Make It Rain v 0.1

“Make It Rain” is citation:obsolete’s update on Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain”--it uses contemporary tech (smartphones, tablets, wifi/wireless/bluetooth, etc.), contemporary music (specifically, Fat Joe feat. Lil Wayne’s “Make It Rain”), and trends in contemporary art practice (interactivity, relational aesthetics, etc.) to reconsider both Reich’s original work in its own historical specificity, and the issues raised by the work in relation to our current historical moment. I’ve written about it here.

The first beta run of the piece was yesterday in my Philosophy of Music class. (The piece originated as an attempt to develop some sort of music-making activity for a class full of philosophy students who may have zero experience/training in music.) Some really interesting things happened, and I think we all learned a lot. We (citation:obsolete, my music/sound collaboration with christian.ryan) definitely got some good ideas about how to move forward with the piece. And, the best part is that these ideas came in talking with my students--even and especially the ones with no musical experience but lots of network/IT experience.

I asked the students bring in whatever devices they wanted to use--anything that could stream music from soundcloud and broadcast it for us to hear. Most students brought phones, tablet computers, and laptops. A few brought bluetooth speakers. You can read more about the specific instructions I gave them here.

Anyway, after experimenting for about 30ish minutes, we had lots of results to discuss.

It’s clear that the phasing Reich got as a result of analog/mechanical processes can’t be produced just by letting digital processes run on their own--or, more likely, the phasing is so extremely gradual that it’s below our threshold of perceptibility. (I’m thinking about how my digital alarm clock gradually slows down; it’s currently about 3 minutes behind the iPhone that’s docked to it, and to which I usually synch the clock’s time. So, there is some slow-down/entropy happening, but at a very, very gradual rate, too great for me to observe in, say, 10 minutes.) Treating the tech as merely a playback device didn’t produce the desired phasing effects.

However, if we treated the tech as mobile devices, this DID produce lots of interesting phasing effects. For example, two students hooked up their phones to a pair of bluetooth speakers (one student per speaker; there was a bass and treble, or ‘left’ and ‘right’ on each speaker unit), put the speakers together in the middle of a long hallway, and then gradually walked towards opposite ends of the hallway...and, eventually turned and walked down other corridors, walking in a loop around the building. Here’s a rough recording of what happened (start in at about 1:45):

As the students (and their phones, which were transmitting to the speakers, which then played the “Make It Rain” loop) walked farther and farther from the speakers, the bluetooth connection between phone and speaker decreased in quality. Sometimes the loop would be delayed, sometimes the loop would skip, etc. Basically, the speakers were programmed to deal with transmission errors in specific ways (delay/buffering to catch up, skipping dropped ‘packets’ of data, etc.). The movement or mobility of the playback devices (the phones) generated these transmission errors by testing the limits of the connection/stream/signal/etc.

We also took a class trip up and down the stairs in our building. The building has pretty decent wifi, but the signal isn’t as strong and reliable in the stairwell (the stairs are stone, the staircase itself is pretty walled off from the rest of the building, etc.). Our devices could get some signal, but not a full, entirely reliable one. So again there was the problem of ‘dropped packets,’ lost data, slow transmission, and MOVEMENT. We began on the third floor; we decided which loop/variation to all play; hit play, and then gradually made our way down two flights of stairs to the foyer, each playing the loop on our devices as we descended the staircase. This took about 2 minutes of the 4 minute loop. The trip downstairs introduced lots of phasing into the playback, so that for the last 2 minutes we could listen to interesting sonic relationships develop. We put all our devices on the table in the middle of the foyer, and then wandered around them to pay attention to the different relationships among different devices. We then repeated the process, making our way back upstairs to the third floor while playing a different loop/variation. Here’s a recording of one of our trips through the stairwell.

So what’s interesting here is that the phasing, the musically interesting phenomena, emerge from exploiting what’s specific to mobile tech as mobile tech--its mobility. These aren’t just playback devices--they’re portable, mobile, streaming ones. So it’s not just mobility itself that’s distinctive, but networked mobility--we’re all walking around, but we’re jacked in to the same network (school wifi) or parallel networks (AT&T and Sprint, for example). My educated guess is that this networked mobility is a manifestation or symptom of general relations of epistemological/ideological, material, capital, and subject-production. But that’s for theorizing later (or, if someone else wants to jump in here and do some theory while I use my creative brain, that would be awesome). If that’s the case, then the question is: How do the musical relationships and effects that result from our playing with networked mobility speak to these broader philosophical issues? How do the material, technological, and social relations of production crystallized in networked mobility (smartphones, wireless networks, soundcloud and other apps, etc.) manifest in or as specific musical/sonic phenomena? Or, more simply: how do the “relations of production” make the musical/sonic features of “Make It Rain” different than the musical/sonic features of “It’s Gonna Rain”?

I’ll post links to more recordings/videos as students post them to the course tumblr. Thanks again to Johnny Cook, Chad Glenn, Zach Jones, Hannah Levinson, TJ Picard, and Ryan Shullaw for their creativeness, their ideas, and their work on this.

