CHAPTER TWELVE
Ian Biddle
Introduction: the logic of the example
The distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, of a breaking string, dying away sadly. Silence follows it, and only the sound is heard, some way away in the orchard, of the axe falling on the trees. (Chekhov 2012: 77)
In this chapter, I want to try to meet head-on something that many scholarly engagements with sound have tended to avoid, or reduce to its simplest coordinates, namely, the complex and self-contradictory political work of sounds that barely pass beyond the human audibility threshold. Most noise studies have tended to be attracted to high-volume spectacular sounds: sounds of war, of destruction, of ear-splitting grandiosity and earth-shattering magnificence. These are exceptional sounds, fascinating precisely for their revolutionary potential and their epoch-making function. What fascinates me, beyond the barely veiled phallic logic of that kind of study, is the tiniest, most modest sound that works its politics below the sensitivity of the seismograph of much from recent sound studies.1 In particular, as we will see, the coordinates against which I will plot my argument include thinking about the relation among tiny sounds, affect and what might be termed the metaphysics of belonging – that process by which we are made to feel in place, as part of an imagined, posited or constructed community, what Esposito captures in his notion of communitas (Esposito 2009). My argument, in other words, meets head-on the political dimension of affect, its potential for rethinking community and its implication in what Giorgio Agamben (2003) terms the ‘logic of the example’. Unlike many chapters in this book that have focused, understandably, on the broadly Deleuzean conception of affect, my utilization here is indebted to Hardt, Negri and, to a lesser extent (by implication), Paolo Virno (2003). Put briefly, Hardt and Negri insist on the material component for thinking affect, in relation, for example, to theories of value and their work, with its roots in Italian Autonomist theory and Workerism, provides some interesting ways to think the relation among affect, labour and neoliberalism (Hardt and Negri 2001: esp. 365ff.).2
We begin, then, with an example. It’s 4 a.m., I wake, again. The third time in as many hours. Shit! There’s someone in the house. A noise, barely crossing the threshold of my hearing, only half-heard, perhaps half-dreamt, has woken me again. Someone, or something. I hold my breath. The blood pumps through the labyrinthine arteries in my ears, the pulse booming over my tympanic membrane, echoing down the bony labyrinth. The noise in my head quietens, as my heart rate slows. I am calm. I am ready to hear it again. Minutes pass. Silence, save the humming of the fridge in the kitchen and the ticking of radiators as they warm and cool. All this is normal, I know … nothing strange there. Just the sound of the house breathing. It’s been 10 minutes. Nothing. I start to give in to oblivion, when … Shit! There it is again. The sound, like nothing, is definitely something. It’s barely audible. My mind races, trying to locate it and to make sense of it – where’s it coming from? What is it? A few minutes more pass. My heart rate has quickened again and my tympanum is assaulted once again by the booming of blood forced through the labyrinthine artery. It sounds almost like it could be tiny teeth gnawing at a cable, or an insect scurrying across the tiles, or a moth trapped in a jar, or that unfathomable sound like a breaking string or the distant fall of the axe on the tree in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I’m caught in its deadly charm, holding my breath, waiting, listening as intently as I dare. I dare not stop, in case it takes me. Ears click and whirl, blood fills and empties, tiny bones and layers of sinew, shift, move, vibrate, and the clicking of the outside mixes with the clicking on the inside until that sound, like the faraway breaking string, so tiny, so seductive and deadly, barely crosses the audibility threshold and tarries at the boundary.
What overrides all else here, at least on the face of it, is a certain ‘classical’ (which is to say, well exemplified, patterned, attributed and sanctioned) ‘affect’ of dislocation, fear, the uncanny, even: put simply, this is not ‘just’ an emotion (although that is already too much), but also a state into which the body is thrown (and into which it throws itself) as a way of warding off these tiny gnawings; a state of emergency. It is not simply how I feel, but the structure of that feeling, its generalizable elements, repeatable elsewhere and in different circumstances. Affect here is the order or predisposition that enables us to speak of emotion, a certain predilection in language, a tinge or stain in the linguistic flow that exceeds language and yet bears witness to its limits. For some, the notion that affect can be thought as a kind of order will be problematic, since it is that which disturbs or upsets in affect that has attracted many to it. But these disturbances evidence merely a coming into relationship of one set of principles with another that are not fully in line with the first set – their incommensurateness is what disturbs, not some ontological energy. Affect’s effects, we might say, are always relational. To be sure, affect is difficult, complex and in some ways always in excess of the representational matrix we employ to try to capture it, but is an order, nonetheless. It is governed by, and governs, for example, a set of processes that seem to attract to itself a stable set of linguistic rituals, utterances, practices. We may ‘struggle’ to capture it, but the shape and nature of that struggle repeats itself over and over. In the ‘example’ of the gnawing teeth, affect presents itself, yet again, as that which we cannot fully capture, but which we can always repeat. This distinction, I would argue, is crucial here.
