The Voice of Alvin Lucier - Mark Dahl

     The aural practice of Alvin Lucier, as he has suggested himself, may be understood as premised on the importance of “carful listening”. The possibilities of listening, when not limited to the linguistic, are properly a concern of musicality. What one comprehends beyond the realm of totally significant information, of apparently constructed signs, beyond the margins of semiosis, is an augmentation in meaning and an expansion of what would be a general evaluation of truth. When we think of pure music in contrast to prose, there appears immediately a disjunction in the notion of truth. In his 1970 work I am Sitting In A Room, Lucier dealt with this disjunction in a brilliant and profound way. The piece was constructed by the artist precisely as is described in the work:

   http://grooveshark.com/s/I+Am+Sitting+In+A+Room/4LoFzF?src=5

       By the end of the recording, one hears an almost constant, yet rhythmic ambient sound in which musicality is constituted by both the physicality of speech and total noise, resonance. The gradual disappearance of linguistic truth gives way to the pure truth of musicality. But there is a destabilising factor on both sides of the transition: Alvin Lucier has an occasional yet consistent stutter. This factor is not only self evident in the recording as well as implicated by the literal information provided in speech, it is also instrumental in the production of the music, in its process of production. We process our mental chaos into linguistic produce, we produce meaning via our emersion in language. Lucier’s stutter represents a kind of feedback or haptic obscurant in this process. When we listen not to a word but to the sound of what would otherwise be a word as it is stuttered, we are listening to the sound of speech, we are witnessing the form of the sign, a signal amidst an endless process of formation. In the context of the sentence, that is, heard in their fixed syntactical position - and as happened so serendipitously in the recording - words are strangely emphasised. In these instants truth, in its form, mutates as it unfolds. The process of the artist’s speech is warped and momentarily disintegrated just as the sound of his speech - with all the information readable therein - is transformed through a resonant process. 

Non-linguistic sound, as with optics, constitutes an expansive connotative zone of meaning formation. Let us consider the evocation of emotion: it is not pure, cold fact that determines this effect, but affect and the immediate association that follows. The affective experiences of any sound are not caused by linguistic information, but from whatever associations resonate in the heart of the listener. Moreover, at this consideration we must recognise the contingency in one’s determination of the significant: When we ask what we know or do not know to be a sign, we should do so upon the notion that knowledge is perhaps only information that cannot be ignored. Within this framework we determine truths for ourselves, but it is possible that regardless of our particular determinations, truth is unstoppable, it cannot be muted. Barthes tells us that “in order for something to be known it must be spoken; but also, once it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true.” As long as we are listening, the truth will haunt us and make us its readers. The function of “careful listening” is here an almost hermeneutic one.  

       I am Sitting In A Room is a kind of disappearing act, but one that includes an emergence of substantial content, by which the work’s initial premise is eclipsed or subsumed. As the artist disappears, I am struck by the one weak link in the chain of logic presented in the recording: What is heard by us is never really speech: through audio speakers we may hear digital, analog or radio signals, but only from the human body may we truly hear speech. The artist in fact disappears from the work the moment he stops speaking and presses play, and from our point of view neither he nor his speech ever appeared. What we then continue to hear could be considered a representation of the inescapable fact of his technical, fundamental and initial disappearance. Recording is itself a posthumous disappearing (or unappearing) act; when it is heard, the producer is typically absent. Lucier documents the process of his own disappearance: speech disappears, and with it dissipates the trace of the speaking subject. 

       In this way, analogously, the recording also documents a transition from the discursive to the phatic. By the time we are left with no trace of the linguistic, a distinct tonality begins to emerge. Soon an almost algorithmic-sounding melody surfaces. These beautiful, ambient tones seemed hidden in the artist’s (by then recorded) speech the whole time. Gradually, as strangely and seamlessly as it emerges, the melody gives way to a total flattening out of sound; the resonation of this sound in this room seems to integrate all tones at once. We are left with a rhythmic wall of noise. 

       At the end of the spoken statement, the artist tells us he wishes to “smooth out any irregularities [his] speech might have.” About half way through this process of recording and playback, all phonetic, oral features are kneaded out into fluid timbre. At this point Lucier is free of his stutter. In a piece like this, which is likely to strike many as thoroughly conceptual, it is easy to miss one very unseeming significance: this artwork says something, in a discreet yet direct way, about the body’s relationship to the reproduced sound of the work, to the production of the work itself. I find an emotionally impactful dimension to this work: When I think of this aspect, I am reminded of a friend of mine who has an analogous experience: she has a bodily disability which limits her freedom of movement. However, she loves to swim, and it is in the water that she experiences the fluidity and ease of movement that is impossible otherwise. She can move her body freely, unrestricted by its requirement to support itself. She is free of irregularity, unhindered and able to exist as she wishes; her movement becomes reflective and confirming of her thought; her will is only then fully resonate through her. Her body may then listen to her will. In is his struggle with such a stigmatised or socially awkward thing as speech irregularity - something that can  create a kind of hardship in one’s cultivation of identity and self-esteem - the artist procures a reprieve for himself, and only in the most profoundly charming and felicitous way. Lucier finds a way to mend the disruption in the linguistc process of meaning production, he reconstitutes his truth. The work is thus a document of a kind of empowerment and relief; Lucier is unbounded. We here a document of his presence in which the facilitation of his speech is finally unburdened by what had prevented his body from carefully listening to his thoughts.    

