The Unsound of a Black Noise

By Mstyslav Kazakov

Before learning about the philosophical grounding of John Cage’s 4’33 minutes of ‘silence’, i recalled my base, almost thoughtless, quasi-physiological, naïve, reactions. I asked myself: How far this game is allowed to proceed, and how many players are allowed at the table? To elaborate: What about full 2-3 hours “Concerts of Silence,” with each piece requiring the note sheets to be watched to catch up by orchestra members, synced to the conductor movements? To scale up: To follow this line of reasoning, what about more than one orchestra/composer/concert hall “playing” “Silence”? And, if that is okay, should, then, this pleiad of “silence orchestral assemblages” (composers, conductors, their fellow orchestra musicians) be put separately from the composers, conductors, musicians who actually use their skills, education, talent, whatever else, and, not the least, musical instruments, to produce some audible sounds (for now, it does not matter which exactly type of sounds). And, if we agree on having them separately, then maybe (just maybe), these assemblages should be grasped not as a part of sonic arts (their subgenre/subcategory), since they have only residual, sedimentary “similarity,” such as a mere visual likeness to the sound-generating assemblage of “an audible orchestra,” imitating some movements of the latter? Maybe, they have to be treated as a new branch of performative arts? But nothing of that happens, because what Cage’s 4’33 is, is a privative performative gesture. And the problem with this performative gesture is just the same as with any performative gesture: it always functions only as a substitute – a superficial proxy of a real entity. Cagean “silence” is precisely a placeholder for “some quietness,” or even “inaudibility” none of which is a silence.

This is because ontologically, silence is, basically, an unsound. An unsound is a negation that is not limited to subsonic inaudibility for human ears (which is still reproducible and measurable). It is also not a descent into quietness. The closest concept that can serve as a relevant analogy here may be the term ‘unknowing’ as utilized by the apophatic mysticism: the prefix ‘un-‘ refers to an undoing; ‘un’ as a designator of negation of the epistemic grounding and paraconsistent apprehension of a limit – the apprehension of the ungroundedness of all thought. Similarly, an unsound is the apprehension of the ungroundedness of all perception or even the possibility of the sonic event, yet not as its mere absence. It is beyond the ‘hearing of silence’, or listening to all the possible versions of silence (as proposed by JLIAT). It is instead the possibility of sound to transcend ontologically its own physicality, a modality of becoming something else, an entity other than a sonic phenomenon. The unsound fathoms what Schopenhauer used to posit in his idea of sound as manifestation of the world (opposed to its representation in arts, for instance): a sound that is absolutely non-sonic, a second-order negation of a sound – a negation of a non-absent sound that negates itself. Unsound is not the negation of sound, but the sound of negation. Unsound is beyond the superficial oppositions one may evoke, those of sound and anti-sound (silence as a performative gesture), just as it is different from sonic phenomena opposed to super- and sub-sonic phenomena.

By the same token, unsound is not the dissolution of all distinct sounds into indistinction. We usually term the latter as “noise.” Akin to the “two silences,” one should speak of the two noises. The first one is the noise’s proxy substitute, a placeholder that, nevertheless, seems to dominate current ontographologies of noise and, more generally, of acoustic phenomena, for all the instances of noise generated as correlates (:= byproducts of a non-spontaneous activities of an entity capable of a mediated or unmediated sound generation). At its best, a performative gesture, just like Cagean silence is. To denote it, i will use the term “pokvach noise.” The term is a derivative a quasi-Ukrainian word “поквач” (“pokvach”) i made up specifically for a homophonic reflection of something that is improper or poorly conducted. Pokvach noise is correlationist because it is a historically determined, local pseudo-contingency: not even an anti-sound (a nonlocal pseudo-contingency), but an anti-music. It could have had many versions and realizabilities, forms of manifestation given the different unfolding of historical contingencies of societal, cultural and technological trajectories, as well as neurobiological developmental pathways in which aesthetics is grounded. The space that it occupies is within the usable instrumentally (audible), domesticated misanthropy, or, more precisely, misophonia.