On PRISM, or Listening Neoliberally

So, here’s a rough, first pass at theorizing one aspect of what’s significant about PRISM. It’s very preliminary, and I would love your thoughts and feedback, as it’s part of some larger projects I’m currently working on.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” President Obama is actually correct, here. Nobody is “listening,” at least not in the traditional sense. To understand what’s going on in the NSA/PRISM program, we need a new theory of listening--how it works, how we do it, what we can do with it.

Traditional theories of listening are tied to Enlightenment notions of subjectivity and Modernist aesthetics. The audiological correlate to “The Look” in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, trad listening is something done by subjects (listeners) and to subjects (we only really listen to speech, music, the intentional sonic products of a communicating subject). Listening and being listened to is what makes you a subject, a full person, a member of society, a human being.

What kind of listening makes the classically liberal Enlightenment subject, the listener of absolute/bourgeois music of the Western “classical” canon? This subject is structured by interior/exterior and mind/body binaries: subjects are distinguished from objects because the former have interior, intellectual depth, whereas the latter don’t (they’re mere corporeal superficiality). This subject is both produced by, and must demonstrably perform, interpretative listening, listening that reveals some sort of true inner meaning. This is the sort of listening involved, for example, in Foucaultian-style confession: subjects create their ‘true inner selves’ by uttering statements that others must interpret. Subjects exist because they are interpretatively listened to. It is also the sort of listening that corresponds to what Ranciere calls the “aesthetic regime of art”--the idea that something like a humble image of peasant’s shoes can reveal some sort of higher, deeper meaning, or that slips of the tongue can reveal unconscious truths. Or, it’s the kind of listening that Adorno advocates, the “structural” listening that finds the meaning of details by locating them in relationship to the whole work, a kind of listening that is tied to a very specific concept of “individuality”. To be somewhat reductive, interpretative listening is about content, finding the message in the medium (even and especially if that medium is the message).

But the kind of listening involved in PRISM surveillance--and in neoliberal modes of audition and subjectivity more generally--isn’t about content, and it isn’t about interpretation. It’s not about form or structure either. The point is that form/content or medium/message distinctions are no longer relevant. This sort of listening isn’t about form or content; rather, it’s the economy, stupid-- “economy” in the sense of a practice of moderation, of minding the oikos, keeping everything in the black. As Glenn Greenwald put it in his Guardian article, this sort of listening focuses on “transactional information rather than communications” (emphasis mine). The economy is not an objective property (like form or content)--it’s a process, a practice, in which the form and the content are emergent properties. We don’t interpret these processes, we (at)tune them. Listening is attunement.

Just think about the PRISM metaphor. What do prisms do? They separate out frequencies--not audio frequencies, but light frequencies. They re-tune light so that the spectrum is more distinctly visible to us. Similarly, PRISM-style surveillance is about the “harmonics” or “attunement” of your data stream. PRISM’s partner program, BLARNEY, doesn’t monitoring the content of your calls, but the metadata generated by your devices. The infamous court order to Verizon doesn’t demand recordings of the audio content of the calls, just the metadata. This metadata is comparable to the overtones/harmonics/partials that accompany every sound. In Western music theory/acoustics, something sounds dissonant and/or out of tune when the harmonics don’t vibrate synchronously or proportionally. The NSA is listening for anomalous harmonics--metadata that doesn’t fit expected, routinized patterns. They’re not listening for content, but for dissonant metadata, for activities that are out of tune and that upset the overall balance of the ‘mix’ (i.e., normalized society). Attunement to dissonance is how the Obama administration proposes to, as they are quoted in the Washington Post, “ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.” Data that comes from the “US,” because it comes from there, will generally be perceived as more “consonant” than data that doesn’t come from the US or “US persons.” Or, being a non-US person means that you’re out of tune, abnormal, dissonant. This same Washington Post article also suggests that PRISM listens like a tuner listens, using algorithms to determine the dissonance--here figured as ‘foreignness’--of data. In the same way that musical/audiological dissonance is the effect of irregular patterning (that is, the irregular/out-of-synch patterning of harmonics), PRISM frames “dissonant” information as the effect of irregular patterning. As a different Washington Post article explains:

the NSA is probably using a software technique called data mining to look for patterns that could be a sign of terrorist activity. The idea is that NSA researchers can build a profile of “typical” terrorist activity and then use calling records —and other data such as financial transactions and travel records — to look for individuals or groups of people who fit the pattern.

“Typical” terrorist activity would be atypical of “normal” people, out of synch with their regular activities. The point of PRISM-style listening is to identify these out-of-tune patterns before they feed back into society and upset the overall balance (of powers, routines, etc).

Pushing this metaphor of a “tuner” even further, I would argue that neoliberal govenrmentality works like an audio equalizer (which, in the Midwestern dialect I learned growing up in Ohio, is called a “tuner.”) Audio equalizers listen, and they listen carefully--not to the content of the signal, but to its overall mix and attunement. They’re not interpreting the content, but regulating the balance of the signals, making sure there is no undesirable noise that would upset the overall texture/balance of the output. Equalizers keep everything balanced. No matter how finely-mixed a recording is, broadcast always introduces noise into audio signals, degrading their quality. Equalizers adjust for the new noise, re-balancing the signal so that it sounds correctly mixed when it pours out the speakers and into your ears. Equalizers, in other words, re-tune the mix, normalizing abnormalities to produce a consistent texture or affect.

