Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework (Part 1)
This is the second chapter of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
Listening: overcoming the limitations of a visual model of thought.
What does it mean to be truly listening? In Moon’s career to listen is a mode of interaction that opens to sensual apperception, one that denies the constructed identity to find the uniqueness in sound. In the king’s story, similarly, listening is the mode of interaction that asignifies what previously carried an indexical relation. Listening, then, is a direct breach in the predominantly visual creation of meaning. To listen is not only to be all ears but a symbolic mode where all senses become equally important in creating a subjectivity.
Take Moon’s film CALLING THE NEW GODS • SENYAWA live in Java (2012), as an example. Shot in various location around Jakarta, the music from duo Senyawa is the foundation on which the film is developed. Instead of attributing signification to what is shown, the electronically modified Indonesian instrument distorts, together with the manic-possession-like singing, the bucolic rural vision of country-side Indonesia. Something is growing underneath, that cannot be seen, cannot be understood, but that can be listened too.
In the opening chapter of Jacques Attali’s Noise, when discussing the dominant mode of scientific thought (and philosophical thought) based on the visual conception, the French author writes that “our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning.”[1] There is an important mistranslation here that Adrienne Janus caught in an article discussing the anti-ocular turn in philosophy. Janus notes that meaning here is misinterpreted in the English translation from the French word “les sens.” A tricky word that carries the idea of meaning but also of sensual perception (among other unfoldings that this word has). The original text meant senses and the right translation would be that visual conceptualization in scientific and philosophical thought “has always desired… to castrate our senses.”
What a difference! From vision castrating meaning to vision castrating our senses! Attali follows-up that, to counter this sensual castration one must listen, that listening works as a “mode of sensual apperception.”[2] In the English translation, listening ends as a form to counter the castration of meaning, implying that to listen is to understand. But in the original, listening is a way to open our senses, to counter the optical castration.
This simple mistake perfectly introduces a problem that haunts continental philosophy, that of sensation and perception as opposed to the intellect. Understanding has historically been linked with the visual, the ocular. Even the word “theory” already carries the weight of thinking with seeing. Heidegger in Science and Reflection probes the etymology of the word by looking into where it came from, theõrein.
The verb theõrein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horaõ. Thea (d. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself, the outward appearance in which it offers itself. Plato names this aspect in which what presences shows what it is, eidos. To have seen this aspect, eidenai, is to know [wissen]. The second root word in theõrein, horaõ, means: to look at something attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. Thus it follows that theõrein is thean horan, to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight-seeing-to linger with it.[3]
To overcome this impulse “already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes”[4] Heidegger turns towards aural metaphors and the acoustics. Adrienne Janus draws attention to Martin Jay’s book Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century Thought (1993) for its genealogy on anti-ocularcentrism in western thought. Jay, through a survey reaching back to Plato’s cave, states that western philosophy “has tended to accept without question the traditional sensual hierarchy.”[5] He then goes on to map out the thinkers inspired by Heidegger, Husserl, and Nietzsche that will manifest “hostility to visual primacy” and develop an alternative approach at some level.
Jay’s book, written in 1992, leaves Jean-Luc Nancy out as Listening would only be published ten years later. Nevertheless, Janus interprets that “Heidegger is a major touchstone and Nancy a culminating figure.”[6] And while Listening is not without its flaws,[7] Nancy brings a renewed strength by asking “is listening something of which philosophy is capable?”[8] The question, therefore, is the possibility of a mode of thinking that can reintegrate sensual perception.
In Moon anchoring his practice on listening as a mode of thinking, how does this transpose to his films? Can a film, like CALLING THE NEW GODS, counter the castration of senses only by shifting its foundation from the image to sound?
