blah-feme

the sonic in the political and the social

The difficulties we face in coming to understand the sonic relation and its relation, in turn, with the social relation more broadly are symptomatic, I suggest, of a crisis in the imagination of the common. The key to thinking the sonic/social relation is obscured precisely because it is interdicted by the forces that seek to hold us in thrall to the charm of property.[i] Without property, we have come to believe, we will be excluded from political representation, destined to dwell in the twilight of the amorphous proto-dēmos, without demand, without voice, without future. To answer the first question I raised above, then (how, that is do we constitute ourselves sonically?), it is in the process of attaching ourselves to an ideal scene of pastoral calm, the private imagined acoustically, that we think ourselves to be whole. It is not that we are all dreaming of a rural idyll, or seeking to live a life like Edward Carpenter’s glorious peasant isolation, but, rather, that we have come to identify with a certain sonic scene in which we have full control over the boundary between the inside and the outside. In what John Picker has termed the ‘soundproof study’, in a model, that is, of a certain imagination of social autonomy, subjects have come to think themselves as authors of their own soundscapes. Noise has become, quite simply, the name we give to the failure of that authorial control.

Yet there have been, as we have seen, some striking moments at which the desire for quiet and the private has been put aside for a desire for the communion of political activism. When the dēmos spills out into the streets and demands to be heard, and citizens leave their purportedly ‘silent’ bubbles and are absorbed into the throng, then glimpses are briefly afforded of some of the ways in which the demand for representation is made. In Madrid, that moment was constituted around the notion that the ‘we’ of the dēmos had been excluded from representation: the ‘they’ of a patrician elite not unlike the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union had deliberately sought to foreclose the representational matrix around a simple political equation (i.e. ‘Basque separatists are the enemy’ and ‘we have not endangered Spain by joining the Iraq war’) such that the ‘we’ of the dēmos is held in a state of hysterical exclusion.

‘Why won’t they be silent’, Nicolae Ceauşescu once asked his assistant, as he stood, on 21 December 1989, on the balcony of the headquarters of the Rumanian Communist Party in the Piaţa Palatului in Bucharest, trying to address the crowds that had gathered there in protest at the government’s actions in the Timişoara uprising. His failure to silence them, the puzzled and frightened expression on his face, the roar of boos, hisses, jeers and jibes, all this signalled the breaking of the channel and the forging of a new political matrix in which the demand of the dēmos to be heard had become deafening. In the light of the structural exclusion of both the Spanish and the Rumanian majority, a certain jouissance, or enjoyment attaches to the solemn coming together, at Cibeles, at the Piaţa Palatului, or at almost any place you care to mention, in the shiver of communion, and participation. That coming together, moreover, has a very particular sonic character, as an investment in unisonality, the speaking of many as one.

So what, then, to reiterate my second question above, are the processes by which we seek out and pleasure in this unisonality? Psychoanalysis has its own kind of answer to this question: we seek out this unisonality, it says, for gratification, for the need of contact, for the will to cohere, share, be a part of a movement that nourishes. And it does seem right to me that we seek it out because we are hopeless romantics, wilful idealists. The social is always an act of faith, a giving of oneself to the dangers of misunderstanding, offence, contagion. We seek out unisonality precisely, I suggest, because it seems to offer a raw and automatic communion, an alignment without introduction, intercourse without seduction, and it places us in the comfortable place of the passive who takes what is given, not having to steer, but being steered, not having to think but being thought. In becoming the object of political action, the thing in the mix, we can still the inner cacophony of the soundproof study and listen to the needs of others. We seek out unisonality because it seeks us. It wants us for a host.

This sonic alignment, this taking up a newly aligned sonic relation with others, engages what Gustav le Bon termed a psychologie des foules, a psychology of crowds. The crowd, for le Bon, is a site of madness, contagion, idiocy.[ii] Yet it is precisely these kinds of ‘idiocy’ or contagion that constitute the critical moment at which the dēmos is constituted. The roar of the crowd, the flatline lo-fi hum of communion, the to-and-fro of shouts, chants, demands – this is the noise that demands; it is a noise excluded from the patrician signals of political work; it is the parasite that builds in the channel until that channel is saturated and breached. The sentimental materialism of noise cannot help us here: this is no simple material as such, no special sonic domain all of its own, no island of sounds written out of political discourse. Noise is here the sound of new signals being sent, new channels being opened, new demands of the political matrix being made. Noise is nothing more (and nothing less) than the call for a new relation.