On Google Earth and the Horizon

Both the notion and the technology of panorama represented a development in visual culture and the relationship of imagination and representation; it was how we saw – or how we desired to see – the world around us. Today we have Google Earth: the panoramic syntax has been inverted: we no longer see the world around us, we now see ourselves around the world.

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In the panorama there is the meeting of subject and object. It is also a demarcation of the horizon, and the horizon is what would be limits in every direction on one axis – it is like an unfixed, unlocatable limit. Being in the panorama meant being surrounded. We were surrounded by the world, but now we are surrounded by the beyond. The shift from the panoramic to the globular is the addition of a set of two axes. It is a shift towards the conflation of limits with their content: it is the difference between a panoptic and an omnioptic view of the world.

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The expression, the gesture shared by the panorama and Google Earth is one of pointing at the horizon. The horizon is not of the realm of language except in being an interstice. It is like a phatic inscription, or one absent from what is inscribed, not part of its content, but rather the trace of voidness, an inscription by structure upon itself. Both of these technologies, both creations are imprints of an entire horizon, imprints of that which pervades everything of meaning. Since there content is endless and absolutely encompasses the World, their form, in being the possibility of form itself, in encompassing everything offset by some kind of vanishing point, allows them to be read as representing all potential representation. In representing the horizon, we indicate the necessary moment before meaning production: form itself, a realization and distinction of absence and presence. And, since it is the condition for the meeting of subject and object, it is, as Barthes described, the basis for a “habitat”, the possibility of representation. In re-presenting the horizon, they imply, bare and nebulous, the imminent difference that somehow comes before everything. Since a limit alway implies whatever unknown is beyond it, GE is presentation by way of hiding : The horizon represents a trace of absence: that which would otherwise inscribe itself on the unnameable. It appears as a center very much as Derrida wrote of center: it is the center of the structure while at the same time not located within the structure. In fact it is perpetually dislocated, its location is constantly deferred, within it, we are constantly arriving. This center, this non-object is the unnameable thing that is its name: the co-implosion of symbol and thing that, through its confusion, is found wordless; a kind of impossible gateway to the void, to the absence of language. What is expressed by representations of the horizon is both the impossibility of its own expression, and the possibility of all expression.

The view of new York from the top of the WTC “Allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (Michel De Certeau). This is how GE today represents knowledge of the world or ‘worldly knowledge’.

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The shift identified here is one of the drawing of a horizon, a redrawing of the interstitial object that surrounds everything. The development is within the correlation between technological development and visual culture, and within our consciousness of what we name “the World”. The worlding function of the horizon does not shift in an obvious, direct way, nor are the correlations involved straight forward or consistent. The panoramic conception of the world persisted long after the discovery of a round earth. The globular map on its own did not bring forth Google Earth. The latter is the product of the culmination and combination of various factors: it represents the total development of globalization, technologically and culturally.

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This development in our imagination of The World is also one of narrative. The content of a panorama constitutes a single image and a single location. The verisimilitude, the depictive accuracy was subordinated to the message: the beauty of a landscape, the glory of a battle, the history of a nation that the viewer is lead through, lead around.

On Money and Crisis

Probably the most profound aspect of money is the way it can be both a valuable object and an index or token of otherwise absent or virtual value, for the potential use-value of the material it commands. Money represents the absolute deferential abstraction of value. This false or fictitious deferral is not concerned with the immediate social, material present, but always exists in a state of potential, based on an imagined future. The typical left-liberal critique of the recent ‘global economic crisis’ locates the folly in the fictional creation of money, they blame the behavior of some, but not the system; 'crisis' is conceived as an incidental mishap, deficiency or danger while it is in fact endemic to an investment-dominated money system.  This view sees money as an otherwise objective, material reality, and misses the fundamental point: money is inherently fictitious or bound to a fictitious horizon.  Speculation and abstraction are not a matter of good or bad practices, of the use or treatment of money:  they characterize the existence of money, they constitute its true character. Money is never more itself than when it is without a rational object or guaranteed referent other than itself. This picture of money is implied by the paradoxical, absurd but accurate definition of money as the ‘prime commodity’: the prime commodity isn’t really a commodity.

