Session 9: Phenomenology

Session 9: Phenomenology
Chair: Scott Wilson

What is This that Stands before Me?: Metal as Deixis
Nicola Masciandaro
Department of English, Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA

“Suppose someone hears an unknown sign, like the sound of some word which he does not know the meaning of; he wants to know what it is . . . [this] is not love for the thing he does not know but for something he knows, on account of which he wants to know what he does not know” (Augustine, De Trinitate)

“[T]he significance of the This is, in reality, a Not-this that it contains; that is, an essential negativity. . . . The problem of being—the supreme metaphysical problem—emerges from the very beginning as inseparable from the problem of the significance of the demonstrative pronoun, and for this reason it is always already connected with the field of indication . . . Deixis, or indication . . . is the category within which language refers to its own taking place” (Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity)

Metal is conspicuously gestural, not more gestural than other art forms, but gestural in an especially self-referential way, in a manner that calls attention to itself as gesture. The most obvious example: metal’s canonization of manual gestures (devil-horns, invisible orange) which, despite whatever expressive intentions and symbolism may inform their use, signify little more than metal, or assent to metal, itself. But this is only the outermost, literal instance of a deeper affiliation between metal and deixis. Metal is founded more exactly upon exuberance in deixis’s essential negativity, an insistent performance of the fact that we encounter reality as such, the actual presence of the this, only through its negation. Taking Agamben’s analysis of deixis as a starting point, I will pursue a phenomenological understanding of metal as a essentially gestural experience, a deixis-production that makes meaning not merely by refusing it, but by reverting all meaning to the incommensurable event of its indication, as if the sign, forced to point back upon its own presence, would disclose a transcendent anti-ontotheological tautology, a human/profane tetragrammaton (I am who I am). Such a procedure, a pointing back into the negativity of pointing, necessarily to the point of refusal of that very pointing, is modeled for the genre in the first two lines of metal’s originary song: “What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me” (Black Sabbath, “Black Sabbath,” Black Sabbath). My analysis will give special attention to the role of black and death metal vocal styles in the metal-deixis relationship. As Agamben explains, the negativity of deixis is fundamentally related to voice: “that which is removed each time in speaking, this, is the voice . . . ‘Taking-the-This’ and ‘Being-the-there’ are possible only through the experience . . . of the taking place of language in the removal of the voice.” What black and death metal voices enact, then, is the return of the voice in vengeance against language as what negates it. Killing the loved/hated word to point to itself, metal’s vocal deixis reopens as always present the place where language begins, what Agamben, following Augustine’s experiential analysis of the dead, unknown word, calls “the no-man’s-land between sound and signification.”

Nile’s Primal Ritual – Induction of the Devotee
Joseph Russo
Brooklyn College, The City University Of New York, USA

Before the fire of the eye of Ra, the Hidden One hath overthrown thy words, the gods have turned thy face backwards, thy skull is ripped from thy spine—Nile, “Laying Fire Upon Apep,” Ithyphallic

One of the primary expressions within metal involves the indulgence in ritual, not merely as a theme, but as a model for what the form itself is, or might become. The American group Nile’s invocational and incantatory songs are striking examples of this potentiality, and this paper will attempt to read these gestures via the phenomenology of ritual. Nile’s primary mythopoetics tend towards invocations of ancient Egyptian gods. However, the content takes precedence over the thematic, for it structures the very execution of the performance. Within Nile’s performance stands the latent unattainability of the ancient ritual, this incantatory/invocational vocal which Nile interchanges with the ‘death metal vocal.’ This incantatory vocal conveys the unnamable through its obscuring of the clear meaning of language and by brutalizing language. On a limited level, we have statements, or more accurately, gateways, into the realization of various primal rituals. To delve further, however, we see that what is being conveyed is a kind of ritual of ritual itself. The strategies undertaken by Nile stand as an experiencing of the phenomenon which is not necessarily attached to the lyric/thematic. While the lyric details, for instance, the steps by which the sun god Ra exterminates the demon Apep, the experience of the sound itself is an assault which disrupts the normative auditory field and brutalizes the listener into a simultaneous active-submissive state, a flinging of oneself into the ritual.