So, when politicians argue that the best way to protect everyone is to find the right “balance” between freedom and security, privacy and security, or try to frame the problem here as one of balance, they’re not critiquing this logic of attunement, but feeding it. All they’re doing is saying that the equalizer got out of adjustment and that we need to re-temper it so that it works correctly.

So, when we talk about what’s wrong about PRISM, why it’s unjust, immoral, and, well, probably not very effective even in its own stated aims, we need to be sure we understand how it really works. We need to be sure we’re critiquing the sort of “listening” that’s actually happening. Our critiques can’t rely on Modernist theories of listening as interpretation, panopticism as the surveillance of content, etc. Rather, we have to treat this as superpanoptic surveillance, to use Jasbir Puar’s term, surveillance that tunes, attunes, de-tunes, and re-tunes.

For example, “privacy” just seems irrelevant here, mainly because the concept generally indicates protection from interpretation. Traditional concepts of privacy rely on the same inner/outer dichotomies that ground the interpretative model of listening. For example, the cops can’t search the inside of your house without a warrant, but they can observe you from across the street, or search the trash you leave out on the curb. Or, as Obama says in the above-referenced NYT article, “If the intelligence community actually wants to listen to a telephone call, they have to go back to a federal judge.” So, the fourth amendment seems to protect us from interpretation, but not from equalization or attunemnent. Is “privacy” something only relevant to “interpretation”? In other words, is the concept of privacy part of a broader “interpretative” discourse? (There has to be a hidden, private truth to either interpret or not interpret.) Privacy, then, might be a privilege vis-a-vis interpretive power. But then it probably doesn’t matter at all to equalizing and (at)tuning power. Would there even be a correlative concept? If “privacy” isn’t the concept we appeal to in critiquing equalizing/attuning power, what concept do we appeal to?

That’s a question for other people to answer. I’m mainly interested in developing an account of how “listening” works in neoliberalism/biopolitics/big data. This is important because big data actually listens more than it gazes (that’s why, um, Nate Silver’s book is called “The Signal and The Noise”). In other words, if panoptic power “gazes”, or works according to a metaphorics of sight and vision, then neoliberal power listens, works according to a metaphorics of acoustics, audition, and sonic perception. So this project isn’t just about understanding listening, sound culture, and perception, but about understanding how hegemony works.

Nietzsche, Wagner, Biopolitics, Race, & Music

“Wagner makes music sick” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 664).

“Life itself has become a problem” (Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 681).

To mark Wagner’s bicentennial, the Guardian published this essay on the connection many of his contemporaries made between his music and mental illness, specifically, the mental illnesses associated with decadent fin-de-siecle modernity. For example, it explains:

The idea of music being a potentially unhealthy form of stimulation, similar to drugs or electricity, had been commonplace during the 19th century," says Kennaway. "But with Wagner, the danger became specifically associated with modern music and modern urban lifestyles in diagnosing the fashionable disease of the time, neurasthenia. Critics even suggested that Wagner's music was sickly and feminine, a suspicion that prompted a popular link to be made between Wagner and homosexuality – viewed then as a medical condition – which was said to be connected to the erotic power of music.

Some of Wagner's critics thought his music was a threat to one’s mental--and perhaps even physical--health. Basically, it corrupted a healthy constitution. This is, as the Guardian article notes, also Nietzsche’s diagnosis, not just of Wagner’s music, but his philosophical and aesthetic agenda as well.

What’s interesting is that this critique of Wagner is exactly the same charge he makes against “Jewish” music--that it is unhealthy, feminizing, excessively “modern,” and thus a threat to the health of the German nation and German art. So both Wagner and his critics were engaged in a debate about the “health” of music, the nation, the individual, etc. The stakes or epistemic framework within which this debate occurred are biopolitical in the sense that Foucault lays out in Society Must Be Defended. This is really clear in both Wagner’s essay “On Judaism in Music,” and Nietzsche’s mid/late-career writing on Wagner (The Gay Science, and what is collected in “Nietzsche Contra Wagner”). Both Wagner’s essay and Nietzsche’s explicit critiques of Wagner both ground their objections--Wagner, to Jews and Jewish culture, Nietzsche, to anti-Semitic Wagner--in loosely biopolitical arguments about health and life.

I want to consider the biopolitical tenor of this debate not just to more fully understand 19th century reception of Wagner, nor even the role of race discourse in both his own work and the work of Nietzsche/his critics, but also to provide another angle from which to consider the question of Nietzsche’s neoliberalism.