Money, as value, as soon as it comes into existence, ceases to be differentiated into either object or concept. It is both and neither.  It is its own fluidity. Money’s positive being, its presence, is its mobility, its abstraction; it is identified by the constant unresolved movement of value. In capitalism, money often begins its life as an exchange for labor; it begins with an exchange, but its value will inevitably rest upon labor or collapse in its absence. The theft of wealth through the capitalist exploitation of labor is no ordinary theft or exploitation: capitalism achieves the profound feat of stealing what cannot be seen or touched.

Money may be the center piece of crisis. As the Invisible Committee has said, capitalism IS crisis; the notion of a crisis of capitalism is silly in this regard. It is instead clarity that we apprehend at such moments.  Nonetheless, the fictional speculation of imagined future value eventually comes into conflict with the tangible. Money, as a force set out to realize its full, inherent contradiction, its oblivion, represents the syndrome of crisis that is the life and spirit of capital.

In some ways it seems money is coming into its own. The current ‘crisis’, seen as resulting purely from deregulation and greed, is like a parody of itself for an unwitting audience. Well into said global financial crisis, Canada releases the new, partly transparent one-hundred dollar bill: money comes into its stride as manifest abstraction, by being present in representing absence.  The absurdity of dominant ideas about material values is expressed as an echo: the sound of our production relations rebounding off our products; the force of our ideas resonating in our material lives.                                                                                                                                                   

          All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled   

          to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.    

          (Marx)

On the Swiss Minaret Ban and the Racist Horizon

In late 2009 Switzerland saw the close of a nationwide referendum on the construction of Islamic minarets. One BBC News article reported at the time that “no- one can quite understand how a proposal widely regarded even by its supporters as destined for failure at the ballot box actually came to be passed”. But though many Swiss were surely embarrassed by the ostensible bigotry of even the initial proposal, the referendum, which was backed by a strong campaign on the part of the right-wing Swiss People ́s Party, passed with more than 57.5% in favor of a ban.

We develop into the subjects of the narratives we construct, and this narratives are read on the panorama of our environment. The way we see the world around us involves a sense of place and narrative by which we translate our lives and our world from the present to the historical. However, being unable to see into the world ́s future, we are situated between the certainly told story and the impossibility of the horizon which, if captured, would be, as we see it from here, the end of the story. In this way, certain political imaginations may play themselves out in campaigns (in this case those of fear and xenophobia) that are projected onto the skyline.

The panoramic sight of a city, such as the skylines portrayed on post cards or the view from the CN Tower, contain an ongoingness towards their framed vanishing point. The frontal, two dimensional view is legible, but the end of this three-dimensional plane seems too hard or even impossible to reach, the distance unthinkable; the horizon is a place that is never arrived at. It is no place at all, a ‘no-place’. But upon the horizontal plane there is another, perpendicular axis: The skyline of a city contains narrative with plots and subplots. It reminds us of what is no longer visible, of things of inescapable visibility, and of things of which - precisely because of their scale and permanence - we need to be reminded. The components of a city’s skyline give us a deep, imaginary sense of place because they interrupt or even obstruct the horizon as vertical intercepts. In this sense the panoramic view of place is a naturally historical mode of representation and imagination; because of the viewer’s perspective, the horizontal dimension is collapsed and (as with a picture-postcard) and the skyline can be sequentially read from side to side. The horizon, however, signifies by way of our view point the future, drawing us forth, straight ahead, across its axis, non-conclusive in all of its imaginable dimensions. At any given time, one may read the city across its entire skyline, but such a mode of reading never ends.

It is in this operation that the significance of narrative in visual culture is found: to view all at once a space traversed over time, a place changed over time, provides a visual companion to our narratival notion of time and history. The skyline as a node, a striation upon an otherwise infinite horizon, represents the city as a unitary, singular place in our imaginations. A place, in being self-containing, contains its passage of time. As Michel de Certeau described it, narrative exists, at least conceptually, in space. In Roland Barthes ́ analysis of the Eiffel tower, he described a view from whichParis becomes a place as well as a landscape, and a view of a history of Paris to be assembled and “deciphered”.

