CHAPTER THREE
Patricia Ticineto Clough
She shook and shook
until my ear drum burst.
Her screams penetrated my body unheard.
more like a vibrating afterward
leaving a broken ground for the sounding of my soul.
And there was no set rhythm,
her expression of rage uncomposed,
like a CD being burnt into me
only a blistering sensation left,
where an arrangement of affects
was meant to be assembled with voice,
only dense noise
traumatizing my senses.
Later my big sister would say
that I appeared to be
deaf, dumb and blind
lost in time
immersed in space
gone to a place
somewhere else.
The child learns to speak, we are told, ‘by imitating the sounds made by the mother, fashioning its voice after hers.’ The ‘child could be said to hear itself initially through that voice […] to first recognize itself in the vocal mirror, supplied by the mother.’ (Silverman 1988: 80)
Not exactly like the mirror stage of envisioning, the acoustic mirror sets up a circuitry from outside sound to the inner ear that makes it impossible to hear only oneself in one’s voice. In the echoing of the other’s voice, one feels the sonorous cave, the resonating drum that one becomes, that one is when sounding – speaking – singing.
In this mirroring, the self that the child becomes is not a presence to which one could be present but ‘the resonance of a return’: a coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating. It is ‘a present in waves on a swell not in a point on a line; it is a time […] that becomes or is turned into a loop’ (Nancy 2007: 12–13) that stretches out or contracts, envelops or separates, and so on. It is this delicate looping that is listening or being heard.
It is what violent screaming disturbs. Without the resonating circuit of coming in and going out from, no lullaby is sung that does not become a scream, a violation from her to me and in me left, the raging sound, silently repeating the beating on a burst ear drum.
A perforated eardrum is a condition in which there is a hole or tear in the tympanic membrane that separates the external ear from the inner ear. The perforation disturbs the transmission of sound from outside to inside. Some things that can rupture the eardrum include sticking things into the ear canal too deeply. Also a direct strike to the ear or an intense shaking of the head can cause the tearing of the eardrum.
And I would learn to pray
for someone to come and take the sound back out of me,
to take the screaming away, once and for all,
to come pray with me, silently.
At the end of prayer I imagined myself answering the call not of a mother’s voice but of some other voice, and then once again: breath, exhalation, inspiration. A pressure, an impulsion
against the violent compulsion in
the presence of someone to tell my story to
as now once again I hope to do.
But are we not beyond the exhausting repetitions of autobiography? Is there not an expiration date on self-representation? Is there not a cessation of story-ing the self for therapeutic ends, and for alleviating traumatic effects that were at the turn of the millennium configured with the repeated demand to give voice to what could not be said, a privacy that now has had no end of publicity. Has not sound become a matter of noise, not voice? Are we not at the near end of articulating subjectivity in terms of memory and forgetting, pressed into an autobiographical logic of beginning middle and ending? Self-representation is thinned, dispersed and the ethnographic other’s representation too. The inner drum leaves the body, leaving the body to resonate with repeated beatings at a technical remove.
Still, the child has not ceased her crying. I hear her sobs coming from afar, from the world all around. My crying but not only mine. The cries are of a sonic warfare, which, when I was a child, was inside and outside the door of the three-room apartment where my family lived, midst mid-twentieth-century urban renewal and the informal refusal to desegregate the schools, a clamorous politics in black and white. This, my first invitation to find a common beat within me, and in the environment, to translate statistical populations of racialized lives into vibrations, coming up from the street, affecting me bodily, resonating with the slow painful beating in my stomach and the fast irregular beating of my heart as I walked.