As Žižek puts it, ‘Politics proper … always involves a kind of short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular’,[iii] or, to put it another way, the political is that space in which the demand enacts a kind of denaturalisation or estrangement of the status quo such that exclusion from that order becomes sufficiently audible as to demand that someone, or some group be granted entry. Knock knock knock. Let us in.

---

[i] It is no coincidence that the recent financial crisis began in the Anglophone property sector, with an overheating of unregulated speculation on subprime mortgages. It is as if property had come to constitute in itself the ground for a certain kind of citizenship, to which all others inspire, and against which all other forms of citizenship are found wanting. To be a member of what Margaret Thatcher called the ‘property owning democracy’ (a fundamental oxymoron, of course), had become not simply a way (as had been the case in earlier decades) of becoming a member of the middle classes (meant here in the British sense), but of becoming socially agentive. Property came to equal representation as such.

[ii] ‘… the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint.’ Gustav le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Félix Alcan [1895] 1907), 17.

[iii] Žižek, ‘Lesson’, 70.

malign malign everywhere

I have, for some time now, been waking to the realisation that there are some that I 'know', some that occupy space near me and who have seemed until now thoroughly benign, good even, that are, to put it no other way I can think of, profoundly malign. Being in proximity to malignancy such as this, malignancy that has taken a great deal of time to show itself, a great deal of time to make itself felt and to engage its sharp teeth, is like coming to a sudden knowledge of the most insidious sickness underlying everything you thought good, healthy and fair. The unveiling of that malignancy has been shocking and yet utterly banal in equal measure. And it is this banality that has unsteadied me the most. That one can ever get used to being in proximity to a creature without an ethical core, and find ways of being in the world in proximity to that creature, is perhaps the most deeply disturbing realisation that I have come to.

I remember much older friends of mine, and before them friends of my parents, telling me in hushed whispers of the darkness that can lurk in the heart of humanity, of the vindictive, spiteful and malicious monsters that prowl the spaces we negotiate each day. Back then I was inclined to put such dark forbidding down to the neurosis of the old, to the weariness that comes of being for too long. But I am now inclined to think them not just right, but, frankly, insufficiently pointed in their characterisation of that darkness.

How can it be, then, that this realisation only comes with age? What is it about being for some time that brings this terrifying and yet utterly mundane wisdom? There is no structural guarantee that living longer delivers such wisdom. Many of the old in my life have become less tolerant of others, more inclined to selfishness and less open to difference. Theirs is no glorious march to wisdom, no path to enlightenment. So why now? Why this sudden unveiling of the malign place at the core of humanity? I think it must be down to a rather local and particular dramatis personae that engenders the need to understand, the survival instinct, if you will. When the creature unveils himself, one is suddenly aware of the need to be careful, of the need to preserve oneself, to be on the lookout for acts of maliciousness. His is the honourable role in this little drama, like the prince in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, or the duke in Kafka’s The Castle. In a way, in acting, they become even more invisible, in maliciously manipulating, they disappear, fade into a strange and grey backfill of ‘them’ out there.

Perhaps this has been my strangest insight to date, that evil, for want of a less epic term, in its banality is also a kind of background noise, a hum , a disturbance as Serres would put it. Except that, today, the volume got turned up for a moment...

Reading Serres

The noise is the thing. Bring it. Between message, channel and target, the noise is the thing. It perturbs, disturbs and makes three out of 2, 4 out of three.

I’m reading Serres’s The Parasite and in that elusive third meaning of the term in French, ‘static’ or ‘interference’, is sedimented something so remarkable, so magical, as if it were a kind of alchemy in the word that would conjure up the precious meaning of a meaning in its absence: for there must be in any system something other than order. something other than the unite that we so crave. It’s almost (but not quite) as if this yearning, for Serres, were a kind of craven yearning for an object that might speak, might give itself up to us in its entirety.

