ECHO: AN ABSTRACT

Patrick Gibson

"The plastic artist, like the epic poet who is related to him, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician is, without any images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial re-echoing." (1) How can we think about sound, and in particular the echoic and reverberant characteristics of natural and architectural space? We are no doubt familiar with its affective nature in the cathedrals of the Church and the halls of the State - a sense of timelessness and immutability can perhaps be attributed to the reverberated tones of voice and sound, a sense of the righteous, the eternal, the sacred - in short, a sense of power that has been put to use to bolster both clerical and secular agendas. Could we propose, then, a political economy of reverb and echo? And if so, would it be one of classical utility, or one based on excess? Georges Bataille has argued that religion in the middle ages could indeed be dened by wastage in the service of God: "Religion is the satisfaction that a society gives to the use of excess resources, or rather to their destruction (at least insofar as they are useful). This is what gives religions their rich material aspect, which only ceases to be conspicuous when an emaciated spiritual life withdraws from labor a time that could have been employed in producing."(2) Bataille's point is that although these edices do provide a certain spiritual comfort and even grandeur in the lives of those that had the church built, at bottom it is the very gratuitousness of the activity, its function as depense, that provide these "rewards". If the cathedral itself was a "folly"., one could only conclude that the acoustics of its interior would be similarly extravagant. To be sure, this sense of lavish excess was curtailed by leaders such as Luther and Calvin in the time of the Reformation, at which point it could be said that this religious manifestation of acoustic depense was transposed rather than silenced. With the advent of the Enlightenment and the re-distribution of power from God to Man, the rise of the bourgeoisie and the eventual hegemony of industrial capitalism, European peoples began worshipping at the acoustically powerful temples of State, Commerce and Justice, temples that indeed could not be said to have lost any of the gratuity of the earlier churches. "Religion in general answered the desire that man always had to nd himself. to regain an intimacy that was always strangely lost. But the mistake of all religion is to always give man a contradictory answer: an external form of intimacy ... But the modern world goes about it in a different way: It does not look for anything illusory and it means to achieve an essential conquest by directly solving the problems that are posed by things."(3) In a general sense, Western metaphysics is, and has for the most part historically been, one based on transcendence and the hegemony of vision. The Western paradigm of knowledge and truth has its foundation in the visual; it reies and totalizes, the gaze is at once active and practical, contemplative and objective, panoramic and absolute. We could call this culture Apollonian (in that it is eidetic); ultimately it privellages the mental over the physiological, and, by extension, we could say that Western subjectivity is based on the primacy of the individual, the unitary ego. Hearing, on the other hand, has to do with the temporal AND the spatial, it has a greater afnity with impermanance and change rather than xity. "Sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us."(4) Hearing has more to do with the Dionysian, in the sense that it is more closely related to music and community, the body and the ecstatic, ritual and intoxication: "(H)ow in these strains all of nature's excess in pleasure, grief and knowledge became audible, even in piercing shrieks."(5) Sound, music, could concieveably allow us under certain circumstances "to regain an intimacy that was always strangely lost", the possibility of a "collapse of the principium individuationis,"(6) and an achievable annullment of traditional Western metaphysics and subjectivity.

Echoes are residues of time and displacements in space. They are fragmentary and disembodied, and as such they disrupt our acquired conception of the "sensible", the graspable, in our vision--based metaphysics. The mythologies of echo attempt to deal with these phenomena in various ways. In one version of the myth, Echo was a wood-nymph, but mortal. 'Taught by the Muses to sing and play all the wind and string instruments, she "danced with the Nymphs and sung in consort with the Muses but ed from all males, whether men or Gods, because she loved virginity. Pan sees that, and takes occasion to be angry at the maid, and to envy her music because he could not come at her beauty. Therefore he sends a madness among the shepherds... and they tore her all to pieces and ung about them all over the earth her yet singing limbs. The Earth in observence of the Nymphs buried them all, preserving to them still their music property, and they by an everlasting sentence and decree of the Muses breathe out a voice. And they imitate all things now as the maid did before, the Gods, men, organs, beasts. Plan himself they imitate too when he plays on the pipe; which when he hears he bounces out and begins to post over the mountains, not so much as to catch and hold as to know what clandestine imitator that is that he has got."(7) An excess of life and death. A violent, rapacious, transgressive act; the exeuberent, symbolic rape of Echo who, like Dionysus, was ripped apart and scattered; Echo dismembered at a remove by Pan, himself a Dionysian gure. Her severed, individuated limbs were buried by the Earth, the primal unity, and they sing still, going so far as to trick Pan himself, the trickster deity. Echo immured in the Earth, the "deep country of hearing, described in terms of geology more than in those of any other natural science, not only by virtue of the cartilaginous cavern that constitutes its organ, but also by virtue of the relationship that unites it to grottoes, chasms, to all pockets hollowed out of the terrestrial crust whose emptiness makes them into resonating drums for the slightest sounds."(8) But we should not allow this geological metaphor, to mislead us: this burial does not establish limits and roots. Precisely because Echo's chthonic presence has been consolidated everywhere, it has been consolidated nowhere. Sounds and echoes are the epitome of loss and transient experience; they are the most ephemeral of things, transtemporal, transspatial. Sound qua sound, echo qua echo, because they are intangible and unxed, can serve no utilitarian end. Sounds and echoes are luxurious expenditures of energy, irretrieveable, overabundant -- laughter! They are the most transgressive of natural phenomena. Stasis is silent, only motion Sounds.
(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy", Vintage Books NY, 1967, Section 5 (2) Georges Bataille, "The Accursed Share", Vol.I, Zone Books, NY, 1988, p.120 (3) ibid, p p. 1 30 (4) Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", University of Minnesota Press, 1987, P. 348 (5) Nietzsche, op.cit., Section 4 (6) ibid, Section 1 (7) John Hollander, "The Figure of Echo", University of California Press, 1981, pp.7-8 (8) Michel Leiris, "Biffures", cited in David Levin "The Listening Self", Routledge, 1989, n. 1, p.300 Thanks MC