I.
I made my song a coat
covered with embroideries
out of old mythologies
from heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
wore it in the world’s eyes
as though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
for there’s more enterprise
in walking naked.
A Coat, Yeats, 1916.
Marie’s investigation into Bracha Ettinger’s art and ‘art-working’ provides a great springboard for discussion of how we might creatively manifest Butler’s theories concerning a narrative account of the self. Building upon the opacity of ourselves to ourselves as well as facets of opacity amongst ourselves and others, Marie’s incorporation of Serres’s concept of noise is incredibly fruitful when it comes to handling questions of narrative expression possibly bypassing the bottleneck of language.
The problem of language, as discussed in class, was installed by Nietzsche when he posited that words can only correspond to words, and thus the philosophers, artists, scientists or sages are all agents of the same (recycled) symbolic order. When we consider Serres contribution, we broaden our conception of communication to include all that swirls around the words vocalized: resonant signs, symbols, gestures and rhythms which may not be coherent or rhetorical at all, but which certainly furnish the moment of address and narrative. To put it more abstractly, humans cannot see gamma rays, hear x-rays, smell dark matter or feel solar wind, but all of these---all of the ‘noise’ of invisible sonic and visual frequencies---absolutely posture the account we give ourselves and the way by which that account may reveal itself in unanticipated ways.
Jan Hein (Hoogstad) makes a similar argument with noise and the overcoming of language (although not invoking Serres but Kittler instead) when discussing the rap artist Ol’ Dirty Bastard (“Oh Baby, I Like It Raw: Engineering Truth,” published in 'Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology', 2008). He writes that on the track ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’, “ODB’s insane rhymes foreclose all forms of interpretation, including those that do not try to testify to an absent intra- or extra-textual referent” (p99). For my purpose here, however, Hoogstad’s later claim that “the discovery of noise as the constitutive other of information opens up a prelinguistic realm that was not accessible before” is more intriguing (p104-5).
I’m pulling the discussion in this direction because I’m left somewhat unconvinced by Ettinger (scandal!) after reading her article Marie kindly linked. Mostly because I do not believe Ettinger moves past this issue of language/symbolic order enough. For me, my sense from her article is that her artwork functions pretty much like those psychoanalytic inkblots, designed to reveal the unconscious projections of the viewer/client (I’m looking specifically where she writes, “By aesthetical and ethical joining-in-differentiating and working-through, a spiritual knowledge of the Other and the Cosmos is born and revealed. Artworking and art-works
create such knowledge. It is reached by borderlinking one’s own soul-psyche to the breath of the psyche of the other and to the spirit of the Cosmos” at page 708, as well as her closing metaphor of art as the transport-station when she writes at page 711, “The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible, but the transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for this occasion”).
Saying that, I would argue that even if the ‘aesthetical encounter-event appears to achieve a dialectical re-encounter of what has been lost in language’, as Marie suggests, the medium of her work for myself is still ‘Oil and Mixed Media On Canvas’ and therefore is still/only mobilized through the language and symbolic ordering of culturally coherent ‘art’. We approach it as art, because we are already comfortable with the way she packages it: namely, the canvas frame, the oil paints with colors we already recognize, and especially the exclusive exhibition of her work in museums and galleries. Basically, my argument is that because we can already pre-place her expression as art, the possible psychic transformations and event-encounters resulting have already been curtailed by our own narrow spectrum of cultural language we deploy and receive through the moniker ‘art’. Even if the larger question I offer is completely off base, we should remember that these event-encounters are only open to the public within the privileged space of ‘artwork’ (museums, galleries), unless we knew her personally, and maybe caught sight of her artwork out of this linguistic context.
Would our generosity become less prolonged if Ettinger employed ketchup and jellybeans on postcards as the medium for her message? How would the affect of the aesthetical encounter-event be altered? And can we even imagine such a world, or should we?
II.
But let’s return to the possibility of prelinguistic realms through noise, à la Jan Hein. I want to suggest now that perhaps even with language we might approach this ‘aesthetical encounter-event’ if language can be, in certain contexts, only understood as noise (or purely aesthetics). I am thinking here of music and songs we encounter that are not in a spoken language we ourselves ‘understand,’ or that make use of tonal qualities with which we are not familiar or can appreciate hearing through the cultural matrix in which we are each situated. Often--nerdishly often, I admit--I find myself completely seized by a sound or phrase, which can trigger a multitude of memories, emotions, images or senses regardless of me hearing it ‘properly’.
For example, I have included the song طالعة من بيت أبوها by the band هاني متواسي for you to listen (.m4a, opens with iTunes, Quicktime and VLC). Although I recognize the language as Arabic, and I have a matrix of emotional associations with the melody because of the narrative I may give about how I came about acquiring it, I do not currently 'understand' the lyrics or the 'intended' message conveyed by the band. This is a song I include on most of my morning playlists, simply because it makes me happy. It's upbeat and makes me smile. I think about laughter and imagine a happy future every time I hear it. Perhaps its the singing crowd 'noise' in the background that charms me into imagining peaceful communities and people coming together, or, maybe the simple acoustic flourishes in each phrase relax my outlook; the sustained notes in which the singer oscillates pitches near the end even seem to ride over the beat like a surf board.
Still, the song remains opaque to me. My account of the song through my language necessarily falters because it only accepts the singing involved as a sequence of tones. Yet when I encounter the song overall, and hear the lyrics only as an aesthetic contribution to the music, there is still quite a bit of meaningful exchange for me. The reason for this is because I do not filter out the parts which are non-sensical to me. I recognize the opacity of the music as soon as I hear it, and, as a result, open up to its possibilities. I suspend my judgement because I recognize the impossibility of grasping the totality of the music.
In the case of this song, my ignorance of the literal linguistic meanings does not reduce its allure; in fact, in some ways it instigates an encounter-event with the recording wherein I bypass linguistic orders and open myself to all of the sound/noise involved. I might pay more attention to the timbre of the singer's voice and how it braids the downbeat, for example.
So to what extent can languge itself access prelinguistic realms in certain contexts? Where else might this hold true?
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