Corey Robin’s fabulous essay in The Nation has everyone talking about the relationship between Nietzsche and neoliberalism. The essay focuses more on Nietzsche’s impact on the famous theorists of neoliberalism (his, “marginal children,” as the title puts it). I want to focus more narrowly on Nietzsche’s aesthetics. His aesthetics, especially his critique of Wagner, reveals the central role of what Foucault (one of Nietzsche’s other really influential “children”--though this kinship language does make me sorta uncomfortable) will later call a “biopolitical” concept of life plays in his mid-late work (e.g., The Gay Science, the Geneaology). Though Nietzsche doesn't get into the statistical/mathematical aspects of contemporary biopolitics, he does treat life--its affirmation or its negation--as the central term of his analysis. This centering of life is key to Foucault's general theory of biopower: biopolitics is broadly, as Foucault puts it, "the power over life," or the power to "make live and let die" (HSv1). This type of power works by investing disproportionately in the lives of privileged groups (because this investment will augment the "life" of the body politic)--by augmenting and maximizing their "health." So, biopolitics centers on life, and works to affirming (some) life as healthy.

This question of biopolitics might help us consider the more general sense in which Nietzsche could be read, somewhat retroactively, as a  “neoliberal” (and, again, this shouldn’t be totally surprising, given his influence in/on Foucault, one of the major diagnosticians of neoliberalism...). But, more narrowly, it definitely gives us a more robust account of both Wagner’s concept of race and Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner.

Wagner’s Biopolitical Racism

Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a textbook example of the biopolitial racism Foucault outlines in Society Must Be Defended: the non-white race poses a threat to the health of the nation (or rather, the nation’s art), and therefore must be eliminated.  As Foucault explains:

racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship...the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and happier (SMBD 255).

Wagner begins "On Judaism in Music" with a classic white supremacist denial tactic: reverse discrimination. It’s not we Germans who are oppressing the Jews, the Jews, he argues, are oppressing us Germans, he argues. They’re oppressing the German people with their “inner incapacity for life” which alienates healthy Germans and healthy German society from “faithful, loving contemplation of instinctive Life, of that which only greets its sight amid the Folk.” In its pure, uncontaminated form, German society, the German nation, is itself full of Life; it is healthy. When music reflects this, “so long as the separate art of Music had a real organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the formative stages of that life” because, according to Wagner, Jewish culture and Jewish art an infection to which a healthy art/culture would be immune. However, as German society has itself been led astray, its “body’s inner death is manifest” and “outside elements win the power of lodgement in it--yet merely to destroy it.” Wagner thinks that Jewish music is a morbid affliction plaguing the already-vulnerable health of the German body politic: “that body’s flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect life.” Jewishness has, as Wagner argues, disconnected German culture “from the real, the healthy stem” that feeds its life-force. The cure for “German” music is more “life,” a re-connection to that healthy, unblighted stem: “In genuine Life alone can we, too, find again the ghost of Art, and not within its worm-befretted carcass.” For Wagner, healthy life means “connexion with its natural soil...instinctive life,” which is only found “amid the Folk.”

Nietzsche’s Biopolitical Critique

Nietzsche thinks Wagner has made the wrong diagnosis. It’s actually Wagner who has “made music sick,” whose music and ideology is life-negating. It’s Wagner who is the the threat to health and life:“But does not my stomach protest too? my heart? my circulation? Are not my entrails saddened? Do I not suddenly become hoarse? To listen to Wagner I need pastilles Gerandel” (664). The problem with Wagner, according to Nietzsche (and the other critics in the Guardian article) is that he's unhealthy.

Nietzsche posits life as his fundamental value, his ultimate measuring rod. Yes, yes, Nietzsche did advocate that each of us create our own values, our own “suns,” as it were. But, in his own writing, “life”--physical health--is the value he most often appeals to when making many different sorts of judgments--aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, etc. After all, his objection to European morality is that it is life-negating, or rather, that European culture has benefited from this reactive, life-negating practice (it’s what made us rational, what gave us science, and, as Nietzsche says in the Genealogy, it’s in part what makes us “interesting”), but we’ve now reached the point of diminishing returns. Nietzsche thinks we need to “upgrade” our value-system, to find a practice that is better at promoting life and flourishing. (We should also ask here: WHOSE life, exactly?)

“Every art, every philosophy, may be considered a remedy and aid in the service of either growing or declining life” (669). The problem with Wagner, as Nietzsche sees it, is that his music and his ideology leads to “degeneration” (666), not flourishing. “Richard Wagner...in truth a decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sank down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross” (676); he exemplifies the type who “suffer from the impoverishment of life” (669).

“L

ife” and “health” are his chosen value/measuring rod not just in the case of Wagner, but more generally. “My objections to the music of Wagner,” he explains, “are physiological objections” because “after all, aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology” (NCW 664). So for Nietzsche “life” and “health”--physiology--is the privileged measure of value. It grounds his aesthetics, and, as he lays out in the Genealogy, his ethics.

Art is healthy when it “suffers from the overfullness of life” (669)--that is, when it is affirmative and resilient...when, you know, what doesn’t kill it makes it stronger:

He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, can afford not only the sight of the terrible and the questionable, but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation: in his case, what is evil, senseless, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, as it seems permissible in nature, because of an excess of procreating, restoring powers which can yet turn every desert into luxurious farm land. (670).

