Materiality and Performativity
According to American philosopher Christoph Cox in his essay “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism,” a materialist account of sound needs to avoid comprehension through theories of representation and signification, as these concepts are rooted in visual (and textual) paradigms and are thus inadequate for an understanding of the sonic. In addition to this radical shift in perspective, Cox’s article also unfolds a dynamic understanding of sonic materiality in terms of “doing” and “becoming” rather than “being.”
From the beginning, Cox articulates his objectives and his objections towards representation and signification:
Why does sound art remain so profoundly undertheorized, and why has it failed to generate a rich and compelling critical literature? The primary reason, I suggest, is that the prevailing theoretical models are inadequate to it. Developed to account for the textual and the visual, they fail to capture the nature of the sonic. (Cox 2011: 146)
The term “visual” in Cox’s account refers to static and stable images, the perception of which is admittedly different from that of sounds. Images are observed from a distance and, therefore, rely on the separation of the viewing subject and the viewed object. In opposition to this, “sound is immersive and proximal, surrounding and passing through the body” (Cox 2011: 148). Thus, thinking through the sonic would be a means of overcoming the separation between subject and object and, further, between culture – the sphere of representation and signification – and nature (including matter) – understood as the dumb, inert stuff upon which humans act. Cox’s rejection of the concept of representation and logocentrism derives from his deep skepticism towards metaphysical, philosophical discourses, grounded in a traditional framework that regards music as representing something extra-musical. For Cox, Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, was a considerable step toward a materialist theory of music and sound. Anticipating contemporary scientific and philosophical materialists, Nietzsche considers “matter itself [as] creative and transformative without external agency, a ceaseless becoming and overcoming that temporality congeals into forms and beings only to dissolve them back into the natural flux, an ‘eternal self-creating’ and ‘eternal self-destroying’” (Cox 2011: 151–152). Moving beyond representation and signification, Cox replaces the question of what sound art signifies or represents with “what it does, how it operates, what changes it effectuates” (Cox 2011: 157).
Despite the American philosopher’s reservation towards the visual paradigm, which bespeaks a too narrow understanding, I posit that materialist visual art theories can contribute to and extend theories of sonic materialism. One of the most significant reevaluations of artistic material in dynamic terms is offered by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss’s book Formless, which aims to challenge the authority of form that has dominated the history of High Modernism. It is inspired by Georges Bataille’s brief entry entitled “Formless” (Informe) in the critical dictionary section of his journal Documents from 1929. Bataille states, somewhat puzzlingly, that a dictionary’s task is not to give the meaning but the jobs of words. According to him, “formless” “[…] is not only an adjective, having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down [déclasser] in the world” (Bataille, as cited in Bois and Krauss 1997: 18). Looking at visual art practices from the perspective of the formless does not mean that the artworks in question don’t actually have a form, but rather that they systematically work towards becoming formless, towards a falling-into-the-informe through material processes such as, for example, burning, melting or liquifying. The formless is the most concrete manifestation of what Bataille called “base materialism” (bas materialism), whose task is to enact processes of declassification, devaluation, diminution, or degradation. Bois and Krauss state: “Nothing in and of itself, the formless has only an operational existence: it is a performative” (Bois and Krauss 1997: 18).
With these considerations in mind, a parallel can be drawn between Bataille’s concept of the formless (and its mise-en-scène according to Krauss and Bois) and Cox’s thoroughgoing sonic materialism. Both can be seen as a critique of meaning and, moreover, as a critique of formal mastery and a rejection of the hylomorphic model – the opposition between form and matter. Cox clearly distinguishes between music and sound art. While music is an assemblage of formally organized sounds, only sound art can delve into the nature of sound itself and realize the potential of sonic materialism.
