Listening
to Music VI /
Listening and Diremption…
(from
‘In place of a Philosophy of Music’, work in progress…)
Just
as in self-consciousness there is only the diremption
(for consciousness of an object is not the same as being aware of ourselves -
as being aware of ourselves as being aware of the object… already double, from
0 to 2). So regarding (self) consciousness (sic) there is only the oscillation,
always two (subject and object points of view); self-consciousness (seeing,
hearing, remembering or projecting oneself) effectively means that there is only
the ‘object point of view’ as imagined by the subject and as overlaid on, or
accompanying, the object world of actual perception. So with listening to music
there is only the perception of the subject and its object, the musical object
(which fills the subject, the ‘eternal present’ as floating on melody, the
movement of human temporality ‘as if’ actualized… as ‘set to music’) of which
perception we may be conscious (that is … self-conscious).
So, perhaps,
accompanied by the point of view of the sonic object…
Now
this is a very strange thing to say… yet when we imagine ourselves ‘as if’ from
the outside, it is the ‘object point of view’ that we refer to, that we use,
that we perform… And if the ‘object on question is not the
visual object, which is our outside as seen by or imagined by ourselves?
What if it is the sonic or aural object that we perceive? That we hear… And
that we then project a viewpoint upon (a ‘listening point’) – as when we ‘hear
ourselves’, as ‘whilst we say’, or as ‘just said’, or as ‘said before’, as if
from elsewhere – with a gap… So what then if we witness ourselves ‘listening’,
as if from outside, by another, as if the sonic object was listening to us,
listening… (as we imagine ourselves as listening, as
feeling… and as we become aware of, observe, what the music is doing to us…).
Again, if the ‘object point of view’, entails ‘the object as other’, as the
other point of view that we imagine as seeing us (seeing us seeing), how does
this work with sound… with hearing, with music? Again, with the voice we are
aware of ourselves as speaking, we hear ourselves as the other, as we might
hear others (as others might hear ourselves). So with singing… and if it is
another who is singing, and if the song is ‘without words’… it is imagined as
if we were singing ourselves… how often do ‘we find ourselves’, ‘unconsciously’
singing alone with the words or just with a melody (and vice versa, as memory
provides the material for the imagined image or sound, which we might then
begin to actualize ourselves…). Which in self-consciousness listening means
that, if we put aside the image of ourselves as listening (as imagined by
ourselves as if seen by the other) it is the sonic object (as other) that hears
us, that is listening to us (as we imagine it). We
imagine it so: and that ‘other’, that personification, is ourselves… We as the
music: we are as heard by the music… that is… we imagine ourselves as the other
of the music (in both senses, simultaneously)… as we are listener and listened
to, the music to the music… self as other… the other that is the music in our
heads… the object of perception… listening to us… (perhaps…
listening us… as in playing us…).
For
with vision there is depth and distance and a visual presence: but music is
invisible – unless faint, then spatialised in the
imagination as distant, no longer proximate… Yet the image of what we see is an
illusion, an image recreated (turned ‘upside down’) in our heads: with aural or
sonic phenomena, with music, we hear it in our heads (especially if
directionality is not part of the musical language – as it is in Stockhausen’s
‘Gruppen’) often deliberately discounting the visual
(or the implied movement of the musical source) as an impediment to listening
clearly… (see my article, ‘Passing Time Again’, for
the temporal implications of this kind of experience). Yet, we never ‘see as if
in our heads’ what we are seeing (this we do afterwards, in recall, in memory)
we ‘see’ directly, this is our experience: even though, as noted above, the
image is mental and ’corrected’ (optically in an inversion, and often by
desire, as in focus, what we notice, what we remember). But with listening we
hear ‘in our heads’. In this music tells the truth (we do not need to worry
about its point of origin, unlike in the case of the voice of communication or
other less welcome, even dangerous, sounds…). In our heads as sonic object as
others (ourselves as imagining subject) might hear it… so no longer an external
object (no longer even a supposed external object), rather the object in our
head as others might hear it, as we listen to ourselves listening, a double
voice that we do not find strange in terms of listening to ourselves think
(‘the voice’ in our heads) but which becomes difficult to think when the sound
is music… Again, if we think the ‘halfway house’ of imagining ourselves singing
(instead of talking)… then we have the same result as if listening to a sonic
object of exterior origin (object of perception)… but with less presence.
Semi-present: as an imagined event or process. In contrast to
the presence of the object of perception as present ‘now’ as (in) the present,
‘now’… our ‘now’ in the ‘eternal present’. Twin tracks… As constituted
by the music, with its own temporal rhythm, which becomes our temporal rhythm
(as we ‘perform,’ sing along or tap our feet), the rhythm of the present…
… as constituted by the music…
… the present of the music…
Its ‘gift’…
For
the ‘musical object as other’ is imagined by ourselves, its point of view is
our imagined point of view, a point of view in parallel to that of the
perceptual object… the sound we hear… suggesting that we are hearing double…the
actual sound… and our consciousness of listening to that sound (a present
sound, and a semi-present ‘sound’), and we are back with the dirmeption, with subject point of view hearing the present
sound, object of perception and at the
‘same’ time, object point of view duplicating this in the imagination… (an echo indeed). But now the ‘other term’ is as a second
self, a parallel self… an accompanying other…
… as constituted by the music…
… as we hear ourselves listening…
The
subject point of hearing (the object) and the object point of hearing (as
object as other, as we hear it in our imagination, listening to us listening).