Health means resilience; the eternal return is, in a way, Nietzsche’s way of framing what we neoliberals call resilience--it’s the affirmation of crisis and suffering as opportunity. In fact, in order to be truly and optimally healthy, we need to fight and overcome illness. As Nietzsche argues,

one should not only bear it, one should LOVE it. AMOR FATI: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than i owe to my health? I owe it a HIGHER health-one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it.” (680)

“Overcoming” is more or less resilience. This resilience or “self-mastery” (681) is, in Nietzsche’s estimation, more like ancient Greek moderation/sophrosyne than it is like Christian morality, which he describes as (ironically) “hedonism” (670): Christian morality, especially its emphasis on “selflessness” is grounded on “the principle of decadence” (671). Christianity is decadent because it indulges the spirit/soul at the expense of the body’s health, at the expense of life itself. Greek moderation is, for Nietzsche, the opposite of Christian decadence. Moderation fosters health because it refuses to subsume the body to the mind:

all the better turned out, more cheerful mortals, who are far from counting their labile balance between angel and petite bete as necessarily among the objections to existence; the finest, the brightest...such contradictions actually seduce one to existence” (673-4).

The best and brightest, the most lively and healthy, are the ones who are most balanced--who are both mind and body (angel and devil), who know what/when to forget, and what/when to remember. Like good neoliberals, cheerful Nietzschean latter-day Greeks know how to solicit and manage risk: they ascend to the peak, teeter on the edge, but don’t ever fall off:

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live....And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there--we who have looked DOWN from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, tones, of words? And therefore--artists?” (683)

So, what Foucault (in HSv2) talks about in terms of the ethics of self-mastery, or the art of self-fashioning, Nietzsche discusses in terms of the “art” of Greek “overcoming” (what in the Gay Science he calls “giving style”). More narrowly, I would argue that this Greek "moderation," this "daredevil spirit" that knows how to balance on the very tip of the highest peak--this is precisely where we see something like the idea of "marginality" in Nietzsche. In order to balance on that peak, to be the most daring of daredevils, you have to know precisely the right tipping point on which to balance--the precise limit beyond which you really will fall off that cliff (and into the abyss of diminishing returns/disease). So, moderation--what Foucault talks about in the "Freedom & Truth" chapter of HSv2--is in this way a sort of marginality-of-the-self. The resonance between Foucault and Nietzsche shouldn’t be at all surprising: it’s like one huge feedback loop---they’re both reading the ancient Greeks, but Foucault’s reading is itself filtered through his own (significant) debts to Nietzsche.

Which sort of brings us back to the question of biopolitical racism: Nietzsche’s pretty much making a biopolitical case that Wagner is the “racial” threat to the health of European culture. It’s the same logic Wagner uses in his anti-Semitic screed, but Nietzsche has turned it against him. It’s at this point that we need to introduce Robert Gooding-Williams’s and my own readings of Nietzsche’s critique of white masculinity--racially non-white femininities (e.g., Italian ones, Ariadne from Naxos, etc.) are the key to his philosophical overcoming...

Why does Plato hate the flute/aulos? And what does this have to do with women?

These people, largely uneducated and unable to entertain themselves over their wine by using their own voices to generate conversation, pay premium prices for flute-girls and rely on the extraneous voice of the reed flute as background music for their parties. But when well-educated gentlemen drink together, you will not see girls playing the flute or the lyre or dancing, but a group that knows how to get together without these childish frivolities, conversing civilly no matter how heavily they are drinking (Protagoras 327d).

Plato hates the auylos (a double-reeded instrument that often gets translated somewhat deceptively as ‘flute’). Hates it. For example, in order for the philosophical conversation in Symposium to begin, they have to kick out the flute girls (who can keep on playing for the other women, but who must leave the men alone for real ‘conversation.’) (176e). Plato indicates the conclusion of this part of the evening by having immoderate Aristophanes burst in “accompanied by the shrieks of some flute-girl” (212c). Plato demonstrates Aristophanes’ own drunken, lustful immoderation by having him compare Socrates to a “piper” (215ish): Aristophanes says Socrates is as enchanting as a flute-playing satyr, but all this is evidence of is Aristophanes’ own irrational, excessively maudlin crush on Socrates. Socrates is actually the paragon of moderation; that Alcibiades could even think he is otherwise is evidence of Alcibiades’ own skewed/immoderate state of mind. But the point is that flute-playing is a sign of immoderate, slavish, feminine unruliness. For example, in Republic III Plato argues that:

when someone gives music an opportunity to charm his soul with the flute and pour those sweet, soft, and plaintive tunes we mentioned through his ear...if he keeps at it unrelentingly and is beguiled by the music, after a time his spirit is melted and dissolved until it vanishes, and the very sinews of his soul are cut out” (411a-b).

Republic VIII also characterizes an immoderate person as one who “yield[s] day by day to the desire at hand...he drinks heavily while listening to the flute” (561c).

Why is the auylos a symbol for feminized unruliness? It’s not properly harmonic in the way a monochord is. In ancient Greak music theory, sonic harmony was a function of mathematical proportion: sounds produced by mathematically proportionate instruments (strings, pipes, etc.) ought to produce musically consonant intervals/harmonies. So, a set of pan pipes cut to the correct measurements ought to vibrate at consonant audio harmonies (octave, fifth, etc.). You could also think of the pipes on an organ--pitch is a function of their physical measurements/dimensions. Thus, Plato calls the flute “many-stringed,” “pan-harmonic,” and, by implication, immoderate (Republic III 399d).