This task in itself is conflictuous, since to theorize sound, as Heidegger reminds us, the inheritance of the visual bias comes attached. Nancy recognizes this difficulty and the challenge of this impossible equation:
…figure and idea, theatre and theory, spectacle and speculation suit each other better, superimpose themselves on each other, even can be substituted for each other with more ease than the audible and the intelligible, or the sonorous and the logical.[9]
The outcome is an “otocentric” mode of thinking based on listening that can be expanded to all the senses as Janus perceptively notes.[10] Moreover, what is most surprising, in doing so, Nancy schematizes a response to three limitations in a visually based philosophy. The first is the subject-object paradigm and the dichotomies that comes with it: immanence-transcendence, body-mind, other-self, absence-presence, material-spiritual, writing-speech. The second limitation, is the view for which signification and meaning is the final objective. Nancy, in his previous books, expresses his ideal on this when in The Birth to Presence (1993) he writes: “A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification.”[11] The last limitation is that with this Cartesian epistemology of sense-making, it inevitably occludes the body and the sensual perception.
Returning to CALLING THE NEW GODS, the use of Senyawa’s music to blur signification and meaning is only one of the three aspects of this otocentric mode of thinking. But this does not mean that the other two traits are not present. One moment, midway through the film, embodies how Moon ruptures the subject-object paradigm and resituates the body in the forefront.
Moving from the opening part of the film, in countryside Indonesia, Moon starts a sequence that happens in a trash dump around the city of Jakarta. Cows are shepherded through the garbage, people collect whatever is still useful, and Senyawa continue their invocation on top of this wasteland. The instrument being played (that was electronically modified) is originally called Sasando. It’s native to Indonesia and believed to already be in use around the 7th century. Suryadi (one member of the duo that forms Senyawa) plays his adapted Sasando on top of the pile of trash, he scales from a primitive string sound to the distortions of an electric guitar.
It isn’t a dichotomy between traditional and contemporary, but a gradual progression with many levels. Likewise, the value that the society gives to sounds is reflected in this scene, what may seem useless for many people still has value in this dumpsite. Moon connects Senyawa’s “call to the new gods” as one where every place can be a ritualistic site. The spiritual doesn’t discern any differences in the material, it all can be used to invoke the senses.
The body, in turn, is brought to the forefront, for it is the miraculous “fleshy throat,” stripped from all the constructions of identity. The singer, Shabara, nuances between a guttural attacking low voice, peaceful melodies, and screams. His voice resonates throughout his whole body, shaking its mass, and convulsing its shape. Voice, music, the sounds of Indonesia, and the image come together to propose a film that first and foremost is the outcome of listening. Instead of searching for meaning, creating and provoking a sensual apperception.
CALLING THE NEW GODS • SENYAWA live in Java further expands how to overcome these limitations of a visual based philosophy (the paradigm subject-object, meaning as the final objective, occlusion of the body and senses), which will form the three cores of this segment after some misconceptions about listening are clarified.
What is it to be listening?
The word listening in itself (écouter) is a start to map and prepare the foundation for Nancy’s theory. The scholar Brian Kane notes that “unlike English, where we contrast the passive form, to hear, with the active or intensive, to listen, the French language can exploit a larger vocabulary for describing a variety of ‘modes of listening’ through the use of verbs.”[12]
These verbs would be ouïr, comprendre, écouter, and entendre.[13] The debate around these verbs is a useful one that unlocks the full meaning of certain passages that in English was lost in encouraging the reader to find a dichotomy between “sensibility versus the understanding” instead of oscillations “of difference within the same.”[14] A discrepancy that further on in this thesis will have more significant consequences as the research dives deeper into Deleuze.
Pierre Schaeffer, in his book Traité des Objects Musicaux (1968) considers the differences between the verbs related to aural interaction. Ouïr is related to inattentive audition, sounds that pass by the listener without being noticed, like the air-conditioner hum in a library. Comprendre is connected to languages, an audition mode focused on extracting the message from a proposition; a listening tied to understanding. Écouter, Schaeffer defends (and this is one of the biggest differences with Nancy), is an audition mode tying the sounds as indices of objects and events. Its tied to situating sounds, their distance, and spatial locations. In identifying them in the surrounding sonorous world. What one would do if searching for a bird through its singing, and more problematically, what initially leads the king to paranoia in A King Listens.