This misophonia hasits exact place in the order of things in an edifice of an “arcology” of Anthropolis, a topos where everything only seems to have an orbit of its own, but is in fact chained to revolve around human – hardwired to anthropocentric cosmology. Noise-as-anti-music is a spurious spontaneity because it is ultimately nothing other than an organized sequence of sonic disharmonies. Any spurious spontaneity is ultimately something projective. Every noise that is projective is projected only to fail where it denies organized sound as a privative negation of sound, that is, negation only with respect to the correlation with what it negates. It is stochastic but not contingent. The point of failure for Cagean 4’33 as “a performance of silence” – a quantized orchestrated attempt to not to make human-audible sounds after a signal, – and for any noise unit, is basically the same: both are the derivatives of a form of anthropic subversion, an equivalence to what Eugene Thacker describes as the weakest of the four stages of “unhuman”: the unhuman viewed through the prism of its instrumental value for human species. As controversial as it may sound, the “unhumanism” here is allowed if and only if the human is still “in charge,” i.e. if there is something to be exhibited against the backdrop of correlates: a sound in principle undetectable to conscious hearing, – to Cagean “silence”; non-spontaneously organized harmonic sonic sequences (tuples or arrays of tones and timbres) – to pokvach noise. Hence, the difference between pokvach noise and the subjects of its “strikethrough” denial (an emblematic pair of eighth notes criss-crossed – a sigil of pokvach noise, grindcore and any other pokvach aesthetics inference) that matters is that prefix `dis-` with its implications fails to deliver the promise of what pokvach noise claims, or, pretends, to be.

There is a principal, metaphysical flaw in attempts to deal with the anthropic subversion of unhuman from the side of “nihil privativum” (a non-existence of something that is ontologically possible but does not actually exist in particular) by adding “anti-” to an ontic “terminal’s $PATH.” The best possible outcome is reaching the second stage of unhuman – anthropic inversion where unhuman is introduced through the inverted relation between human and inhuman as a form of “local misanthropy.” As Thacker puts it, here, a unilateralism relationality endures, but it has been reversed.” Additionally to Thackerian metamorphoses of unhuman, or within it, i distinguish between misa(o)-X and failure of/for X. Misanthropy, as well as any other forms of elaborated or spontaneous hatred toward X is still captured in tenets of human phenomenology, because it emerges as misanthropy only if correlated with other attitudes, and positions, all of which are essentially `all toohuman,` too. Anthropic inversion subverts anthropocentric vision of the world but in anthropomorphic terms, through the improperly conducted demounting of human exceptionalism, – expectably ending up with the same exceptionalist agenda (Derridean and postderridean deconstruction as a metaphysical project is perhaps one of the showcases of such failures; ecologically oriented black metal as observed by Ben Woodard, and, i’d add, the latter’s intersection with subcultural anarchism – musicians that “hail the black-and-green dawn”). Where, at the stage of anthropic subversion, the subject to be made use of was unhuman, it is now the unhuman that makes use of human (as adjective rather than noun) to proliferate and spread itself within the human Lebenswelten, the Lifeworlds. But to make a sense of this digression, we must move from misanthropy to the above mentioned misophonia.

Just like misanthropy refers here to philosophical misanthropy, misophonia refers not to a disorder, or a syndrome [of selective sound sensitivity], but to a more generalized subversion of sonic event, of potentially varying scales. A “local misophonic event,” for instance, can refer to a not-music production – a term used to delineate the outcome of any harmony-agnostic sound design. Rather than directly confronting music/harmony by the “Binary opposition Principle” or “Principle of Incommensurables,” as pokvach noise does, or moving beyond the sonic physicality and manifestations through distinct means of production, the result is not antagonistic, but agonistic to any potential subject of music perception as music and pokvach noise (noise as anti-music). A not-music as an instance of “local misophonic event” refers to sound sequences that can be described as liminal sound objects which no one would listen to intentionally, stripped of conceptual or performative functions (making their listening useless even as something akin to a proof of concept); more plainly, it is a creation of sound sequences that prompt only one question: “Why would ever anyone waste their time and efforts to create this?” Examples of not-music include:

(1) A promising one-minute tension-rising beginning of an industrial techno or psy-trance track which consistently evolves into climactic resolution, reaches climax, with a classical drop on the peak of tension, after which the 4/4 or syncopated techno kick follows… usually! – but unlike usual scenarios, here, reaching a drop, the track ends; 

(2) A middle of the generic piece of “waltz” or other classical music for a live orchestra that is composed of layering structures of never ending crescendos without catharsis or resolutions;

(3) A doo-wop-like vocal only humming & whistling, in a tone of triumphant roulade “of a grindcore blastbeat” – recording of it released on some Floppy Disk or other dead-end “pagerpunk” technology;

(4) An elaborate recording of “tailored ringtones” which in reality are enormous (say, 1,33 GB per file) copies of the same audio file with first ≈2 minutes identical, after which the only “differences” are: the not-music producer “sings along with the artist” a phrase that “helps one to detect who is calling without looking at the phone screen;” the potential base songs include (but not limited to) Mambo No.5… or Ace of Spades where a couple of words from the second verse are “sang above” as “If you’re friend with Róman – Pick up the phone: they call…”; manual trimming of the files beginning/ending by milliseconds, so that the ringtones are not just identical copies, but are literally different audio files if juxtaposed byte-to-byte;

(5) Very long studio tracks “dis-mastered” versions (Black MIDI versions of music with vocals are acceptable), with a very subtle, a matter of 0.0000n-ths, asynchrony of starting points, or almost “invisible” polyrhythmic quantizing mismatch (≈0.015-0.023s discordance) between drum, guitar, bass tracks, etc, or between the music and vocals – a setting that, as a composition progresses, eventually descends into a very annoying cacophony.

A sonic expenditure as it is, not-music is still within the gravitational impact of pokvach noise, even if its orbit is among the farthest, almost liminal.

An instance of a nonlocal misophonia is something that transcends the pokvach noise. Perhaps, the most salient example of a nonlocal, particularly, a cosmic-scale misophonic event, is what we can rightly call a relict noise of the Universe, relic radiation, or the cosmic microwave background (CMB/R) – the afterglow of the hot, dense state of the early universe that fills all space. CMBR is associated with primordial acoustic waves that were generated in the early universe, e.g. in the first 50,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe was filled with a radiation fluid that was in thermal equilibrium with ordinary matter. The environment allowed for the generation of acoustic waves moved with a speed similar to the speed of light (because the early universe was radiation-dominated), generating tiny fluctuations in temperature and brightness in the CMBR, observable today as well, with limitations and ontic differences of the waves themselves, given what can be assumed about them. The acoustic waves of the early universe can be thought of in terms of their frequency and wavelength, but their measuring by conventional sound-gauging methodology and machinery is no better than guessing due to the vast distances involved. Instead, the sonic properties of the primordial waves are inferred from the patterns of brightness fluctuations in the CMBR. Another instantiation, a series of cosmic misophonic events known as Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), had occurred “some” ≈380k years after the Big Bang, in overdense regions of primordial plasma where the heat generated by photon-matter interactions created high levels of outward pressure that counteracted gravity forces attracting matter towards the overdensity regions. The counteraction created oscillations comparable to sound waves generated by pressure differences in air, with the ontic differences: the results were manifested as spherical sound waves of baryons and photons moving roughly with ≈0.6 of the speed of light, directionally opposed to the overdensity; decoupled with photons, the pressure relief of the system left behind baryonic shells of matter, with each such shell representing a different sound wave wavelength. Conversely to primordial acoustic waves of CMBR which can be measured only by “chromatic analysis,” BAO are measurable to the point that the sound wave wavelengths of BAO are used to gauge other properties of time and space. A standard “ruler” of measuring the cosmic distances is known as the sound horizon – the maximum distance that a sound wave could travel in the early universe before the recombination event occurrence. The BAO signals are taken as patterns of the galaxies distribution that reflect the influence of sound waves, appearing as a bump in the correlation function of galaxies separation event, thus indicating a preferred distance scale (:= the sound horizon). Nonlocal misophonia is out of the reach of pokvach noise – it is a sonic archefossil, – an instance (of a kind) of Quentin Meillassoux’s archefossil. It is a level of anthropic inversion that enables the ‘un-‘ of the unhuman emerge. The limit is liminal, as well as it is ontological: the form of manifestation, for being a sonic archefossil it is a sonic archefossil.