In the case of the auylos, there is no necessary, direct correlation between the mathematical proportions of its physical structure (e.g., distance between finger holes, for example) and the sonic harmonies it produces. Or rather: to produce sonically consonant frequencies--to get the instrument ‘in tune’ so that it sounds the right notes--the auylos’s physical structure is mathematically disproportionate. If you think of a contemporary oboe or bassoon, they keys are neither evenly spaced nor do they follow systematic mathematical ratios like the 12:9:8:6 ones Pythagorean harmony uses. This is what Plato’s referring to when he says, for example: “in the case of flute-playing, the harmonies are found not by measurement but by the hit and miss of training, and quite generally music tries to find the measure by observing vibrating strings. So there is a lot of imprecision mixed up in it and very little reliability” (Philebus 56a). For a much more detailed explanation of the construction of the aulos and its “unharmonic” or immoderate character, see Thomas Mathiesen’s “Apollo’s Lyre.”

But what does this have to do with women/femininity? Well, the ancient Greeks thought women's bodies were immoderate, and that women were incapable of being truly moderate/harmonic (see the "Freedom & Truth" Chapter of Foucault's History of Sexuality v2 for the relationship between harmony, self-mastery, and masculinity). For example, in the Phaedo, Xanthippe, Socrates' wife, is presented as immoderately emotional, whereas his male friends are composed. Similarly, the ancient Greeks thought women's bodies were particularly disproportionate, unruly, and unpredictable: "hysteria," after all, used to indicate a "wandering uterus." So women's bodies and their souls are, like the aulos, disproportionate, and non-harmonizable.

On Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages: unless you realize this is about the overtone series, you probably misread Rousseau's argument

So, this post is really rough and sorely in need of editing, but I need to get it up and running for my Phil of Music course, which starts Monday. In some ways it’s a tl;dr of one of the chapters of The Conjectural Body...

“Note how everything constantly brings us back to the moral effects about which I have spoken, and how far the musicians who account for the impact of sounds solely in terms of the action of air and the excitation of nerve fibers are from understanding wherein the force of this art consists” (Rousseau, EOL 293).

Philosophers frequently misinterpret Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language. He is NOT arguing for immediate bodily/affective presence; in fact, affect is, for Rousseau (or at least the Rousseau of the Essay) fundamentally mediated...as are bodies. What he’s mainly interested in critiquing is the idea and ideal of physical reductionism and biological determinism--the idea that our social and cultural structures ought to reflect the structure of the natural world. In this view, as Rousseau puts it, “the only precise relations to be found in nature,” which is treated as “the rule for all relations” (283). Social relations, artworks, everything ought to reflect the organization of the natural world. Thus, according to this view, “if we are to philosophize properly we must go back to the physical causes” (283). Rousseau pretty much scoffs at the very idea: cultural discourses--like language or science--shape the very physical phenomena they purport to merely observe. But before I get into his critique, let me lay out the move he’s challenging.

This idea that social and cultural hierarchies are justified because they follow/reflect natural hierarchies is a common foundation for both (a) Rameauan tonal harmony and (b) classically liberal approaches to social identity. Jean-Phillipe Rameau is a French music theorist and composer; his Treatise on Harmony is one of the main documents that codified tonal harmony--the system of keys and chord functions/progressions that we still use today in most pop music. Tonality abstracts a system of musical organization from a particular interpretation of acoustics, namely, the overtone series. In tonality, chords built on each scale-degree (do, re, me, fa, sol, or I-ii-III-IV-V, etc.) each have a ‘function’--the more consonant (I, V, IV, ii) ones produce a sense of resolution, and the more dissonant ones (ii, vii) produce a sense of tension. But how is relative consonance or dissonance determined? What is the standard or measuring device? Enlightenment music theorists like Rameau used the overtone series--that is, the acoustic properties of a fundamental pitch and its harmonics--as this gauge. Each tone is composed of a fundamental tone, the main pitch, and a series of decreasingly intense (loud) harmonics. These harmonics sound at an octave above the original tone, a fifth above that, a fourth above that, and so on. This series of intervals (I, V, IV...) is the hierarchy theorists like Rameau used to determine the relationships among chords and chord functions. In this way, the organization of musical works reflected the hierarchies present in the physical structures of sound. Similarly, Enlightenment concepts of race and gender also grounded social hierarchies in (supposedly) natural ones. Philosophers--like, for example, Kant--thought that the organization of society ought to reflect the naturally-given organization of bodies. In Kant’s race theory, the Earth’s varying geographic conditions give rise to different types of human bodies. Human bodily difference is naturally given--it is caused by the physical features of the earth. These differences are hierarchically related: European geography is most conducive to life and civilization, so European/white bodies are the most advanced ones, the ones most cable of fully flourishing/realizing their ‘human’ nature. Next comes Asian ones, and African ones are last. It’s the same type of thinking in both Rameau’s and Kant’s case: there are naturally given hierarchies, and socio-cultural systems ought to reflect these hierarchies.