Entendre, finally, is the one that Schaeffer dedicates more time to expand on its meaning: “For entendre, we retain the etymological sense, ‘to have an intention.’ What I hear [j’entends], what is manifested to me is a function of this intention [intention].”[15] Here the sound itself is the object of attention, not the origin or the comprehension of the sound, but to focus and take the sound as intended object of audition. To do so, one has to shift from écouter to entendre by ignoring the source and actively focus on the sound attributes, just by doing so the presence of Schaeffer’s sound object is called forth. This background is then essential to begin with Nancy for in his opening page he writes:
…hasn’t philosophy, forcibly and in advance, superimposed or substituted upon listening something that might be more on the order of l’entente? [translated to English as understanding][16]
Even the translator’s notes trying to clarify the meaning of “understanding” doesn’t differentiate the importance of the original using entendre (which in tendre also carries the meaning to stretch or tension) instead of comprendre, which would more appropriately translate to understanding.
Nancy doesn’t explicitly make any connections to Schaeffer’s conception of the verb entendre, and both Nancy’s écouter and Schaeffer’s entendre share some resemblances in its call for a non-significational and non-indexical mode of listening. What distinguishes Nancy, though, is the criticism that’s lost in translation, of entendre as having “a subject possessing the capacity for attention who wills its direction; and an intentional object towards which this attention is directed.”[17]
In light of this, when Nancy discusses the tension and balance of the philosopher as between “a sense (that one écoute) and a truth (that one entend)”[18] it’s not one versus the other, sense vs. meaning, but rather a smaller variation and difference between openness (écouter) and intentionality (entendre). The grounding questions seem similar to Schaeffer when Nancy asks:
What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message? What secret is yielded — hence also made public — when we listen to a voice, an instrument, or a sound just for itself?
Nevertheless, he soon moves forward to where the actual interest in Nancy’s essay lies. It’s within this framework that Nancy reaches the question that introduces his postulations:
(…) What does to be listening, to be all ears, as one would say “to be in the world”, mean? What does it mean to exist according to listening, for it and through it, what part of experience and truth is put into play? What is at play in listening, what resonates in it, what is the tone of listening or its timbre? Is even listening itself sonorous?[19]
At the Edge of Meaning
Nancy is adamant in differentiating listening from hearing, écouter from the other verbs. He recognizes such a task is not easy and remarks two distinct sound tendencies and our reaction to it. The first is to listen to someone whose words being voiced we want to understand, in this case, sound tends to disappear, “the listener strains towards a present sense beyond sound.” The latter is music, where sense rises from sound itself independent from outside signals or signs. In both cases listening only has two propensities — “the one where sound and sense mix together and resonate in each other, or through each other.” In other words, either sense is searched for in sound or “sound, resonance, is also looked for in sense.”[20]
The solution devised is an intermediate state in between both tendencies, a stance of suspension in the resonance to find sense not in sound itself (as Schaeffer asks) or in the signifier, but in the action of its existence, in its resonance. Thus, “to be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin…”[21]
Moon’s previous affirmation that “the music is the pretext. What I am interested in is the human interaction”,[22] echoes this stance of finding a way to create the resonance. It distances Moon’s listening from Schaeffer’s, bringing it closer to Nancy’s conceptualization — the power of music is not what it means, or expresses, it’s found in resonating, in creating the space for sense.
Before continuing the next logical step, and explore resonance, I would like to delve into what is sense. Sara Nadal-Melsió, in her work on the artists Allora & Calzadilla, mentions that logos has many forgotten meanings and that originally in Greek one of them is, in fact, musical interval and suggests that “something remains immeasurable, forever escaping the calculus of reason.”[23] Taking this route, and understanding sound without linguistics, one remains with pure sense.
