Listening Together.
An extract of a section I've been struggling with - but at the same time really enjoy..
At the end of Eric Dolphy's Last Date, on completing the most ethereal of solo improvised flute lines Dolphy effuses that 'once you've heard music, its gone, in the air, you can never capture it again'. We feel this intense absence whenever we attempt to share music we are passionate about, which has become instrumental as a vehicle for 'carrying variation', for recalling and enfolding context upon context in development of a dynamic continuity that can never quite commute to the next listener, to another body. The inverse but nonetheless related experience is that of the collective individuation that we sometimes experience when subject to the irreducible excess of a unique performance together - we become 'more than one' together, irreducibly, and without possibility of a return - we are uniquely tied as components in a singular musical event-assemblage (Manning 2012). The twinning of absence and/as supplementarity is intensely manifest between bodies - the absence underwriting an unspeakable and irreducible supplementarity that is ineffably shared between bodies.
In these two examples we find a parable of the mnemotechnical dynamic and of the media form as architecture of event. In each of these cases a biogrammatic differential is central. While that differential manifests as a ‘disorienting inexactitude’ (a kind of disjunct in the perception and interpretation of an apparently shared experience -particularly in the first case ), Stiegler argues that this inexactitude 'resolves' or rather 'reflects' a mediate-exactitude. That is, variability realised in interpretation and immediacy is the expression of a relational becoming. In the human ecology of thinking-feeling this variability represents a biogrammatic generativity and (ensuing) differential (to refer back to Massumi’s conception of the biogram) - a differential between continuities that are as intensely bodied as they are irreducibly distributed.
In each case (of sharing music together) their are different dopplerings of a biogrammatic differential at work. The music in both cases is more than simply signal - it is the basis for realising/modulating a particular phase of the whole being in question. In the first instance the music is the basis for a return to a being in excess of the body alone - the music speaks both of and to the body and so in the act of listening again we realise a dynamic unity of movement and sensation - where unity is more than simply a continuity - it is a completion.
Like the musician with their musical instrument we are whole again as we regain that which voiced a being in excess of the body alone. That unity is (of course) singular (available only to the sharer) not to with whom the music is shared (at least not in the same way). In the latter example in which we experience a singular event of listening together there is a modulation of the virtual and 'dynamic unity' of movement and sensation (or rather a modulation of the virtual pertaining to these 'dynamic unities of movement and sensation') in the sense that the continuities in question become modulated with the intense experience of the performance.In this context modulation is conceived in the sense of a synthesis of two signals - so that one becomes the carrier of the other via the difference it realises therein. We carry the imprint of the events implications -its absence (‘its having been’) as a resonant ‘dephasing’ of our becoming (Stiegler 2009: 15, Manning 2012). That becoming marked therefore by an irreducible absence is also (potentially) the basis for a mutual supplementarity; the shadow of the whole being in question is carried in the sum of its dephasings.
In the two instances above the differential realised between minds - the singular dephasings of those biogrammatic continuities are figured as, in the first, the ground for an irresolvable disconnect and second for an irreducible supplementarity. Both the irresolvable disconnect and the irreducible supplementarity are the function of the same biogrammatic generativity and are a natural extension and extrapolation of Massumi’s paradox of a virtual and dynamic unity of movement and sensation into the social (Massumi 2002:21). What differs is the function of the music (the particular music in this case) as a kind of event architecture. In the first instance there is an assumption that the quality of the music alone speaks to and of a particular intensity. In that assumption there is a forgetting of the resonant continuity upon which the implication of that intensity is based. The biogrammatic differential is at once naturalised and marginalised - the singular ‘mindedness’ of the other (listening) party takes on the same status as that 'promised writing' - the assumed shared understanding that Stiegler describes as afforded by the orthographic class (Stiegler 2009: 40). Our own ‘other mindedness’ is assumed universal; we assume the experience of the music is common (Massumi 2002: 190). In the second instance - of a shared experience of musical performance) the absence (or shadow) of the music becomes the vehicle for a supplementarity realised between bodies - there is a resonant dephasing between bodies that transcends the music alone so that the ensuing social continuity no longer need make recourse to the music as a basis for a return.
There is something critical to the design of a generative mnemotechnical architecture and a vital sustainable becoming in this idea of a resonant dephasing and the supplementarity that it realises between bodies without the intermediary of the object. There is another form of communality and collective individuation opening out in this second dephasing. In the example of a musical-intensity-shared and an irreducible supplementarity the music is no longer the architecture of a return to anticipated potential - as the architecture of event it has removed itself from the continuity that it conditions. It remains only as a modulation of a (or rather , at least two) biogrammatic continuities - as shadow - as subtractive key to a supplementarity realised across a biogrammatic differential. Turrell’s pursuit of a non-vicarious art comes to mind here - there is an aspect of this resonant dephasing is his routing around of the perception’s autonomic 'plumbing of vision' and the ensuing communality his architecture affords - a becoming collective in difference rather than in spite of difference.