A Quiet That Moves
We could have used all our psychological effort to block out the noise, to fight it in some way, to numb ourselves to it. This would have meant that we had closed our receptive listening door not only to the outside but also to our inner world. Instead the atmosphere in the room suggested that we accept the presence of the noise and use our energy to find the inner focus for the yoga tasks at hand. I found that it created a kind of highlighted equilibrium between inner and outer sound worlds, leaving enough room for experiencing both, even moments of receptive listening to the construction sounds.
-Hildegard Westerkamp (article on Yoga and Construction Noise)
Among the Northern and Southern schools of Chinese Buddhism there had been a long-running debate regarding the nature of meditation. This was exemplified in the difference between the 'sudden' teaching of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an Buddhism (638-713 AD), and the more conventional, contemplative style of his rival Shen-hsiu (606-706 AD). According to Hui-neng, the natural mind is without any disturbance or ignorance, and simply to recognize this was the path to liberation. This concept develops in the second half of the T'ang dynasty: "The old forms of cultivation were superseded...by the revolutionary methods of beating and shouting or spontaneous dialogue” which eventually yielded to “explicit discussion of no-thought” in which “sudden practice gave way to suggestive poetry, enigmatic saying, and iconoclastic anecdote" (Bielefeldt). With this came the breakdown of the gradual technique of conventional meditation, changing the idea of what it meant to practice towards enlightenment. This new Zen made the inherent nature of the mind accessible to all.
This same dialogue occurred in adjacent traditions of conceptual art in the mid 1970s. Pauline Oliveros, a composer and sound artist, had begun ‘articulating' and organizing a series of Sonic Meditations, or instructions for guided group meditations that would culminate in the sounding of bodies, emanating from the deep breathing of the participants. Meanwhile, Moscow's Collective Actions Group (CAG), whose ‘actions’ consisted of journeys to snowy fields, attempted to cause a rupture or break with illusion by means of what one of the founders of the group, Andrei Monastyrski, might refer to as a "temporary suspension of understanding or interpretation of that which is perceived,” or an ‘empty action’ (Gerber). I would like to argue that the more transformative practice is that of the Collective Actions Group.
In the introduction to Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations, the writer speaks to how Oliveros “has abandoned composition/performance practice as it is usually established today for Sonic Explorations which include everyone who wants to participate. She attempts to erase the subject/object or performer/audience relationship by returning to ancient forms which preclude spectators… All that is required is a willing commitment to the given conditions.” This practice is directed towards the notion of ‘Sonic Healing’, purportedly separating the act of creation, imagining, and group bond from “attempts to control what is heard in the community” propagated by the Church, the court, and contemporary Muzak, through an attunement to one’s Self and environment, achieved by way of these expanded sonic meditation practices. In her essay regarding these ‘articulations’, On Sonic Meditations, Oliveros turns to a secularized Yogic tradition, writing about the divide between the mind and the body, and its parallel binary of attention and awareness. She writes of their “synchronization” by auditory means, experimenting compositionally with drones as a musical device. A long tone becomes an “object of interest”, separated perceptually from the surrounding musical materials. This is expanded into whole compositions centered around a single tonal field, influenced by traditional Indian music and the corresponding ideas of tuning one’s body and mind to a healing tonal center. An example of this is given in the first meditation:
Teach Yourself to Fly
Any number of persons sit in a circle facing the center. Illuminate the space with dim blue light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing. Always be an observer. Gradually allow your breathing to become audible. Then gradually introduce your voice, Allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally. Allow the intensity to increase very slowly. Continue as long as possible naturally, and until all others are quiet, always observing your own breath cycle.
Variation: Translate voice to an instrument.
As the essay continues, Oliveros connects her experiences performing these meditations to her conception of the divide between attention and awareness. She introduces a third (and subsequent fourth) mode of observation (conscious and unconscious), and compares and contrasts the varying states that accompany the predominance of one form over another, all related to the image of a circle with a dot in the middle.