Of course, this truth will never out: what this first ‘example’ (if we can call it that) shows (or imputes) is that the narrative of the unknown and the unknowable sound is no narrative at all. Affect, we might say, is the register that helps us ‘tell’ this ‘story’. But the example here is barely even a narrative fragment; it is, rather, something closer to a remnant or, perhaps better, a remainder – what is left behind after the wakeful and the sleeping regroup and abandon the borderland that separates them. It is a lump, we might say, of raw affact. There is, then, absolutely no belonging here, no locus, no identity, no house of race, no dwelling place of gender. As we shall see below, this is what might be termed, following Agamben, a raw example, the element both in and out of place. Affect in-and-of-itself. What this remnant or example points to is a logic that will not bear any notion of belonging. Identity politics is lost here since this is a special kind of displacement at its tiniest, but also its most poignant. Alone with oneself, one is bare, vulnerable. You and/or affect. And the sound of those teeth, teeth that might bite any minute, is, for the Freudian, the sound of a potential self-unravelling, a place at which one is split, doubled, displaced: the Freudian affect is an affect of ego, a process to be marshalled, or stilled, or managed. For Freud’s famous patient Schreber, conversely, this sonic remnant is merely a becoming of the voices in his head like the sound of sand pouring through an hourglass; for Schreber, the absence of intelligibility is precisely what rewards, what energizes him. For Deleuze, it is this kind of nothing at all, save a bearing witness to what is schizophrenic in everyday conversation. Belonging, then, is reduced in this remnant to a kind of emptied belonging, a belonging without place. A belonging as such. It is, we might say, a belonging without community, a belonging to affect.
From the perspective of classical social theory, this remnant is a kind of failure, precisely because it interdicts belonging, and therefore bars community. In The Coming Community (2003), however, Giorgio Agamben attempts a rethinking of the terms on which we make demands on belonging, and on ‘community’ more broadly, and makes the thinking of community a thinking of what we might term a kind of ‘linguistic belonging’. Agamben thereby attempts to move beyond what might be termed the incommensurateness of identity and universality, the impasse that flows from trying to think together locally-made identities on the one hand and larger principles of sociability on the other. His argument references a range of pre-modern sources, especially the so-called Scholastics,3 useful for him, it would seem, for the light they cast on the crisis he identifies in thinking about community, and the possibility they afford him to think outside the post-Enlightenment straightjacket of the Rousseauean social contract. In essence, these older sources allow for a questioning of the fundamentals of community as such, not through a nostalgic or misty medievalism, but by offering a way to refute the stubborn persistence of putatively ‘rationalist’ (Cartesian, Euclidean) discourses on the community that will always reduce lived communities to sites of failure:
The coming being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum – whatever unity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The common translation of this term as ‘whatever’ in the sense of ‘it does not matter which, indifferently’ is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which,’ but rather ‘being such that it always matters.’ The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire. (Agamben 2003: 1)
This notion of ‘whatever being’ allows a thinking for Agamben of a kind of particularity that is beholden neither to the universal nor to the individual: Agamben’s translator, Michael Hardt, makes the point that ‘whatever’, his rendering of the Italian qualunque, refers ‘precisely to that which is neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic’ (Agamben 2003: 107n. 1). As a potential break in the logic of the archaic demand of belonging (the call to commune), then, qualunque would seem to promise a way of thinking about communities that does not pre-structure failure into that thinking. It imports, rather, a notion of what might be termed a theory of being community. This being ‘such that it always matters’ is a being that will always take up into itself both the singular and the plural, both the particular and the general. Hence the ‘failure’ of the barred belonging in our response to the tiny sound of the teeth that might bite, can be rethought from the perspective of a belonging that belongs to something other than belonging, a recasting of the social order within a logic that disturbs and productively queries traditional conceptions of community. As Agamben puts it, ‘the antinomy of the individual and the universal has its origins in language’ (ibid.: 9). In other words, the very act of naming a thing (‘community member’, for example), transports the singularity of that thing into a class (Agamben uses the sign ‘tree’, which, he says, ‘designates all trees indifferently, insofar as it posits the proper universal significance in place of singular ineffable trees’) (ibid.). If singularity (when named) is always doomed to be transported into class, then it follows, within the logic that Agamben sets up here that the linguistic operation of naming is agentive or, to put it another way, ‘belonging’ in this sense is mere linguistic belonging.
