Co dzwoni nam w uszach? Od ciszy Cage'a do krzyku Schonberga i z powrotem

Abstract

In the absolute silence of the anechoic chamber John Cage supposedly heard the sounds of his body, and although this interpretation of what happened is questioned, one can draw from this experiment a not necessarily empirical lesson that for the subject the field of the hearable is constituted by a surplus which materialises in a hallucinatory sound. In Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung we encounter the opposite kind of surplus: a second of the scream so full that to exhaust it half an hour (the duration of the compositon) and all the intuitive resources of the composer are necessary. This scream is a formless permanent presence tearing the narration apart and materializing as its tears, which places it on the side of (non-empirical) silence. Therefore, because the field of the hearable is split for the subject, “on the side of silence” silence does not exist – it manifests itself as all kinds of sounds, even hallucinatory ones. We can reach the “absolute” silence only if we take the position of the paradoxical object which splits us – only through the surplus of constantly changing and at the same time formless sound, which paradoxically reaches a complex state of stasis. In the pure presence of the split, in which the difference between the subject (consciousness) and the object (sound) is overcome, the external rules of organisation (instinct, reason) are no longer biding, and the subject, who is a dissonance, becomes its own cause.