This image becomes a metaphor for attention/awareness, and correspondingly conscious and unconscious observation. The circle eventually becomes a dotted-line valence, accompanying one’s transcendence of category in the name of a broader connection of one’s self to their environment, and of these categories of perception to one another.
Here we will begin our descent into more treacherous territory, and cite an ancient passage as the beginning of a critique. From the Diamond Sutra, given by the Buddha to an elder monk named Subhuti:
“Moreover, Subhuti, when bodhisattvas practice generosity, they do not rely on any object—any form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or object of mind to practice generosity. That, Subhuti, is the spirit in which bodhisattvas practice generosity, not relying on signs. Why? If bodhisattvas practice generosity without relying on signs, the happiness that results cannot be conceived of…Someone who looks for me in form or seeks me in sound is on a mistaken path"
What is occurring in Oliveros’ work is a refusal to defile her practice, to use a criticism levied against the earlier monks and their contemplative works. This tradition of gradual Buddhahood by way of gradual practice is inaccessible to the cynic, to those of us whose thoughts have been shaped by the post-social of digital virtuality, whose brains since childhood have been inscribed with bureaucratic emotional language, who have nowhere to run, in a state of halted motion and construction noise. In Oliveros’ pieces, the objects of one’s thoughts continue to stand, and sound is made into an object of observation as well. There is no way to escape a closed circle, and the point in the middle of it can be reassigned, co-opted. This method of meditation has much more of a relationship with the Muzak she dismisses as a method of social control than she would care to admit. As participants, we have been made subject to a dominant signification, an object of concentration that appears in the mind after we understand what it is we are doing. Where is the recognition of a world outside the idealism of this regulated and gradual exercise?
This is the same debate which swept through the Buddhist schools of China in the 6th century, culminating in the development of Zen. While those who encouraged sudden practice also wrote of the practice of meditation, those who practiced conventional meditation became purveyors of a program with no possibility of escaping from forms and concepts. They were unwilling to see that there is a contradiction between theory and praxis, which can only be escaped by a rupture in one’s subjectivity. Everything is the Buddha. The subject, in a slightly challenging durational sense, must be brought to the cliff of their subjectivity, and forced to keep walking. They are reinvented through this ‘deterritorialization’ in which one can begin a project of intersubjectivity, of being-in-the-world. The intervention must be directed towards the 'in-between' of the psychic and physical – to understand that there is no separation between these things, that there can be no enlightenment in a clinging to concepts, even those abstract as attention and awareness, even those of authorship and performance. We must take a broader definition of music than that which results from the breath, and understand that Oliveros’ turn to meditation misses a key aspect of enlightenment, that Zen realization of ‘no-mind’, the understanding which precedes perception, that which comes before attention, awareness, or observation, both conscious and unconscious.
“Slogan Actions”, a method of the Collective Actions Group, consist of a banner being displayed at a determined point in the woods, which “through paradoxical linguistic constructions in the tradition of Zen-Buddhist koans,” effect situations where “signification actually consists in the cancellation of meaning.” (Hänsgen) In 2005, a slogan action was conducted using the Diamond Sutra cited above. Before those invited to attend the action arrived, an orange doll was attached by duct tape to a tree, and a cassette machine playing a recording of the Diamond Sutra was attached to a tree across from it. After the participants arrived and had heard the recording, the cassette player was taken down, and replaced by a bundle of sticks. Then, a fishing line was hung between the two trees in the shape of a four petal lotus, and five sheets of paper containing scientific commentary on the Diamond Sutra were suspended from the line.
While the action consists of many other infinitesimal details (the colors of suspension materials, the size of the paper, the length of the recording, and the ‘factography’ that is given to the participants upon the culmination of the action), the transformation of the cassette machine into a bundle of sticks is one of the most crystalline images of the Zen koan method in all of CAG’s events. The sound stops, and the mechanism by which the sound was created is removed, and replaced by assembled organic materials. One of the founders of the group, Andrei Monastyrski, says of this Action:
"For me, this slogan is, most importantly, an abstract composition, a chromatic structure. It is like a piece of music. What seems very strange is the inclusion of living elements, such as a bound bundle of branches that took the place of the tape player, and the participation of a Pharaoh hound in the action’s space [a dog passes through, unplanned]...this last action does not awaken any discursive desire to understand it at all. And that’s a good thing."
