Intro.
This piece is a type of critical-artistic test. It comes out of research undertaken by two interconnected strands of a broader doctoral project (Always Pushing Away the Abstract Child) that builds a speculative character through the application of cited notions of philosophical reason (links to this research can be found in this ‘Intro’). The two associated thematic elements that this work consists of and responds to, relate to tinnitus as it manifests through(-out) this character’s depiction. These are, the use of this condition's metonymical potential, and crucially, its relation to the character’s ‘real’ existence and ‘ideal’ perception(s).
Consequently, the test takes place by selecting from an ongoing series of contingently produced images entitled Post-Tinnital that use a specific ‘glitching’ process in their creation. These images are then combined alongside chosen passages of the present text chapter from this character’s ongoing construction within the PhD, which equally focuses on tinnitus as a type of speculative ‘hinging’ process for this subject. These short text sections have been specifically selected from this doctoral work and its present extended text chapter on its character called, Tinnitus Channelled. Additionally, this text work, in turn, combines and correlates around performative sound-based collaborations, as does the PhD overall.
Hearing ‘that’ voice in the airy whispers; those which always made that former ‘friend’ (in its former definition) laugh. He had always found this funny and it was known and exploited — not for the reasons the ‘friend’ had believed but because, like all embraced humour — this had been a necessary objective and its channelling was fashioned, studied, cherished and proliferated. The ‘voice’ resided within and on the environmental sounds. Rarely articulating anything and likely never as recollected, which could be understood, semantically so. However, it was inherently and intensely ‘felt’, fully realised inferentially, perceptually, but not logically and actually, and never absolutely, as ‘it’ or ‘that’, can never be.
…the wind and the trees, passing through, connected together, in sound and inner visions, tones that last in moments and seem so ever-present…
Into it all, walking in it all, the vibrations and flows of the liquids are making the sounds that only they hear. The inside-outside-inside… noise that is useful when moving around and the liking of discourse that comes over the wireless, and the wireless is just that — but it is broadcasting ‘in’ the ideas of the subject and the thoughts of their associates. Into it, out of it and between it too. This works against them but that is the point.
One of the numbers they played, is, remembered, but difficult to concentrate on and highly complex due its usual repetition, extreme simplicity, which was unusually long for them, it was long, but it is all standards and growths. Certainly all the standards they could think of that this isn’t. Still into being into these dreams, that they definitely weren’t, but it will be understood better with that characterisation. No day or night loss of consciousness had taken place in the envisagement of these accounts. No, this had never changed much since childhood. Only their received and assumed perceiving had become relativised and those that can’t consider these ideas and their processes — as they just might be, getting closer to this, to them — became more ‘age-appropriate’. However, they created a warm protection in moments, nonetheless. But, just like painting has been treated, assessed, judged by some noted advocates and others; the frankness and beauty of naïveté, ‘youth’ as it could be and is often called, makes for a resulting object and object ‘in thought’, to become closer to a truth, which never occurs and far more importantly than that, actually represents a ‘something’ un-less-contrived — for them, which is all they can be ‘for’, when levelled. A fact that the slack-jawed, proceeding sophists and their crowds, forget during aptly titled ‘Salons’. Where they mainly remain, muted…
The amplified affects, it partially stays inside, no chance of full banishment, its long held note holds forth, cure cannot be found for live sounds absorbed in experience.
For as everything, such as states, objects, concepts, being exactly what they are in each individual instance, and not as anything else. Connections and inferences are made but never of a metaphorical disposition.
Therefore, the inner feeding-back of sound materials, like those resounding at that time and in others; their repurposing within a system of exchange and these states themselves, conceptualised, actualised and executed, demonstrating certain exemplars of observed acts. In this instance, creating interrelations, connections and other significant associations. The significance of these relevances, or trivialities, are predicated on cognitively determined, spatiotemporal judgements and their preconditioned subjective reasoning(s). The crucial paradigmatic factors, manifest within the conceptualisation of these ‘left’ objects, their commercial repurposing in this space and their causal inferences within this shop, were present in thought and recollection, most of that day and of others, unframed alongside.
Laughter, recurs, a sound from the hall, currently, not happening, get back to the voices, machines and spaces, to escape from the inside, momentarily.
Prolonged tremor, a tone and unexplainable auditory residual, a vibration sometimes felt and always sensed when awareness of these internal reactions are alerted. A reaction that lies dormant during moments of embrace and provisionally residing in and as, cognitive fluidity. When with them, ‘looking back’, intensively guided and superseding these unwarranted physio-affiliations, the breathing and gusts from around the top, side and within the cranium, dispersed. Peace did not rein, there is no harmony, no comfort in that sense, that would be incorrect to imply.
But rather an exhilarating joyousness of attentiveness, affinity and singular closeness, which is unexpectedly identified in an extended temporary moment. The return though is the slow and variable hissing of an inner movement and commencement. This uninvited sense of renewal, further tones and a direct auditory undercurrent, each time, is a part of their ‘forever’, so never, yet, overlooked.