The other (self) is listening to us… listening to the music. ‘Listening us’ as the broken unity of these… And
we are back with the sonic object … as ourselves. Yet in a way that is not the
same as with the image (as we imagine ourselves as others might see us). The
difference of seeing and listening; different kinds of presence…? To see oneself seeing… this is commonplace (dare I say, a staple of
the dirmeption) the image gives the effect of
‘distance’. To hear oneself hearing, or better to listen to oneself
listening… the ‘distance’ seems to have gone. But the double is still there…
Yet
self present as image is the same as self present as sound, as us moving and talking… which is
the same as self in time as doubled, as self observing
and self observed ( by self)… in a ‘smaller gap’ then
recollection or projection. But the smallest difference is still a difference –
we are not unconscious, so are conscious of ourselves… are still double, are dirempt (oscillating between subject and object point of
view – the constituents of self-awareness, or self-consciousness). The music is
as another’s voice heard (not our own) yet our listening, our consciousness of
our selves listening, makes it our own… makes it ourselves… in a way the image
of another seems at first not to do… (but if we think further, our mimetic
faculty is just that, our imaging ourselves as if that other, and then acting
accordingly… becoming that image, from mentioning the other, we move to
performing the other… perfomring the music of the
other…). Becoming the other, in music means that we listen to ourselves
listening… we become the replication of the music in ourselves… Self as object, by means of the other. As we become our
materiality in ways apparently not open in the other senses… Become, Subject as
Object, by means of the Other. ‘Become’ is perhaps the
most important word here… Our experience of ourselves as projection, generalisation, abstraction… As we become all subjects
(‘Subject’), all minds (‘Mind’), as all objects (‘Object’), all matter (‘Matter’),
by personification, in the (imagined) view of all others – by our projection of
ourselves into those objects which then become others (subjects)…which then see
and hear us… as objects and perhaps also others. So
closest to music as self, because generating feeling, emotion, materiality,
mind and self… body, movement…
And we remember
that ‘the Object as Other’ (as we project genius loci’ onto an unsuspecting
mountain range, or (in my case) a rock face) is the doorway to ‘the Sublime’
(so to ‘sublime music’, as ‘the music of the sublime’) and is intimately
connected to the diremption, with origins in the diremption whose division permits the projections that
result in the sense of the Sublime… a relationship that goes a long way back…
and yet may be found to re-echo in modern culture (like rituality) not least in
music…
A
fault-line of the self (that is at the same time a ‘fount-line’ in the self),
in the matter of mind, that is particular to sound, to listening, to music, so
offering the fault-line that constitutes music as (with all the arts) riven by
the diremption, its particular form of the diremption as ‘externalised’ by
us, ‘collectively’, as culture… a fault-line that is built upon one voice and
its other, a one voice with always an accompanying other (as we listen to
ourselves listening), of one voice, in contrast to two or more voices, plural,
plural return, an eternal echo, to ‘the eternal present’ –in our eternal
present- one and other taken together as others… as we listen to ourselves, listening
to ourselves, listening to ourselves, a reverberating echo, in the echo chamber
of the self, voice and its others, music and its others, voice and voices… A
voice ‘within’ and a voice ‘without’…
Yet,
with external and internal voice ‘reversed’, as we hear the external voice and
imagine the internal voice, its echo and its comment, collecting associations:
subject point of view as listening, object point of view as the re-duplication
of this (just as we often repeat mentally, at an almost infinitesimal distance,
the words we have just heard, the words we are hearing, are listening to, to
make sure we have heard them ‘correctly’, and that we ‘understand’ them, their
meaning, in context, with their associations…). A reduplication which is
‘listening’ (as opposed to just ‘hearing’), as understanding… perception and
its processing, its doubling within, gift of the object point of view (or
perhaps gifting the ‘object point of view’), gift of the object as other (or
gifting the ‘object as other’). And a re-duplication which contains the
difference of one and many voices – of solo line and choral background, as of
verse and chorus, as of lyric as posing the question and anthem as asserting an
answer, asserting meaning… The problem of the complaint resolved by the
solution of the answer… And internal and external voices have been reversed, as
the echo of the perception, the echo that is the imagined object point of view,
turns, in inter-subjectivity, in society, in culture, into the materially and
semantically more assertive chorus or orchestral tutti…
Lyric become subjective expression and anthem become objective identification…
reversal of the subject and object points of view as we experience them and as
they make up -quite literally- our-selves… Oscillation marking the boundary
(which is also the connection) of the ‘internal and external’, of the self and
culture, here the self and the arts, so concerned with, indeed connected by,
resemblance (as emotion and identity, as subject and object points of view) as
the self and music… Oscillation, marker of the diremption,
infinite alternation stabilised into genre, as in
verbal culture it is stabilized into narrative, and in language and thought it
is stabilised into ideology and further by belief
(and in the sciences stabilized into cause and effect and classification). From
two voices to two types of voice, from passive reception or perception, to
active re-duplication, or listening (and with echoes in sentence making and
word-order as priority, as an active repetition variation of the same)… From
one to two… from their oscillation to their inversion of roles… From one to
two…
Self as other…
Self and other…
From
‘call and echo…’
To ‘call and … response…’
From
one to two… from one to the background of the two… the other as plural…
Self as others…
Self and others…
From a solo voice and its echoes…
To verse and chorus…
Also a kind of ‘call and response’…
*
Copyright
Peter Nesteruk, 2023