How, then, are we to get past the antinomy of the individual and the universal, without falling by default into this ritual of nominal raising up, what Hegel termed Aufhebung? And how, conversely, might we avoid falling prey to a hopelessly nostalgic imagination of the pre-linguistic community, as if there could ever be an instance without type? The trick that Agamben tries to pull off here is to call for the imagination of a space before linguistic belonging (logically impossible, of course, but unfolded as a kind of what if), thereby making a demand on linguistic conventions that we might term, following Trotsky, transitional (making, that is, an apparently perfectly reasonable demand – such as ‘housing for all’ – that points up the inadequacies of the linguistic or social system on which the demand is made) (Trotsky et al. 1977: 81–2, 106). If, in other words, we demand that our linguistic conventions are reoriented towards the community, not as in a relation of diagnosis, but as a kind of participation, then we might be able to structurally disorder the nominal deadlock of belonging such that linguistic convention and belonging operate not as pre-requisites of each other (where the one relied on the other being in place before it can unfurl itself), but co-requisites. For Agamben, this is possible from within the peculiarly Scholastic logic of the example:
[…] in any context where it exerts its force, the example is characterized by the fact that it holds for all cases of the same type, and, at the same time, it is included among these. It is one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all […] the proper place of the example is always besides itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds […]. (Agamben 2003: 10)
The example, then, is collated, or pulled together, in a rigorous analysis ad absurdum of our ‘everyday’ notion of the example: Agamben’s point here is that the example, as we have come to understand it, does not come from a simply ‘natural’ state of being, nor does it ‘exist’ as such. It is, rather, a habit of thinking that is logically at odds with itself, but which nonetheless survives, thereby pointing to something interesting and potentially quite radical at work within Western metaphysics, but which had until now been disciplined, marginalized, or silenced in the name of a certain idealized imagination of community. Here, we might say, is the key to understanding what disturbs in the little tiny sounds – to what extent are those sounds to be grasped as exemplary? What is the set of which they are an element? What is the class that structures and orders them?
It is my assertion, then, that the tiny seduction of small unknowable sounds, like the teeth that might bite, is an instance of precisely this disturbing logic of the example, a logic enthralled fully to the order of affect. Agamben asks of this logic that it enable a rethinking of the notion of belonging, not as a form of being linked to any specific quality or characteristic (to any law of inclusion) but as a quality both of standing alongside members of the set and of standing for them all (and also therefore for itself). The example is thus both inside and outside, both of and for the community of elements. The putative ‘failure’ of any such example would not be in its failure to match up to the quality of this or that community (to live up to what I shall later term the pastorale of community), but simply the failure to be. Once it is, it is always already in place, always both belonging and not belonging, always already demonstrative of that which it seeks to exemplify and yet somehow exceeding that specificity. From this perspective, community and belonging do not fall or fade away if we think them within this logic of the example: community is, rather, always already in place, always ‘playing along’, as the German word for ‘example’, Beispiel, would seem to attest (Agamben 2003: 10). From within this logic, then, the so-called ‘failure’ of the community to match this or that quality is no failure at all but constitutive of the becoming of the community. Communities are exemplary precisely as they do not ‘cohere’, precisely as they point to a contention, precisely as they point up the porosity of their boundaries.
So when the teeth that bite can be heard nearby, when the distant string breaks quietly and the axe falls on the tree, we belong only to ourselves as a kind of raw belonging. A belonging always already in place. But what is this community of the example, really? And what, more importantly, is the use of a community on which we can make no demands other than the empty demand for its being, a demand that has always already been met? Is a community of the dehumanized, for example, in which captivity and harsh food rationing have created a brutally competitive micro-economy of grace and favour, a community at all? Indeed, as if to recognize the poverty of this imagination of the community of the example, Agamben himself emphasises the fact that the space of the example is merely ‘empty’:
These pure singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They are expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign ε. Tricksters or fakes, assistants or ‘toons, they are the exemplars of the coming community. (Agamben 2003: 10)
One is tempted to note here the studied flatness of this structure and the structural conflation of community and being: in the world of the example, we are led to believe, being ensures belonging; the example will always speak for and as all, and elements will take up relationships among themselves without their naming, without their being conducted to do so. I am struck both by the potential promise of the transitional demand that linguistic convention reorient itself toward the community, but also by the extent to which that demand can so easily fall back into the strictures of a kind of idealized Arcadian pastoral scene: as we shall see, like the false plenitude of the musical pastorale, Agamben’s community-to-come seems to work as a reproach to the incomplete empirical community, and damns that community to eternal fragmentation. And yet, for Agamben, the example delivers precisely what it seems to interdict, a becoming of community that never rests. In other words, there must be no resting on harmony, no simple uncontested social domain since that way lies the totalitarian: ‘wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tianmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear’ (ibid.: 87). Indeed, if there is anything we can recuperate from Agamben’s apparent flattening and emptying out of the community, it is to be found, I suggest, in the structure of the transitional demand (a demand he does not know he is making, but making it nonetheless). It provides, I suggest, a way of moving beyond what might be termed, as we shall see below, the logic of the pastorale, towards a way of thinking about the community that is sufficiently complex to avoid both the kinds of foreclosures that ensure community always fails and the kinds of empty generalities that cede no content to community at all.
Agamben offers us a way, however precarious, however problematic, of approaching the subtle and delicate politics of the tiny sonic experiences that charm, terrify, seduce and fix us in their spell in the middle of the night. In his notion of the example, which he takes from Gersonides, the late thirteenth-, early fourteenth-century Jewish philosopher, he offers us a model for thinking the ambiguity of audibility threshold phenomena as exemplars of their own doubled character, as belonging and exceeding that belonging.
