Irregular Rhythms, Unintentional Design

What emerges in the ruins of industrialization? If human beings have ruined the planet, caught in the drive to be modern, can we find a new way to live? To what can we turn for a model? Tsing argues that, in order to survive, human beings must learn new ways of noticing, new ways of listening. She points out that, in spite of the best-laid plans of states and capitalists, unpredictable occurrences surround us. She writes,

Precarity is the condition of our time [...] Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can't rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive (20).

If we accept that, rather than the stable, planned, progressing civilization we narrate ourselves into, we live in a state of precarity, we must reframe modern concepts of subjectivity and individualism. “I” can never act independently or securely in a state of precarity; “I” rely for survival upon other human and non-human organisms and technologies (Tsing illustrates this idea with a walking stick). Tsing calls this “assemblage,” “open-ended gatherings,” which sometimes become “happenings,” encounters which are greater than the sum of their parts.

            Tsing illustrates assemblage and happenings by referencing polyphonic music, particularly European Renaissance and Baroque polyphonic music. She writes,

These forms seem archaic and strange to many modern listeners because they were superseded by music in which a unified rhythm and melody holds the composition together. In the classical music that displaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was ‘progress’ in just the meaning I have been discussing: a unified coordination of time […] When I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage (23-24).

            Tsing titles the first chapter, in which this paragraph exists, “Arts of Noticing.” In order to understand how to survive in capitalist ruins, we must notice assemblage; but assemblage, she implies, must be heard and felt. It is rhythms and melodies. While modernity and progress relied upon eyes for their narratives, a sense which seems to privilege the linear, assemblage is heard (and, in the case of mushrooms, smelled). Noticing assemblage requires us to create and process knowledge in new ways.

            These ideas, in addition to the discussion later in the book of how John Cage composed to reveal ambient sound, reminded me of the work of a colleague of mine, No.e Parker. No.e studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan for several years before returning to the United States to pursue a PhD in music composition. Last summer and fall her work was on display at the UC Riverside Culver Center’s Sweeney Art Gallery, where she’d set up a container of compost filled with electrodes which connected to a computer program and speakers, creating “a live soundscape of out of real-time data.” The electrodes took temperature data, which was translated to hertz. Citing Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, No.e writes of her composition project,

Composing [De]Composition recontextualizes the biota of compost into an artistic material and collaborator—joining the seemingly unconnected practices of home composting, data collection, sound art and music composition into a research-based, new media artwork. The project establishes compost— a complex, living material—as an “actant … a source of action that … has sufficient coherence to make a difference.”

            The musical result of this project had two parts. The first was the exhibit, which allowed listeners to hear real-time compost temperature change as it occurred in the room. The second component was a final performance, which took all the data and condensed it into a wieldier composition, sped up and performed with MIDI sound. Both sound files are available through links from her personal website, which you can access here. I attended the final performance of the MIDI version (you can see me lying on a yoga mat in one of the pictures on her website), and my overwhelming sense at the end of the performance was wonder at what sound could express. As Tsing likewise advocates, as we recognize the fault in monolithic methods of modernity, we must offer instead “stories built through layered and disparate practices of knowing and being” (159). Many composers bristled at No.e’s project. Ignoring her complex conceptual and technical efforts, they questioned how Composing [De]Composition could be a composition if she did not have control over the notes. The pervasiveness of stories we tell ourselves about the lone creative genius attempts to prevent deliberate “cross-species coordinations” (156).