anethics of aural ambiguity

8/20/2019 Anethics of Aural Ambiguity

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anethics-of-aural-ambiguity 1/35

ANETHICS OF AURAL AMBIGUITY

3329854901

MA AURAL & VISUAL CULTURES



2

GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON



3

Beginning with an as yet undefined,amorphous potentiality, all is

possible. No prescriptive outlinedelimits a boundary: every trajectoryseems equally viable. Still, theimpossibility of an undifferentiated

formlessness betrays its shape as the field begins to concretize. Materialand vectorial constraints limit this

radically open field to determinablesets of affordances, whilst immaterial pressures loom at the horizon asvirtual capacities awaiting inevitableactualization—when possible.



4

CONTENTS

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………4

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………...5

Xenopoetics: Ireland’s Oral Inf(l)ections……………………………………………………7

Machine reCode: The Logical Substrate of Anethics………………………………………11

The Field of Sound…………………………………………………………………………..13

Sonic Identity………………………………………………………………………………..15

Brief I: Dislocating The Concept…………………………………………………………...21

Toward Nonnormative Listening…………………………………………………………...22

Brief II: Bayard Operators………………………………………………………………….26

This Ambiguation……………………………………………………………………………27

A play of utterance……………………………………………………………………………..28

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………29



5

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. A 2D projection of Poem II. (Bataille) of Amy Ireland’s

Bouequet…………………..6

From: Ireland, Amy. “Bouequet, Or A Joke About The Language Of Flowers.” In CreativeManoeuvres: Making, Saying, Being. Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2013.http://www.aawp.org.au/the_creative_manoeuvres_making_saying_being_papers.

Fig. 2. The (infinite) poetic line for Amy Ireland’s Bouequet.………………………………..7

From: Ibid.

Fig. 3. The phonetic cipher for Poem II. (Bataille) of Amy Ireland’s

Bouequet……………..9 From: Ibid.

Fig. 4. A point as constructed from a (i) set-theoretical and (ii) category-

theoretical perspective with the morphism

f…………………………………………………….12

Fig. 5. Diagram of a domain being transformed into a reduced range via the

identity function g……………………………………………………………………………..15

Fig. 6. Visualization of Stevie Wonder's 'Superstitious' generated by The Infinite

Jukebox………………………………………………………………………………23

Screengrab from:http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html?trid=TRQDXXM13AFAB66B3F.



6

ANETHICS OF AURAL AMBIGUITY

What is a chamelion [sic] in a box of mirrors?

—0[rphan] D[rift>]1

We have much to learn from these differences between resemblances.—Hélène Cixous2

This essay constructs the concept of aural ambiguity so as to propose the

decoupling of the habit-fuelled tendencies of monovalent sonic navigation from the

processes of listening: anethics. In this essay, ethics—and thus anethics—will

generally be articulated within a Spinozist framework. For philosopher Benedictus

de Spinoza, ethics amounts to an increase and preservation of an entity’s conatus—

the unique and inherent valences that entity tends towards. However, these

tendencies are not such that they are

pre-given, because we

do not know what the body can do, or what can bededuced solely from a consideration of its nature, and …experience abundantly shows that solely from the laws ofits nature many things occur which … would never have

believed possible.3

This means that it is necessary to experiment in order for the specific tendencies of

an entity’s conatus to begin to be outlined. Yet, not every experiment will result in

the expansion or conservation of an entity’s conatus. Experimentation may lead to

counter-valent effects that are detrimental. Spinoza’s conception of ethics then can

be understood as a selection process that proceeds after experimentation: it is a

disposition to follow valences that align with an entity’s conatus, and also to lead

1 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 47. 0[rphan] D[rift>] is a groupof cultural practitioners who (dis)organized immersive audio-visual events. Emerging within thematrix of materialist cyber-philosophy of 1990’s UK that circulated around the work of Nick Land,Sadie Plant and the Warwick-based Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, 0D expedites the processes oftechnoc(c)ulture in an attempt to induce the loss of identity. Overstimulation and disorientationbecome tactics to bring about trans-individual virtual futures as-yet-unknown. Throughout this paper0D will serve as an underlying motor. In their sourcebook of 1995, Cyberpositive, texts aredisassembled and at times glitched to the point of becoming unrecognizable, performing anonnormative assemblage laced with ambiguity and audio-visions. What 0D performs in text, theprocedures for anethics of aural ambiguity performs in sound. 2

Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 2005), 118. 3 Benedictus de Spinoza, Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 280–281.



7

away from ones that are maligned with it. Ethics is the—homeostatic conservation

or negative feedback loop—of the conatus. An ethical listening could then be

characterized as an experimental process of sounding out what tendencies the body

naturally drifts toward. An ethical listener avoids encounters at the thresholds of

perception that might put the listener at risk. An unethical listener, by contrast,

labours against their conatus in order to provoke liminal and possibly detrimental

listening experiences. Nonetheless these are not the only possibilities; there is a

third route: anethics. Anethical listening proceeds with Spinoza’s first step of

experimentation, but rejects the ethical imperative to advance in alignment with

habit-fuelled tendencies and also jettisons a restrictive model of unethical listening

that specifically bears toward an annihilative tendency. An anethical listener

experimentally navigates the field of sound, without bearing toward advantageous

or adverse effects.

Anethics is a notion developed by philosopher Paul Mann. For him, it describes

the paralyzing pragmatics of nested commitments and (over)problematization. In

short, every question can be questioned, ad infinitum. The issue of how to proceed

when faced with too many decisions, too many alternate paths, leads Mann to a

Beckettian (im)mobility: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”4 The problematic, for Mann, is

one of competing ethical concerns and the impossible constitution of the Law that

might subsume them. To put it in Spinoza’s terms, if we must constantly experiment

in order to track the tendencies of the conatus, then a full account of what is

possible (Law) can never be achieved. Writing in 1999, Mann is faced with a

(postmodern) question: with no way of evaluating a universalized set of tendencies,

how does one enter into ethics at all? “Not anethics against ethics, but in the

expectation that ethics will not be able to contain its subject, because ethics is

precisely an attempt to formalize the laws that exceed it.”5 Rather than signal an

impasse that must be reluctantly and arbitrarily transgressed—I cannot, but do—

Mann’s concept of anethics will be remobilized in this essay as a productive

pragmatics of cross-contextual synth-analysis and dynamic structuralism via an

4

Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster, vol. 2: Novels (NewYork: Grove Press, 2006), 407. 5 Paul Mann, Masocriticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 199.



8

implicit category-theoretic substrate.6 Put another way, a polyvalent way of

navigating through the field of sound will be constructed, a syzygetic7 listening, and

anethics will be its cipher.