The entire perceptual field is transformed. There is no searching for one’s truth or opinions, and the materials for enlightenment are introduced: the translucent wire, the scientific commentary on the sutra, the bundle of sticks. This introduction of enlightened materials corresponds with an absence (the removal of sound and its body). Here we must provide some expanded definitions in terms of the elements of an action. Many of the ‘empty actions’ organized by CAG include music or recorded sounds, but a more comprehensive idea of their music exists in their complex relationship to work, social organization, and the building of semiotic fields. Therefore, grounded in a preliminary exposition of CAG’s core structures for action, we will define music as that which produces unintentional sounds, as ‘art without work’. (Gerber) The presence of sound is defined in this action by the removal of sound which draws greater attention to one’s surroundings, a relational notion of sound as silence. When the cassette player is removed, all of the participants are inevitably drawn to the cessation of the sound, drawn towards nothingness. When it is replaced by the bundle of sticks, the participants’ attention is immediately dispersed into the ‘extra-dimensional’, for there is no longer an object of consideration (the sound). Or rather, the object of consideration has been rendered impermanent, and its temporality has been manipulated (from the linear/ephemeral nature of the recorded voice to the silent and material bundle of sticks). When one knows the details of the action, such as that the sticks had been sawn off of the trees while clearing the space of the action, the contradiction is heightened, for what you are observing has been there before.
I think this action demonstrates precisely why the procedures utilized by Collective Actions access the Buddhist ‘suspension of will’, and lay the ground for further developments towards a more expansive and subversive notion of sound art. Defining music as the engagement of contingency on semiotic fields, as Marina Gerber does through the words of Monastyrski and Cage in her book on Collective Actions, we can see the possibilities for a new practice that ‘points at itself’, in a dialectical practice of defilement – taking the objects of perception, bringing them through the zone of indistinguishability, onto the demonstrational semiotic field in a way in which the participants are transformed, not by their actions but rather by the inherent understanding of absence and impermanence.
In Oliveros’ statement that “all that is required is a willing commitment to the given conditions”, there is no possibility for enlightenment – for this commitment means rather a clinging to forms that cannot help but be restrictive, oppressive, and uniform. While desire for an individualized affect of calm or ease can be seen in the trending organization of sound baths, this cannot be seen as separate from the raging temporal-industrial complex that is our daily lives in post-modernity. One’s subjectivity is being constantly scattered by the bureaucratizing of emotional life, and the ‘attention/awareness’ binary has been co-opted by corporate impressions of sympathetic work practices, all the while encroaching on your private time. The psycho-social manifestations of this theft are insidious, and no attempt at a mediation that exists within its confines, adjudicated by concepts and clinging to forms, can effect a proper realization that might lead to social change. I argue instead for the happenings of the Collective Actions Group as a model – we must point at the ‘in-between’, at that field upon which lines are drawn and society is ordered. The Actions imitate elements of government bureaucracy, but participate in a deterritorialization, opening the circle closed by determinate metaphor, at every instance evading and recreating its content and form in an indescribable moment that is simultaneously wholly material.
Bibliography
Bielefeldt, Carl. Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation. University of California Press, 1988.
Deleuze & Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Gerber, Marina. Empty Action: Labour and Free Time in the Art of Collective Actions. Transcript, 2018.
Hänsgen & Monastyrski. A Dialogue on the Slogans of Collective Actions. Conceptualism.letov.ru
Slogan-2005. Conceptualism.letov.ru
Oliveros, Pauline. Sound Meditations. Smith Publications, 1971.
Oliveros, Pauline. On Sonic Meditations. Painted Bride Quarterly, 1976