The Sound of a Dream
Niall Lucy
Sounds are never simply something we just hear; we never just listen to sounds. We don't just listen, because there are no sonic objects for listening to. There are only sonic events.
That
sounds can be transmitted across space and recorded over time is no proof
at all of an object-value for sound. Like the objectifiable written word,
the sound-object is a theoretical convenience: the one is always subject
to event-ualities of being read, the other to being heard. In this way
it may be possible to hear the sound of one hand clapping, on the model
of narrating the event of a dream.
Dreams
aren't nothing, on say the model of a square triangle, but what they are
has no materiality beyond so many electrical impulses in the brain. Yet
dreams are not reducible to these impulses, any more than sounds can be
reduced to precise configurations of pitch, tone, frequency and other
variables. No less than dreams, sounds are irreducible to what they're
made of. But what each is made of, neurological and sonic impulses, lends
them a certain object-status insofar as these impulses are able to be
recorded, even though it would be absurd to suppose that an EEG read-out
of a dream was actually a record of the dream itself. Imagine
if I took along one of my dreams in the form of a neurological chart to
a psychoanalyst and expected him or her to read it for symbolic content,
as if the shape of this peak meant that I wanted to sleep with my mother
and the shape of that trough that I wanted to kill my father. Dreamwork
isn't palmistry, in other words. But still it's worth noting that, for
psychoanalysis, the form of the dream that is of least professional interest
is in fact the form that is most objectifiable. Every other form will
do, including a lie. So dream analysis is, in principle, able to be carried
out on a drawing or a photograph or a theatrical performance of a dream,
but not on a chart of neurological activity -- and it would not matter
to the analytical process (although of course it would to the analysis)
if any of these forms were deliberately misleading. Contrary
to an earlier remark, then, it would seem that dreams are in fact not
dissimilar from square triangles, except that the latter can have absolutely
no material form whatsoever. A square triangle can exist only in the form
of a desire for it to exist, and this is of a slightly different order
of being from that of a dream. While dreams might express desires, it
is precisely in this sense that the dream acts as a carrier of meaning
and can to such extent be understood as semiotic. One might therefore
be tempted to say that dreaming is a cultural achievement, that dreams
are no more 'of' the natural world than butter or plastic. But
to suppose from this that somebody could choose to stop dreaming would
be as preposterous as thinking that someone who chose to live on a desert
island had escaped culture. The choice, in both cases, is simply unavailable.
This is not to deny that dreaming, while it is clearly at some level involuntary,
is perhaps still a cultural practice, no less than writing or kissing
(which may also be involuntary). Unlike
writing, though, dreams (so far as we yet know) don't leave behind traces
of themselves, except in a form of degree zero semiosis that's effectively
unreadable. To the extent that dreams are unrecordable, but nevertheless
still 'real' or 'actual', they are more like events than texts (at least
insofar as 'text' describes a cultural object that requires reading and
which can circulate, precisely as an object, independently of its producer).
But dreams can of course be turned into such texts, by means of some form
of inscription -- and it's at this point that the dream-event becomes,
like a page torn out of a diary, something to be scrutinised at a distance. However,
a page from a diary is not just any page of writing: it isn't like a legal
document, or a newspaper column, or even a poem. Ideally, diary entries
are personal and spontaneous; their ideal genre is that they don't have
one, and their ideal reader is the writer him- or herself. They are in
fact like dreams, in other words. Precisely that: in other words.
It
is only in the form of other words (other pictures, etc.), as text, that
dreams are able to be recorded. These other words, ideally, are a transparent
textual form of a memory-event. Once again it is important to note that
such texts cannot be produced from a neurological chart (though other
texts can), which cannot act as a memorial substitute. Memory can be supplemented
only by writing. Whatever memory is, in other words, it can be known only
via forms of supplementation, forms of writing, whether verbal or inscriptive.
And to the extent that memory is writing-dependent, we can say that memory
is writing (and writing, memory) insofar as it is never available in some
pure, whole and original form outside writing. Nor is there an outside-writing
form of the dream, a square triangle, or the sound of one hand clapping.
Insofar
as this is true for remembering, I think it is also true for listening,
despite the fact that sound is recordable and therefore, in its textual
form, plastic, able to be cut up and played backwards. But plasticity
is of the nature of texts, of writing in general, and cannot be confined
to sonic texts as a special feature of their aurality (or their orality)
based on the object-value ascribed to them by virtue of recording practices
and mechanisms. A sound is no more plastic than a memory or a dream, and
this is certainly no less true for the object-value lent to sound by being
able to be recorded.
Sound's
recordability, then, which appears to be the condition of its reversibility
and hence its plasticity, is not in my view its most interesting feature.