Xenopoetics: Ireland’s Oral Inf(l)ections

ecstacy [sic] the warping of language

—0[rphan] D[rift>]8

Taking up the Beckettian dictum that dissuades Paul Mann from productivenavigation, poet and philosopher Amy Ireland hears “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”9 as“the task of a speculative aesthetics.”10 Ireland is one of the co-founders of theAustralian para-academic literary salon, Aesthetics After Finitude, and is in constant

pursuit of a future poetics leaking into the present where “material interferencepatterns run through the human, a future of trans-, post-, and non-.”11 Hers is anexplicit gesture to let the outside in, as can be seen in her xenopoetry:

6 The use of the branch of mathematics known as ‘category theory’ in this essay to construct analternate version of anethics will be further outlined below. The term ‘synth-analysis’ effectively

translates the ‘pendular motion’ of moving from global to local and local to global contexts asoutlined by philosopher of mathematics Fernando Zalamea. For him, this method is integral to anynon-trivially universalist project. See Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of ContemporaryMathematics (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2012).7 Syzygy is a term used in such varied contexts as a mode of Alred Jarry’s poetic tactics; a technicalrelation within the high-level mathematics of algebraic geometry, a branch related to categorytheory; as a key operation within the diagrammatic number system of Nick Land, 0[rphan] D[rift>]and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit; as the alignment of three celestial bodies. The notion willbe developed as a species of nonnormative audition later in this essay. 8 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 63. 9 Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, ed. Paul Auster, vol. 2: Novels (NewYork: Grove Press, 2006), 407. 10 Amy Ireland, “The Aesthetics of Transcendental Materialism: A Propaedeutic for Xenopoetic

Creativity” (presented at the Art After Finitude: Speculative Aesthetics in the Humanities, Universityof New South Wales, 2013). 11 Ibid.



9

Fig. 1. A 2D projection of Poem II. (Bataille) of Amy Ireland’s Bouequet.

Bouequet is a 3D poem. The dimensionality is no metaphor. Consisting ofthree short object-poems in the shape of 3D-printed spherical flowers, the reader is

confronted with an altogether alien experience when holding these poems. As sheexplains, these poems have been derived from three original texts on “the theories

of (poetic) abstraction” which “have then been transposed phonetically, effectively

transforming them into sonic events and consolidating the work’s tendency towards

homophonic equivocation”12 or phonetic ambiguity. The phonemes of the originaltext have been reified into distinct shapes that, with an accompanying cipher canbe read. But, reading here takes on an idiosyncratic meaning as it becomes possibleto literally traverse the concretized phonemic space of the poem in multipledirections. Compared to the three original texts, the spherical topology of the poem-

object dis-orients the reader with a proliferation of possible routes. Bouequet is aninvitation to multiplicitous navigation, as the reader continuously moves through itssonic terrain from one phoneme to another.

12 Amy Ireland, “Bouequet, Or A Joke About The Language Of Flowers,” in Creative Manoeuvres:Making, Saying, Being (Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2013).



10

Fig. 2. The (infinite) poetic line for Amy Ireland’s Bouequet.

Although the accompanying cipher does include an image of the infinite(poetic) line that can be traversed in order to produce the original sequences ofphonemes, this image only hints at an orientation. Rather than disclosing theunipathic (ethical) way of moving across the poetic surface in a manner that could

be directly mapped onto the normative linear plane of the original essays—a mappingthat could be described as foregrounding the conatûs of the original texts—Ireland’s

spherical redistribution explicitly engenders non-linear and nonnormative(anethical) engagements with the text. To a certain extent the complex poeticprocess is occulted, mirroring the cryptographic character language. The original“texts are condemned to flicker eternally between potential readings, setting inmotion an infinite permutation of internal tensions”13 that need not be and cannotbe stabilized or decoded. Due to the lack of punctuation, it is possible to imaginean endless stream of sound being produced from a reading of these poem-objects.

With respect to the originals from which the phonetic content has been extracted,Ireland’s Bouequet incites a heretical practice of literacy. Her reoriented phonemesare the result of a “trisonomic,” poetic abstraction that moves from text to soundto topology, defining a compacted field of “radical insurgencies, heresies and

subversions”14 that produces an aural ambiguity playing at a xenorality. "Each newlevel of abstraction multiplies language’s latent ambiguities, engendering a

13 Ibid. 14 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press,

2008), 244, as quoted in Amy Ireland, “The Aesthetics of Transcendental Materialism: A Propaedeuticfor Xenopoetic Creativity” (presented at the Art After Finitude: Speculative Aesthetics in theHumanities, University of New South Wales, 2013).



11

semantic noise that feeds back into the code system, driving it towards entropy."15 In traversing Bouequet our ears are opened by an outside polyvalence which mayform while concatenated phonemes beckon an orientational anethics oscillatingbetween signal and noise—poem-objects speculatively gesturing toward an

oscillation-oriented ontology.16

Fig. 3. The phonetic cipher for Poem II. (Bataille) of Amy Ireland’s Bouequet.

15 Amy Ireland, “Bouequet, Or A Joke About The Language Of Flowers,” in Creative Manoeuvres:Making, Saying, Being (Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2013). 16

This is a play on the contemporary philosophy movement known as OOO or Object OrientedOntology, an offshoot of the more general philosophical tendency named Speculative Realism. Thetheory, as developed by Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton, rests on the assumptionthat objects—extensive ‘atoms’ that cannot be simply reduced to their parts nor to their relations—form the basis of reality. The speculative reality entailed by this belief is one where unicorns, apples,egregors, chameleons, RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, ear worms and the UN all equally exist, since they all maintaina level of consistency that need not be underwritten by a perceiving subject. An oscillation-orientedontology, by contrast, is one where the vibrational continuum or flux becomes bass [sic] material ofreality. In this case, poetic meaning is constituted in the oscillation between sense and nonsense(noise). For detailed introductions to Object Oriented Ontology see: Graham Harman, The QuadrupleObject (Washington: Zero Books, 2011); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be aThing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects,Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013). For an account of an oscillation-

oriented ontology, see the chapter “13.7 Billion B.C.: The Ontology of Vibrational Force” in SteveGoodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear , Technologies of Lived Abstraction(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 81–84.



12

Yet, ambiguity is not only induced by Ireland’s specific deployment of poetic

cryptography. It is also an inherent feature of language.17 For her:

Language is a method of encryption that translates itsoutside, however one chooses to construe it, into acoded, symbolic inside. Both divine and logicallanguages, designating as their grail a faultlesscorrelation between these two realms, necessarilyunderwrite their code systems with either divineguarantee or rational precision. It could be said thatpoetry capitalizes on the failure of these systems, whilesimultaneously mourning their loss.18

In this sense, language itself is already a xenopoetic operation, cryptographically

transducing its outside in. The internal parody19 of language flirts with anunattainable ideal and perfectly stabilized Law, but is inevitably destined todestabilize itself—so too does the set-theoretic anethics of Mann. In fact, as in thecase of homonyms, there is already an inherent capacity within language to fold inon itself and produce aural ambiguities.

