The rehabilitation of schizophonia: social interaction, sound and media in the Automatic Writing Circle

Thomas Gardner, Senior lecturer at the London College of Communication and a member of the CRiSAP research group. (http://www.crisap.org/)

Abstract: The interaction between musicians has been one of the traditional strengths of music: it stretches to include an audience and ritual participants but has its origins in group activity, the interpersonal responses of one musician to another. This paper examines the way that electronic media have transformed the interactions between musicians, particularly in the context of live performance. A central theme is the way in which mediatisation creates new splits within previously integrated musical situations and also merges differences usually defined by physical boundaries.

In this article Gregory Bateson's theories on schizophrenia are employed to bring a new understanding to the term ‘schizophonia’. This rehabilitated concept is proposed as the key to a creative exploration of new situations and discontinuities which make up group performance in a mediatised environment.

The particular work of the improvising group ‘Automatic Writing Circle’ (automaticwritingcircle.co.uk) is drawn on to illustrate some of the areas in which potentially schizophrenic states, involving splits and communication breakdown, have been recuperated to create a growing competence in hearing and responding to difference.

The group I will be discussing is an incomplete fusion between an acoustic instrumental group and an electroacoustic group – in fact, it grew out of two separate groups. In the first group, the Ecosonic ensemble, there was an exploration of entrainment and the role played by ‘outsider’ musicians in redefining processes of entrainment, whilst in the second, players of an electronic instrument, the Ouija board, sought to bring the experience of electroacoustic sound as ‘other’ into the politics of entrainment.  The relationship between these two groups, and their conceptions of sound and body, changed as they began to work more closely together.

I am happy to have been a member of both groups, and to have been fundamentally concerned with the theorisation and construction of ways in which their new joint functioning takes place. One mark of their coming together was in a new name, the ‘Automatic Writing Circle’. The name mixes various metaphors: ‘circle’ represents an aspiration towards community, whilst ‘automatic writing’ refers, amongst other things, to the way in which ‘outside’ voices influence us during performance, as well as to the different kinds of writing that occur in the group (writing software, recording sounds…). The name brought into being something on the edge of what is possible and marked a turning point in the work of the group, encapsulating a change with which we had been struggling for several years.

At the core of this new group is a negotiation with split identities, not achieving a state of requited togetherness but nonetheless reflecting on what it is to be with each other. It is for this reason that I describe the work of the group as the ‘rehabilitation of schizophonia’. The objective is not the overcoming of splits to create a finished whole, but to find metaphors and ways of working that allow our splits to take on a creative rather than a repressive edge. The notion of schizophonia crosses the boundary between the sonic and the personal, linking ideas of a mental state with an effect of technology.

Situating schizophonia

Before describing the work in more detail I would like to situate this term, schizophonia, and begin to establish the way in which I re-appropriate it. R Murray Schafer first made us of it as a label for a problematic split in signification arising from electroacoustic reproduction. He described it as a reference to 

… the split between an original sound and its electroacoustic transmission… We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. (Schafer 1977, 90)

Schafer’s intention in labelling a split in this way is clear: it is both a pointer towards a less alienated relationship of man to nature and a pejorative label for the presence of amplified sound in culture. The difficulty, as I see it, with his use of the term, is that it idealises one side of the split (the pre-electronic) as if it were an original whole.

An equivalent but opposite version of wholeness was explored by Pierre Schaefer in musique concrète. In this version the restoration of unity lay in the future, in the fuller realisation of the sonic phenomena which the tape recorder brought into reach. 

The two sides of the schizophonic split  (acoustic ecology and musique concrète) highlight a different focus on time - acoustic ecology referring to a lost unity in the past and musique concrète referring to a unity that will arrive in the future.  We can identify wider features of the world view of someone adopting one of these orientations: the  ‘tape-recordist’ incarnated as R Murray Schafer takes the social and environmental scene in which they are making the recordings as the primary source of structures in which they are interested (phonography), whilst a tape-recordist incarnated as Pierre Schaeffer takes the abstract symbols derived from the sound at playback as the source of significance (musique concrète). The first world view is more concerned with the iconic, embeded relationships, whilst the second is more concerned with those that are abstract and context free.

Schizophonia suggests that one should get out of that split state, and move to one side of it or the other - but what happens if we just stay there?

Between Schizophrenia and Schizophonia.

A link to Gregory Bateson’s theories on schizophrenia rests on a similar distinction between embodied iconic communication and the abstract symbols of linguistic communication. 

Bateson’s argument begins by examining the differences between the iconic communication of animals and the linguistic communication of people, noting that linguistic communication had not replaced iconic communication but was a supplement to it. 