From this perspective, differences in linguistic structures and social customs “can be explained by the difference in organs. I should be curious,” Rousseau challenges, “to see this explanation (252).” He critiques this style of reasoning from “physical causes”--what O. Oyewumi calls “body-reasoning”--with a snarky argument by analogy. Comparing sound to light, Rousseau uses a prism as a metaphor for the overtone series:

Here you have the resolution of light, the primary colors, their relations, their proportions, the true principles of the pleasure you derive from painting. All this mysterious talk about drawing, representation, shape is pure imposture on the part of French painters who think that with their imitations they can arouse I know not what movements in the soul, then it is well known that there are only sensations. You hear wonderful reports about their painting, but look at my hues” (283).

Rameau’s physicalism treats sound merely as sensation (“hues”), and not as cultural discourse (“painting”). People understand and are affected by paintings not just, and not even primarily, because of the way artworks refract specific frequencies of light at our eyeballs. We understand a painting as a painting because it is situated in complex cultural practices--this is why Warhol’s Brillo Box is an artwork, not a misplaced box of cleaning supplies. “Melody” is Rousseau’s term for the musical equivalent of “painting”--sound as a cultural discourse, not a physiological given. “Harmony” is his term for “hues.” Rameau’s theory of harmony attempts to ground music in the nature of sound, and it ignores the role of “melody”--that is, affective cultural discourses or implicit knowledges--in producing the very body that is supposedly immediately ‘given’ by nature.

Rousseau isn’t objecting to the lack of immediacy in Enlightenment political and musical theory--rather, he’s objecting to the attempt to claim as unmediated something that is highly mediated. Enlightenment-style body-reasoning disavows the cultural mediation done by affect/implicit understanding. THAT is what Rousseau’s objecting to. For Rousseau, the body only appears as or feels immediate and “natural” because it has been habituated to implicit knowledges.

Voice and Affect:

Sonic language--the ‘voix’--is absolutely social, and not at all physiological or naturally determined. Unlike gestural language, which is immediate and naturally determined (‘dictated’ by ‘needs’), sonic language is “wrung” (252) from the passions, which are themselves socially mediated. Passions--social and affective needs arising from intersubjective relations--are the origin of spoken language; they are catalyzed by social pressures.“If we had never had any but physical needs, we might very well never have spoken and yet have understood one another perfectly by means of the language of gesture alone” (251). However, because we have complicated social needs and desires, we speak, we communicate with our voices. “Voice,” for Rousseau, means sonic affect.

Sounds are unmediated sonic gestures; they are ‘natural’ noises. Voices, however, have to be trained. They are physical and physiological phenomena, but the practice of speaking orients the body, shapes its organs (mouth, vocal chords, ears), so that even ‘the body’ is not a natural given, but something that must be “made sensitive...by dint of habit.” To go back to his prism analogy, we only “see” the hues we’ve been habituated to see (e.g., different cultural notions of color, or of whole/half/quartertones).

So, for Rousseau, there is no voice of nature, no ‘natural’ human voice emerging directly from geographical and/or physiological materiality. To demonstrate this point I’m going to quote at length, because it’s really, really important to get the nuance here. In the Essay, there are

three states of man considered in relation to society. The savage is a hunter, the barbarian a herdsman, civil man a tiller of the soil. So that regardless of whether one inquires into the origin of the arts or studies the earliest morals everything is seen to be related in its principle to the means by which men provide for their subsistence, and it is for those among these means that unite men, they are a function of the climate and the nature of the soil. Hence the diversity of languages and their opposite characteristics must also be explained by the same causes” (272)

Geographic conditions create a situation to which social systems must respond--but these responses are not directly caused or determined by the physical properties of the enviornment. They are contingent, manufactured methods of addressing problems. For example, when “forced to make provisions for winter, people have to help one another and are thus compelled to establish some kind of convention amongst themselves” (274 emphasis mine). Convention is a human response to enviornmental conditions. Language is one such convention--or rather, it’s a second-order convention. Geography determines social system (savage, barbarian, civil man), which then determines linguistic features/structures (gestural or vocal language, for example).“Aidez-moi” (help me) and “amez-moi” (love me) (279)--the first utterances in Northern and Southern languages, respectively--are socially and culturally shaped responses to environmental conditions. The PHYSICAL causes of the differences in languages (e.g., the physiology of vocalization and sound production) come from affective and social responses to geography and climate--it has NOTHING to do with either the immediate structures of the earth, or of the human body--it’s how human beings respond to nature. Passion--the need for help, the need for love--is social responsiveness, not bodily immediacy (it is bodily, just mediated).