I walked to the church before it was fully light, still lost in the sounds of the night. I walked carefully full of fear, and even before there, I could hear the large dog’s bark. It awaited me on the last length of street just before I could see the church’s steeple,
looming over me and everywhere the people
letting out ‘the basic growl of blackness,’
the blackness of a ‘non-orginary drive’
that inheres in the force that brings governmental regulation
into existence at the very same time that criminality
fugitivity, waste and debt.
come into being.1
It has been proposed that the physicality of loud sounds can be understood in a number of ways – as ‘an ill-defined sonic force exerted en masse, as the conveyance of the materiality of sound’ complementing ‘the experience of sound as a nonphysical sign’, or hearing only with the ears and mind, ‘as the experience of the intensity of vibrations on the whole body as well as within it’ (Kahn 2001: 227) as the physiological response to sound ‘as a potentially dangerous action’ such that loudness ‘ultimately is governed by injury,’ and in this way ‘the body refuses to indiscriminately allow all sound’ (ibid.: 233).
But the body cannot always refuse. Screams can enter unheard
when they come all at once
when they come from everywhere, as if disembodied
or of a body too monstrous to imagine
or to hold whole in the imagination—
a shattering body of sound, shattering the child’s body.
Sonic warfare has been defined as ‘the use of force, both seductive and violent, abstract and psychical, via a range of acoustic machines […] to modulate the physical, affective and libidinal dynamic of populations, of bodies, of crowds’ (Goodman 2010: 10). Sonic warfare is more about imperceptible sounding below or above human hearing but which nonetheless affects the human, pushing it to the edge of nonhuman-ness. It is ‘a war of vibration’ and ‘the production of vibratory fields,’ bringing forth from before the theory of information a sensing of noise as weapon, blasphemy, plagues, dirt, pollution and destruction (ibid.: 7). But it is now of a sophistication too, of a technoscience that has taken up the transsensorial or the affective sensorium in order to find ways to modulate conscious perception through the indiscriminate rhythms of vibration.
I did not sleep easily at night
and this is nearly all I remember
of us all being there, in the dark of the bedroom,
in the three room apartment,
except for the pattern thrown up at night
through the curtain on the window,
the light of passing cars onto the ceiling sliding down the wall
never quite still, the lines and angles spiraling and curving
propagating in a fluid frame. But perhaps not from outside at all
but something captured from within,
unhearable sounds, vibrating, jumping onto my skin and pushing in.
Once I was made to swallow the pattern whole.
Choking I could not control
the screaming now inside me echoing silently.
The echo ‘cannot occur without a distance between surfaces for the sound to bounce from. But the resonation is not on the walls. It is in the emptiness between them. The echo fills the emptiness with its complex patterning […].’ The echo is complex; ‘it is not composed of parts. It is composed of the event that it is which is unitary. It is a complex dynamic unity […] where the bouncing back and forth multiplies the sound’s movement without cutting it’ (Massumi 2002: 14). The movement ‘remains in continuity with itself across its multiplication’. Resonance converts ‘distance or extension into intensity. ‘With the body, the “walls” are the sensory surfaces. The emptiness or the in-betweenness filled by experience is the incorporeal dimension of the body [….]’ (ibid.). A relay between the corporeal and incorporeal dimensions is not yet a subject but may well be the condition of possibility of the emergence of one.2
The pattern in me an echo chamber for an incipient subjectivity. The pattern a bloc of outside-in, a bloc of colours, postures and sounds, beastly figures of a spasmodic deformation, a transformation of human bodies into vectors of matter energy. My only zone of comfort became a zone of undecidability. And, there, I would learn to speak in tongues and to articulate what a third ear could hear but could not be directly said. Formed to channel voices and frequencies, a third ear allowed communication between the living and the dead, between sanity and insanity and disparate locations in space and time.
All that is left of that now is the rhyme and this compositional form to make you linger in the cut between singularities, that generative space that fills and erases itself: a space for the development of a musical faculty.
Her screams as if an intensive camouflage for words,
transposed by me into rhythmicity.
This is not autobiography
But rather a turn in me
to perform a vibrational artistry,
to become an ontologist of vibrational force.