Problems in framing and holding identity, balanced between an iconic and linguistic representation are particularly marked in the case of schizophrenia, which Bateson saw as a state of mind placed in the individual by the family group’s deliberately misaligned communications (with contradictory physical and linguistic expression). The consistent repetition of communications in the form of a ‘double bind’ resulted in the situation in which, in order to protect themselves from overwhelming anxiety and direct threat, the schizophrenic is forced to misrecognise their own communications and those of others. As Bateson says, 

To be close to the parent, he must sacrifice his right to indicate that he sees any meta-communicative incongruencies, even where his perception of these incongruencies is correct… The patient may know but must not tell, and thereby enables the parent to not know what he or she is doing. The patient is an accomplice in the parent’s unconscious hypocrisy. (Bateson 1973, 208.)

Whilst in this passage Bateson suggests a cause for schizophrenia lies in the cybernetic system of the family, in other work he discusses the possibility that schizophrenia may be the expression of a wider genetic potential which may equally take the form of transcontextual insight or an artistic gift.

Returning to Schafer’s term ‘schizophonia’, one can see that, unlike the extremes of actual schizophrenia, the ability of the victim of sonic schizophonia to think about the frame of their communications is not impaired. They are, on the contrary, intensely interested in the nature of the frame in which communication can occur. The depth of anxiety or concern which may impair articulation on the part of the schizophrenic is not disempowering in the case of the schizophonic.

However, as Bateson’s later research, and that of Goffman’s research into situationism makes clear, the fully successful identification of context is by no means a given, depending, as it does, on the impossible duality of a position in which the observer both generates and is a contained within a situation generated by others. My intention here is, thus, to make a partial rehabilitation of schizophonia, by suggesting that the state of not knowing, of having an inherent instability in the constitution of identity, is a characteristic of our being.  To wish to rule this out, by turning to a phenomenological unity or to a pre-modern idea of natural cohesion, is a comprehensible response to the threats of splitting, but is also counter productive as it leaves no space for regimes of difference operating within the construction of identity. 

The Ouija shadow

Returning to the history of the two, initially separate, groups - I would like to chronicle the ongoing, contaminating effects of schizophonia. 

The two groups that preceded the Automatic Writing Circle were motivated by the idea that the ‘other’, initially at the borders of the group, could be integrated into the group through processes of musical entrainment, implying that the schizophonic state can be resolved.  However, in bringing the two groups together there was a conceptual problem: both groups were in a sense occupying the whole space. The kind of presence that they were working towards did not leave room for the other group, as each could saturate the environment. How could the instrumentalists hear and entrain with the electronic Ouija players, and how would the Ouija players incorporate the individual expressivity of the acoustic instrumentalists?  Because both groups had been moved by an ethos of fusion, of integration, it seemed that we had left no space for conceptions of splitting or of absence. 

A turning point came with the new conception of the Ouija board, in its shadow version [1]. This provided a physical metaphor for schizophonia, a coherent image of disjunction (given that any image of disjunction is bound to split itself, or exceed itself, break its own boundaries). This arrival marked the start of a negative dialectic, with a long chain of consequences. 

The revolutionary moment came during a rehearsal in which there was a portable theatrical spotlight. I realised that the existing relationship between camera, light and body could be changed. Rather than the camera focusing on the illuminated hand itself, it could focus on the shadow cast by the hand. The focus of the performer is then split between the image of their hand as it appears before them, connected to their body, and the shadow of the hand as it appears on the sheet [2]. Through this one extra step of indirection, a wide set of oppositions were set in motion. The shadow acted as a guiding metaphor, in a physical as well as a verbal sense. Its interpretation remains open ended, particularly since the central image is one of displacement; in which the shadow image of the performer both represents the self and creates a distance from it.

Figure 1. Ouija Players Kirsten Edwards and Peter Coyte with Stephen Preston (baroque flute) Seth Ayyaz (Ney) and the author (cello) in the foreground. Photo by Ilari Nummi

In keeping with this image of displacement, it should also be emphasised that the Ouija board is not itself the focus of the work that occurs in the Automatic Writing Circle. The introduction of the shadow metaphor allowed a certain level of blockage in the conceptualisation of our processes to be overcome, allowing us to engage with areas that had previously been suppressed or unusable, or which arose subsequently. Of particular note was the arrival of new performers: the musician Seth Ayyaz became a member of the group and, through his instrumental practice, allowed us to consider inclusion or differences from Arab avant-garde music (including the question of whether such a genre exists), and at our borders we encountered the ethnographer Taina Riikonen. Riikonen’s ‘in crisis’ mode of performative writing permitted the disturbances we originally discovered in our sound making to be legitimately displaced into the fields of ethnography and writing, simultaneously destabilising and putting into question the distinctions between these three categories.