In the system of objects that attends this yearning, noise is the enemy, the beast.

when the wolves cease their baying: the silences of Arcadia

It should be noted that the silence/noise relationship, the relationship between a blockage in the signal channel and its saturation (or breach), is not merely reciprocal, but intimately (ontologically) co-dependent. Pastorale, as one of the mechanisms enacted in the early modern courts of Europe by which the violent traumatic kernel at the heart of community was buried, enabled a mode of representation of that community in which one could ‘safely’ participate. Pro-pastoralist thinkers like Alpers have tended to imagine this participation not as a retreat or a kind of counter-factual delusion, but as a way of working through the problematic of representation itself. Certainly, one of the ways that the pastoral domain could function in Renaissance Italy, for example, was as a space for the (re)presentation of the body politic. The representational thesis, born of a recuperative pastoralism, thus holds that the pastoral forms of early modernity emerge in response to new demands for court socialisation. But what was it precisely about the greenwoods or Arcadia itself that occasioned so much cultural work? And why has it persisted so stubbornly? Why seek to cover over the violent core of abandonment that attends community?

What is problematic in the recuperative account of the pastorale is precisely this silence about the undergrowth of violence that sustains the pastoral domain – Arcadia’s mute paradisiacal spaces cast the noisy and troublesome subjects of early modernity as mute figures in an idyllic landscape without escape or end. Pastoral, by its very nature, is interminable. And yet, the desire for the pastoral was, and remains, intense and widespread. There is therefore a particularly intensely performed disconnect between the violent act of abandonment and the wistful fa-la-la of the Arcadian pastorale, a disconnect that points to a profoundly needed disavowal of the overdeterminedness of the social rigours of court etiquette. What pastoral enabled, it seems, was a translation of etiquette into the ‘natural’, of responsibility into spontaneity, of duty into freedom.

We can see how, in the Philoctetean logic of the pastorale, violence marks the opening out of the merely utilitarian collective (of warriors) into a community of adherents: the king’s abandonment to Lemnos, as the founding violence of the community of ‘free’ men (like Freud’s account of the horde’s patricide as a founding moment of civilization), occasions the enclosure of the pastorale, what Giuseppe Gerbino has characterised as an ‘instinct of self-representation’. Gerbino’s persuasive thesis is that the Renaissance fascination with the pastoral constituted nothing less than the desire to construct a universe (‘developed through decades of Petrarchist and Neoplatonic exercises’) ‘… in which the Renaissance discourse on human desire could be represented in a dramatic form’. The move from the Petrarchist interiority of the self/lover to the performance in court settings of the pastoral community of singers and poets enacts for Gerbino a moment of a new kind of socialisation in Renaissance court etiquette. Indeed, within the terms we have set up here, that ‘socialisation’ is both transformative (in moving towards a court logic based on exchange and the representation of difference) and compensatory, in that the violent ground on which the structures of court etiquette were founded (the ‘warrior lover’, for example) had to be covered over, disavowed.

The musical forms that attend this new disavowal in the Italian Renaissance are fascinating for their consistent adherence to a logic of sonic self-sufficiency: when pastoral tropes enter the Italian madrigal in the late 1570s, they do so remarkably quickly and with a striking consistency, and they draw on a set of new musical resources to enact this new enclosure: sighing closures, wistful mannerist lines and clear melodic shapes that speak of the power of music to open up a world as proxy, balm, salve. As Gerbino would have it, ‘That it may be possible to fall silent, if even for a moment, and enjoy the pure pleasure of poetry and music as the only redeeming value of language was the lesson of ancient shepherds.’ The introspection of this falling silent in the face of music, the ‘withdrawal’, ‘retreat’, or enclosure that such an act requires, points to something interesting in the history of what scholars of the so-called ‘affective turn’ in the humanities are calling the ‘attention economy’