Such an ontology delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities. Such an orientation, therefore, should be differentiated from a phenomenology of sonic effects centred on perception of a human subject, as a ready made interiorized centre of being and feeling. ‘If we subtract human perception, everything moves […] At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating’ (Goodman 2010: 83). For subjectivity and objectivity all that is required is that an entity be felt by another entity. ‘All entities are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities’ (ibid.). Here media are ‘contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus’ (Parikka 2010: xvi).
Thus, an ontology of vibrational force objects to a ‘linguistic imperialism that subordinates the sonic to semiotic register […] forcing sonic media to merely communicate meaning, losing sight of the more fundamental expressions of their material potential as vibrational surfaces or oscillators’ (Goodman 2010: 82). But neither should vibrational force be misconceived as ‘a naïve physicalism’. What is to be prioritized instead is ‘the in-between of oscillation, the vibration of vibration, the virtuality of the tremble’ (ibid.).
An ontology of vibrational force lets sound come to the rescue of thought rather than the other way around, forcing thought to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body. And there might well be a shift in the thought of trauma too, from its being conceived as a blocked unconscious repetition to its being engaged as a bloc of energy matter through which a vibrational force forces a new path, allows for a swerve a difference in rhythm.
This is not an inscription of the self so much as a presentation in the speed and slowness with which one slips in among things, how one connects with something else. Not commencing but slipping in, entering in the middle or ‘taking up or laying down rhythms’. This deprivileging of a phenomenology that takes the human as centre of being and feeling meets with a rethinking of the digital that no longer privileges the analogue against which the digital often is thought ‘to be simultaneously exact and reductive’ (ibid.: 119). An ontology of vibrational force directs thought of the digital elsewhere, to the ‘numerical dimensions of the virtual,’ ‘the rhythmic oscillations of the microsonic and the molecular’, so to come to appreciate ‘an affective calculus of quantum, and the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself’ (ibid.: 122). Ah, ‘a sensual mathematics’ that would add to the calculus of probabilities ‘vague or incomplete quantities at the limit of 0 and 1’, transforming ‘the logic of binary states, yes and no, into the fuzzy states of maybes and perhaps’ (Parisi 2012b: 8). This is ‘not merely a matter of qualitative renderings of a digital binarism’ but rather a matter of ‘new processes of quantification’ (ibid.: 8). These processes recognize the full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and one, zones defined by ‘an intrinsic numerical variability which remains computationally open’ (Parisi 2009: 362). And it is on this development of new processes of quantification and the social formation of which they are a part that rests much of what will become of social media, their capacities and incapacities to sustain communication, to arouse affective connection, or to isolate and survey, to control with regulative governing force. It is what will inform the future direction of self-representation and representation of us all, intensifying or refusing a politics of statistical populations in the distribution of vitalizing information.
In between the wild pulsation of her screams, I dream of stopping time and moving myself through space to another place where I am lured into existence by abstractions. I will come to find some ease in numbers, calculus algebra and geometry. These become for me the means both of dissociation and creativity in a propensity for identifying the computationally open within every count or measure, opening every method to the founding violence of sound, to a rhythmicity in me but also all around.
And now today when I go back to where I once lived outside the door of the apartment I am pushed away by the sound of rapping beats so loud, so strong, I cannot stay very long-standing there without needing to push against a psycho-political pathologizing of statistical populations of racialized lives in the making of legal and illegal migration counted ethnic populations, a biogovernmentality, that displaces the politics of black and white just outside the door of the apartment. I walk carefully to the church. And I feel again resonating in me a violence, not only personal or cultural, or the dialectic of the two. Violence must be thought anew. It must be thought in terms of a biogovernance that, in its fully mature state, comes so close to life, comes so close to vitality, so close to rhythmicity. It is a war that engages us all especially those who walk the streets where I once lived as now again I do, hearing again the screams, feeling again the violence
that comes all at once,
that comes from everywhere.
I walk to the church to pray.
Notes
1 See Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s ‘Blackness and Governance’ (2011).
2 Steve Goodman also draws on Massumi’s discussion of the echo. See Goodman (2010: 45).