In a way, “passion” is what contemporary philosophers would call implicit understanding. What he’s really trying to talk about is implicit understanding. “Passionate” music engages not just cognitive understanding, but haptic, corporeal knowledges (like Sara Ahmed’s ‘orientations,’ or Linda Martin Alcoff’s ‘interpretive horizon’). The ancient Greeks thought of music in this way: this is why Plato thought the moderation and self-mastery required of the guardians of the Republic could be learned by practicing music and athletic training--musical training was corporeal/affective training. Sounds whose “effect is entirely physical” and “is due to the interaction of the different particles of air set in motion by the sounding body and by all of its constitutent parts” may be pleasant, but “unless this pleasure is enlivened by familiar melodic inflections it will not be totally delightful” (286). So, I can find random sounds interesting, but only those sounds situated in interpretive discourses and contexts are really meaningful. For Rousseau, purely physical, culturally unmediated sounds are just nice, they’re not affectively moving. This is because he thinks affect it not immediate, but culturally habituated/learned. For example, he argues: “rude ears perceive our consonances as mere noise. it is not surprising that when the natural proportions are altered, natural pleasure disappears” (286). Music is pleasurable and meaningful because it engages our affective implicit knowledges--our internalized and shared cultural discourses. “Sounds act on us not only as sounds but as signs of our affections, of our sentiments [which are social]; this is how they arouse in us the emotions which they express and the image of which we recognize in them” (288).The Tarantella example shows that music affects bodies only to the extent that these bodies are acculturated to it: “each is affected only by accents with which he is familiar; his nerves respond to them only insofar as his mind inclines to them: he has to understand the language in which he is being addressed if he is to be set in motion by what he is told” (289). Rousseau isn’t arguing for affective immediacy, but culturally specific implicit understanding.

Rousseau is warning that the Enlightenment is a cultural formation that distances us from precisely what civilization gives us--passion, convention (which is what animals lack). Affect not immediate or natural; Rousseau thinks there are no affects in the state of Nature. So, when he says that “man did not begin by reasoning but by feeling” (253), he’s not arguing that feeling is more primitive and natural than reason; rather, he’s arguing that affect/feeling is what brings us out of the state of Nature. Affective relations are what make “us” civilized peoples, not savages (who communicate with gestures) or animals (who likewise communicate representationally rather than affectively). With its deadening of affect/passion and increasingly precise accuracy, European rationality is more like primitive gestural languages than the “songlike and passionate” (253) ones Rousseau champions. In a way Rousseau is arguing that Enlightenment rationality returns Europe to a more primitive, ancient episteme--a visual episteme (this time analytical rather than gestural). It is more accurate, but less affective: “accent, which was not forthcoming from the heart, was replaced by clear articulations...to arouse not sentiment but understanding” (280). (“Accent,” in the Essay, means PITCH. “Articulations” are consonants.)Rameauean tonality tries to cut this middleman out, and return directly to the clarity of viz/gesture/physiology. He is trying to be ‘objective,’ and cuts out this inter/subjective element (which, as Rousseau points out, is ultimately the universalization of his own subjective/cultural milieu).This objectivity misses the point:

Whoever wishes to philosophize about the force of sensations must therefore begin by setting the purely sensory impressions apart from the intellectual and moral impressions we receive by way of the senses, but of which the senses are only the occasional causes: let him avoid the error of attributing ot sensible objects a power which they either lack or derive from the affections of the soul which they represent to us (287).

In other words, Rousseau thinks Rameau attributes to nature--to the relationships among sound frequencies--a power that is actually cultural. The problem with Enlightenment rationality is that it feigns objectivity--it claims to cut out the middleman of “interpretive horizon” or “implicit understanding,” and get right straight to the universal, ‘objective’ science. But it doesn’t.

So why should anyone other than Rousseau scholars care about this?

Rousseau’s Essay does a couple of really interesting things:

1. It shows the connection between tonal harmony and classically liberal concepts of social identity: they both use the “body-reasoning” or reasoning from physical causes that Rousseau critiques. We’re more familiar with this body-reasoning in the case of racialized and gendered social identities: there is a natural hierarchy of bodies (men and women, everybody else and white people, etc.), and a just society ought to respect and reflect that hierarchy, etc. But what Rousseau does is show that this type of reasoning, this epistemic framework, also grounds Enlightenment tonality.  The same general epistemic framework is present in both classical tonality and classically liberal political theory. So, Rousseau helps us understand the relationship between ways of thinking about music, musical practices, and ways of thinking about politics and political practices.
2. As I have argued elsewhere, Rousseau’s early work might actually be the very sort of non-ideal theorizing that Charles Mills suggests or hints it may be. Instead of theorizing from actual politics, Rousseau is theorizing from actual musical practices. So, Rousseau’s musical writings might be better, more productive resources for political philosophy than his actual political writings.
   
   3. Rousseau's geography is really different than Kant's. Kant also uses geographic differences as the basis of what, in his work, is racial difference. As I mentioned earlier, Kant engages in precisely the sort of reasoning-from-nature that Rousseau is critiquing here. But that's not their only difference. Rousseau is not using geography to ground a hierarchy of bodies--geography compels people to respond to it, and its these responses that are different. Now, Rousseau certainly thinks there's a teleological progress from savage to civilized 'man', but savagery or civility is not determined by one's physiology--either your climate or your body. So you might say that the Essay is not using the sort of reasoning we find in Enlightenment race theory (and Kant is). But another thing that's interesting about Rousseau's geography is the absence of Africa. He mentions Egypt and north Africa a few times, and "a Carib" once, but sub-saharan "black" Africa is totally absent from the Essay. In the essay, ASIA is the ultimate "other" to Europe. So the Essay doesn't use the black/white binary that posits Africa as Europe's polar opposite. There is definitely something going on about cultural difference, but it's not "race" in the way we philosophers conventionally understand it.