In apophatic terms, a limit can be thought as a form of failure – a failure of X to transcend something that delineates X as such an X, therefore both the limit and its transcendence work as ontological differentiation modes, the former as its impossibility, the latter as its transgression. When i say that Noise and Silence are identical with both referring to their second, genuine meaning beyond their conventional anthropocentric correlations (silence as performance, noise as pokvach noise), i think of them as instances of a black illumination at the stage of Unhuman as a Failure. The difference that remains here is only in terms, both are inappropriate due to the failure of language to represent this non-manifested manifestation of unsound. A failure, both logically and ontically, has layers just as a negation has: there are First-Order and Second-Order Failures (FO/SOF). Thacker uses the case of apophatic theology and, by similar token, climatological mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet, to point to the failure mode of thought in the context of the mysticism of unhuman. This is what may be called SOF. Another example is the so-called “Mandelbrot’s probability” events, or “The Grey Swans” as FOF, versus The Black Swans as SOF modes of thought. The former are highly unlikely to occur with the failure attributed to the ways of handling them effectively or optimally (at least as Pareto-optimal scenarios, the cases of optimization where trade-offs are inevitable): we know that things exist in general, we can even scientifically approximate to modeling them and calculate their probability, fully or partially knowing their causes and so on. We just may fail in making desirable events occur, that could have prevented the undesired ones from happening. But we are aware of them, at least for the most part: the Known Unknowns. Black Swans are literally apophatic fragments of probability theory, risk studies and other relevant intersecting domains: the unknown non-optimizable variables that are epistemically unaccessible as something to consider as a part of a model of disaster. SOFs are transcendental risks discoverable only by the fact of occurrence (“if it happens, it happens” – a tautology of disaster). They are something that thought fails even to consider as a potential failure point, implicitly – things from the list “nothing else is X” – something other that is still an X.

The failure of language here is a FOF, but it points at a failure of a higher order as well, and perhaps this is the only pointer – here is why this is black illumination. What goes beyond the limits of nonlocal misophonia is perhaps something that can be defined only as an ontogenic transversion where the term ‘transversion’ would mean simultaneously “transgression,” “transversality” and “inversion.” The result is a strange unfathomable transcendence that is at once ontological and ontogenetic, the evisceration of sound from the sonic, reiteration of the unsound epiphanies of sound waves: an immeasurability of CMBR; cosmic distances measure units, which BAO are. The negation here would be not something that is done to sound (generated or contingent), but a negation indissociable from sound itself, inherent to physical properties, acoustic materiality of a sound wave – “more than just a sound at a certain frequency” (Thacker, 2014, p. 190). An ontogenic transversion that begets an unsound is neither the archesonic fossil, nor the absence of sound, nor it is a mere footnote on relativity of its perception. It is a metaphysical principle – a manifestation of an empty sound, or, a failure of sound beyond mere sonic; the manifested sound of negation (not apparent still), the Real but not accessible otherwise than through the black illumination of a failure. Unsound of the abyss which is not silence, quietness, noise or ritournelle, but the “strange sameness” of non-sonic Silence and Noise – a failure, the limit of access to which we can only signify in language. Given the inaccessibility, a withdrawal of this ontogenic transversion that unsound is, i can only refer to it in terms of apophatic, unhuman acoustics: the black noise.

Reference

Thacker, E. (2014). Sound of the Abyss in Melancology. Black Metal Theory and Ecology. Ed. by Scott Wilson. Zer0 Books, pp. 179.191.