When the rift between language and its outside yawns, poetry sneaks in.Xenopoetics becomes a way of accelerating20 a process of mutual inf(l)ection. Iflanguage itself already has this productive capacity, could it be that humanity in itshabit-fuelled tendencies serves as an impediment to language’s “mad, self -

propagating, non-linear putrescence”?21 Or is it the xenopoet, as the anethicalpropagator of polyvalence, that is able to intervene within language to feed itforward to its own as-yet-unknown futures? Ireland asks: “If language is code, might

it not run wild once the last tethers of human exigency are cut?”22 By leadinglanguage into levels of abstraction that would otherwise remain implicit, esoteric

17 For a detailed account of various forms of ambiguity, mostly within a textual register, see theunparalleled William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966). 18

Amy Ireland, “Bouequet, Or A Joke About The Language Of Flowers,” in Creative Manoeuvres:Making, Saying, Being (Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2013). 19 The autonomy of parody is extended beyond the restricted economy of language toward the moregeneral economy of a base materialism in the writings of Georges Bataille. See Georges Bataille,Visions Of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985),especially “The Solar Anus.” 20 Accelerationism names a political strategy whose contemporary form, as presented in the worksof Reza Negarestani, Nick Land, Ray Brassier and Helen Hester is an attempt to leverage neoliberalcapitalist strategies and mechanisms against capitalism itself. This process whereby a system isprovoked into long-range positive feedback loops resonates with the operation of xenopoeticsoutlined here. It is possible that accelero-poetics is a distinct variety of a poetry that insists on lettingthe outside in. For a detailed sourcebook, with an exceptional introduction, see Robin Mackay andArmen Avanessian, eds., #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth; UK: Urbanomic, 2014). 21

Amy Ireland, “Bouequet, Or A Joke About The Language Of Flowers,” in Creative Manoeuvres:Making, Saying, Being (Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2013). 22 Ibid.



13

and unactualized, Ireland’s Bouequet offers alternative avenues for p(h)o(n)eticnavigation.

Machine reCode: The Logical Substrate of Anethics

[ A] package of software implements for hacking intothe machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels. —0[rphan] D[rift>]23

At the turn of the 21st century, universalist projects underpinned by category-theoretic abstract dynamics—generally opposed to set-theoretic inertia—gain anincreased prominence, such as can be seen in the current work of philosophers AlainBadiou (2006 onward), Reza Negarestani (2011 onward) as well as that of musictheorist Guerino Mazzola (2002 onward). The shift from a set-theoretic to acategory-theoretic orientation makes possible the construction of apparatuses thatgesture toward the non-trivial conceptualization of disparate logics. Following inthis trajectory, the proliferation of contexts that for Mann was understood to bedebilitating can be reconstructed as an anethical operation of nonnormativelynavigating through multiple contexts at once.

Paul Mann’s anethics sees ethics as a perpetual transgression. His inability to

contain his subject and his continuous “attempt to formalize the laws that exceed”24 can be seen as a result of having a set-theoretic framework. Set theory—theconceptual machine code of the 19 th and 20th centuries—has at its core the conceptof the successor. In short, what is meant by this idea is that for every set—amultiplicity defined as a collection of particular objects—there is necessarily anotherset that envelops it such that there can be no set ‘in between’. For example, a set

that contains 3 elements is succeeded by a set of 4 elements, not a set consisting of5 elements, 7 elements or any other number that is not 4 elements. What the ideaof a successor entails—and here we see the issue with Mann’s cumulative paralysis—

is that no matter what the set is there will always be another that envelops it. There

can be no Law that subsumes all others for another law will supersede it. Within thisset-theoretic framework, any account of ethics will always be incomplete. From theperspective of a particular set of ethics, there is no way to map the transition fromit to the set that succeeds it: the successor is an axiomatically presupposed aporia.In a sense, only the successor can account for the set that has been succeeded, butthis retroactive orientation is blind to its own inevitable successor.

Further still, within the perspective of set theory, every set of a particularnumber of elements is, as a rule, equivalent. If in this sense competing ethicalcommitments are considered as being of equal value, the logic of Mann’s incapacity

23 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 201. 24 Paul Mann, Masocriticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 199.



14

to decide between them is made intelligible. If anethics defines a multiplicitousethics, then, from this set-theoretic perspective, every option is equally valid andundecidable; all immanent, context-specific differences between sets of the samebreadth are indistinguishable. To put it in Spinozist terms, if there are multiple

advantageous valences that a body can tend toward, if conatus is seeminglypolyvalent, then set-theoretic anethics is stuck at a crossroads25 unable to decidewhich path to take. However, category theory is another way of constructing thisdynamic, which offers other means to pilot the proliferation of options and theseemingly incapacitating valences they entail.

From a category-theoretic perspective, it becomes possible to characterizedisparate ethical commitments as being distributed across a single unified field. Todo this each account becomes a set of entailments localized on a universal field oftendencies and, as a result, the immanent, context-specific differences are

dynamically defined in relation to each other. This is not to say that category theoryis totalizing. On the contrary, category theory offers a pragmatics that moves fromone context to another, analyzing the rules of each locale and simultaneouslysynthesizing them in a global dynamic plane that is potentially reconfigured withthe encounter of new contexts. In effect, a logical substrate that is category-theoretical is a diagram of thought's abstract dynamics.

Rather than have the notion of a successor as the essential drive, at the coreof category theory is the concept of the morphism.26 It is possible to conceive of amorphism as a way of mapping one set onto another set. What this means is that

category theory effectively posits a mathematics or logic of the transformationsfrom one set of ethics to another—whether this other be larger, smaller or of thesame size—while maintaining the original dynamics internal to each. An intuitiveexample of the transition from set theory to category theory is that of the point. Inthe former, an axiomatic presupposition of a transcendent, ideal object is necessaryin order to construct the concept of a point: the notion of an object without breadth,length or width. From the category-theoretic perspective, the construction of apoint is the act of pointing paired with a limit function, such as a plane. The limitfunction is needed in order to locate the point, otherwise the gesture never arrives.

A point is transformed from a dot to an arrow.

25 Paul Mann explicitly uses the image of the crossroads to characterize his conception of anethics.See Ibid., 214–216. 26

See F. W. Lawvere and S. H. Schanuel’s Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories for a deceptively simple introduction to category theory, which includes detailed descriptions of thevariety of morphisms.



15

Fig. 4. A point as constructed from a (i) set-theoretical and(ii) category-theoretical perspective with the morphism f.

This transition may seem trivial, but it permits the non-trivial conceptual shift froma machine code that is static and imposed onto the subject, to one that recodes theconceptual dynamics internal to the subject onto a field that is then open tonavigation. In this way, anethics becomes an abstract operation that can bemobilized as a productive pragmatics of cross-contextual synth-analysis. Given thatsound is an effect of movement, it is apt to use category theory as the underlyingmachine code for the construction of anethics of aural ambiguity.

The Field of Sound

[U ]nder the right conditions, yourears … can tie into deep structures —0[rphan] D[rift>]27

The field of sound appears as a subset of a more expansive vibrationalcontinuum. There are material vibrations that are unsound28, they cannot be heard.As techno-sonic theorist David Cecchetto makes clear in his introduction toHumanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism, sound is differential, relationaland multiplicitous; that is to say, rather than being a static object, sound exists viathe oscillation of media at frequencies within certain thresholds that are dependant

on specific listening apparatuses—what is heard is change.29 While matter pulses,auditory systems convert mechanical oscillations that fall within specific perceptualthresholds into the varieties of sonic experience: rhythm, pitch, timbre, intensity,and so on. Although the vibratory continuum of matter concretely envelops the field

27 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 238. 28 As Goodman writes, “The concept of unsound relates to both the peripheries of auditory perceptionand the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.” Steve Goodman,Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear , Technologies of Lived Abstraction

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), xx. 29 David Cecchetto, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism. (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2013), 2–3.