It isn't what appears to be the essence of sound that makes sound interesting,
in other words. So instead of coming at a theory of sound from the inside,
as it were, I prefer (no doubt perversely and cautiously at the same time)
to approach the matter from an outside, in a form of the dream.
Dreams
are as insubstantial as square triangles, while also being different.
If dreams never quite just 'are,' at least they can be said to happen;
but not even this can be said of a square triangle. And I think the same
is true of sounds as it is of dreams: sounds and dreams are event-like,
by which I mean they happen, but without ever coming into being as objects.
Sounds, like dreams, are never capturable by technology; so that any sound
recording is in fact of the same ontological status as a photograph of
a ghost, which one might liken to a photograph of a square triangle, or
indeed of a dream.
And so we arrive at a continuum -- of sounds, dreams, square triangles, and ghosts. Strangely, of these it would seem that it's only sounds that must always remain unable to be photographed -- if it were to be believed that ghosts are real; that somehow a square triangle could exist outside a desire for it to exist or beyond the present limits of human cognition
(in
which case it would already exist, unbeknown to anyone); or that in the
future it will be possible to photograph our dreams. Each of these events
is at least able to be imagined:
I have
a sense, for example, of what a photograph of one of my dreams would look
like, etc. But the idea of photographing a sound seems to make no sense
at all.
This
is not simply because sounds can't be seen to be photographed, since I
do not believe that ghosts or dreams or square triangles can be seen either.
But they can be imagined in this way, and that's the crux.
So what
if we began to think of aurality in terms of visuality: what might this
produce? What would sounds 'look' like as a consequence of such thinking?
By the same token, what would the visual 'sound' like if we began to think
the specular in terms of the sonic? I'm
not asking these questions in order to inspire new forms of avant-garde
practice in relation to sight and sound. Instead, what I'm suggesting
is that sounds are heard through the body, that they resonate corporeally
and not only on the tympanum. Certainly I think this is true of the sounds
that I make myself, especially through my voice. My voice, I think, no
less than my imagination, while it is able to be prosthetised, exists
in such relation with my body that prevents it from being an effect of
the operations of some part of my body alone. This is why a recording
of my voice, coming to me from outside my body, always has the quality
of a prosthetic device: just as if I were to write a novel -- that might
be a kind of prosthetics of my imagination. For
this reason, then, I prefer to think of a corporeality rather than a pure
aurality of sound, insofar as this allows for sounds to be seen and felt,
as well as simply heard. One may even go so far as to postulate an olfactory
sense of sound. In such a way sound is able to be thought in terms of
a different set of codifications, which doesn't rely on the relation of
a hearing subject to a sonic object (a thing to be listened to) but rather
can begin to develop an understanding of sound in terms of a corporeity
that is always in the process of arriving at its own eventuality.
The
body is never able to be thought in terms of a completion, that is to
say, but always insofar as it decays and develops -- entropically, intellectually,
psychically, physiologically, etc. There is never a moment at which the
body is fully realised or finally formed, a point at which the processes
of its own internal densities come to rest. No such moment short of death,
when still the body carries on towards the point of a passing through
into some other dimension beyond reach of a conscious 'self'.
And
so for living bodies, the recording studio marks a space in which it might
be said that the body can experience its own death -- externalising itself
as a prosthetic trace that memorialises a living presence no less assuredly
than a gravestone. A recorded voice is always, then, a voice from the
grave, from beyond the body, even though it reaches the body as an event
to be actualised (where there is both loss and acquisition) through a
kind of endless corporeal receptivity. This is of course especially true
of one's own recorded voice, which arrives in a form of the self as other,
but is perhaps no less true of the recorded voice in general insofar as
this must always take the form of a lost and open detachment, like a page
torn out of someone else's diary. No less
than a dream, in other words, a sound is a corporeal event. This does
not mean that sounds eventuate in terms of a sort of private interiority,
either in a psychoanalytic or an existential sense. For this might be
to suppose that dreams are the expression of an unacculturated unconscious
or of an individual's essential alientation. Dreams, although they happen
in the body, do not occur outside culture.
This
is why it seems to me that we can think the sound of a dream, on the model
of being able to dream a sound. And there is no way of knowing whether
the sound of a dream might be different from so-called other sounds that
occur in our bodies while awake. But if sound can indeed be thought this
way, as corporeal and dream-like, then it may be that as a medium (and
I'm thinking here especially of sound-usage with regard to radio) sound
can be understood in terms of accidental effects, to which it is no less
prone than a body dreaming or awake.
Every
body is an accident, waiting for the ultimate accident to occur -- death.
This, too, is part of our corporeality, so that perhaps in every dream
and sound that eventuates in our living bodies we are reminded of that
accident that remains to become, at the moment of our unbecoming, crossing
to an afterlife like switching to another channel.