A place of existence that can be fully understood if returning to a period where linguistics is still not part of life, that of the womb and a newborn infant. With infinite acoustic-articulations and always listening for a sense beyond meaning, the baby is the perfect example of Nancy’s stance on how one should listen. Nadal-Melsió compliments — “if language begins with a reduction of that stupendous phonic ability into a finite oppositional organization, a return to the primal acoustic scene must involve an opening up to the infinite sonorous singularity that preceded it.”[24] Thus, the baby, free of any sonorous significations and signs, is the perfect example for Nancy. It’s as if “we never listen to anything but the non-coded, what is not yet framed in a system of signifying references, and we never hear [entend] anything but the already coded, which we decode.”[25]
The fetus and newborn infant furthermore represent Nancy’s multilayered interpretation for the word sense. A topic that he had previously explored in his books A Finite Thinking (2003) and Being Singular Plural (2000). Sense in his work assumes a concept inspired by Nietzsche (especially his book The Gay Science) and opens the word up to include signifying, sensual and spatiotemporal directional sense. In this manner, the material world in which we find ourselves and meaning are the same, the world is only sense “on the grounds that there could be nothing else. Sense and the world are coextensive, perfectly commensurate, with no superfluous meaning overhanging this coexstensivity.”[26]
Through this interpretation, sense is more than merely meaning as sign, its an alternative mode of perception. A mode connected not to understanding (comprendre) but to a primal pre-language existence.[27] To which from here forth, to help differentiate from the common interpretation of sense I’ll refer to Nancy’s conception in its original form, sens. This development of a new englobing sens comes as an answer to his previous criticism of signification:
Signification is […] the very model of a structure or system that is closed upon itself […] Before the terrifying or maddening abyss that is opened between the possibility that thought is empty and the correlative possibility that reality is chaos […] Signification is the assurance that closes the gaping void by rendering its two sides homogenous.[28]
Having this conception of sens helps illuminate then what it is to be “listening to the beyond-meaning [l’écoute de l’outre-sens].”[29] Once again a deceptive translation, which this time, the translator recognized and inserted the original to clarify that more than beyond-meaning it’s another-sense. Nancy moves from the western thought of sense to a primordial, sensual, spatial and signifying sens. For it’s through this alternative sens that signification is not the final perspective but a small part of the spectrum of perceiving the world.
As CALLING THE NEW GODS • SENYAWA live in Java develops, it is Nancy’s concept of sens that Moon tries to convey. He doesn’t entirely break with signification as the visual can still be understood at its basic level (rice fields, people, cars, trash, and city) but it is only a small part of the work, which moreover than being understood must be sensed in all the gradual differentiations that emerge from the space opened by the resonance of the music. As it ends, the visual becomes almost indistinguishable, since Moon shoots Senyawa playing at night only with the lights from the street lamps. In impairing the visual, he further forces a space where sens is what matters.
The Resonant Self
The question that arises next is how to enter into this primal scene where opening to sens becomes possible? Can a filmmaker enter the resonance in a neonate state? For Nancy, the answer lies in displacing the self encountered in the dualistic subject vs. object. Forced with the impossibility of the “I” returning to this primordial mode, Nancy looks towards changing where the self is located. He searches for a new self in the endless referrals, in the process of resonance, a space that he denominates renvoi. Another difficult term to translate as it means “return (as in return to sender), return a gift, send back (a parcel), repeat (a phrase or passage in music), refrain, refer, allude back…”[30]
The self, in this case, breaks away from the phenomenological tradition to mean “nothing other than a form or function of referral.”[31] Hence its outside to a proper self (I) and neither is intrinsic or exists to the self of an other. Its presence conditioned to only exist and identify “itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense.”[32]
This differentiates greatly from Schaeffer for whom the self-subject “tends” or “stretches” his ear to sound, sound always carrying meaning, an intentionality to be heard in this two-way communication. In Nancy’s sens, self and sound share the same “form, structure or movement” in the renvoi. It’s no longer intentional, and the self only exists (or insists) in the echo present in this infinite referral.
Janus acutely observes that for the self to take place in renvoi, in the way Nancy proposes, the listening subject becomes less-human. “In other words, all objects, insofar as they resonate, tend to become listening subjects.”[33] This is a central point for in posing anew the question of the self he also opens the listening subject to an infinite variety of possibilities (to which Janus finds seven of them in Listening). Moreover, resonance isn’t only a condition for listening (écouter), but it’s the very “beginning and opening up of sens.”[34]
In renvoi (the infinite sonic referrals), the sound is methexic rather than mimetic, “not concerned with representation or appearance but with the relations established by the sonorous and its duration.”[35] Imbued with this idea is the concept that the process of renvoi is a diachronic one. Physically there is a space of time (as small as it may be) for a sound wave to envelop and reflect back its echo to its origin. A reflection altered by the “timbre” of the bodies that it encountered. This process is endlessly repeated, each time evolving and transforming the sound. “The acoustic is, then, a site for encounters” concludes Nadal-Melsió.[36]
This encounter is the link to the next important aspect in Moon. For these encounters to happen, for the resonating self to occur, there invariably is a resonant vibrational space. Rather than objectifying in a visual plane Nancy delegates this spatial aspect to the renvoi itself, epitomizing it with the line in Wagner’s Parsifal Act 1 — “You see, son, here, time becomes space.” The acoustic space is created, or better, opened, with listening and the sonorous event.
