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Geotraumatic Evacuation of the Voice

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Geotraumatic Evacuation of the Voice GEOTRAUMATIC EVACUATION OF THE VOICE Miguel Prado Biography Miguel Prado is the story of a person's life told from his birth to his death, detailing his deeds achieved and failures, and everything of significant interest to the same. His biography (Greek βίος, bios, “life” and γρᾶφειν, grāfein, “write”) usually takes the form of a expository story frequently narrated in the third person of the life of a real person from birth to death or to the present. In its most complete form, Miguel Prado also explains his actions according to the social, cultural and political context of the time attempting to reconstruct documentarily, his thoughts and figure. Miguel Prado can be recorded in the form of audio, visual or writing. SUMMARY This text reflects on the possibility of contemplating thought and the human body as a field for experimentation in the context of non-ideomatic improvisation (or other kinds of experimental music). Partly in response to this question, it sets out the first steps of a speculative program: The geotraumatic evacuation of the voice. Starting from the concept of geotrauma developed by Nick Land and Reza Negarestani and transiting certain concepts of the philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari and Laruelle, it will seek to investigate the possibility of performatively evacuating the voice from our body. This being an exercise in acquiring an outside perspective of our subjectivity (subjectivity understood not only as the property of perceptions, judgments, language... from the point of view of the subject, but also in its notion as transcendental subjectivity) and the objects that mediate our cognition. Trying to crack the apparent insolubility of “the experimental thing” (science or humanities classified as experimental) as that which is founded on the subjective experience; what is known and reaches through it. A tool through which we can drain traumas in its geophilosophical understanding. As the text advances we will try to point out that trauma should be understood not as what is experienced, but as a form of cut made by the real or the absolute in its own unified order; a cut that brings about the possibility of a “localized horizon” and a “regional condensation” (Negarestani, 2012a). Keywords: geotrauma | subjectivity | deterritorialization | depersonalization | body without organs “Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.” (Engels, 1876) Experimentation and body In the history of experimental music, the human body has been used on numerous occasions as a primary tool. Despite this, it has been used mostly in order to project (as if it were a conventional musical instrument) a set of aesthetic decisions directed at the self and / or collective affectation.1 From Charlotte Moorman accompanied by a cello built of ice stuck to her naked body, to Justice Yeldham sucking, biting and spitting against pieces of amplified broken glass, the human body seems to play a delicate role in experimental music. In this context, we often find one or several bodies: the audience, the artist, producers and those working on the event, etc. But when the human body is incorporated as material for performance, this element usually acts as a visual representation of physical sensation; a way of manifesting the most basic physical limits: the danger, the fracture, the subjective conditions of sensibility or our exposure in public. Despite this, we shouldn’t rule out the notion that it is also a way to reintroduce the artist in to the power relationships of the situation in itself: to reintroduce and re-legitimize the individual vision, the subjective perspective. The body is expressing both the social situation at a given moment, and also a particular contribution to that situation. Inevitably, then, since the body is mediating the relevant social structures, it does the work of communicating by becoming an image of the total social situation as perceived, and the acceptable tender in the exchanges which constitute it. (Douglas, 1979: 168) Keeping to one side the production of sounds through instruments, the materialization of our thoughts through experimental music seems inevitably oriented to the process of verbalization of these same thoughts. 1 Despite the presumption which is located in the bosom of experimental music and that could be summed up in the words of David Cope describing it as “which represents a refusal to accept the status quo” (Cope, 1997: 222). It seems that a renewal in the forms of musical production in part has not been accompanied by a renewal in the process of receiving what is produced, which remains identified with the process of sensory perception and beauty. Examples arising from “Text-sound” art are endless. Roughly, we can separate the work of artists who use the vocal apparatus as an instrument and whose principal means of coherence lies in the experience of abstract sound—a good example of this would be the Japanese Noise singer Junko—, from the work of other artists, who produce audible words more or less divorced from their meanings, with the direct intention of conveying semantic information. Such is the case of the well- known work of Alvin Lucier: I Am Sitting In A Room (1969). [...]I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. (Lucier, 1969) What Lucier suggests with this purification of his slight stuttering (in the recording process of his speech, playback, and its recording again, etc.), exceeds the game of feedback and gradual disintegration of his intelligible voice, as it is replaced by tones and frequencies established on the basis of disfemias/stuttering and determined according to the architecture of the space and its sonority. Besides the demonstration of an acoustic phenomenon, his voice diluted in the resonant space, also refers to the decomposition of the interpreters subjectivity. Examples like this are particularly interesting because they concern something with a very specific meaning, the material condition for which arise ultimately in ourselves (our organs, our vocal apparatus), and not in any other device for the production of sounds (the most obvious case being musical instruments). This device works for the improviser, artist or musician as a “transitional object.” D.W. Winnicott developed this term to describe an intermediate stage of development between psychic reality and external reality. In this “transitional space” psychological comfort can be provided by finding such a “transitional object.” In the process of searching for an external point of view it is important to remove these mediation objects; Objects rooted in confusing processes of self-identification, which become a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.1 1 A.N. Whitehead establishes the notion of the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness” as the false attribution of substantial reality to abstractions. An example of this would be the fact that the mouth only exists in connection with the body. You can imagine it independently; this, however, is an abstraction and only justified when recognized. If we accept the mouth as an entity in itself, regardless of the body we incur in the “fallacy of false concreteness.” As the product of a mental/ cognitive process, verbalized information requires a decision just as it also requires a “mental object.” It is not possible to sustain an experimental study without iteratively altering that study’s base assumptions. In the artistic context, the instrument as a “transitional object” does not introduce a variable or provide a possible unknown outcome in music. Its properties as a stable source of security entrench the experience, distancing it from unstable ground. [...]playing the monochord was nothing more and nothing less than a passive verification of already fixed ideas, in fact the metaphysical tetractys. It was a kind of doing on the ground of prefabricated thoughts. (Mazzola, 2002a: 33) The alleged suitability of a musical instrument (material, exterior, objective) for experimentation in music, has underestimated the use of our thinking (interior, subjective, matter analyzed by itself) as a field for musical experimentation: Experimental sciences are classically related to empirical exterior nature. According to a traditional opinion condivided by Immanuel Kant , experiments are understood as interrogations of a passive witness. Nature is passive and will answer to the hearing in an objective way, i.e. independently of the interrogator’s subject. These two characteristics, passivity and objective response, have since been recognized as erroneous idealizations. Physical experiments are substantially interactive processes, this was evidenced by uncertainty and complementarity principles of quantum mechanics. But physical nature is also responsive on a more conceptual level. Each response to an experiment may alter the theoretical position and the concepts which drive the experiments.[...] So, what is the difference between exterior and interior nature? It relies on the more apparent, though not fundamental, autonomy of exterior ‘natural’ phenomena. But a second view reveals an inner nature—especially on the level of man-made universes such as mathematics and music—which is not less complex and uncontrollable than exterior nature. (Mazzola, 2002b: 32) Geotraumatism and Geotraumatic Evacuation of the Voice What kind of abomination can be inspired by a cacodemonic music such as that known as the Solar Rattle, a music which unleashes a cosmic-semiotics in its ionized howl? (Negarestani, 2008: 149) The loss of the instrument for the artist and therefore; the fact that the artist now needs to deal with the mental objects and their verbalization as material for their work (without shelter in transitional material objects), takes us back to the different organs involved in the articulation of speech: the human vocal apparatus as speaker and at the same time as wastepipe.
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