The rock n’ rollers, still dressed and ‘up’ from the club, on, and watching, Saturday mornings’ persons’ TV, placed beside the perma-smiles of the sickeningly happy, uber-neat, colour enriched presenters. All cosy, perched paradoxically on their sickeningly brightly coloured couch, with the typically fluffy companions in tow. An image that was so commonly bizarre, for these decades, which were always on the verge of, or actually breaking the glossy finish of their surroundings, well-rehearsed professionalism. Terrestrial broadcast or simply, ‘on the tele’ in those times, available and beaming straight into the collective aestheticisation of the national consciousnesses, arresting, bypassing, horrifying, ridiculing or thrilling, depending on receptions and various material circumstances. These moments nonetheless diverging from the mundanity and down right offensiveness of the beige remnants of a superior, unquestioning ‘professional’ stance, or more exacting, its crucial veneer. Although never broached, this is the essential image of the patriarchal colonising foundations, entrenched in the established essence of this ‘nationhood' and its badly hidden brutal histories. The view of one of these leather clad ensembles — one that stands above the others — helped shape and alter the actions taken and the assessments made by significant sections of a wider populace. Clearly, due to a variety of factors this would never be acknowledged. However, the idea of upsetting the seemingly stable state approved ‘order of things’, on such a far reaching scale and being apparently oblivious to this, would make a collection of various alterations inevitable. The scene, mainly black as expressed, open but considered, the hair as long as it was, slightly straight and also with a ‘wave’, held the scene, which invited just as it equally threatened those whom were at risk from these images.
Inherently, the repetition of sounds, images, movements and stances would reverberate outwards and then carry to them, others; changing otherwise unremarkable ‘experiencing’, to remarkable extents, ever since.
Now however, we must ‘trust’ that there is nothing behind these enforced obligations. Suddenly, after all the rhetoric about ‘structural’ duplicities and endemic rot at the core of that which controls, all is now as it seems, is the message, their message. What has been done beyond, outside its ever shrinking partitions, so that this system of abundance perversely fashioned into all its zombified states, can be dragged around for a little longer — ringing the last bit of communally required wealth, the source of this demonic addiction, out of its long since departed, mummified formations and social form rendering structures.
The horrors it inflicted and inflicts ‘outside’ are now inside, settled there and targeting, as time has reliably illustrated. What was once necessary to execute on ‘others’ and those most unrepresented internally, is now inadequate to the cause of their maintenance and proliferation. Therefore, if there had ever been any doubt, the rot has now moved in fully and there is no “safety in numbers” as they desperately try to find ways of not losing their own meagre status. So, “we need to blame those whom previously it was easy and fortunate for us to ignore”. They are essentially them, they cannot be identified with therefore, and ‘othered’. There is nothing in it for them, in-fact it would only mean putting at risk what they have and will go to almost any length to hold on to… for as long as they can. It ain’t looking good though, as panic sets in. The obsession with that which can distract from all responsibility, reproduces and builds to new unseen heights. The pitch for this and against what lies behind it all, can be heard and witnessed in almost every linguistic turn and in their explanandum and explanans. As the end is envisaged and now pointed to, defined and scheduled; still any mention of that which society, like philosophy, fails to get to grasp, may well only be reckoned with in the moment near ending. So, they carry on obsessing about this, that, and the other…
Therefore, the last, for now, cited terrain left to territorialise and capture completely and overtly, is in full swing. Its momentum, as yet, has met with less resistance than what would be necessary for full rational liberation. Unsurprisingly, the illogical is relentlessly sustained here, as the bidding being done by those whom are threatened by this form of systemic survival and violence, gains vengeful force and becomes more veracious and hence incrementally more violent. Particularly as the authors of this tyranny continue to spur them on, to greater lengths and with gradually more horrifying results — the illogical builds continually, unflinching, as the need for any actual sort of sophisticated propagation, begins to dissipate. To hack the body, this is it. The target of their discourse and the advancement of their interests. Suddenly, without scrutiny, now, this system should be trusted — they say. To them, the past habitually acknowledged and critiqued, un-belonging but inflicted, doesn’t indicate any need for such analysis. Its pathological brutalities have indicated nothing to them on this account it appears; only that in questioning its authority and enforced obligations should now be met with scorn, distrust and eventually, penalties — which manifestly, are never enough.
This is its (in-)actions, its implementation and its structural process, which proclaims to them, amiable to it or not: let the formation of this, your mass psychosis, reign.
Outro.
From a rational perspective, a commitment is seen as a cascade of ramifying paths that is in the process of expanding its frontiers, developing into an evolving landscape, unmooring its fixed perspectives, deracinating any form of rootedness associated with a fixed commitment or immutable responsibilities, revising links and addresses between its old and new commitments, and finally, erasing any image of itself as “what it was supposed to be.” 1.
The initial stage of this text-image exploratory test was/is intended to create a ‘ground’ that comes together through the conceptualisation of rational ‘autonomicity’, which these two research strands, regarding and reflecting tinnitus, focus on as a commitment to a type of ‘revisionary process’. The depiction of, and perceived automatic/independent effect of this auditory condition, coalesce around, respond to, and reflect the research potential of this idea of autonomy as a critically constituting concept for this work’s instalment and its character’s amalgamation. Hence, by consciously intervening on and within the assumed rationale of text (narrative) construction and image-making-presentation processes — in order to realign and reformulate these intentionally critical acts — one was/is attempting to challenge certain norms and ‘rules’ associated with the creation of such works and their ‘literal’ meanings, through the production of a dedicated ‘whole’ that comes from these two pieces, and crucially, to equally scrutinise the reading(s) of these selected works and their inevitable contingently produced aggregation in: Post-Tinnital Testing. This notion and application of ‘intervention’ aims to allow for greater access to the norms associated with the creation-presentation-experience triad for those involved in the various stages of this/its means, instance and act of presentation, and its eventual reading; allowing for a rational interrogation, questioning, and if need be, revision of these normative processes and the relations contained within this work’s sound-text-image making concatenations.
Negarestani, R. (2014) ‘The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman’, e-flux Journal, Issue #53. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/53/59893/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-ii-the-inhuman/