The idyll of the pastoral community
In order to understand precisely how this logic works, we need to think about the ambiguities that attend community, belonging and the relationship among tiny sounds, affect and social relations. M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Village (2004), for example, offers us a glimpse of some of the ways in which we might begin to rethink this constellation. Like many of his movies, The Village deals with boundaries and the fear of the trespass of the other into the heart of community and, as such, structurally inverts more traditionally ubiquitous cult-fears (the fear of being stolen away into a hostile community). The opening sequence spans the world of the nineteenth-century village of the title, from the trauma of losing a young member of its community, to the guarding of its boundary at night against the unknown outsiders (‘those of whom we do not speak’), from the young women burying a branch of berries because they bear the forbidden colour red, to giving thanks for the plenitude of the village (‘we are grateful for the time we have been given’). The village is a space resolutely connected to the trauma of a failing pastorale: its older members are refugees from horrors outside the village (each of the founding members has a black wooden box, never to be opened in company, in which reminders of the horrors of the past are held), and the young, ostensibly untouched by those horrors, are nonetheless gripped by a fear of what lies outside, in the woods. This opening montage is heavily scored by James Newton Howard’s music referencing quite explicitly (and knowingly) the twentieth-century pastoral style – the harmonic ‘movement in stillness’ evident in the pastorales of Handel, Vivaldi et al. is reworked here in the light of its encounter with twentieth-century ‘pastoral’ styles, notably Vaughan Williams, Delius, Copland, Ives and so on. The harmonic ‘stillness’ is achieved not simply by archetypal repetition of an underlying harmonic sequence or a prolonged pedal point, but by the extensive and systematic use of modal harmony. The repetitive arpeggiated solo violin figure, reminiscent, perhaps, of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, and similarly dislocated from the inferred tonic pedal point as befitting the modal texture, tops out a rich and wide frequency range, as if to reference the promised plenitude of the scene of the pastorale. The images are wrapped in the sonic envelope of what Anahid Kassabian has termed ‘assimilationist’ structures of identification. (Kassabian 2001b: 107ff.). Such structures are reliant on orchestral scoring in the Hollywood idiom to order the narrative around a coherent give-and-take of identification: where a character is supposed to elicit sympathy, any number of musical topoi can effect the appropriate identification – most obviously the use of the minor mode, slow mournful hymn-like textures, chromatic-to-diatonic movement, falling harmonic sequences and so on. The topoi are enlisted to draw narrative attention onto the affect of the scene or to structure our identifications around the moral order of the narrative. What is striking here is that the assimilationist structure of the sound track points to an unusual affect of site, where the sonic envelope of the music marks the village as a nurturing space, a space in which change can only bring harm and in which stasis promises the bliss of unending plenitude. Musically, then, the village is bound into its space by the territorializing gestures of the modal harmonies.4 Long shots and expansive musical spaces work together to make up this sense of the eternal territory of the village.
The assimilationist structuring of identification here is absolutely in line with the makeshift ideology of the post-industrial pastorale insofar as it works to structure a reproach: even as the film unfolds and we learn of the deceit on which the village is built, the music does not abandon its enveloping tendency. There is, indeed, a stark contrast between the film score and the sonic world of the village itself: as the score demonstrates fidelity to the structuring of a nurturing sonic envelope, the village is beset by ominous sonic threats to its boundary by the mournful howls of the unspeakable beasts in the forest. Indeed, just as William Hurt announces, in the opening words of the film, his gratitude for the nurturing space of the village, so the others in the woods make their presence felt with their doleful moans.
The mismatch of the two sonic spheres, what structuralist film music theorists would call the hypodiegetic and the diegetic (the music that scores the film and the music and other sounds that exist ‘within’ the narrative space of the film) points, perhaps, to the always already more-than-one-ness of film production: film, we might say, is the site at which a utilitarian community is formed, a community of work. Yet the mismatch also points to a textual dissonance in the film itself that is in line with the observations we have been making thus far about the primal pastoral scene: in post-industrial societies, the pastorale works as an archaic demand on the community that can never be fully realized such that the always already incomplete nature of the community is aligned resolutely with social failure. In other words, community is set up to fail ontologically. Indeed, the mismatch we identified here between the two spheres points precisely to the incommensurateness of the pastoral fantasy and the lived reality of the social. The Village, then, is a tragedy, in that the disclosure of the ‘deceit’ that has held the community together brings the community into a radical questioning of its self-coherence and the real possibility of its abandonment such that it might no longer remain viable.
The sonic qualities of the village are not completely in accord with its visual/spatial qualities, then: where the visual world of the village is shot through with anxious emphases on boundaries and enclosed spaces, the imagination of the village in the score is quite different, thereby juxtaposing an empirical finitude (the particularity of the community) with the open-ended promised plenitude of the musical territory of the film score. The score, then, overwrites the cartography of tragedy, offers a way of recuperating or ‘repairing’ the broken structures of the social. The sounds of the narrative (voices, clicks, whistles, the rustle of the acousmêtres’ clothes, the fall of feet on the ground, music to dance to, song, the resonance of the meeting hall, the noises of work, play and so on), by contrast, all work to fill out the empirical space of the village, by lending it a rich indexical acoustic field, precisely that field that Ivy, the blind precocious protagonist, must herself negotiate in order to set the village to rights. The acoustic space of the community, then, is structured both as a secondary space beholden to the visual/spatial narrative (as effecting its indexical enrichment, its ‘authenticity’) and as an element of the narrative in its own right: just at that moment when Lucius is stabbed by George, for example, the acoustic stream is blocked, delivering a kind of ‘deadening’ effect; there is no score, no acoustic indexical field, no sonic clue, but simply the striking shock of the bare visual remnant, the knife in the belly. The acoustic stream is only restored with the thud of Lucius falling to the ground and George’s whimpering.