16

of sound, this field does not exist in the same way as does the oscillating continuum.Despite the fact that many aspects of sound emerge as a function of vibratory matterand so can be directly mapped onto a material counterpart—frequency of vibrationonto pitch, amplitude of vibration onto volume, distribution of overtone partials

over the vibration onto timbre—the resulting picture flattens the psycho-physiological processes that undergird auditory perception. The field of sound canbe constructed as a sonico-relation [sonic correlation] where the mapping betweenmaterial fluctuations and auditory perception is not as simple as a one-to-onecorrespondence. This is not only due to the fact that audition is indifferent to certainvibrations: vibrations beyond the bandwidth of aurality are not heard and so thesefluctuations are effectively mapped to zero.

What begins to break with the possibility of a one-to-one correspondence isthat actually vibrating extensive matter is only one mode of the field of sound;

intensive processes such as memory and imagination are equally important foraudition. It would be an absurdity to bracket out local histories and traditions—

whether individual or social—as having no effect on aurality. Yet, it must be notedthat although auditory perception is what allows for navigation through the field ofsound, this field in some sense has a reality of its own, outside individual listeners.The specific orientations undertaken whilst moving through the field of sound willin fact condition the kinds of sounds encountered there. This is more an indicationof the dynamic structure of the field, rather than a demonstration of its subjectiveexistence. Just as structures and dynamics change when the scale of analysis

changes within a physical system—a quantum scale, molecular scale and macro scaleafford different kinds of organization—different contours are encountered on thefield of sound depending on the listening orientation. If, as Steve Goodmandescribes, “[t]he bandwidth of human audibility is a fold on the vibratory continuumof matter”, then we can conceive of the field of sound as consisting of complex

intensive labyrinths within that continuum that—as sound becomes more abstract—decouple auditory experience from a material reductionism.30 Although constructedout of the vibrational continuum, the field of sound cannot simply be reduced to it.Defining the field of sound as being circumscribed by the vibratory continuum of

matter risks neglecting the conceptual and social potentials of sound as a dynamicabstract machinery. Put another way, sound is actually contained within thevibratory continuum, yet sound has virtual potentials that exceed materialconstraints and open them out onto more immaterial modes of propagation.31 Thefield of sound cuts diagonally across the concrete and the abstract.

30 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear , Technologies of LivedAbstraction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), p. 9. 31 The distinction between the actual and the virtual is engineered throughout the work of Gilles

Deleuze, including his collaborations with Félix Guattari. For a succinct explication see Gilles Deleuzeand Claire Parnet, “The Actual and the Virtual,” in Dialogues II, European Perspectives (New York:Columbia University Press, 2007), 148–152. A much more in depth presentation appears in his books



17

In a characteristically Deleuzian tone, philosopher and translator RobinMacKay, brilliantly describes the intricate folds of the field of sound as acontinuum that goesbeyond the limited thresholds of human experience:

sound, on its broad peripheries, creeps out of the brainand into the body, then out of conscious sensationaltogether. Since mechanical recording apparatusesknow no such distinctions, human territorializations ofthe vibratory continuum on all levels—psycho-physiological, cultural and musicological—can only berelativized by the acute analysis of sound. Stratal schemaare transcendentally deduced from experience.32

Past the restrictive sonic capacities of the human, there exist distributions of the

sonic insensible that are registered by audio technologies.33 Without the aid ofapparatuses to tune into these (humanly) unsound frequencies, the inhuman regionsof the field of sound would remain nothing but pure speculation. The advent ofinstruments to register oscillations within this range, which can then be transducedinto other sensory modalities or even transposed into the human auditory range,allows fanciful conjecture to modulate into a considered investigation whereexperiment occurs not only in thought.

Sonic Identity

Who am I? Whoever I can get away with being.—0[rphan] D[rift>]34

While navigating the field of sound, listening to its contours, disparate ‘sonic

events’ may be encountered that are perceptually indistinct. Distributed across thesound field are audible regions that can be identified with one another, leading tothe shaping and structuring the audible continuum. A sonic identity function —or

homomorphism35—operates such that one ‘aspect’ of the sound field may be moreor less mapped onto another ‘aspect’ within a certain threshold of differentiability.

Given that sounds are not static phenomena, the function of mapping one ‘instance’

on cinema. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1986); Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 32 Robin Mackay, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Wildstyle in Full Effect,” in Deleuze and Philosophy:The Difference Engineer , ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Routledge, 1997), 249, my emphasis. 33 For a comprehensive prehistory of sound recording technology see Jonathan Sterne, The AudiblePast: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 34 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 383. 35

Homomorphism is a term taken from mathematics that designates a transformation wherein whichthe relations between elements in the domain (the first set) are maintained in the range (the secondset).



18

onto another is enacted via a homomorphic operation that identifies the one withanother or multiple others: it is a relation between oscillations, an identificationbetween modulating processes. Locating these sonic identities throughout the fieldof sound, organizes the sound field, effectively ’shrinking’ the range of the

continuum. The audible domain of the vibrational continuum is twisted or filteredinto a ‘smaller’ range when identity functions are performed on the field.

Fig. 5. Diagram of a domain being transformedinto a reduced range via the identity function g.

To make this clearer, it is helpful to think of homonyms. As a caveat, oral

language is only a subset of the aural field and thus is constrained to a more limited

locale. There are more sounds than can be uttered. Orality will be used in order to

more easily exemplify the homomorphic processes being discussed, but most—if not

all—of these aspects are extendable onto the field of sound beyond the phonetic.

When listening to the words ‘there,’ ‘they’re’ and ‘their,’ it is unlikely that the

listener will be able to distinguish which word is which.36 Without any context, these

words are sonically identical and thus ambiguous. It could be argued that once these

words are uttered, they are distributed over time, which makes their distinction

possible. However, given that all sound is already spectromorphological37 and a

change over time, temporal distinction does not suffice to stabilize and

disambiguate an identity. It is left unknown whether the same word has been

reiterated three times, or if in fact three distinct words were pronounced. All the

same, when contextualized, sonic identities begin to split and their local grammars

36 The efficacy of this example is significantly reduced in the written form it takes here. 37 Spectromorphology is a descriptive tool developed by electro-acoustic composer, Denis Smalley,intended to give listeners and composers explanatory traction on their listening experiences. Withthe increased proliferation of synthetically produced sound and the exploration of new musical forms,the standard language of musicology became inadequate. Thus, a new way of describing musical

experiences, outside notions such as scale, bar, and beat, was begging to be coined. See DenisSmalley, “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes,” Organised Sound 2, no. 2 (August 1997):107–26.



