"
Objects emit
zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone,
like a pair of carefully tuned sine waves that fills a house with a
crisscrossing field of interference patterns (a brief description of La Monte
Young's and Marian Zazeela's Dream House in New York). Eliane Radigue's
astonishingly layered ARP syntheziser tones fill a church with resonances whose
lowest frequencies are felt physically as much as in the ear. A dissonance at
that sonic depth results in the body being physically shaken, literalizing what
Adorno says about how art shudders and shatters the subject.[1]
The music is not “about” the environment: it is an environment. Biogenesis
is simply a recording of Radigue's heartbeat, alongside which the sound of the
heartbeat of the baby in her uterus begins to be heard.[2]
Played through speakers capable of transmitting the bass frequencies, such as
the ones used at the 33⅓ exhibition at SFMOMA in 2003, Biogenesis
reaches into the listener's body. Coexistence is forced on us, whether we like
it or not. With their vibrant lines, the paintings of Bridget Riley and the
aboriginal artist Yukultji Napangati emit zones that grip me in their wake,
unleashing powers on my optic nerve. A human ethical or political decision is
made already in the force fields of intermeshed zones. There is no way to find
oneself already heaving achieved a transcendental purchase on the zone. Kantian
synthetic judgment, in which I have decided what an object is, what object-ness
is, is possible (if at all) only because I have already found myself strafed by
the zones that objects emit. The simplest cigarette butt or child running into
the street reduces every ethical or political stance to the status of
hypocrisy. It is the hyperobejct that forces us to sense this hypocrisy most
exquisitely. Hyperobjects are simply so large and so long lasting that the
zones that cascade from them are rich and intense enough to become aware of
them; and to become aware of the irreducible gap between zone and object, which
Kant calls the gap between phenomenon and thing.
Because of this gap, I am far from
saying that we immediately encounter situations in which we know exactly what
to do, as if everything were mechanically automated. Rather my sense of
distance and irony, my hesitation, becomes more pronounced when I find myself
latched onto a zone. It is the ontological priority of the zone that accounts
fully for the feeling of strangeness and belatedness in my decisions about the
object that emits it. It just is impossible to come up with the right reason
for why I put the cigarette out in the sequoia forest. Indeed, if I try to
generate a reason, I find myself watching the cigarette burn the undergrowth--I
have already made a decision not to put out the cigarette. The zone has already
grasped me in its beams. This does not mean that I know exactly how to dispose
myself relative to the zone. Far from it: it means that I have no idea, or that
I can feel the irreducible dissonance between my idea and the zone.
On what scale am I engaging the zone?
Why do I put out the cigarette? Is it because I am concerned about the
environment in general? Or this tree in particular? This forest? Is it because
I understand global warming, and I see the cigarette as an indexical sign of
human ignorance, a small piece of a gigantic puzzle? Again, the zone is not a
region of direct experience, but a shifting, illusory field of irony and
weirdness. This is not Nature. This is Heidegger's thrownness, inverted.[3]
I do not find myself any old where, a projection of my Da-sein's unique
uncanniness. Everything is doing that. The uncertainty and hesitation
are not just in my Da-sein, but in the tree, the rock, the cigarette butt
glowing in the ferns. My sincerity, my sensitivity to my phenomenological
enmeshment in zones, is the very thing that prevents me from grasping it as
solid and predictable."
--from Hyperobjects: Ecology and Philosophy after the End of the World (U of Minnesota Press, 2013)
[1] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr.
Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 349.
[2] Eliane Radigue, Biogenesis (Metamkine,
1996).
[3] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan
Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 127.
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