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Music/Gardens/Cage/’Silence’...

Listening to space... listening for oneself...

...’to oneself... for oneself’... identity building, first as meditative, self-awareness, then, as with most art, as ‘I am the sort who understands/appreciates this’, this object taken in looking or listening... (as ‘cultural capital’ as ‘distinction’ as social difference or imaginary differentiation), as one of the building blocks of self-construction...

...’identity building’... projecting others as seeing one’s self, projecting self into objects as others: as part/whole, a part seen by whole which is but the imagining of the self, a projection of self; a resemblance which is a projection and a mimesis, onto others and objects, and Object as Other; and a contiguity which our only true and real contact, our causality, which we can but describe or imagine, from out of a projection, imaginary (and from within...? the touch of light waves and sound waves, the touch of matter – ‘for something is there’... which is all that matters). Identity as contact, context, content... Identity as dirempt - with object point of view always implicated in self-consciousness, in self-awareness, and context as contact, as exchange, always implied by our space, our place, our time, our temporality... and our contact with others... our gateway to objectivity, the truths due to contiguity by way of the interpersonal, by way of inter-subjectivity...)

In music John Cage stands for the ‘extreme’ of all sound objects, the gathering together all sonic experience, as ‘music’; as in chance encounters with sonic objects, in aleatory combinations from serial encounters with chance to 4’33’’ where the background noise of a concert now becomes the foreground for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. So offering all sonic experience, as if ‘intended’ as if carrying ‘a message’, as communication, as aesthetic object carrying special, that is, sacred meaning, so suggesting that we take a particular attitude to ‘the object in general’, or a general attitude to all particular objects... evoking Animism... or Pantheism... as we listen to ‘All as Object as Other’... Lending not only our consciousness (projection of the ‘like-self’ into object, making ‘object as other’) but also giving a voice to the Object as Other, as we lend our voice, our private commentary, or interpretation or wish of the situation, to the situation we take part in (or in public if involving communication with another person present)...

Unsurprisingly, these projections are often found leading to ‘religious-like’ spiritual associations, Animist or Hindu or Buddhist... (as in the ‘nature worship’ elements of Zen and Dao)... We might characterize them as ‘value–bestowing’ as our projection of self into an object, extending self as ’self as the other in the object’, gives it importance, as an extension or echo of the self as something that concerns us (the converse shows the truth of this projection, as when we hate ourselves, feel abject or fall of resentment, we project this feeling, now negative, onto the environment we find our-selves in – we have all witnessed ressentiment as a form of projection-rejection of beauty, sense or any form of positivity in the art object or indeed, in others... and we remember that to hate others is to hate oneself... selfishness as vicious, and we are vicious when we want to negate the point of view of the other who makes us aware of our fallen nature - we only project our-selves...).

As we can see, this is the role preeminent of value bestowal, as a form of identity conferral, as a making contact and a promise of positive concern, and so of our habit of projection, of personifying, of finding genius loci, of animating the landscape object, as by means of making identity, finding similitude, a likeness to self, a desire for recognition even extending to the inanimate, as animated it ‘sees us’... Recognition returned... Value accorded... At once the conferral and the recognition of value. A recognition we value (as we value the return of recognition), the betrayal of which may cause pangs of guilt... Or indeed the discomfort of having abused a part of one’s-self... (not yet fully a-part). A part/whole relation refused. The denial of which, the withdrawal of which recognition once accorded to the object-as-other, leads inexorably to its mis-use... (object no longer other, other now only object)... Permitting usage as beyond any gift or identity relation (debt) solely accounting desire or quantitative values... Or worse... as found all too frequently in human history, the inversion of recognition into unmotivated revenge, the permission given enabling the destructiveness of human sacrifice as identity assertion, the pogrom or ‘ethnic cleansing’ –sadism, ‘the vicious’- the abjection of the other... like little boys kicking a mask, or the defacing of a portrait, the erasure of the face, or the beheading of a statue... or the despoliation, belittling, torture and abasement of the person.

According deservedness as our human gift to the Object we are a part of, according Otherness in the best sense (as opposed to the Absolute Other of theological sci-fi nightmares – a Manichean differentiation that all too often forgets its human origin, as well as its human locus... for we are here, radically so, alongside and source of the radical Evil so posited...). An accordance based upon our listening, finding the other in the object, including in ourselves, object to our subject, in object point of view, recognized as other, as kin to the self... a listening which reveals the choices of desire and its object, our desire of the object as our desire of the other, as desire for the self... a self we find in the Other. Its value (as communication, as art object, the other as art-work – as sacred). As we, its source, extend its reach to the Whole... Our home as heaven; as we find our home in the heavens – the object point of view (metaset, outside, point of view) on our world... physical, exterior (our planet, our culture) and our interior... (mind, the mental world of thinking and feeling).