So what was it about the pastoral, in particular, that turned early modern heads? How does this falling silent mark modernity? What is the shape and curve of this attention? What this moment, admittedly short-lived, makes it possible to think is the management of attention through both public and private ritual, and it is the reflection in silent listening (in public) on the inner world (the private space) that allows reflection precisely on the content of the private world and its difference from the public space of the court. The pastorale is precisely that space in which the history of rituals that open out this thinking, and which enable both withdrawal and return, are enacted. The demand for silence in the introspective moment of the late Italian madrigal and its European copies is a new kind of demand made on citizens to split their world in two: modernity sets off with this violent bifurcation, in the gentle calm of introspection and one’s loss to the anguishes of the late now distended mannerism of the madrigal. Our nymphs and shepherds starting coming away, one might say, just as the roar of modernity becomes perceptible, as the noise-to-signal ratio began to degrade. Esposito has intimated that modernity itself is about precisely this kind of withdrawal:

It’s true that modernity is self-legitimating, cutting itself off from every social bond, from every natural link, from every common law. Yet there also emerges from within modernity itself the tragic knowledge of the nihilistic character of this decision. The Hobbesian uprooting is lived therefore with a sense of “guilt” with respect to a community, both whose absence and necessity one recognises.

What modernity mourns is precisely what it craves, and precisely what it has barred to itself, a self-evident social sphere that will represent itself spontaneously. In the withdrawal that the demand for silence enacts, early modern subjects of court experience their own doubledness. Silence and noise, calm and fray, thus come to mark the terms on which their interior and exterior worlds are to be held apart.

Esposito's communitas

So what are we to make of this performative authenticity, if its very naming occasions this dipping and swooning of the analytical language that attempts to grasp it? How are we to understand it, precisely as we bear witness to its impossible ontology? Returning once more to Esposito, it is clear that, for him, the impossible ontology of the community is not something that can be simply set aside or bypassed, but requires a fundamental engagement, a fundamental inclusion within the analytical trajectory, or grasped even as in some sense running alongside it. This first step in Esposito is very seductive since it would seem to be arguing for a radically different conception of the collective than that normally rehearsed within the dialectic of what he terms ‘belonging and owning’: ‘what is common’, as Esposito puts it in his analysis of that dialectic ‘is that which unites the ethnic, territorial, and spiritual property of every one of its members.’

This thing that unites, this ‘substance’ or connection, whatever it may be, is that which binds members together in an enactment of mutual owning and belonging: ‘[Members of a community] have in common what is most properly their own; they are the owners of what is common to all.

The radical turn in Esposito’s argument comes precisely here, at this very early moment in Communitas where he seeks to lay out the problematic of community’s impossible ontology. This dialectic is something he wishes to ‘distance [himself] from’, to ‘search for a point … within the origin of the very thing itself under investigation’, that promises to ‘lead to a notion of community that is radically different from those that have been dealt with up to now.’ Esposito’s achievement is to reset the terms on which community can be thought by unearthing in the roots of our modern conception of community the void of the debt or gift:

[in communitas] there is still another meaning to be added, one, however, less obvious because it transfers properly within itself the larger semantic complexity of the term from which it originates: munus (its archaic form is moinus, moenus), which is composed of the root mei- and the suffix -nes, both of which have a social connotation. The term, in fact, oscillates in turn among three meanings that aren’t all the same and that seem to make it miss its mark, or at least to limit the emphasis, the initial juxtaposition of “public/private” – munus dicitur tum de privatis, tum de publicis – in favour of another conceptual area that is completely traceable to the idea of obligation [dovere]. These are onus, officium, and donum.

In the munus, then, aligned to these three different senses of gifting, is ‘transferred’, to use Espoito’s term, a sense of obligation, in that the act of giving, as a kind of testament to one’s recognition of one’s beholdenness to the other, performs one’s recognition of one’s mutuality in relation to the other(s). The performative nature of this giving, then, is key to how I wish now to elaborate Esposito’s obligation-centred understanding of the communitas for the purposes of the theme of this section, the performative authenticity of communities. If we accept that Esposito’s analysis is sound, or at least strategically productive here, then the relation of gifting to performing will be key to how we proceed.