The developing relationships, and the crises and redefinitions that followed from them (and continue to follow), have had a definitive effect on the work of the group. I will not document here all the technical, musical, sonic and social fields which became engaged. [3] The expanding frame encompassed increasingly wide levels, loosening our reliance on previously defined structures for our performances, and allowing a subtle interplay to develop between the instrumental selves of the acoustic performers and the category-transforming sonic identities of the Ouija players.

I would, however, like to examine some of the conditions that began to emerge at the limits of the shadow metaphor.

First silence

The final twenty minutes of a performance by the Automatic Writing Circle at the Sibelius Academy in 2009 [4] are characterised by three principal types of drama. 

1. Prolonged exchanges (Clip 1) Small fragments are expanded by the whole group and have elements of increasing co-ordination and prolongation. Players find temporary stratified positions within the ensemble, sometimes holding their place through longer phrases, sometimes through tightly-coupled interchanges.

2. There are extremely slow sections, which focus on the detail of an evolving feedback sound generated from the Ouija board. (Clip 2) These continuous and slightly pulsing tones are created by feedback between delay lines and the performance acoustic, alternating with their re-synthesis using sine-tones. It is an interesting image: the Ouija board, instead of expanding the instrumental space, works with the empty space created by non-playing musicians.

3. Extended periods of silence. (Clip 3)

These three kinds of dramatic behaviour illustrate an overall theme, which is the gradual movement over the course of the improvisation from narratives constructed by an outsider (both mediatised and in the room) to one which is a response to absence. 

At first the Automatic Writing Circle were the ‘outsiders’ in the auditorium, packed with Helsinki residents and students at the academy. The members of the group were marked as different because we took the official responsibility for sound-making. The opening period of performance consisted of a negotiation between the sounds already in the space of the auditorium and our own additions to it. Then the negotiations of difference moved their focus towards the definition of cohesion and critique within the group, exploring themes of entrainment between individuals, and also exploring the mediatised disruptions of acoustic instrumental performance and the boundaries between the electronic mediatised space and the actual room space. Finally, taking the theme of ‘presence’ and its boundaries a stage further, the performance engages more directly with the apparent antithesis of presence, which is absence or vacated space. The discipline of the Ouija players, in not touching the instrument and in working with shadow, had already brought the metaphors of absence into play, but it is in the final 20 minutes of the improvisation that the wider creative potential of this most ‘outside’ of outsiders begins to be realised.

It is as if our capacity for hearing the different forms within which difference can be articulated had been widened, and we no longer sought the Hegelian narrative of Thesis Antithesis and Synthesis to propel us forward. The logic of alterity gave the collective its initial values, and helped us to progress from one point to the next, via drama, collapse, boredom, crisis or redefinition. There had been a rhythm to this cycle of changes, perhaps lasting every 4 to 10 minutes and, along with the awareness of the character of repetition, came an awareness of the ending.  However, after all contexts had been repeatedly brought, hurled or placed together, another kind of listening becomes more prevalent. In many ways it is indistinguishable from the content of our group dynamics of inclusion, critique and exclusion. The ‘other’ other with whom we are engaging is no longer the Ouija player, or a member of our group, or a specific sound.

When we return to silence, to listen again to the place we are in, it is a silence which also refers to the end of the performance. As far as we performers, or the audience, are concerned, any of the silences which occur after about an hour of performing could be considered the ‘end’. In fact, the performance goes on for another 20 minutes, entering silence and then re-emerging. This had an element of bravado, of pushing the limits of what is acceptable (there may be some in the audience who would leap at the opportunity to leave after an hour of this kind of improvisation), but it also allows a much deeper re-appraisal of our time together, of what we learned, and the conditions of ending under which it was always operating. Thus, at the periphery of the generative capacity of an actual outsider (an individual or soundscape or timbre) is the generative capacity of this future absence, the hovering of an anticipatory mourning – the place which needs to be available to enable our awareness of that which is no longer present, our own future non-presence. In a sense, this is the implication of the shadow in the ‘Ouija’, to bring in the voices of those who are not present – but it is only in the ending phase of the performance that its generative implication becomes clearer. The silence is not only the Cagean ‘silence’ in which one hears nonetheless the sounds of new forms of association; it is a silence which allows for reflections on absence. 

After the first long period of collective improvisation, in which there is a sense of being able to reach genuine prolongation and merging and fluent passage between states, there is an extraordinary long silence, followed by the very gradual emergence of a ringing feedback from the Ouija players, playing the silence – mediatising the space. 

This is not ‘mourning’ in some nostalgic or repressive sense, but, as the white space illuminated by the Ouija metaphorically shows, it is a space that needs to be offered and available for occupation, even though it remains unfilled. This cannot be undecidably distinguished from the experiences of personal outsider, or mediatised outsider, and the political clashes of organisational schemas – it is not a final reckoning, but some kind of pulse, which might take many forms, but which we did seem to be able to elaborate collectively.