[T]he most significant sound art work of the past half-century […] has explored the materiality of sound: its texture and temporal flow, its palpable effect on, and affection by the materials through and against which it is transmitted. What these works reveal, I think, is that the sonic arts are no more abstract than the visual but rather more concrete, and that they require not a formalist analysis but a materialist one. (Cox 2011: 148–149)
It is noticeable that visual artworks that deny the imposition of form upon matter are frequently labeled “abstract” (meaning non-objective or non-representational). One example is Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (1978) that he (or his friends) created by urinating on copper-coated canvases, which oxidized due to the uric acid, resulting in speckled green surfaces. Contrary to their description as “abstract compositions” or “experiments with abstraction,” they are entirely committed to material factuality, in this case, human bodies, bodily fluids and metal interacting with each other. Another example (provided by Cox) is electronic music, which has worked since its emergence in the 1950s “with nothing but flows of electrons run through filters and modulators that contract, dilate, and otherwise transform them to produce a deeply physical and elemental form of music that belies the epithet ‘abstract’ often applied to it” (Cox 2011: 155). Similarly, Bataille’s formless, and how it is staged by Krauss and Bois within the scene of visual art, disrupts any idea of abstraction. Falling-into-the-formless, as the process of oxidation in Warhol’s paintings shows, is dependent on the interaction and transformation of concrete substances and reminiscent of Nietzsche’s idea of matter as an “eternal self-creating” and “eternal-self-destroying” without external agency, as mentioned above. The ethical dimension of Cox’s sonic materialism lies precisely in the fact that humans are denied a privileged ontological position above the natural world. As a “new materialist,” Cox wants to overcome the separation of culture and nature, subject and object, human and non-human, sign and world, all of them hierarchical oppositions, which he holds responsible for a “provincial and chauvinistic anthropocentrism” (Cox 2011: 147) in contemporary cultural theory.
In her article “How to Be Complicit with Materials,” art historian Petra Lange-Berndt offers an insightful analysis of materiality. In line with Cox’s perspective, she conceives material “in terms of concrete, direct and inert physicality” (Lange-Berndt 2015: 12) and promotes a version of materialism that advocates an ontology of events. Before addressing the political – and ethical – issues of her contribution, let’s take a quick look at her terminological discussion of materiality and material. Materiality, according to Lange-Berndt, refers to the complex entanglement of diverse factors and is an effect of ongoing performance. The term “material,” however, denotes in more concrete ways “that which artists are working with” (Lange-Berndt 2015: 14). It describes substances as “always subject to change, be it through handling, interaction with their surroundings, or the dynamic life of their chemical reactions” (Lange-Berndt 2015: 12). Thus, both material and materiality are permeated with performativity.
Lange-Berndt argues that emphasizing the materials of art (rather than art’s form or even content) constitutes a political decision, as “it means to consider the processes of making and their associated power relations, to consider the workers […] and their tools and spaces of production” (Lange-Berndt 2015: 12). She proposes a methodology of “material complicity,” whereby complicity serves as “an analytical tool within art practice, art criticism and art history.” She argues in favor of granting “agency” to the materials and recognizing that “they can move as well as act and have a life of their own” (Lange-Berndt 2015: 15–16), rather than sitting and waiting until human agency activates them. Viewing materials as dynamic and entangled entities challenges not only gender biases (material coded as feminine) and societal power relations (material defined as natural or subaltern) but the “anthropocentric post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition” (Lange-Berndt 2015: 16) as a whole.
The arguments presented by Krauss and Bois and Lange-Berndt relativize Cox’s claim that the visual paradigm is inadequate for thinking about the sonic in materialist terms. Additionally, the opposition that Cox constructs between images and sounds – whereby the former are construed as spatial, static, and stable, and the latter as temporal and in constant flux – may not hold in the context of moving images.[1] It becomes even less viable in light of the specific case studies presented here, as Cox’s notion of sounds as “temporal events” and “becomings” (Cox 2011: 156–157) is equally applicable to the filmic images under scrutiny. Moreover, these images can arguably be seen to defy a distant, objectifying gaze, as I will demonstrate. The following section discusses how images and sounds that draw attention to their surface texture call forth haptic engagement and show what “haptic vision” and “haptic listening” imply.