Calvino, on the other hand, brings a more sinister metaphor, ending the king’s story with a renvoi that takes over all the rest — “Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs…”. Nancy, in being concerned only philosophically with the implications of listening eludes the physicality of sound, which I will address later on in the section called Music.
Regardless, Nancy’s self is simultaneous with the space-time created by the renvoi. This acoustic presence is one that envelops and shows itself fully. It’s not originated from a logic of manifestation but a different one, more like evocation: “while manifestation brings presence to light, evocation summons (convokes, invokes) presence to itself. It does not establish anymore than it supposes it already established. It anticipates its arrival and remembers its departure, itself remaining suspended and straining between the two: time and sonority, sonority as time and as meaning.”[37]
With Nancy’s process of renvoi, sens becomes independent, only depending on the sonic interaction to exist. By doing so, he makes possible a sort-of primal space for sens to resonate and evolve. The evolution of sens through the endless encounters is what begins and gives the presence for this self to insist in a space-time that is opened by the sonorous event.
In sum, Moon is unable to enter the resonance as a newborn infant and purely listen, but this becomes a minor problem as Nancy’s post-phenomenological self, once it’s summoned into existence, becomes independent. The beauty of the series Petites Planètes is indebted to Moon’s work in searching for the sonorous event, preparing the renvoi and invoking the self into existence, so that he may interact with it and find sens. The title CALLING THE NEW GODS, when grasped through this process of a filmmaker that listens, refers precisely to this conjuring of the self.
The sequence at the market, where Senyawa is positioned in the middle of a circle of passersby, epitomizes the process mentioned above. Moon takes the duo into the heart of Jakarta, setting-up an improvised performance in the middle of a market where most people there are at lost at what is happening. The public spaces assume in Moon’s work, since the Take Away Shows, a location where he can set in motion the renvoi and introduce all the subjacent bodies as listening subjects. The soundscapes of these places are also an integral part in the renvoi, dialoguing with the music to open sens so that the self can come into existence. As Moon wonders around, responding and interacting with the renvoi, he attempts to capture the sens within the encounters that are happening between him and everything that is participating in this aural exchange.
The Sonorous Body
Each body in Moon’s films, deliberately or not, ends up being part of the renvoi. The musician’s body, in particular, is the center of Moon’s focus for it creates the sonorous event and is transformed by it together with all that surrounds it. The focus on the body is reflected in the conclusion of Nancy’s book. Listening transforms the body, it becomes an echo chamber, stripped of its organs (a body without organs), an organon, redefined through his concept of rhythm and timbre. A “body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul.”[38]
To understand the development to reach this point a return to the primal scene of the fetus and new-born baby is needed:
Perhaps we should thus understand the child who is born with his first cry as himself being — his being or his subjectivity — the sudden expansion of an echo chamber, a vault where what tears him away and what summons him resound at once, setting in vibration a column of air, of flesh, which sounds as its apertures: body and soul of some one new and unique. Someone who comes to himself by hearing himself cry…[39]
Thus, Nancy’s reconfiguration of the body dates back to the birth (even fetus) in thinking of the body as the first potential for sensual (sens) self-reflection. In nativity, Nancy posits that the body, whether female or male, is already an acoustic organ capable of renvoi, capable of resonating and of sens — perception, directional, dynamic, and maybe the least important, sens as meaning.