In the act of gifting, in that staging of one’s beholdenness to the other, one brings into relation the performative and the obligatory,

or, to put it another way, the public and the offices of the public good. This relation, then, points to something quite striking in the communitarian imagination, and, until Esposito, partially hidden - that communities are bound by what is yet to be done as a riposte to the difetto what has been done already. The gift of work, the gift of time, of one’s energies, of food or shelter, of support to another, a sharing of task, a mutual acknowledgement of each other’s needs, is what sets in motion the tying of members of a community to each other, precisely in this sense of debt, of void, of the requirement to give, over and over, in acts of atonement, acts of obligation, acts of deliverance from the debt that grounds those ties. Paradoxically, the desire to cancel that void of debt, to ‘fill’ it, nonetheless points to the function of that debt as constitutive of the community in and of itself.

The rush to fill that debt, the desire for a plenitude at the heart of the community, is a structure that operates according to attraction, in which performative acts of gifting are drawn to the gravity well of the debt to the other.

on what is modern in men

European modernity’s fateful entanglement with the noisy roar of the public domain and its bifurcation of the public and the private domains has a number of striking consequences for the sonic component of its new social order in which subjects are held in an oscillating state of withdrawal and return: the first consequence is that music in particular comes to represent a site of possibility in which ‘ecstatic’ contemplation (being possessed by music, or lost in a kind of interiorised listening) bears witness to the edges (the ‘limits’ and ‘scope’) of the social; the second is that sound more broadly is aligned with control, especially with an intensification of the processes by which the boundary between private and public spaces is policed; the third is that sound and noise enter into the dance of power in which subjects are interpellated not merely as subjects of the Euclidean visible domain, but as creatures of the sonic domain, as nascent acousmêtres of the new soundscapes of urban Europe; the fourth is that the noise-to-signal ratio of urban Europe begins to shift, very slowly (almost imperceptibly), towards an ever higher value in which that which is extraneous to the quiet act of communication gets louder and louder. In this shifting sonic terrain, community comes to stand also for a certain set of relations in sound, for a certain commitment to quietude, stillness and plenitude, setting in motion modernity’s pastoral demand in its first ‘modern’ (pre-industrial) incarnation. Communities participating in the new socialisation of sound, especially court communities, enact ritualised engagements of sound such that the logics of allegiance, duty, honour and order could be brought into being and performed as if spontaneous, as if given freely, preordained in the hearts of men.

Spring shming

My friends have just gone out running. Every spring this seems to happen – as the sap rises so does the insufferably pious optimism of those who think they’re going to lose weight. It’s not that I resent their losing weight, nor their rituals, but it is that tendency to want me to join in. Come on, they say, with that bright and annoying brash tone, we can do this TOGETHER.

Oh God, which foul devil invented that word, together. If there’s one thing I hate about spring it is the return of the public sphere. People like to ‘get out in it’, to ‘get some fresh air’, or to ‘take a Sunday stroll’. It’s like fucking Stepford wives sometimes.

I don’t know if it’s my Englishness, or my personality that brings with spring an almost palpable sense of deep alienation from my fellow man. I think it is in the demise of the public sphere, what Paolo Virno has called that ‘publicness without a public sphere’ of the late modern, that my alienation is to be explained. The inexorable decline in the imagination of the common, and the intense privatisation of the public sphere, leaves us without the tools to engage the public, even where it seems to throw itself at us, screaming ‘JOIN IN’. How am I to respond to this ubiquitous call to join my fellow man, the interpolation of spring in the sexual, political and aesthetic discourses of the public sphere, to enter its terrain?

Well I’m not going out, I can tell you that!

at home, strange, still

M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Village (2004), like many of his movies, deals with boundaries and the fear of the trespass of the other into the heart of community and, as such, structurally inverts our ubiquitous cult-fear of being stolen away. The opening sequence spans the world of the nineteenth-century village of the title, from the trauma of losing a young member of its community, to the guarding of its boundary at night against the unknown outsiders (‘those of whom we do not speak’), from the young women burying a branch of berries because they bear the forbidden colour red, to giving thanks for the plenitude of the village (‘we are grateful for the time we have been given’). The village is a space resolutely connected to the trauma of a failing pastorale: its older members are refugees from horrors outside the village (each of the founding members has a black wooden box, never to be opened in company, in which reminders of the horrors of the past are held), and the young, ostensibly untouched by those horrors, are nonetheless gripped by a fear of what lies outside, in the woods.