The Village, then, whilst clearly readable as a critical study of the community ideal, can also be read, against the grain of the visual/cartographic narrative, as an exploration of what might be termed the social relation in sound: the structuring of subject positions, locations and affiliations through resonance, timbre, pitch, dynamics, attack, decay and gain; the acousmêtres and the acoustic ecology of the village; the open/closed binarism of inside/outside (inside the house or meeting hall and out in the open, or within and without the nurturing sonic space of the village). When Ivy stands at the door of her house, for example, at night, as the others ‘attack’ the village, in a scene evocative of Caspar David Friedrich’s Frau vor untergehender Sonne, she speaks both forward into the empty darkness and back into the light of the house, the one voice quiet and imploring, lost into the open-air acoustic of the dangerous outside, the other strong and buoyed with its own agency: ‘go back inside’. The one voice dissipates, the other resounds through the house.
As we have seen, the diegetic-acoustics of the film and its visual narrative are not always in this kind of strict alignment. Indeed, at that very point in the film when the boundary of the village is first breached and one of the ‘others’ is glimpsed crossing under a watch tower, the score delivers an idiomatic resonant metallic ‘stab’, reminiscent of High Modernist 1950s avant-garde uses of percussion, and in stark contrast to the pastorale of the rest of the score. This is meant to mark out a point of traumatic narrative shift. The diegetic-acoustic structuring of that scene, however, works quite differently. The watchman’s shuffling back from the drawbridge and the follow-up emphatic refusal of his sighting of the breach with the thudding fall of the trapdoor, and the higher-pitched clang of the latch, point again to a kind of binarism in which low, resonant thuds and booms are juxtaposed with non-resonant scrapes and bangs, the one giving an acoustic life to the watch tower’s strength and resilience, the other underlining its flimsy temporary nature. So here, then, where the film score delivers a structural stab to mark the narrative turn (and thereby turning, itself, towards narration rather than territorialisation), the diegetic-acoustic structuring of the scene is metonymic, partial, fragmented. The ‘stab’, I would argue, is the cinematic mode of production’s attempt to capture the logic of the example: it renders audible to the cinema-going audience what ought to be barely audible, the swish of a red cloak, the clicking of talons, the crossing of a boundary.
The social relation in sound, here, is always marked by affective ambiguity, not because social relations are always already primarily structured in the visual domain, but because the post-industrial demand of the pastorale will always require a disavowal of the sonic in which the cartograpohic-visual order comes to stand for social relations as such – touch, smell and hearing faculties are all held in abeyance, curtailed or subsumed within the still life moment of the dead organic community: where visual coordinates of community can easily hold the boundary in place, and clearly mark inside and out with the lines and planes of Euclidean geometry, sound promises always to overrun that orderly Euclidean pastorale with a kind of unruly contagion, with the chatter and noise of the social.
If there is one thing that The Village brings into ear shot, then, it is the complex and disruptive work of the acoustic ecology of affect: social relations and coordinates are imagined, set in place and disturbed, not just in the domain of the visual-cartographic imagination, but also across a wider affective engagement of the senses, across almost the whole human sensorium.5 In the encounter with acousmêtres and their sonic environs, we begin to get a sense of what it might mean to think about the social, and about communities more specifically, as resonant, as having a sonic life, as susceptible to the order of affect as they are to geometry, physics, day and night.
Thinking the pastorale as thinking abandonment
In Western European art music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the pastorale operated as a kind of oasis within a larger narrative at which, to use a term narratologists would use, the narrative flow is interrupted by the scenic (Genette 1988: 33–7).6 Scenic logic is constituted around a certain set of structural foreclosures that encircle the archaic idyll of the social in its self-sufficient space, thereby rendering it mute, or always already out of reach. Paul Alpers, speaking of the literary pastoral form more widely, has recently remarked that the pastoral quality is one that counts as, ‘a form that self-consciously considers questions of scope and limitation’ (Alpers 2004: 4). This play of edge and centre is central to what will follow: the pastoral form is a form that speaks to the very possibility of the generic (in both senses of the word – as about genre and about belonging to a genre). In this sense, pastoral forms are those forms which require clearly determined borders and which thereby draw attention to the exceptional space in which they operate. Alpers’s account, then, is recuperative. For him, pastoral enables an analytical trajectory that can lead to insight precisely because it is about exploring ‘scope and limitation’ (ibid.: 4).
