.). Here we are again—loop, return, and zigzag—Frames 1-24 where, “Nothing happens, and yet everything changes” (Deleuze 1991/1994, p. 158). The event of sound/non-sound lives in the paradox of being and non-being.
References
Barad, Karan. 2003. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’ Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801-831. Deleuze, Gilles. 1969/1990. The Logic of Sense. London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1991/1994. What Is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University.
Dolphijn, Rick & van der Tuin, Iris. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Evens, Adan. 2005. Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2011. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Robinson, Keith. 2010. ‘Back to Life: Deleuze, Whitehead and Process.’ Deleuze Studies 4 (1): 120–133.
Semetsky, Inna. 2010. ‘Experience.’ In: Parr, A. ed. The Deleuze Dictionary Revised Edition.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 91-93.
FIGURE 5: SOUND/NON-SOUND (2013)