19

or laws begin to open onto potentials for distinction. A local sonic identity function—

the determination of the logics of a particular ’sonic event’—allows one to parse the

field of sound in a manner regulated by aspects neighbouring what is being analyzed,

reducing potential ambiguity. By taking the particular context of each ‘sonic event’

entering the process of identification into account, it becomes possible, when

mapping one context onto another, to determine ‘aspects’ that remain invariant or

begin to vary. The degree of invariance that results from the transit between one

sound and another is the extent to which these sounds can be identified. When there

is a maximal level of invariance, the ‘sonic events’ are identical; when there is a

minimal level of invariance, the ‘sonic events’ are completely dissimilar; when some

‘aspects’ vary and others remain invariant, the ‘sonic events’ are similar but not

identical. To use the words from the example above: there are ways in which words

are deployed such that their sonic ambiguities are controlled; they’re

distinguishable. Here, the sonic identities are disambiguated as a function of their

appearing.

*

* *

A logic of appearing, that is the logic of a world, comesdown to a unified scale for the (intrinsic, subject-less)measure of identities and differences and for theoperations that depend on this measure. It is necessarilyan order-structure, making sense of expressions like‘more or less identical’, and, more generally, ofcomparisons of intensities. We call this order, and theoperations associated to it, the transcendental of asituation (or of a world). 38

In order to further this account of sonic identity it is useful to turn to Alain

Badiou, 39who constructs a conception of identity out of the abstract dynamics of

38 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009), 571. 39 Badiou’s extremely intricate philosophy is often pejoratively characterized as Platonic. However,the onto-logical processes he mobilizes derive from material dynamics. That is to say, in a typicallyexistentialist fashion, existence precedes essence. Yet, what is interesting about his philosophy is

that existence not only precedes essence, it also forms it. As matter begins to sediment into habitualpatterns, ‘conceptual gestalts’ emerge that begin to consist within an abstract, set -theoreticallygoverned space. The modifications of matter continuously modulate these gestalts and sometimes



20

category theory. Moving from the set-theoretic account of his Being and Event to

the category-theoretic perspective of his Logics of Worlds, Badiou describes the

method of his later project as an “objective phenomenology”40—an attempt to gain

conceptual traction on the reality of appearance. To be more precise, in books II,

III, and IV of Logics of Worlds, Badiou exhaustively outlines a Greater Logic—in

concordance with the mathematics of category theory—that he describes as “an

exhaustive, … materialist theory of the coherence of what appears.”41 Given that

this account takes up the majority of the Logics of Worlds—a book that is 617 pages

in length—its conceptual architecture will only be sketched so as to detail a more

robust conception of sonic identity. What will be of particular importance is the

notion that identity is constructed as a mechanism supported by the stabilization of

a context and of particular ‘aspects’ within that context, as well as a certain degree

of invariance across ‘aspects’ of that context. Stabilization and invariance are purely

immanent operations, emerging out of the context-specific dynamics inherent to the

situation being conceptually navigated.

Objective phenomenology tracks invariances within appearance. Appearance,

for Badiou, is figured as a measure of identity and difference within a unified field,

context or world. What this means is that whenever a body or entity appears within

a particular context it maintains a certain relationship to all the other bodies or

entities appearing within that context. Put another way, appearance locates a body

or entity within a context and registers its dynamic tendencies in relation to other

appearances. This then can be conceived as the degree to which something

manifests within a particular region. So long as something makes an appearance, it

can be related to anything else that also appears. As Badiou states, “there always

exists a transcendental evaluation of ‘what there is in common’ to two given

evaluations.”42 A 'transcendental evaluation' is simply the tracking of tendencies

inherent within a specific context and also the determination of the strengths of

these tendencies in relation to others. It is important to understand that it is the

" function of appearance" itself that "measures the identity of appearance of two

have the power to completely reconfigure the space itself. If Badiou’s project is Platonic, then Platois a materialist. 40

Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009), 38–39. 41 Ibid., 94. 42 Ibid., 202.



21

beings in a world.”43 The evaluation of two tendencies is already implicit in their

relation, and this relation always exists so long as they both appear within the same

context. Identity can be here constructed as the degree to which tendencies align.

When two bodies or entities appear with the same tendencies, they can be said to

be maximally identical. This is the case when, given a certain context, the function

of identity between these appearances remains invariant. In a sense, when two

bodies or entities share the same conatus then they are maximally identical. It is

important to stress the variable quality of identity within Badiou's theory of

appearances. Since identity is constructed as a homomorphic function between

appearances, the context wherein which appearances take place is significant. In

fact, the degree of identity between bodies or entities may significantly differ when

dislocated into a different context. What appears such in one context, may not

appear so in another. Identity is sensitive to context-manipulation.

For a more concrete sonic example, suppose you are alone on the bus

traveling to an event, listening to new music on earbuds. The music drifts in and

out of focus as you notice other sounds: the engine of the bus, other people

speaking to each other and the scratch of trees against the windows. There are

other things on your mind, other perceptions entering your field of attention and

you are not trying particularly hard to maintain focus on the music—I'm not sure if

I like this track—then someone asks you a question. It takes a moment before you

even notice you are being addressed, then your attention shifts. This general

soundscape (context) is a complex weaving of the proximal sounds of music being

emitted from just beyond your ear drum, the more distant sound of the questioning

voice and the more ambient sounds of trees, other voices and the engine. Each sound

appears in relation to all the others and demands more or less of the attention.

However, attention is not necessarily what constitutes a 'transcendental evaluation'.

The disparate sounds within this soundscape exist whether or not attention is paid

to them.44 More radically—and this is the position being put forward by Badiou's

method of an objective phenomenology—these sounds have explicit objective

('subject-less') relations to one another. Important to the 'transcendental evaluation'

of a soundscape is the position of the listening apparatus—the body of the listener—

43

Ibid., 200. 44 Of course it is possible to insert into this example an earworm or even a hallucinated auditoryexperience. There are sounds and contexts that are entirely dependant on the listener.



22

since it also makes an appearance within the context. If attempting to perform a

'transcendental evaluation' of the intensities—or volumes—of each sound within the

context it is first necessary to locate each sound and the listener(s) within the

context. Given that here the listener's earbuds are inserted directly into the

listener's ear, the volume of the music emitted by the tiny speakers need not be too

loud in order to seem maximal. Yet, the ambient sounds still leak into the ear,

indicating that the intensity of the music is equal to or lower than these external

sounds. For Badiou, appearances can be determined at three values: (1) maximal, it

appears as the most intense manifestation within the particular context, (2)

minimal, it appears as the least intense manifestation within the particular context,

and (3) neither maximal nor minimal, it appears at a degree between the most

intense and least intense manifestation within the particular context. With these

three values alone it is possible to locate the degree to which any sound within the

soundscape appears.45

Of course, these appearances may differ depending on the particular

orientation undertaken when performing a 'transcendental evaluation,' but one can

then perform another 'transcendental evaluation' including multiple orientations.