For Susan A. Stewart (2002), whom Alpers takes to task for her critique, the pastoral is the site of a profound disconnect between those represented and the authorial machinery of the poet. In her sense, pastoral constitutes an attempt to represent as ideal or beautiful the exile of bodies to deadly silence, a mute Arcadian scene in which cries of suffering are permanently stifled. Indeed, what Stewart terms the ‘Philoctetes problem’ stands for her as structurally illustrative account of the ideological work of the pastoral: Homer recounts in the Illiad (and after him, Sophocles in his play Φιλοκτήτης, Philoctetes,7 thought to have been completed in 409 bce) how the hero Philoctetes is bitten by a water viper and the wound festers; his kinsmen cannot stand the sound of his cries or the smell of his wound and abandon him to the island of Lemnos, only to ‘recall’ him again when they need him in battle:
How can the poet know – how can anyone know – what sounds, what cries, were uttered, what agonies were expressed by Philoctetes in his abandonment? It is only because of a consequent reception, one that followed the ‘recalling’ of Philoctetes by his men after his command had been replaced by others, that such suffering can be given voice. Philoctetes may call forever to the wind; it is only this recalling that can bring back the repetition of his utterance – the repetition that enables the poet to create the image of his suffering. (Stewart 2002: 102)
This cruel abandonment is about silencing the suffering of the wounded hero, stilling the affect of this traumatic scene, enclosing him in the pastoral space that robs him of his agentive noise. Stewart’s account of the pastoral scene of abandonment is interesting for two reasons: first, the scene is silent, or, rather, the scene is enclosed (on an island, for example) such that it does not allow the noise of the social to speak; second, the scene is founded on a communal cruelty that binds the kinsmen together – like the horde in Freud’s account of patricide as a kind of origin of the (homo-) social in Civilisation and its Discontents, the scene of abandonment is precisely that point at which the men constitute themselves as community, as collectively agentive. The ‘recalling’ of the hero, then, happens on the terms that the kinsmen set; they determine the manner and time of the return and, at that point of return, the hero is instrumentalized as their warrior king (in the Illiad, Philoctetes is referred to as ‘the Argive’s … great King’). In this sense, then, the social emerges both as a disavowal and as an affirmation, as both abandonment and recall. But the act of recall can only be enacted at the moment the horde constitutes itself as community, and that community requires the abandonment of its ‘king’ as Homer determines him. This circularity – that abandonment is the precondition of recall – is constitutive of the pastoral.
Pastoral, then, is the demand to tarry at the site of abandonment, to peer into the exotic world of suffering and to render it mute, render it calm, render it as a desirous space in which the king would not be crying out in pain, but idly reclining under and oak tree, surrounded by the abundance of nature, in still-life communion with it. Silence and exile, then, are key structural demands of pastoral. Pastorale, then, is a historically specific instance of pastoral more generally and its specifics, I would argue, are precisely about determining the relation of modernity to its abandoned master, about determining how to mourn for the ancien régime without ‘recalling’ the monarch. In this pastorale, we have noted how stillness and spontaneous belonging are held in a state of harmonic closure: the musical forms of the pastorale draw on the logic of exile in which shepherds’ cries are stilled and their agentive action is reduced to the sphere of their bodies. It is, in particular, the unbeholdenness of the pastoral community to other communities that the musical form seeks to play itself out: that form seeks to generate what David Schwarz, drawing on Anzieu and Rosolato, has termed a ‘sonorous envelope’ (Schwarz 1997: 7ff.): the Baroque form in particular, especially the pastoral scenes of the French Baroque opera-ballet genre, the pastorale héroïque, seeks to deliver a structure that can hold itself together, by which I mean a structure that can hold what German Neo-Aristotelen theorists of the first half of the eighteenth century termed Aufmerksamkeit or ‘attention’ in sufficient measure such that the form is not seen as wanting.8 In other words, the High Baroque pastorale is about delivering the sonic image of a certain kind of abundance in enclosure. And the pastorale is not a discursive form, it is no alla fuga: the form demands a certain composure, a certain sense of its ‘scope and limitations’ to recall again Alpers’s phrase, in which its elements must appear as if in harmonious co-existence. There are no outsiders here, no interlopers, no contested elements, and no ‘others’. This sonic space of its ‘envelope’ is completely self-sufficient.