Second silence: Mediatised

I would like to explore this ending a little more, as it brings into contact two issues germane to the conception both of group performance and the mediatised encounter with sound. These can be encapsulated very simply as a question about ‘liveness’. 

In Spectres of Marx, Derrida opens the Exordium by asking us to imagine someone, ‘you or me’, coming up and saying ‘I would like to learn to live, finally’. The book is an examination of this question, and hinges on the restless sense that individual presence is only partial, that liveness is not a state consequent on some simple fact of being alive.  Rather, Derrida suggests that one of the conditions of liveness is a sense of justice or responsibility to those who are no longer or not yet alive, in addition to a direct engagement with the immediate community. Thus, learning to live involves a discourse with those who are on a spectral periphery. 

Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” (Derrida 1994, xviii)

Liveness thus refers beyond the living present and includes consideration of borderlines, including those between the living and the dead. This has considerable bearing on those arguments which suggest a binary opposition between ‘live’ performance and electroacoustically produced sound, such as those advanced by Pierre Schaeffer (1966). If a requirement of liveness involves dialogue with spectres (as suggested by Derrida), then the non-presence hinted at by electroacoustic sounds (through the absence of tangible performers) is not a binary opposite, but an already entangled supplement.

However, it is important to note that, despite the ephemeral nature of electronically-produced sound and its potentially disembodied origins, it nonetheless exists on a more material plane than the spectres considered by Derrida.  In cultural terms, there is a complex aesthetic balance concerning the precise value attributed to the disembodied material from loudspeakers.

In Breathless (2002) Allen S Weiss discusses a particular cultural shift that occurred at the opening of the twentieth century. In his analysis, a consequence of the sensory extension provided by sound recording is a profound change in the ontology of mourning and melancholia; changes foreshadowed in the writing of authors such as Poe and Mallarmé, amongst others.

Working at the core of the redefinition of lyrical nostalgia is the exploration of a technically-assisted form of melancholia, brought about through the persistence of the traces of liveness, without the living body at its source. Freud’s essay on Melancholia provides a particular reference point for Weiss, and the essay itself uses a poignant extension of the shadow as one of its central images. According to Freud, melancholia could be defined as an illness related to and distorting mourning.  The void which in mourning is experienced as the loss of an attachment in the outer world becomes transformed, in melancholia, to an inner void adopting the form of a psychically charged shadow:

The shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification. (Freud 1962, 3047.)

Recorded sound can perpetuate the traces of the lost object, simulating, in a mechanical way, the shadow objects created by the sufferer of melancholia or, in a modernist extension, schizophrenia. This allows certain genres of sound art to inhabit, vicariously, the melancholic or schizophrenic position, focusing on the psychically active features of the remaining shadow.

Recorded sound is in a fine balance between the preservation of corpses, “radio bodies are nobodies” (Whitehead 1991, 85), and the dialogue with spectres advised by Derrida as a condition of our own liveness. It is not a balance that can be resolved decisively and without ambiguity. The potency of the technical prosthesis provided by recording can be seen in the shift from the lyrical nostalgia found in nineteenth century romantic poetry to the schizophrenic, multi-centred sensibility of postmodern identity. The new powers of recorded sound, with their potential to create and sustain numerous shadow identities within the principal subject, are a significant agent at work in this transformation.

The claim of the Automatic Writing Circle is that it elaborates new ways of working with this complex cultural and ontological balance, crossing and re-crossing the chasm between sound as an object, fixed as a shadow in our ego, and sound as a shadow, opening up a wider dialogue with others, both present and absent.

Notes

1. Earlier versions used a camera focussed directly on the illuminated hands of the performer.
2. The shadows fell onto a shroud-like white sheet (originally an old bed sheet) suspended horizontally in front of them.
3. Aspects of this ongoing work are discussed by Taina Riikonen in a separate article forming part of these proceedings,  and extended articles and sound recordings can be found on the website www.automaticwritingcircle.co.uk
4. The performance lasted for 75 minutes and can be heard in full on the AWC website referenced above.

References

Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Paladin St. Albans.

Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Routledge.

Freud, S. (1957). “Mourning and melancholia.” Standard Edition 14. London: Hogarth Press, 237-258.

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1st ed. London: Penguin Books.

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harper & Row.

Schaeffer, P. (1966). Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Schafer, R.M. (1994). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vt: Destiny Books.

Weiss, A.S. (2002). Breathless: sound recording, disembodiment, and the transformation of lyrical nostalgia. Wesleyan Univ Pr.

Whitehead, G. (1991). “Holes in the Head: A Theatre for Radio Operations.” Performing Arts Journal 13/3, 85–91.