It’s from this indistinct organ that Nancy’s body arises (does it need to be human?),[40] a body “before any distinction of places and functions of resonance, as being, wholly (and ‘without organs’), a resonance chamber or column of beyond-meaning.”[41] The body resembling Senyawa’s modified Sasando, player and instrument merging into one. Alternatively, Nancy’s example of the little hole in the clarinet that better explains his “matrice” of resonance — the ultimate body a belly-mouth matrix where listening begins and ends. Where “the ear opens onto the sonorous cavern that we then become.”[42]
Douglas Kahn, in his book Noise, Water, Meat (1999), gives the best illustration when interpreting that modern aurality might very well started with Lautréamont’s 1868 novel Les Chants de Maldoror. A quite obscure novel at the time that philosophically opened the debate that would gain full force a decade later with the invention of recording. In the book, the character was born deaf; he’s unable to listen and to find his own voice until he decides to search the mysteries of heaven. There he encounters, what Maldoror calls, the Creator — a horrendous and terrific anthropophagic creature on top of a pile of shit and gold. As Maldoror saw those around him being eaten by this creature, even being deaf and unable to hear the noises of those bodies being crunched and torn apart, something inside him happens:
Finally, my breast so constricted that I could not breathe the life-giving air quickly enough, my lips opened slightly and I uttered a cry…a cry so piercing…that I heard it! The shackles of my ears were suddenly broken, my ear-drum cracked as the shock of the sound mass of air which I had expelled with such energy, and a strange phenomenon took place in the organ condemned by nature. I had just heard a sound! A fifth sense had developed in me![43]
Like the first cry of a newborn, Maldoror’s impossible scream uncompartementalizes his body, turning it into an echo chamber. The voice opening the barriers to écouter, the newfound organon for sens. As Kahn notes “his scream neither addressed the Creator [the name of the creature] nor reached the ears of his creations [those being eaten]. It merely announced the presence of himself”[44] or what I would argue, announced the presence of the self in renvoi, of a listening to the resonance of his scream.
Furthermore, Maldoror’s scream contains in itself rhythm reployment/deployment of the sound that resonates inside and outside his body, an invaginating sound that forms a hollow. Rhythm, as Nancy reminds us, “not only as scansion (imposing form on the continuous) but also as an impulse.”[45]
While Kahn uses this example to move on to the recording process of listening to your own voice, Maldoror’s capability to listen, deriving from his capability to scream, brings to the forefront the importance of the body in forming the subject, not as an I, but in the process of sound itself:
But what is the figure that is throbbed as well as stressed, ‘broached by time’, if not a figure that has already lost itself and that is still expecting itself and that calls to itself (which cries out to self, which gives itself or receives a name)? What else is it but a subject — and then isn’t the subject itself the starting of time in both values of the genitive: it opens it and it is opened by it? Isn’t the subject the attack of time?[46]
The attack of time is precisely the moment that Lautréamont writes about. Before the scream, before the sound, there is a friction, the fold/unfold of the beginning of a dance, the body finding its possibility and necessity of resonance. And from this friction, the rhythm opened up in time, forms the other intrinsic and indivisible value of the sonorous body — the timbre.
Moon’s work One Man Nation, is a constant build-up to the attack of time. The film begins with the artist Marc Chia searching for sounds in the streets of Singapore, looking for a possibility to start the dance between him, his environment and music. Moon focus almost half of the film in Chia’s process of collecting the soundscape, to later concentrate on how he will now use all these samples to create a renvoi.
As the musician spins into motion the sounds that he collected, a friction starts to arise. From the interaction between him and the sonic, a necessity to resonate emerges. Chia, who has not spoken a word throughout the whole film, screams, the force of his breath opens his body and turns it into an echo chamber. The belly-mouth matrix undeafens his timbre. Sound releases him from the imprisonment of the visual. A concept already present in this scream that would soon after express itself in the artist’s work (now called Tara Transitory) as the sonic will be used to explore the boundaries of nations, identity, and gender.[47] In contrast to his recordings around Singapore, Chia’s scream is unique and singular, fully dependent on the body. A sound with timbre and rhythm.