Fire walk with Me; or Dwelling in the Lodge of Differentiation
Jamerson Maurer
University at Buffalo, USA

“Wold embraces the Mytho Poetic; the communication is expressed through our music, and theoretical as well as practical work done through our Woldclan brotherhood and our lodge, the L.O.T.M.P. [Lodge of the Mytho Poetic]” (Wold, album booklet, ‘L.O.T.M.P.)
Despite the structural ‘order’ within (perhaps) any musical expression, there are always moments of rupture, of evasion & invisibility lurking in the soundspace, ontoaural shadows painting the caverns of our corporeality.  This is particularly true of metal, whose aesthetic as well as narrative expressions often embrace the ‘dark’ and philosophically ‘negative’ & conceptually-negating space(s) of the lived-experience.  This concept of an underlying ‘Order’ of space & reality—of an ‘Order-ing’ of space, time & object—is a central notion to many explorations within Phenomenology, from Merleau-Ponty’s  ‘pre-reflective cogito’ to Tymieniecka’s conceptualizaion of an ‘ontopoiesis’ within consciousness or ‘Logos of Life.’  As such, the central kernel ruminating in these trajectories of phenomenological (& ontological) thought is fertile terrain for metal, particularly black-metal, to conceptually germinate through their poetic expressions.  It is my contention that these dynamic, perpetually shifting shadows of sound & perception, existing as they do in momentary possibilities manifesting in space & time as illusions of objective form, represent significant phenomenological & ontological problems with the very notion of ‘Order’ itself.
The music of Wold is inexorably woven into a ontopoietic space; not in the sense theorized by Tymieniecka, but rather as the conceptual space born from the zone of differentiation between the ontological datum informing the poetic expression & that expression itself.  This space effectively functions as a ‘lodge’ within whose walls differentiation manifests in perpetuity. The human, in that now-mediated space of the ‘lodge,’ again reacts to & impacts/imprints its surroundings, all-the-while those surroundings themselves are mediating the body(s) marking it.  Such is the conceptual structure in this particular notion of ontopoiesis, in which the ontological component exists & evolves through the poetic expression, while that expression itself is the creative/constructive mediation of the ontological kernel(s) themselves.  This specific conceptualization of ontopoiesis, then, identifies the human not as a static body, but rather as a conceptual structure in a consistent flux of differentiation, as ontocorporeal shadows traversing the space of the ‘lodge.’
I propose exploring the band Wold & the way in which Language in the ‘lodge’ is effectively hijacked; the signs, & thus signification, function not as interiorized kernels of datum, transmitted for either linguistic or phenomenological preservation—the effective transmission of ‘information’—but rather as an Artaudian Language, the Language of a Theater of Cruelty, in which signification exists on the Physiological/Corporeal (rather than ‘Logical’) level.  This hijacking-of-Language (in which ‘Language’ is a primordial physio-encounter) & thus of signification as such within the Phenomenological field, in effect perpetually transforms ‘words’ into linguistic bodies-without-organs, statico-objects find themselves now ruptured, now burning & burnt, (re)born into so-many Phoenix, the shadows of signs haunting a soundspace, only pausing to configure themselves into illusions of clarity.
I believe that the ontophysiological condition exists within Wold (and, perhaps generally, ‘death metal’ itself) through a poiesis of ontoaural possibilities–in the summoning and establishment of a soundspace that fundamentally impacts & indeed modifies & alters the physiological subject.  The implications germinating within such poietic projects have significant import in Phenomenology, particularly to the various strands of thought regarding the/a ‘Order’ underlying ‘Perception’ itself & the objects constituting ‘reality,’ for if those static-objects, interiorized in a striated space, are in fact hijacked-vehicles, machines flying ‘off the grid’ (in a significatory sense), into the ‘lodge’ & its smooth spaces of possibilities, the very illusion or concept of Order (of Order-ing) is itself fundamentally problematized.