Sound Materiality
The ontological problem of the object, as it has been developed here, invites us to think sonic materialism from this processual perspective. Epistemologically, Whitehead’s non-anthropocentric, non-phenomenological understanding of concreteness aligns with how sound escapes common sense about substance and materiality. The difference between sound and music, in this Whiteheadian sense, will be one of consistency. With music, a more sustained object of experience emerges than with sound, allowing us to speak about an enduring object. But any sound is made of concreteness. Only, there are different degrees of consistency and hence different degrees of endurance depending on the kind of sound. A processual sonic materialism provides tools to grasp what escapes our positivist-materialist-inherited understanding. Music, as it appears, is already something else: it passes by and yet there is a genuine concreteness enmeshed in this experience. With sound, the same happens, but there are different degrees of consistency and hence different degrees of endurance depending on the kind of sound. The founding gesture of Shaviro’s account of speculative realism is to collect under the same umbrella a profound call to “a robust ontological realism” (Shaviro 2014: 5). At the expense of – or perhaps celebrating the intellectual pleasures of – constantly having to point out the multiple ways in which authors that have been labelled as speculative realists “disagree strongly among themselves” (Shaviro 2014: 5), this huge umbrella attempts to converge Whitehead’s concerns with what has been called new materialism. However, as I have mentioned elsewhere, “I would not be so eager to label Whitehead as ‘new materialist’ just yet” (Ramos 2022: 14). The crux of the matter lies specifically in what concreteness means for Whitehead. For him, the most concrete particle of existence is also the most evanescent thing we may imagine: the actual entity. Process-oriented ontogenetic philosophies[4] differ greatly from the general new materialist movement in various terms. For example, as Brian Massumi highlights, “activity and event” are “ultimate notions” instead of a “substance-based ontology,” such as the OOO developed by Graham Harman (Massumi 2014: 48). Another difference is “to think subjectivities-without-a-subject rather than the object without the subject” (Massumi 2014: 48). Coming back to sound materiality, my concern here is to ontologically situate sound consistency, arising as an event-subjectivity, within Whitehead’s process-oriented philosophy. This concern is what shifts my attention from materiality to concreteness. Taking James’ words, the “stuff of which everything is composed” (James 2003 [1912]: 2) does not rely on substance. Rather, this “stuff” at the basis of the processual tapestry of the world is an emergent subjectivity called event.
Within the discourse of sound studies, Christoph Cox developed conceptual tools for thinking sound processually, proposing an alternative to the textuality and visuality that have dominated cultural discourse. He calls forth for a “materialist and realist” philosophical posture (Cox 2018: 3), and argues for a “transcendental realism,” following what Deleuze has called “transcendental empiricism.”[5] Based on the ontological grounds of transcendental empiricism, indeed, Cox’s realism is closely related to what Whitehead calls “Reality” (1978). But there is a nuance, to which the shift from materiality to concreteness is key. Once we have acknowledged the possibility of an incorporeal materiality, what remains is the certainty of different “modes of existence” (Souriau 2015) and different modes of materiality. Cox discusses the concept of “sonic flux” as follows: “Noise as the ground, ‘the continuous acoustic flow’ that provides the condition of possibility for every articulate sound, as that from which all speech, music, and signal emerge, and to which they return” (Cox 2018: 119). The sonic flux is a virtual dimension from which sounds are contracted through experience. Once actualized in experience, these sounds affect virtuality in return – and subsist. Contraction is an action that differentiates “the intensive processes of production from the actual empirical individuals we encounter, the dynamic material reality from its particular expressions” (Cox 2018: 132, my emphasis). Yet, for Whitehead, the intensive processes are themselves expressions. In other words, intensive processes are themselves actualities at the very core of this intensive dimension that Cox calls sonic flux. The difference is at the level where actuality is stated: for Cox, actuality emerges at this inflexion where sound ceases to be noise, whereas for Whitehead, the very fabric of Reality is populated with actuality, i.e. actual entities. Although small, this nuance may make a difference as it shifts the attention from the differentiation between noise and music (Cox 2018) to expression.
Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “bloc of sensations,” Cox is not far from Whitehead’s event subjectivity. Indeed, he mentions the work of art’s “fundamental independence from the world of subjects, objects, and states of affairs” (Cox 2018: 37). According to him, the work of art emerges from the exploration of an “impersonal and prepersonal transcendental field” populated with “intensities and affects” that “precede and exceed the human” (Cox 2018: 40). His problem is set at the articulation of sense from noise, and the acknowledgement of a sonic incorporeal materiality that is independent of human expression. What we acquire by adding Whitehead to the discussion is an attunement to expression at the molecular level of experience. Thus modulating the problem, we move the focus from the emergence of subjectivity as work of art (or at the level of the nexus) to the emergence of subjectivities at a molecular level (at the level of actual entities). For Whitehead, expression takes place at the level of the actual entity: “Expression is the activity of finitude impressing itself on its environment” (Whitehead 1968: 20). The finitude here mentioned is related to the very act of the actual entity coming into being: “Actuality is the decision amid ‘potentiality’” (Whitehead 1978: 43). It is a cut across the multiplicity of data available for the experience of the actual entity under way: “Expression is the diffusion, in the environment, of something initially entertained in the experience of the expressor. No conscious determination is necessarily involved; only the impulse to diffuse” (Whitehead 1968: 21). Diffusion is a contribution that makes a difference. This difference is the communication of an aesthetic emotion, i.e. an “affective tone” (Whitehead 1967a).
According to what has been delineated here, the essence of the sonic object is relational: this relationality is the essence of the contiguity between actual entities, taking form as nexus (and its variations). The contiguity between actual entities contribute to the sense of unity that can be felt, for instance, in the unison when an orchestra or a band plays a song. It does not reside in melody, nor in musical notes. It is not about precision, and it is not about imagination. The form as nexus emerges because relationality among all these elements – and many more – come together driven by the emerging subjectivity. In other words, this unison is virtually moved by a subjectivity-without-a-subject and emerges at this pre-individual molecular dimension of experience agitated by potential. They are movements of subjectivity that emerge through the gathering of virtual forces. This is not only true with live music. Every song, either played, written, or recorded, is a being in itself that surprises the composer. The unison is that being. It is relation. Contiguity stands as a matter of fact given in a single instant and as continuation during a certain span of time. It is melody, musical notes, precision, imagination, and everything else disclosed at once. Moreover, it is here but its spatial ramifications are mind-bending: “So far as mere extensivity is concerned, space might as well have three hundred and thirty-three dimensions, instead of the modest three dimensions of our present epoch” (Whitehead 1978: 289). To think with Whitehead, some things must be thought differently. As Shaviro stresses, for Whitehead, “there is no ontological difference between what we generally call physical objects and what we generally call mental or subjective acts” (Shaviro 2009: 21). Mentality, for Whitehead, lies in the event’s “capacity to surpass the given” (Massumi 2014: 102). It drives the emerging subjectivity towards the accomplishment of its higher potentiality. It agitates potential and is co-constitutive of the emergence of actuality. Every actual entity has a mental pole that inspires great adventures of radical novelty, and a physical pole that gathers and in-forms relevant data into experience. This in-formation is what constitutes materiality: form taking place, feeding from relevant data. Materiality is thus to be understood as actual fact, as an emergence of actuality, as affective difference.
Steve Goodman’s discussion on the topic of sound revolves precisely around “an engagement with theories of affect” in a way that emphasizes “sensory relation, in its intermodality, as rhythmic vibration, in excess and autonomous from the presence of a human, phenomenological subject or auditor” (Goodman 2012: 9). Affect, in this context, “comes not as either a supplement or a replacement to the preoccupations of cultural theories of representation, but rather as an approach that inserts itself ontologically prior to such approaches” (Goodman 2012: 10). In so doing, Goodman’s main argument accords with Susanne Langer’s suggestion that music is not a language, but rather a “significant form” (Langer 1957: 241), its most important trait being “expressiveness, not expression” (Langer 1957: 240): “Such significance is implicit, but not conventionally fixed” (Langer 1957: 241). Langer’s expressiveness follows the logic of affect, the qualitative yield that emerges with sonic event subjectivity. Affect is rooted in expressiveness, in other words, it is expressly concrete. This is sound’s material dimension. Thinking music materiality in these terms entails that we deal with a materiality that is “real-but-abstract” (Massumi 2002: 5).