This opening montage is heavily scored by James Newton Howard’s music referencing quite explicitly (and knowingly) the pastoral style – the harmonic ‘movement in stillness’ evident in the pastorales of Handel, Vivaldi et al is reworked here in the light of its encounter with twentieth-century ‘pastoral’ styles, notably Vaughn Williams, Delius, Copland, Ives and so on. The harmonic ‘stillness’ is achieved not simply by archetypal repetition of an underlying harmonic sequence or a prolonged pedal point, but by the extensive and systematic use of modal harmony. The repetitive arpeggiated solo violin figure, reminiscent, perhaps, of Vaughn Williams’s The Lark Ascending, and similarly dislocated from the inferred tonic pedal point as befitting the modal texture, tops out a rich and wide frequency range, as if to reference the promised plenitude of the scene of the pastorale. The images are wrapped in the sonic envelope of what Anahid Kassabian has termed ‘assimilationist’ structures of identification.

Such structures are reliant on orchestral scoring in the Hollywood idiom to structure and order the narrative around a coherent give-and-take of identification: where a character is supposed to elicit sympathy, any number of musical topoi can effect the appropriate identification – most obviously the use of the minor mode, slow mournful hymn-like textures, chromatic-to-diatonic movement, falling harmonic sequences and so on. The topoi are enlisted to draw narrative attention onto the Affekt of the scene or to structure our identifications around the moral order of the narrative. What is striking here is that the assimilationist structure of the sound track points to the unusual Affekt of site, where the sonic envelope of the music marks the village as a nurturing space, a space in which change can only bring harm and in which stasis promises the bliss of unending plenitude. Musically, then, the village is bound into its space by the territorialising gestures of the modal harmonies. Long shots and expansive musical spaces work together to make up this sense of the eternal territory of the village.

The assimilationist structuring of identification here is absolutely in line with the makeshift ideology of the post-industrial pastorale in so far as it works to structure a reproach: even as the film unfolds and we learn of the deceit on which the village is built, the music does not abandon its enveloping tendency. There is, indeed, a stark contrast between the film score and the sonic world of the village itself: as the score demonstrates fidelity to the structuring of a nurturing sonic envelop, the village is beset by ominous sonic threats to its boundary by the mournful howls of the unspeakable beasts in the forest. Indeed, just as William Hurt announces, in the opening words of the film, his gratitude for the nurturing space of the village, so the others in the woods make their presence felt with their doleful moans.

The mismatch of the two sonic spheres, what structuralist film music theorists would call the hypodiegetic and the diegetic (the music that scores the film and the music and other sounds that exist ‘within’ the narrative space of the film) points, perhaps, to the always already more-than-one-ness of film production: film, we might say, is the site at which a utilitarian community is formed, a community of work. Yet the mismatch also points to a textual dissonance in the film itself that is in line with the observations we have been making thus far about the primal pastoral scene: in post-industrial societies, the pastorale works as an archaic demand on the community that can never be fully realised such that the always already incomplete nature of the community is aligned resolutely with social failure. In other words, community is set up to fail ontologically. Indeed, the mismatch we identified here between the two spheres points precisely to the incommensurateness of the pastoral fantasy and the lived reality of the social. The Village, then, is a tragedy, in that the disclosure of the ‘deceit’ that has held the community together brings the community into a radical questioning of its self-coherence and the real possibility of its abandonment such that it might no longer remain viable.