This is the novelty of having a category-theoretic account of the reality of

appearance. Since Badiou's objective phenomenology proceeds from immanent

dynamics inherent to a situation (context), multiple orientations to the particular

appearances being evaluated serve as alternative ways of approaching the dynamics

at hand. This approach does not modify the dynamics, but embeds them onto a

unified field allowing them to mutually inflect one another. Taking multiple

orientations into account when performing a 'transcendental evaluation' might have

the effect of stabilizing the dynamics of the situation and thus priming for

navigational traction on the reality of appearance.

A morphism from one region of the field to another reveals both the local,

internal dynamics of each region and the global dynamics when these regions are

45 In Logics of Worlds Badiou does at times use sound to elucidate his Greater Logic. However, thissound appears as an intrusion to his illustrative landscape. What we hear in his example is “thedeafening noise of a motorcycle skidding on the gravel.” Ibid., 126. This noise reappears on pages126–135, 162–164 and 178–184. Besides this specific instance Badiou tends to avoid speaking of the

field of sound, preferring to restrict his engagement with sound to (classical) music that has alreadybeen canonized such as that of Arnold Schönberg, Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner. See Ibid., 79–89; Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner (London ; New York: Verso, 2010).



23

put in relation. In fact, it is possible and indeed necessary to construct morphisms

from a region back onto that self-same region, so as to trace its own internal

dynamics. Badiou names this process of self-identification existence.46 Without the

operation of self-identity differences between sets could only be inferred. Existence

stabilizes an identity, which can then be evaluated with other appearances. The

remaindered valences—i.e. the tendencies present in the process of self-identity,

but 'lost' in the process of 'transcendental evaluation' with other tendencies—attest

to 'absolute differences' not evaluated between the appearances being evaluated.

Since the 'transcendental evaluation' measures what is common, another process is

necessary to take into account what is different. Badiou puts it in a nutshell:

“Existence governs difference.”47 It is within this difference that polyvalent

trajectories begin to proliferate and other trajectories on the peripheries of identity

beckon further navigation. Anethical listening describes a way of navigating through

the field of sound, whether that drift be localized in the ear, expanded to the entire

body or distributed across multiple bodies with or without prosthetic aids. A

syzygetic listening (dis)inclined to follow the conatus.

*

* *

Brief I: Dislocating The Concept

Jump into a space and it’s not called anything. None ofthis wants to be named, cause it does not exist,doesnot make sence [sic] outside of here and is not

communicable,is only felt through slight feelings and is not too practicle [sic].—0[rphan] D[rift>]48

46 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009), 208. Badiou’sconcept of ‘existence’ leads to a particularly complex logic for it entails an abstract dynamics thatmoves between his Greater Logic (Appearance) and the onto-logical structures of ‘conceptualgestalts’ (Being). In effect, existence maps processes associated with the way Ideas manifest and

how this manifestation (retro-)actively (re-)constructs Ideas. 47 Ibid., 210. 48 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 150.



24

In 15th century France a band of thieves formed named the

Coquillard (the companions of the shell). In order to commit

their crimes they relied on aural ambiguity. The companions of

the shell overcoded the standard French at the time with their

own meanings. A word having nothing to do with theivery would

be code for the-one-who-steals-bags (vendegeur ), another word

for the-one-who-picks-locks (crocheteur ), and so on. But these

words were in common use in 15th century France. So, within

earshot of the public, the coquillard could plan an attack and no

one would be able to hear their 'foreign' tongues. Only if you

were a companion of the shell yourself, would you have any idea

of inaudible bait-and-switch that was going on. The Coquillard

were effectively enacting a nonnormative (anethical) listening

since they would constantly be open to hearing the 15 th century

common sense meaning as well as their own unique sense of the

word, simultaneously. The Coquillard maintained a strict code:

no one who was not a companion of the shell was to learn their

aural traditions and laws. A clear distinction between who was

'in' and who was 'out' was made, but by simple utterances of

polyvalent, overcoded words. 49

Shibboleths function in a analogous manner, in that they

are words, phrases or sounds that can be used to determine

whether someone is of the group or not. It is unlike Coquillard

since it does not operate on polyvalence or overcoding. A

shibboleth is a way to probe another, simply based on variances

of their word's sonic identity. A simple example of this is the

word Toronto. Generally, those that grew up in that city do not

pronounce the last 't', and say "Torono". If someone pronounces

that penultimate letter, "Toronto", one familiar with this aural

tradition of dropped t's will instantly be able to recognize that

49 For a beautiful account of the Coquillard and other hermetic linguistic practices see Daniel Heller-Roazen, Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers (New York: Zone Books, 2013).



25

this person is from elsewhere. This lends another meaning to

sonic identity .

* *

*

Toward Nonnormative Listening

Change for the machines. That’s all we’ve ever done is change for the machines. But this is the last time. We’ve finally changed enough that the machines will be making all the changes fromnow on. The only place to go is into it.—0[rphan] D[rift>]50

Sonic identities are operations that establish equivalence between sounds,

within a certain threshold of identification—there is a gradient between sounds that

sound the same and those that do not, as well as sounds that sound similar to others—

and, as a consequence of this identification we obtain aural ambiguity. Although

sonic identity and aural ambiguity mutually entail one another, from a particular

orientation, they should be conceptualized as relatively distinct processes. Sonic

identities map one sound onto another sound based on a threshold of

infra_perceptibility51 so that the sounds become indistinct, whereas aural ambiguity

can be used as a way of navigating between these identities, (mis/)recognizing the

potential of each (identical) sound’s polyvalent trajectory by maintaining their

locally instantiated deployments. Taking these processes together we get a diploid

coincidence simultaneously pulling together and coming apart; or, in a word: syzygy.

In a sense, we do not create sonic identities. Although the given constraints

of a specific identification process will determine different identities, these

identities are, in a sense, already distributed throughout the field of sound. A C#,

for example, sounds like another C#, when heard within the context of pitch-

content. A song of a specific genre can be identified with another with the same

genre specificities, if genre is the identifying constraint. With regards to language,

we do not really invent the sounds we use to speak. That said, sonic identities are

50 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 309. 51 The minute shift displacing the hyphen to an underscore makes the notion of this concept legible.

The notion is derived from Marc Couroux’s concept of the infra_legible. Marc Couroux, “Appropriationand the Infra_legible” (presented at the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, Kitchener, April2011).



26

not at all given to us, we must discover them, and yet aural coincidence

intensification can be constructed. Hyperstition names this process. The word first

appears in print in 1999 within the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s collaborative

project with 0rphan Drift, the cata-comic MESHED, where one of its definitions

reads: hyperstition is a “coincidence intensifier”.52 A co-incidence: occurring

together or syzygy. The French writer and 'pataphysician Alred Jarry used the term

'syzygy' to denote a method of "transfix[ing] a momentary conjunction or opposition

of meanings."53 It seems possible then that when navigating the sonic field, taking

note & ‘collecting’ instances of syzygy—the co-implicated processes of sonic identity

& aural ambiguity—or at least by tweaking the listening apparatus so as to introduce

a latency into an oto-matic identity stabilization, the proliferation of polyvalence

can be induced or further intensified. It is worth noting that the theorist Steven

Connor, in his essay “Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens,” makes explicit

reference to this ‘collection of aural ambiguities’ when he speaks of the “collectors

of mondegreens”—mondegreens being aurally ambiguous lyrics.54 He mentions the

example of Jimi Hendrix’s “excuse me while I kiss this guy” [“the sky”]. The twin -

process of syzygy, in its capacity to (mal/)align one aspect of the sonic field onto

another, de-forms the sonic field, generating a potential for hyperstition; syzygy

literally entails coincidence, a conjunction of identification and separation.