What the analytical trajectory of the sonic delivers here is a way of identifying a series of complex and partial transferences of the pastoral into the noisy undergrowth of modernity – where overt (figurative) pastoral forms seem in radical decline (with the demise of the exotic, the erosion of the other), the sonic spaces of the pastoral persist, I would argue, in our almost ubiquitous quest for silence, the search for nurturing (enveloping) sonic forms and the privatization of listening itself which, as can be readily argued, is itself a new instance of the pastorale. Indeed, there is a striking continuity to be sketched in the history of musical pastoral forms themselves which could be told along the following lines: from the High Baroque pastorale héroïque, through Gluck (the ‘Dance of the blessed spirits’, for example), Mozart (in, for example, the opera Ascanio in Alba), Beethoven (not just the ‘pastoral’ symphony) and the romantics (numerous Lieder, chansons, operatic scenes etc.), European musical nationalisms and the so-called ‘English pastoral school’, each intervention constitutes a re-examination, with the musical resources to hand, of the attention/abundance dialectic. What emerges with the bucolic articulations of the romantics and after, is the alliance of putatively ‘archaic’ materials with the pastoral where modal forms (the tendency to less hierarchical pitch collections) predominate. It is interesting that these forms, which mark one of many incursions of the vernacular into Western art music, are (ostensibly at least) derived from folk and popular musics and they stand, as Arnold Schoenberg himself suggested, in stark contrast to the ‘developmental’ tendencies of the art music tradition:
Structurally, there never remains in popular tunes an unsolved problem, the consequences of which will show up only later. The segments of which it consists do not need much of a connective; they can be added by juxtaposition, because of the absence of variance in them. There is nothing in them that asks for expansion. The small form holds the contents firmly […] (Schoenberg 1984: 164)
Schoenberg’s understanding of folk music materials, it seems, is based on the notion that the art music traditions of Europe are properly developmental, or ‘discursive’ in the terms we have been arguing. The ‘pastoral’ materials of the folk traditions of Europe, as they are presented in art music, then, are structurally disturbing elements which must be attended to: they represent a challenge that brings to the art music tradition a new set of structural problems. Hence, as one now very famous argument proceeds, we might point to the incursion of the modal-vernacular into the art music tradition as constitutive of the emergence of some forms of European (and other) musical modernisms (Samson 1995: 59–67). What disturbs Schoenberg, it seems, is structural incommensurateness – the system to which he has so intently attached himself is threatened by a structural unravelling, if the lump of vernacular matter is allowed to subsist within it. Schoenberg’s analysis of the famous falling third of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that follows the remark he made above, is particularly suggestive for its appeal to a different kind of pastoral musical field: Beethoven’s music is closed off from vernacular contagion since it relies on a ‘motive’, that is ‘incomplete and depends on continuations: explanations, clarifications, conclusions, consequences etc.’ (Schoenberg 1984: 164).
Among this set of elements what stands out is the element ‘conclusions’. It is not, therefore, that Beethoven’s music is endlessly open to reinvention, to recasting, reworking or elaboration, but that it requires its own closure. In other words, the ‘small form’ of vernacular music that ‘holds the contents firmly’ is precisely that to which the ‘larger forms’ of Western Art Music (at least those that Schoenberg is dealing with here) aspire. The vernacular is felt like an unpleasant shiver down the spine, like a ghostly apparition that stalks the dominant set field: it is an ‘independent structure’ that gnaws at the base of the edifice. Art music, like a kind of gated community, subsists on its own island, locks out the vernacular. The logic of the pastorale, therefore, is reversed, but not undone. What gnaws at the rabbit fence of art music is precisely what it knows it must become, a mute idyll, a museum, a nature reserve. As we know from Freud, the uncanny always speaks of death.
The shiver, the held breath, the quickened heart rate and the churning stomach of the lonely sleeper brought into sudden knowledge of her or his vulnerability to abandonment, all these eloquently speak of what becomes legible when we pay attention to affect. In Schoenberg’s emphatic bifurcation of vernacular and art music traditions (‘put a hundred chicken eggs under an eagle, and even she will not be able to hatch an eagle from these eggs’ [Schoenberg 1984: 165]), especially in the colourful intensity of his use of the language of ‘the natural’, the ‘real’, and so on, we can trace residues of the affect of belonging. The intensity of the bifurcation and its absolute linguistic-performative commitment to the ‘superiority’ of the art music tradition are clearly charged by a certain anxiety about the coherence of the art music field, and his belonging to it. Schoenberg’s careful attention to the boundary feels like he’s pulling his feet under the duvet to make sure that nothing bites.
Example, affect and community: Small tiny seductions
The teeth that might bite at any time, the tiny flutters of the moth in the jar or the insect scuttling across the floor, that unknown and unknowable sound at the threshold of listening, which, like Agamben’s ‘example’, disturbs and yet can be recounted many times, makes clear that the logic of the example promises some interesting ways of thinking about the political. There is something that persists and is repeatable in this disturbing remnant (of affect, of non-belonging, of something). On the one hand, it is precisely its smallness, its modesty and its ready confusability with the internal sounds of the machinery of listening that make it so attractive (in the barest structural sense of the term). On the other, it draws us into a relatively precise consciousness of the limits of the listening machine, its material confines. As such it both fascinates and repulses, comforts and disturbs (Schoenberg speaks about the ‘charm’ of the folksong). We listen without daring to stop precisely because it promises something. Like all seductions, it promises a certain structural deliverance. From the tiny seduction of the unknowable sound (those teeth), to the logic of the example, from its problematization of the metaphysics of belonging and its refusal of the pastoral, through to the fully-fledged assault on the organic community, it is the register of affect that speaks most provocatively and most consistently here. Affect enables us to articulate the nature of the seduction that makes us hold our breath, holds us in anxious and silent fixation, and rewards with the thrill of fear, the spasm of non-belonging. Just as Schoenberg’s belonging to Beethoven is disturbed by the vernacular (‘I cannot remember a single case of deriving subordinate ideas from a folksong by this method’), so our belonging to day or night is disturbed by those teeth. In both cases, affect is, as it were, ‘cut off’ from its moorings, and afforded a radical autonomy.