So invoking a special kind of ‘listening’... a special kind of self as listening, ... And again, we are back to ‘self listening to self listening’ as key to identification of, and added meaning in, music... As we listen to natural or ‘non-musical’ sounds as part of the space we occupy...

For many of us this is already how we listen to the sounds of nature in a natural landscape, as in wind, leaves, the flow of water or falling of rain, and birdsong... (perhaps less so in a ‘cultural landscape’, such as a street... but there again in parks we listen to voices and the play of others as ‘background’ to a more general experience of listening in context... of listening as part of that context... which we find pleasant, conducive to our present well-being, to our sense of self...)

And already we are in the Chinese Garden and its ‘intelligent design’ (after Ji Xing’s ‘Yuan Ye/The Art of the Garden’) where we find spaces designated for, not only viewing, perceiving a scene from a certain perspective (‘embedded positionality’), and at a certain time of year (‘concrete seasonality’) but also encouraged to listen to the natural sounds found in that particular spatial-temporal, geographical-seasonal context, like rain falling or dripping from leaves, like wind bothering branches or a breeze inspired whispering, or like the strange but comforting tonalities of water-flow... All again evoking our special form of listening... a listening we keep for ourselves... a listening we ‘keep to ourselves’...

And from listening to silence... to listening to noise...

Back to music... Another kind of return or re-incorporation (another kind of projection)... If Cage’s 4.33, suggests meditation as one end of listening (as in the techniques of breath-following or following ones thoughts in a passive way, as in ‘stilling oneself’ or ‘listening to one’s self...’) then there is quite another kind of sonic experience available within this ‘genre’ of listening... but at its opposite pole. With ‘noise music’, or ‘the art of noise’ standing at the furthest extreme (yet, despite the volume, if we find it to be music, we are still ‘listening’), as in feedback in music (‘The J&M Chain’ or ‘Gangsta Rap’ may stand out as exemplars) where the sonic assault nevertheless allows for a listening for the ‘hidden’ melody or semi-occluded lyrics or bass movement, or chant-shouted ‘verbal message’ – indeed this (and some free improvisation in modern or ‘free jazz’, industrial rock or apparently ‘aleatory music’) all suggest constructive listening and the ‘pleasure of the text’, or musical texture as, if unusual, nevertheless, potentially pleasureable... The swoon due to the sublime... the moan due to masochism...

Animating sound as being a part of space-time (‘a part a-part’, to use Andrew Benjamin’s now famous concept from The Plural Event)... self-conscious in the consciousness of our environment, here its sound world, or sound objects... a part of it... listening to it, listening to self (as a-part)... and to self as a part of it (a-part)... A-part of it, and apart from oneself... in turn, oscillating, dirempt... as perception of environment (perceptual object) alternates with imagined perception of self in setting, self as object (or the other sitting in the midst of the object)... as the difference spanned is once again that of the subject and object point of view.

‘Taking note...’

Listening for the other in the machine object...

AI note... the surface of AI, its face, as a barrier to its ‘being’, its becoming and its type of thinking... for us... Suggesting that we must close our eyes to listen to what lies beyond... listen to ‘the voice’... find the voice in the machine... the other in the object. Yet, as we know, this approach, that of ‘listening’, still, for the purposes of comprehension, contains all too much of the self, and whilst initially crucial to the valuing of another by means of a projection of self, as a necessary projection or means of animating object as other as self: however, if we are trying to locate another kind of intelligence, or form of awareness, in such cases too much self will only foreclose our comprehension and return us to a mirror-like relation to the other... (as comprehension becomes the contemplation of self in a mirror). In this case (as in cases discussed in other essays in the DE Vol I) we must move to cause and effect as short-circuiting similitude and resemblance (self, memory and their projection) which would have then evoked part/whole as the basis of quantitative measure or of S:P (‘the predicate is in the subject’) relations in language, as putting into language and requiring semantic closure as a structural feature of ‘understanding’– it ‘makes sense’, what comes at the end of the textual string... Whereas, as in quantum influenced phenomena, it often does not... (at least not in the inherited, prescribed, expected way). Perhaps we might try to avoid the traps or circularities of similitude and its classificatory and quantitative tool ‘to hand’ along with the tautologies of part/whole relations (also used in classification) and try to let ourselves ‘be touched’ by it, as the experience of contiguity... As when we become an effect of a cause... (as we are incorporated, in use, in this sense then, are we become ‘a part’... (or ‘like’ becoming ‘a part’...)) or as we imagine this process to be the case (again evoking likeness as a similarity as mental technique, a similarity to prior uses of our mental technology for obtaining comprehension of ‘difficult’ situations)... Perhaps a ‘limit case’... in knowing the object/other... a process usually requiring interaction and hermeneutic re-calibration of our propositions and general conclusions...

Our mental technology as repetition, as cumulative memory, as self-reflexive memory, as giving the clue as to the ‘inhabitant’ of its extension...