Timbre is a value intrinsic to the body that Nancy uses to link the sonorous body to the materiality of the world. It “does not stem from a decomposition: even if it remains possible and true to distinguish it from pitch, duration, intensity, there is, however, no pitch, and so on, without timbre.”[48]
Timbre, consequently, is the resonance of the body and also the resonance of the listening process. Each body unique and capable in timbre of communicating its incommunicable singularity:
The world of sound is quite simply the world of the living. And the world of the living is also the world of the singular. In acoustic, the singular takes the place of the individual. The individual belongs to the human and to the universal, the singular belongs to the living… difference is the norm in the rhythms and sounds of life.[49]
From the otocentric perspective, the body gains full attention as the condition to the creation of sens. This is not merely the human body, though, the sonorous body is more assimilated to the hollow, the echo chamber and thus can apply to anything capable of resonance. Interesting enough, each of these bodies by opening to sens, through the attack of time, carry an intrinsic and unique timbre that assures its singularity in the acoustic world. In the aural, difference is already an existing condition, the singularity of the sonic subverts the constructed ocularcentric identity.
As such, the body in Moon’s work is spotlighted as an organon responsible for attacking time. The sensual castration and occlusion of the body is counteracted by the focus on its sonic singularity, by listening to the sens created by each intrinsic and unique timbre.
One film that captures well Moon’s fascination with the ideals of écouter is the volume 12 of the Petites Planètes collection THALMA & LAÉRCIO DE FREITAS. The director follows the singer Thalma de Freitas improvising songs and melodies as she walks through Rio de Janeiro.
Through montage Moon also shows her father and pianist Laércio de Freitas loosely playing on the piano a base to which Thalma sings. Using a campy trick Moon leads the listener to believe that the piano base was recorded beforehand and that Thalma is listening on her headphones to this base to which she sings while walking through the city (she carries a recorder on her hand). The film reinforces this notion by cutting between Thalma singing and her father playing. Towards the end the trick is revealed, Moon zooms out from the current shot to show that it’s on a notebook on top of the piano, and that in fact, her father Laércio’s accompaniment came later on in the process. The piano was actually answering to Thalma’s improvisations.
This turnaround calls to attention and questions what was Thalma listening to while she was singing. By the end of the film, through this uncommon trick that isn’t present in any other of his work, Moon brings the focus back to Thalma listening to her own voice being exchanged with the sonorous bodies that surround her in Rio de Janeiro. She is here actively listening (écouter) to the renvoi. The singer sets in motion Nancy’s self in the echo and infinite referrals of her voice. Her voice, the attack of time that unfolds in a dance with the sonorous world a new presence, a new sens.
The voice assumes a sonorous quality that surpasses any meaning, any speech, it’s musical, sonorous. Laércio de Freitas piano isn’t a regular base of accompaniment to his daughter’s song; neither works merely as a soundtrack as the images present in Moon’s film would lead to believe. It functions by listening to the self created by his daughter, her voice not reduced to speech. In this manner, the piano here attempts to transcribe the materiality, the timbre and rhythm of this renvoi into sound. Sound is the opener and conditioner for this interaction:
The intimacy of the sonic and the aural produces a shared, multiple, and tactile temporality, thus moving from the ordinary to the transcendent through breath. This may be the primary emotion of sound, its movement through time.[50]
THALMA & LAÉRCIO DE FREITAS is Moon’s emotional portrait of a daughter listening in the exchange of her voice as other with the world, and a father being touched and entering this endless referral that creates a self. A clash of timbres, rhythms, and echoes that open itself to sens through listening.
Balancing at the Impasse
A recurrent underlying figure of speech has been repeated in different forms up until now. It first appeared as the descent into darkness in Calvino’s story, in becoming minor it was “the space of the impasse”, and in this chapter, it appeared as what Nancy calls “being at the edge of meaning.” The three allude to the difficulty in maintaining this in-between stance that listening requires. Throughout the chapter Moon’s films were used as an example of the director aligning himself with this stance of interaction, of listening being explored as a mode of thought, an alternative to an ocular-centric philosophy. To assume this stance is only a first step in a long journey ahead. Now, listening must be assimilated in the process of filmmaking and most importantly in the film itself. As more forces and variables are added, to balance at this edge of chaos so that ultimately, the film can listen, is an increasingly difficult task.
