On the Sound Image and the Radical Plurality of the Audible[1]
Gabriel Paiuk
This essay postulates a novel notion of the sound image in which mind and material artefacts are conceived as instances across which the image occurs rather than as hosts on which the image is anchored. I develop this notion in a post-anthropocentric context in order to address the audible – that which is heard – not as exclusively bound to the realm of the individual mind, but rather as produced within material circuits, technical infrastructures and collective protocols.
The foundation of this reconceptualization lies in the image theory elaborated by philosopher Gilbert Simondon in his published course Imagination and Invention. This foundation is crucial in unfastening the notion of sound image that I propose from previous usages of the term that conceive of it as some kind of duplicate or representation. Simondon asserts that the image is not only relevant to any sensorial domain – “each of the senses has its own image” – but also defines it as an “intermediary reality” (Simondon 2022: 15 and 13) that unfolds within what he calls the cycle of the image (Simondon 2022).
In the context of Simondon’s thought, the sensorial is conceived as the result of a vital engagement between an agent and its milieu rather than as the product of the autonomous sensory capacity of that agent. Simondon’s fundamental philosophical project lies in a critique of still-prevalent accounts of physical, biological, psychic, and collective individuation that “suppose that there is a principle of individuation prior to individuation itself that is capable of explaining, producing, and guiding it” (Simondon 2020: 1). He privileges the process of individuation over the constituted individual and claims that the search for a principle is a mistake since there is no principle of individuation that precedes this process. The “operation of individuation […] should be considered as something to be explained and not that in which the explanation must be found” (Simondon 2020: 3). Throughout Simondon’s body of work, the constitution of the sensorial is understood as a problem-solving process inherent to the unfolding of individuation. In Imagination and Invention, he proposes to conceive of the image as articulating the metastable process of engagement between agent and medium across a cycle that comprises four discrete instances: anticipation, reception (or perception), recollection, and invention(Simondon 2022).
As Simondon scholar Andrea Bardin argues, for Simondon the image is, “in fact, the name of an operation” (Bardin 2015: 147). This operation comprises a variety of components and protocols. No singular instance taking part in the cycle of the image – such as for example a mental content or a pictorial artefact – can, on its own, exhaust what the image consists of.
Upon this foundation, I conceive and elaborate a notion of the sound image as a temporal node that articulates the engagement between a sensing agent and their milieu.[2] The way in which this articulation unfolds then informs how the audible is variably produced. The sound image (as I conceive it here) should be distinguished from any kind of visualist translation, and it should also be unhinged from its conventional understanding as any type of surrogate or as an exclusively mental content. The production of sound images is entangled with the way in which audibilities come to exist. I appeal to the notion of audibility – the capacity to hear in a particular way – to shift the emphasis from the conventional ascription of the audible to the private and inaccessible privacy of the mind, towards its inherence in the circuits and protocols that inform how the audible is produced.[3]
Images are to be conceived as operations that unfold in the metastable process of sensorial engagement, as a result enabling different audibilities. Audibilities implicate the material and technical infrastructures as well as the cultural protocols in which hearing takes place. As has been elucidated in the work of ethnomusicologist and sound scholar Ana María Ochoa Gautier, these protocols are entwined with particular cosmologies which themselves entail different forms of participation in an environment. She writes: “Before the question of how do people perceive the environment in auditory terms comes the question of how the very boundaries between personhood and environment are conceived” (Ochoa Gautier 2017).
The notion of sound image is necessary for a sonic materialist perspective since it draws attention to the material configurations within which the audible is constituted. Often, materialist conceptions of sound misattribute the material character of sound to the static identity of the sources projected by the listening subject’s cognitive apparatus, as, for example, in the expression “the sound of stones.” In these cases, the dynamic and relational character of the sonorous is bypassed in favor of the static identity produced by a perceptual attribution. Sound’s material dimension, though, inheres in the entangled nature of coupled oscillatory movements. The way the audible is produced – and how what is heard comes to be different – depends on the processes and circuits in which sound partakes. I distinguish here between the audible and the sonorous, where the latter could be understood as the vibratory character of sound independent from the act of listening. An account of the sound image is necessary to avoid misconceiving the audible as a direct rendition of the sonorous, thereby missing out on the circuit which enables every production of the audible. The elaboration of this notion of the sound image serves then to adjust a materialist perspective in order to address the intricate material constellations in which the audible is produced.
The notion of the sound image has been developed in multiple contexts in the past, including most prominently by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the neurologist Jean-Marie Charcot. In the twentieth century, as technical possibilities for recording and reproduction technologies flourished, the concept gained increasing prominence in the realm of artistic production, over time becoming ubiquitous in the discourse of artists such as the composer François Bayle, among others. Beyond specific cases the use of the term has mostly relied – when not used in explicitly visual terms (i.e. implying that the sound image is a visual instance summoned by sound) – on a representational understanding of the image.
The concept I put forward requires a fundamental revision of this representational model of the image, proposing instead that it be understood as an operation that renders something visible or audible. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, in identifying the image with the “distinct” in his book The Ground of the Image, claims that “the distinct stands apart from the world of things considered as a world of availability. […] What is withdrawn from this world has no use, or has a completely different use, and is not presented in a manifestation” (Nancy 2005: 2). Nancy displaces here the axis of the definition of the image to an operation that consists in the withdrawal from availability. In so doing, he bypasses the dichotomy of the image as either a mental content or a pictorial representation, which has significantly marked the classic debate on the nature of the concept. For Nancy, what would define an image is rather the production of a temporal alteration or delay which extracts the sensorial from the pure present of perception – the domain of availability. This definition thus applies both to mental entities and pictorial artefacts; both instances can eventually be characterized by their temporal performativity. Their becoming image implies processes of dilation, suspension, inscription, proliferation, or recollection, to name but a few. In Nancy’s quote the image entails, in resonance with Simondon’s perspective, a procedure which extends the temporality of the sensorial from that of the always immediately available and sets it to work within more intricate temporal circuits.
This temporal revision of the concept coheres with the crisis that the status of the image in general is undergoing. The stability and visuality of the image is being challenged by the context of ubiquitous computing that pervades contemporary society. Optical instances commonly understood as images are often nowadays the product of associated sets of data capturing aspects of “visuals, sound, heat, movement, biometrics” that “need to be processed, correlated, fused, and matched with a database” (Hoelzl and Marie 2017: 73). Reliance on pictorial artefacts in processes of optical imprint has been superseded and the kind of relationships they produce are changing together alongside the circuits, agents, and processes that define what an image is. As German artist Hito Steyerl has expressed it, “it has become clear that images are not objective or subjective renditions of preexisting conditions, or merely treacherous appearances. They are rather nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports” (Steyerl 2013: n.p.).
My argument for a novel notion of sound image strives, on the one hand, for an account of the mutable conditions that inform how the audible is produced. The sound image I propose is not an illusion but a realist account of how the audible implies forms of engagement with an environment. On the other hand, it also argues for a fundamental expansion of the notion of image that embraces the realm of the sonic and, as a result, takes part in a reconfiguration of the broader notion of image across an operative and temporal axis. It demands a reevaluation of the notion of the image that draws attention to the heterogenous technical, material, and social contexts that make imaging processes possible, across any sensorial domain. This reevaluation is especially relevant today as questions of sensorial intelligence – as they unfold in a changing technological reality – are set to play a significant role in the way forms of engagement with the real are constituted.
Next Section – Distinct Sound and the Possibility of the Sound Image