http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 26 Mar 2009 IP address: 193.60.94.67 Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious CHRISTOPH COX School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002, USA E-mail: ccox@hampshire.edu This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s conception of the perceptual unconscious, I propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for example, music and speech. Examining work by Max Neuhaus, Chris Kubick, Francisco Lopez and others, I suggest that the richest works of sound art help to disclose the virtual dimension of sound and its process of actualisation. As both a term and a practice, ‘sound art’ has become increasingly prominent since the late 1990s. The label has been embraced by artists, curators and critics, and the number of museum and gallery exhibits dedicated to (or prominently featuring) sound art has grown exponentially in recent years. While showcas- ing a new generation of audio artists, many of these exhibitions have also traced a genealogy of sound art that stretches back to the emergence of the art form in the 1960s and have thus given the current boom an historical footing. 1 In 2001, sound installation pioneer Max Neuhaus responded to this situation by questioning the nature and viability of the practice. So-called ‘sound art’, he wrote, is nothing but an ‘art fad’. As a term and a category, he maintained, it does no useful work and does not helpfully supplement existing categories such as music or sculpture (Neuhaus 2000). Neuhaus’ response captures a set of prevalent misgivings about ‘sound art’, in particular the suspicion that the cate- gory is merely a way to repackage music for an art market and art-critical discourse that value visual objects more than they value ephemeral sounds and recordings of them. It also resonates with the view of many contemporary artists that ‘sound’ is not the basis for an art form but is simply one tool in the contemporary artist’s increasingly multi- (or post-) media toolkit (Cox 2004). Neuhaus is a venerable figure whose engagement with sound is both broad and deep. Nevertheless, I want to defend the distinction between ‘music’ and ‘sound art’ – not in the interest of drawing up a table of inclusion and exclusion, but in order to explore some important philosophical distinctions between these two fields of sonic art. The distinction, I con- tend, is an ontological one, a distinction between two different domains of auditory existence. At its best, ‘sound art’ opens up or calls attention to an auditory unconscious, a transcendental or virtual domain of sound that has steadily come to prominence over the course of the twentieth century. 2 In contrast with music, speech and signal, I will call this domain noise, though we will see that the reach of this term extends far beyond that of its ordinary usage. 1. NOISE Background noise [le bruit de fond] is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and cesspool of our messages [y] It is to the logos what matter used to be to form. Noise is the background of information, the material of that form [y .] Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not at rest [y .] The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, con- tinuous, unending, unchanging. It has itself no back- ground, no contradictory [y .] Noise cannot be made a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must 1 For example: Sonic Boom, Hayward Gallery, London, April–June 2000; Volume: Bed of Sound, P.S. 1, New York City, July– September 2000; S.O.S.: Scenes of Sounds, Tang Museum of Art, October 2000–January 2001; Sounding Spaces: Nine Sound Instal- lations, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, July–September 2003; Treble, Sculpture Center, New York City, May–July 2004; Sonambiente 2006, Akademie der Ku¨nste, Berlin, 1 June–17 July 2006; and Waves, Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, 25 August–17 September 2006. 2 I use the term ‘transcendental’ in its philosophical sense, one established by Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the ‘empirical’, ‘the transcendental’ and the ‘transcendent’. In keeping with traditional metaphysics, Kant uses the term ‘empirical’ to refer to the domain of (ordinary and scientific) sensory experience and the term ‘transcendent’ to what lies entirely outside of this experience. The novelty of Kant’s epistemology is to carve out a third domain, ‘the transcendental’, which designates the conditions for the possibility of experience, conditions that are not discovered directly within experience but without which experience as we know it would not be possible. In this essay, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s reformulation of the Kantian transcendental as provid- ing the genetic conditions for real experience rather than the general conditions for all possible experience. Organised Sound 14(1): 19–26 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000041