It may sound outrageous even to mention that a film can listen, but Nancy’s philosophical displacement of the self to the renvoi unlocks such possibilities. If the listening subject is now reconfigured to anything that reverberates, the object of the film is also included in this new sonic autonomy. Furthermore, with sens subsisting in the creation of the renvoi, it wouldn’t be a stretch to conjecture that that two non-human listening-subjects in interacting through its own resonances could be able to produce sens. Or in the case of a film, that the listener enter into a renvoi not only with what it portrays but to interact and find sens together with the film itself.
Moon’s practice will eventually return to these questions in Híbridos, but first, inspired by Phillipe Grandrieux, he will start developing a method on how to keep the stability, to balance himself at the edge of meaning.
Continue reading Part 2: The cinematic diagram: mastering the loss of control or go the INDEX.
[1] Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, p. 3.
[2] Janus’ translation from the original French text of Attali’s Bruit in Janus, A. (2011, Spring). Jean-Luc Nancy and the “Anti-Ocular” Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory. Comparative Literature, 63(2), p. 185.
[3] Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, p. 163.
[4] Ibid., p. 166.
[5] Quoted in (Janus, 2011, p. 187)
[6] Ibid., p. 183.
[7] Which Sarah Hickmott exposes through a feminist view in her article (EN) CORPS SONORE: JEAN-LUC NANCY’S ‘SONOTROPISM (2015).
[8] Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Listening. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 1.
[9] Ibid., p. 14.
[10] (Janus, 2011, p. 183)
[11] Quoted in (Janus, 2011, p. 189)
[12] Kane, B. (2012). Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject. Contemporary Music Review, 31(5–6). doi:10.1080/07494467.2012.759413, p. 440.
[13] The verbs are also very similar to the other Latin languages.
[14] Ibid., p. 442.
[15] Quoted in (Kane, 2012, p. 441)
[16] (Nancy, 2007, p. 1) This is Kane’s translation that keeps it similar to the French original while Mendell translated “…d’avance et forcément superposé” to “beforehand and out of necessity”.
[17] (Kane, 2012, p. 443)
[18] (Nancy, 2007, p. 2)
[19] Ibid., p. 5.
[20] Ibid., p. 7.
[21] Ibid.
[22] (Moon, Vincent Moon: Interview, 2010)
[23] Nadal-Melsió, S. (2018). Allora & Calzadilla. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, pp. 21–22.
[24] Ibid., p. 26.
[25] (Nancy, 2007, p. 36)
[26] Hutchens, B. (2005). Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, p. 6.
[27] Janus further explore Nancy’s conception of senses and its various unfoldings.
[28] Nancy quoted in (Kane, 2012, p. 443)
[29] (Nancy, 2007, p. 31)
[30] Translator’s note in (Nancy, 2007, p. xi)
[31] Ibid., p. 8.
[32] Ibid., p. 9.
[33] (Janus, 2011, p. 194)
[34] (Nancy, 2007, p. 31)
[35] (Nadal-Melsió, 2018, p. 11)
[36] Ibid.
[37] (Nancy, 2007, p. 20)
[38] Ibid., p. 43.
[39] Ibid., p. 17–18
[40] Ironically, this reminds me of Daft Punk’s album Human After All (2005). This already purely uncompartmentalized robotic echo chamber that functions exclusively to produce music (resonance) has to assimilate itself to a human body to search for a humanity in the mechanical, electronic organon. A quest that gives a new meaning to the film Electroma (2006) that came out of this album.
[41] Ibid., 31.
[42] (Janus, 2011, p. 198)
[43] Lautreamont, C. (2006). Maldoror and Poems. (eBook) London: Penguin UK.
[44] Kahn, D. (1999). Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 6.
[45] (Nancy, 2007, p. 39)
[46] Ibid.
[47] The blog Sounding Out! Gives a better understanding of the current work of One Man Nation and its relation to the queer body, ritual, noise and sound art; https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/10/05/ritual-noise-and-the-cut-up-the-art-of-tara-transitory/
[48] Ibid.
[49] (Nadal-Melsió, 2018, p. 26)
[50] Ibid., p. 23.