The panoramic imagination increased around the 18th century in Europe by way of various developments – hot air balloons, trains, panoramas – and at the same time the horizon, which had been a limit, came to represent limitlessness (See Denise Oleksijczuk’s book The First Panoramas). For Louis Marin, the Sears Tower in Chicago is a “simulacrum of eternity”. This implies that the tower spans the past and the future: its size is so great that it towers over not only Chicago but over time – the tower is than 'larger than life'. The effect is that the structure radiates permanence: it is immovably great – indeed the tower has always been a thing of fantasy, as far back as the biblical story of Babel. From its top, one can observe the unreachability of the horizon. In 'Frontiers of Utopia' Marin can be read to suggest that the relationship between vision and the passage of time produces a corresponding narrative and destination, history and utopia. This is how the tower or minaret in its impossible way, as Barthes said of the Eiffel Tower, “means everything”.
Such structures, in collusion with the skyline and the horizon, relate to the development of our narratival view of the world. It is between the omnidirectional and inversely reciprocal panoramic viewpoint, and the inescapable visibility of the structures providing such a view that a sense of place and utopia is visually facilitated. The place in its imaginary existence contains its own ongoing narrative – inconclusive as its horizon. The tower is, by way of its broad presence, in a visual relationship with the viewer at ground level. It is this panoptic presence that gives figures on the skyline an intersubjective significance, a social significance in our visual culture. The towers that see us all in our separate positions, in a shared city, occupy space in our lives visa vis our imaginations.

The presentation of public space is an area of political engagement, and this is likely to be contextually significant. In Vancouver, Canada, a policy was adopted that all signs on the Granville street strip – the entertainment district – should be neon. This was not simply a preference for homogeneity, but an opting for a particular connotational signification. This was around the time of the 2010 Winter Olympics and was part of an effort to shape Vancouver as a “world class city.” Eight years earlier a similar authority was exercised when hundreds of people occupied and rallied around the old Woodwards building over the course of over 80 days, demanding social housing and an end to poverty. A banner was hung from the giant W – a feature of the Vancouver skyline – that sat atop the tower rising from the building ́s roof: “CAMPBELL ́S OLYMPIC SHAME”. The banner, which referenced the British Colombian Premier at the time, was photoshopped out of an image used in the Vancouver Sun newspaper as part of an news story. The point is that it was, as is typical, the tower that was wanted as an iconic image. These things are indicative of the political regulation of public space on a visual level. They are, like the Swiss minaret ban, part of the construction of political narrative; a particular memory of a particular building can be engineered.

The Swiss referendum, however, was not as logical and transparent: it was not about the obvious function of a public structure, but about its greater, deeper significance, its representational function. The ban focused on the sight of minarets, and this worked as an inadvertent expression of racism and xenophobia, indicating an emotional response to a changing skyline, the emotion being hatred. The politics of the debate are played out here visually, involving emotional responses. Affective, emotional responses and expressions are described by Katz as ̈formal evidence of what, in one ́s relation with others, speech cannot conceal ̈. This implies a non-reasonability - precisely that which is always part of a racist argument – such an argument requires a constant evasion of justification.

What is interesting about the ban is that it is a policy of symbols. The minarets can be seen in this context as an assertion of identity and presence.

The possibility of what can be imagined is a corollary of the standards by which we view the world around us. Put simply, reality and imagination are in a mediated, dialectical correspondence. With the development of representational technologies there has been a gradual inversion of the arena as a mode of spectation. The view has become globular, the orbital view of earth is the inversion of the panorama; it is the ultimate panorama. This development coincides with the rise of transnational capitalism and the decreased relevance of the nation state in the global context. This degeneration has meant that nationality and place, since they no longer encompass or transcend the political contest and ideology contained within them, have become self- referentially ideological in themselves. So, this particular xenophobic reaction corresponds not to an invasion, but a gradual appearance of cultural difference – not to another world, but to a seemingly expanded world: ‘traditional’ Switzerland becomes the foreground to its own horizon.
The racism, xenophobia/ethnophobia of the ban is thus based on a perceived psychic, cultural, structural threat: the figures of the skyline stand between us and the horizon – between us and what limits our access to knowledge. If we proceed onward a step from Barthes suggestion that ̈in order for something to be known, it must be spoken, but also, as soon as it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true ̈, then it is no wonder that certain signs are banned from the skyline – from the place where things can be most broadly and clearly announced, where stories are told, and space is designated.

It is important to recognize how this is not directly a debate about individuals but rather about public objects that are experienced collectively, and yet it has at its heart an intersubjective issue, an issue of individuals and identities: minaret construction was opposed not because the structures do not represent a population in Switzerland, but because they do. The opposition was directed at a visual confirmation of the Other ́s presence in the Place. Exclusion from the skyline means omission from a place and a story - a way of antagonizing or invalidating a group ́s actual social presence. Maintaining the illusion of an impossible universality involves trying to make difference invisible.
Cities are characterized partly by a sense of change and growth. The Swiss fear is of a story betraying a reflection of the assumed subject positions – the assumed privilege – of those standing before it – a disruption of a symbolic order of cultural subjectivity and values, a disruption of privilege, dominance and supremacy. Racist nationalists do not want a swiss story told with foreign (Muslim) signifiers. The banning of certain signs from the skyline is the political regulation of visual culture: what is repressed from the skyline is repressed from our imagination, from our sense of place and narrative. 

[1] Louis Marin, Frontiers of Utopia