“Mark the Music”: Microsound and Becoming-Silence

Abstract

In her efforts to defend masochism as a legitimate sexual practice, Anita Phillips reflects on cultural phenomena that may induce comparable flights of subjective dissonance. A reference to experimental music, for example, portrays a scenario with which partners of the latter’s aficionados may be familiar: “You love jazz, soul, and late seventies pop, yet insist on going with your lover to concerts of atonal modern music that leave you excited but defeated—it is not just intellectual pretension, but a longing for the sublime sense of exile of that super-rational absolutism” (Defence 34). “Excited but defeated”—to clarify, we might say that such defeat is a common response to the failure of cultural products (or indeed, life) to meet certain expectations; or rather, that exceed expectation. We may find ourselves lost in unfamiliar terrain, reluctant nomads on the page, the screen, or in an abstract sound environment, exiled from what is easy and somehow precious. Excitement and sublimity, on the other hand, erupt when we sense that there is something valuable in our misdirection and follow through on the peculiar impulse to continue wandering across foreign planes of intensity. We are moved by a particular type of “longing,” one that, by virtue of its fearfulness, is to be distinguished from conventional pleasure or wish fulfillment. This longing draws us toward liminal experience, to “the edge of what is possible,” as Susan Broadhurst puts it (Liminal 12)—what is possible in and around our bodies, our reading, viewing, thinking, feeling, and listening selves. Easy pleasures do not always suffice in the postmodern world.