This unmooring, then, speaks of a special kind of transformation, as noted by Michael Hardt in his characterization of ‘modernization’ in the first half of the twentieth century. Quoting Robert Musil’s ‘story of ideas’ Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Hardt usefully characterizes this unmooring as delivering a feeling that the world has been turned upside down, a feeling of our having being unchained (and set adrift) from everything we thought we knew and understood:
There was a time when people grew naturally into the conditions they found waiting for them and that was a very sound way of becoming oneself. But nowadays, with all this shaking up of things, when everything is becoming detached from the soil it grew in, even where the production of soul is concerned one really ought, as it were, to replace the traditional handicrafts by the sort of intelligence that goes with the machine and the factory. (Musil 1996: 367; quoted in Hardt 1999: 91)
For Hardt, Musil bears witness to an earlier ‘first’ estrangement, which affect enables us to repeat at the level of the ‘human’: ‘The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentally transformed in the qualitative shift of modernization’ (Hardt 1999: 91). What has changed, of course, is that, ‘Information, communication, knowledge, and affect come to play a foundational role in the production process’ (ibid.: 93). Therefore, the later estrangement (what Hardt calls ‘informatization’, our own predicament) is evidenced precisely by the emergence of affect as a primary agent in the economy, and therefore, this new palpability is felt like an alienation. In this new disposition, dominated by the ‘affective labor’ of the service industries, the pastorale subsists as a kind of veil, drawn over the origins (long since lost) of affect in capital. The pastorale here maintains its function as a mute Arcadia, as a kind if imaginary Lemnos and it does this by reducing to the function of the nature reserve anything that might critique the primacy of neoliberal capital. The pastorale thus generates, from within capital itself, a territory of otherspace, as if, somewhere, there were a community to which we are called, and to which we can belong without being subjected to the debilitating vulnerabilities we are forced to live through in late modernity. The logic that pastorale seeks to cover over is thus this: that the ties that bind us into the social are profoundly delicate, susceptible to breakage and unfit for the storm.
What affect delivers here, following Hardt and Negri’s trajectory, is not some grand transhistorical principle or domain, but a striking and productive (which is to say, strategic) way of gaining access to (making sense of, developing analytical models for) the complex dynamics of capital. The politics of the tiny seduction, a delicate affective politics, a modest turbulence, a tiny spasm, is precisely about exploring openly, and without the spectacular sonics of other kinds of political discourse, the limits of community and belonging, and a way of coming into a relationship with the new fundamental role of affect in production processes. Its politics is not assured, its outcomes resolutely ambiguous, but it is a politics nonetheless in that it requires us to examine the nature of community, vulnerability, suffering and abandonment to the pastoral nightmare of mute suffering thereby bearing witness to the brutality of a belonging without voice. It is a politics with teeth that bite.
Notes
1 Of course, there are also many who do not fixate on the mega-seismographic in sound studies. But the observation that big noises, especially those with high velocity bass frequencies, have consistently fascinated sound scholars, still holds true for the most part. Tara Rogers, for example, has noted that, ‘electronic music histories have been imagined and structured according to tropes of noise and silence’, and that the ‘origin stories’ of electronic music, ‘tend to normalize the hegemonic practices that follow’ (Rogers 2010).
2 For many, of course, there is little to separate Hardt and Negri’s notion of affect from that outlined by Deleuze, and dealt with in many chapters in this volume. The key distinction I would want to draw here stems from recognizing the intellectual legacy of the Workerist dimension of their thought: class struggle, cycles of crisis, and a constant and unflinching focus of their critical energies on neoliberalism are key to what distinguishes them from other neo-Spinozans. When Negri asks us to think of Spinoza as a radical, for example, he does so as a materialist and a Marxist (Negri 1999; 2004).
3 Scholars referenced include, in no particular order, Aristotle, pseudo-Plutarch, Thomas Aquinas, Gersonides, Amalric of Bena and Guillaume de Champeaux.
4 For a provocative (and persuasive) analysis of how subjectivities are played out in modal musical form, see Susan McClary’s Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (2004: esp. 101–21). In the context of McClary’s argument, the identification of post-industrial modality with the sonic envelope of the pastoral might seem contradictory. But McClary’s point is that the harmonic and textual resources are themselves resources for creating new models of subjectivity. It is, I would argue, only in the new historical contexts in which modality is employed, that it becomes imbued with the pastoral demand.
5 Anahid Kassabian’s suggestive analysis of listening as a contact sense, for example, is particularly helpful here, precisely because it points to a sensual field that is more often than not overlooked in essentially Euclidean analyses of the social. See Kassabian (2001: 107ff.).
6 Genette’s analysis of ‘the scene’ in the novel denotes an exact alignment of reading time and the narrative time in which action unfolds. The example he always gives is dialogue which appears to unfold in the novel at the same speed as the reader experiences it. In the context I am using it here, however, the putatively discursive nature of the scene is not what I mean. My usage is closer to what Genette terms the ‘pause’ (1988: 35) in which narrative speed is halted altogether.
7 It is known also that Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote versions of the story but theirs have not survived.
8 In his regard, Johann Christoph Gottsched’s famous neo-Aristotelean essay on tragedy, ‘Von Tragödien oder Trauerspielen’, Chapter 10 of his Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst is exemplary.