Navigating the sonic field tuned by a nonnormative listening we can ‘collect’

syzygies to provoke the further proliferation of coincidences—intensifying them—and

thus make the sonic field more pliable.

An illustrative example:

52 0rphan Drift, and CCRU. MESHED. (London: Beaconsfield, 1999). 53

Alfred Jarry, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry , trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 54 Connor, Steven, “Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens” (presented at the Listening In, Feeding Back, Columbia University, 2009), http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/.



27

Fig. 6. Visualization of Stevie Wonder's 'Superstitious' generated by The Infinite Jukebox.55

The Infinite Jukebox is a web app, built by Paul Lamere at the Music Hackaday

event at MIT in Boston in 2012. It analyzes an .MP3 sound file’s sonic profile,

separates this into ‘beats’ & links temporally distinct ‘beats’ that are sonic

identities—based on pitch, timbre, loudness, duration and position of the ‘beat’ ina bar. [The web app’s visualization makes this explicit.] The links—or aural

ambiguities—serve as pathways that are probabilistically followed. When the

playback is at a ‘beat’ that has been identified with another and there is a bridge

or link between them, there is a chance that the playback will jump to this other

55

Paul Lamere, “The Infinite Jukebox for Superstition by Stevie Wonder,” Web app, The Infinite Jukebox , (November 11, 2010),http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html?trid=TRQDXXM13AFAB66B3F.



28

part of the song. The threshold of similarity and probability of jumping can actually

be ‘tuned’ within the application.

The Infinite Jukebox effectively functions via aural ambiguity in order to

infra_perceptibly transport us to a similar but alternate part of the song. A ‘beat’ is

switched out for its sonic doppleganger. Rather than listening in a linear way from

start to finish, the Infinite Jukebox folds & enfolds the sonic time-space of the song

allowing for a nonnormative mode of listening. The process that allows the

infra_perceptible switch to occur is what phonomagus Marc Couroux names

technoablation, a backgrounding of the constructed nature of a technology that—via

the habituation to its operations—makes the function(ing) of a technology seem

immutable.56 Within the context of our example, this means that we have been

conditioned over time to expect that a sound file will play linearly from beginning

to end—although this is not always the case, such as when a part of a song is looped

or sampled in another song—but by exploiting and baiting our auditory perception

through its linear habituation, a sound can be switched out for another of the same

sonic identity; the switch is thus occulted. We don’t necessarily hear the switch,

just a song progressing forward. Without The Infinite Jukebox’s visualization or one’s

familiarity with the song, one would simply hear an endless soundfile.

As described above ethics is a set of valences determined locally; in other

words, ethics within the context of aurality is the decision to orient in one direction

over another while navigating the sonic field. An ethics that is based on normative

structures, hermetically sealed off from the logics of other contexts via a strict

adherence to aural traditions. These aural traditions are intra-contextual habits that

have formed over time and may sometimes become laws. Progressively reified, aural

laws are the implicit rules of aural tradition. For example, genre is one such aural

tradition and there are specific codes of conduct with which the sounds of a

particular genre are heard, for those familiar with them. In the context of The

Infinite Juke box listening to the song from beginning to end OR choosing a single

path through the song over another path becomes decisional and an ethical

operation.

56 Marc Couroux, “Preemptive Glossary for a Techno-Sonic Control Society (with Lines of Flight) Pt.2,” The Occulture, March 9, 2013, http://www.theocculture.net/preemptive2/.



29

“Anethics is the misplacement of ethics.”57 Anethics opens ethics onto a range

of foreign ethics. Rather than being an intra-contextual, univalent mode of listening,

anethics is a way of navigating in a polyvalent manner that short-circuits disparate

contexts, allowing them to inf(l)ect each other. Not only are the aural laws [logics]

within a specified context still operative—anethics is not anti-ethics—but there are

foreign laws [or logics] as well as laws of a second order that function between

contexts. Anethics is the ethics of ethics. Mann: “In anethics, one is the agent of a

foreign power. … a secret control runs us, operates us.”58 It is possible to navigate

through the sonic field allowing the ambiguities distributed throughout this field to

open aurality onto possible [alien] xeno-vectors via a nonnormative listening—The

Infinite Jukebox as an anethical operation—but these are abated by intra-contextual

[or local] conditions that reify aural traditions into habitualized aural laws—a

normative listening. Navigating via syzygy, as mentioned above, is one such

nonnormative listening. Bayard operators are another.

*

* *

Brief II: Bayard Operators

Dislocated sounds.—0[rphan] D[rift>]59

Pierre Bayard is a contemporary French literary critic and

psychoanalyst, known for constructing novel readings of texts.

The titles of his books alone are enough to give a sense of his

ingenuity: What if Books Changed Authors? , How to Speak About

Books You Haven’t Read? and Plagiarism By Anticipation.60 In the

latter, Bayard inverts the flow of time à la Menard61 so Nietzsche

57 Paul Mann, Masocriticism, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 249. 58 Ibid., 256. 59 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 239. 60 Pierre Bayard, Et Si Les Œuvres Changeaient D’auteur? , Paradoxe (Paris: Les Éds. de Minuit, 2010);Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009); Pierre

Bayard, Le Plagiat Par Anticipation, Paradoxe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009). 61 "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges written in the style ofan annotated bibliography with biographical notes. In it the fictional 20th century French writer



30

becomes the influence of Cervantes. Pierre Bayard's method can

often be thought of as context-manipulation. When a book

changes its author, when a song changes producers/composers,

or when a piece of music is heard as if from a different time

period or genre, its aural law is being modified and supplanted

by a foreign ethic. This is an anethical operation that can be

enacted within a sonic locale in order to provoke as-yet-unheard

valences or even reinforce already present vectors. Dormant

dynamics may awaken, and yet still others remain from the

original context. Bayard operators dislocate a region within the

field of sound in order to identify its invariants [invariance].

Thus, they breed novel potentialities since alternate realities

(pasts, future-pasts, presents, past-futures, and so on) can force

themselves out: affective fictions making themselves real.

Distending the present by pressuring its laws, the future begins

to leak in: a hyperstition.