The sonic qualities of the village are not completely in accord with its visual/spatial qualities either: where the visual world of the village is shot through with anxious emphases on boundaries and enclosed spaces, the imagination of the village in the score is quite different, thereby juxtaposing an empirical finitude (the particularity of the community) with the open-ended promised plenitude of the musical territory of the film score. The score, then, overwrites the cartography of tragedy, offers a way of recuperating or ‘repairing’ the broken structures of the social. The sounds of the narrative (voices, clicks, whistles, the rustle of the acousmêtres’ clothes, the fall of feet on the ground, music to dance to, song, the resonance of the meeting hall, the noises of work, play, and so on), by contrast, all work to fill out the nurturing space of the village, by lending it a rich indexical acoustic field, precisely that field that Ivy, the blind precocious protagonist, must herself negotiate in order to set the village to rights. The acoustic space of the community, then, is structured both as a secondary space beholden to the visual/spatial narrative (as effecting its indexical enrichment, its ‘authenticity’) and as an element of the narrative in its own right: just at that moment when Lucius is stabbed by George, for example, the acoustic stream is blocked, delivering a kind of ‘deadening’ effect, there is no score, no acoustic indexical field, no sonic clue, but simply the striking shock of the bare visual remnant, the knife in the belly. The acoustic stream is only restored with the thud of Lucius falling to the ground and George’s whimpering.

The Village, then, whilst clearly readable as a critical study of the community ideal, can also be read, against the grain of the visual/cartographic narrative, as an exploration of what might be termed the social relation in sound: the structuring of subject positions, locations and affiliations through resonance, timbre, pitch, dynamics, attack, decay and gain; the acousmêtres and the acoustic ecology of the village; the open/closed binarism of inside/outside (inside the house or meeting hall and out in the open, or within and without the nurturing sonic space of the village). When Ivy stands at the door of her house, for example, at night, as the others ‘attack’ the village, in a scene evocative of Caspar David Friedrich’s Frau vor untergehender Sonne, she speaks both forward into the empty darkness and back into the light of the house, the one voice quiet and imploring, lost into the open-air acoustic of the dangerous outside, the other strong and buoyed with its own agency: “go back inside”. The one voice dissipates, the other resounds through the house

Hence the diegetic-acoustics of the film and its visual narrative are not always in this kind of strict alignment. Indeed, at that very point in the film when the boundary of the village is first breached and one of the ‘others’ is glimpsed crossing under a watch tower, the score delivers an idiomatic resonant metallic ‘stab’, reminiscent of High Modernist 1950s avant-garde uses of percussion, and in stark contrast to the pastorale of the rest of the score. This is meant to mark out a point of traumatic narrative shift. The diegetic-acoustic structuring of that scene, however, works quite differently. The watchman’s shuffling back from the drawbridge and the follow-up emphatic refusal of his sighting of the breach with the thudding fall of the trapdoor, and the high-pitched thud of the latch, point again to a kind of binarism in which low, resonant thuds and booms are juxtaposed with non-resonant scrapes and bangs, the one giving an acoustic life to the watch tower’s strength and resilience, the other underlining its flimsy temporary nature. So here, then, where the score delivers a structural stab to mark the narrative turn (and thereby turning, itself, towards narration rather than territorialisation), the diegetic-acoustic structuring of the scene is metonymic, partial, fragmented.

The social relation in sound, here, is always marked by ambiguity, not because social relations are always already primarily structured in the visual domain, but because the post-industrial demand of the pastorale will always require a disavowal of the sonic in which the cartograpohic-visual order comes to stand for social relations as such – touch, smell, and, hearing faculties are all held in abeyance, curtailed or subsumed within the still life moment of the dead organic community: where visual coordinates of community can easily hold the boundary in place, and clearly mark inside and out with the lines and planes of Euclidean geometry, sound promises always to overrun that orderly Euclidean pastorale with a kind of unruly contagion, with the chatter and noise of the social.

The Village brings into ear shot, then, it is the complex and disruptive work of the acoustic ecology of the social: social relations and coordinates are imagined, set in place and disturbed, not just in the domain of the visual-cartographic imagination, but also across a wiser of senses, across almost the whole human sensorium. In the encounter with acousmêtres and their sonic environs, we begin to get a sense of what it might mean to think about the social, and about communities more specifically, as resonant, as having a sonic life.