* *

*

This Ambiguation

[F ]ictions stolen from the near future in search ofan operational strategy for the living of life, life,which in itself is experiencing slippage into thevirtual technologies of the near future. The realis leaking. And the feedback is a white noise ofnew meditations indexing themselves into the

spectacular substrata in the interzone where thereal and the irreal fuse.—0[rphan] D[rift>]62

Pierre Menard is said to have undertaken the task of re-writing Miguel de Cervantes epic work, DonQuixote. But rather than commit the original to memory or copy it out word for word, Menard’sventure consisted in the re-production of the work. The words of the original were to be written asif his own. In doing this, Don Quixote becomes a contemporary work and its historical context isradically altered. It is quite clear that Borges’ story serves as a method for the literary criticismoperative in the work of Pierre Bayard. Inverting normative tendency, fiction rewrites criticism. It

might be worth making explicit mention of the similarity between the names Pierre Menard andPierre Bayard—a near sonic identity. 62 0[rphan] D[rift>], Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet Editions, 1995), 270.



31

Perhaps all of this has already diverted our own trajectories. Foreign antics

of aural ambiguity play tricks with ‘our’-aurality. Our aurality: a normative

conception of the operations of the aural [/oral] and a gesture towards others still-

to-be-heard. This will have been the underlying motor for anethics of aural

ambiguity: all paths are necessary.

*

* *

A play of utterance lends polyvalence.

As a code of conduct, aural law dictates a rule that codifies, restricts and

affords specific modes of behaviour. Anything outside the habits sedimented by aural

tradition—the as-yet-unknown and/or prohibited—becomes unsound, and anyone

that risks transgression fails to hear the prophecy of the law. Unofficial prescriptions

condition how we integrate the past, orient to the future and compose in the present

via rumoured customs. A circumscribed ethics, aural law is a limiting model of

aurality: the liminal space of audition between the listener and unanticipated sound

is mapped by deterministic epistemologies so that one is able to prepare for sounds

to come. Such an orientation alienates the listening subject from unchartable

contingencies, lending him or her a false sense of security by allowing for a feigned

mastery of the environment; since the future can be determined, nothing can be

outside this listener's horizon. Within this teleological model, sounds are made

redundant and, as a result, all possible (sonic) futures are annihilated (via genre-

specific listening, earworms, audio branding, etc.). Yet, this law is fiction.

Radical openness is a(n anethical) disposition that allows one to acknowledge

participation in a larger unconscious economy—that is principally beyond one’s

control—constituted by manifold interconnections that delimit what is possible and

what is not. To put it another way, if aural tradition shapes our conception of sound,

can we develop other ways to think of and engage within the field of sound

leveraging the hidden propensities of existing audio interfaces—biological and/or

technical—to induce as-yet-unknown experiences? Radical openness develops



32

theoretical models of audition. Such alternative conceptions operate through

improvisation and experimentation: proceeding into the unknown, eliciting

continuous renegotiation so as to attune oneself to various ‘economies of frequency’

and the potential (un)sound outside of them.

* *

*



33

Works Cited

0[rphan] D[rift>]. Cyberpositive. London: Cabinet Editions, 1995.

0[rphan] D[rift>], and CCRU. MESHED. London: Beaconsfield, 1999.

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York:

Continuum, 2007.

———. Logics of Worlds. Translated by Alberto Toscano. New York: Continuum,

2009.

———. Five Lessons on Wagner . Translated by Susan Spitzer. London ; New York:

Verso, 2010.

Barcelos, Lendl. “The Utter Limits: Labyrinths of Xenop(h)o(n)ethics [Lost Thread

Mix].”

https://www.academia.edu/8100849/The_Utter_Limits_Labyrinths_of_Xeno

p_h_o_n_ethics_Lost_thread_mix_.

Bataille, Georges. Visions Of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 . Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Bayard, Pierre. Et Si Les Œuvres Changeaient D’auteur? Paradoxe. Paris: Les Éds.

de Minuit, 2010.

———. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read . New York: Bloomsbury USA,

2009.

———. Le Plagiat Par Anticipation. Paradoxe. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009.

Beckett, Samuel. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Edited by Paul

Auster. Vol. 2: Novels. New York: Grove Press, 2006.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis:


Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. New York: NewDirections, 2007.

Cecchetto, David. Humanesis Sound and Technological Posthumanism. Minneapolis:


Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata: escaping texts. London: Routledge, 2005.

Connor, Steven. “Earslips: Of Mishearings and Mondegreens.” Columbia University,

2009. http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/.

https://www.academia.edu/8100849/The_Utter_Limits_Labyrinths_of_Xenop_h_o_n_ethics_Lost_thread_mix_



http://www.stevenconnor.com/earslips/








34

Couroux, Marc. “Appropriation and the Infra_legible.” presented at the Open Ears

Festival of Music and Sound, Kitchener, April 2011.

http://couroux.org/words/appropriation-and-the-infra-legible-2011.

———. “Preemptive Glossary for a Techno-Sonic Control Society (with Lines of

Flight) Pt. 2.” The Occulture, March 9, 2013.

http://www.theocculture.net/preemptive2/.

Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers. New York:

Zone Books, 2013.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1986.

———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1989.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. “The Actual and the Virtual,” in Dialogues II.

European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 148—

152.

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity . New York: New Directions, 1966.

Fales, Cornelia. “The Paradox of Timbre.” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 1 (2002): 56.

Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear .

Technologies of Lived Abstraction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Washington: Zero Books, 2011.

Ireland, Amy. “Bouequet, Or A Joke About The Language Of Flowers.” In Creative

Manoeuvres: Making, Saying, Being. Australasian Association of Writing

Programs, 2013.

http://www.aawp.org.au/the_creative_manoeuvres_making_saying_being_

papers.

———. “The Aesthetics of Transcendental Materialism: A Propaedeutic for

Xenopoetic Creativity.” University of New South Wales, 2013.

http://vimeo.com/86157704.

http://www.academia.edu/5964031/The_Aesthetics_of_Transcendental_Ma

terialism_A_Propaedeutic_for_Xenopoetic_Creativity.

Jarry, Alfred. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry . Translated by Roger Shattuck. New

York: Grove Press, 1965.

http://www.theocculture.net/preemptive2/


http://www.aawp.org.au/the_creative_manoeuvres_making_saying_being_papers



http://vimeo.com/86157704


http://www.academia.edu/5964031/The_Aesthetics_of_Transcendental_Materialism_A_Propaedeutic_for_Xenopoetic_Creativity











35

Lamere, Paul. “The Infinite Jukebox for Superstition by Stevie Wonder.” Web app.

The Infinite Jukebox , November 11, 2010.

http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html?trid=TRQDXXM13AFAB66B3F

.

Lawvere, F. W, and S. H Schanuel. Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction

to Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Mackay, Robin. “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Wildstyle in Full Effect.” In Deleuze

and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer . Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson,

247—69. Routledge, 1997.

Mackay, Robin, and Armen Avanessian, eds. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist

Reader . Falmouth; Berlin: Urbanomic; Merve, 2014.

Mann, Paul. Masocriticism. Postmodern Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.

Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality . Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan, 2013.

Smalley, Denis. “Spectromorphology: Explaining Sound-Shapes.” Organised Sound

2, no. 2 (August 1997): 107–26.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. Spinoza: Complete Works. Edited by Michael L. Morgan.

Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Zalamea, Fernando. Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics.

Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2012.

anethics of aural ambiguity

Documents