The Rhythm of Echoes and Echoes of Violence

Abstract

This paper contributes to non-ocularcentric theory and theorizing by way of a methodological application and extension of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. It explores the cultural dynamics of echoes and history, using as an instrumental case study Steve Reich’s 1966 tape-loop composition, Come Out, to elucidate the ambivalent and contradictory relations of time, temporality, and possibility. While the focus is primarily on the text of Come Out and its context of police brutality and civil rights, it moreover contributes to an enriched and historically grounded understanding of rhythmanalysis while engaging with rhythmanalysis as a methodology, based on the expanded conception of echoes proposed.

Keywords

echoes minimalism police brutality race rhythm rhythmanalysis

Introduction

The Camden Arts Centre in London recently exhibited American artist Glenn Ligon’s Call and Response, a testimony to the history of state-sanctioned police violence against black US citizens. One notable installation in the exhibit was a hanging pair of neon-lit words, ‘bruise’ and ‘blues’, facing away from one another, a reference to Daniel Hamm, who was beaten by police at the Harlem 28th Precinct in 1964. To escape the beatings, Hamm had to reveal to staff that he needed immediate medical attention: ‘I had to’, he declared later on tape, ‘open up the bruise and let some of the bruise blood to come out to show them I was bleeding’ (quoted in Gopinath, 2009: 127). Minimalist composer Steve Reich in 1966 used a fragment of Hamm’s testimony for his tape-loop composition, Come Out, which has since been lodged in the canon of postwar American music, and is often used as an example of the state-sanctioned brutality that black US citizens have had to endure in their dealings with police. Such a public image of state-sanctioned violence was initially revealed through Emmett Till’s 1955 glass-top funeral casket: Till’s corpse, which was utterly unrecognizable when delivered to his mother, spoke to the racist violence inflicted on black US citizens (Till had been accused of flirting with a white woman), but moreover to the unfathomable acquittal of the accused who were found not guilty despite having confessed to the crime (Pool, 2015: 415). Till’s pinnacle image called international attention to a case of injustice that was ‘too visually provocative, too viscerally challenging, to be contained by time or distance’ (Harold and DeLuca, 2005: 266). Indeed, the brutalized and symbolized body echoed throughout 20th and 21st century encounters between police and black US citizens. For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement was organized entirely around the case of Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman (Reeves, 2015: 288–9); Martin was unarmed, concealing no more than a bag of Skittles in his black hoodie, while Zimmerman was acquitted on Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ defence. Hoodies and Skittles later became emblems of the movement (Martinson and Jackson, 2015). In 2014, Eric Garner, arrested for illegally selling individual cigarettes (‘loosies’), was detained in a chokehold by a police officer after resisting arrest, gasping as he collapsed to the ground, ‘I can’t breathe … I can’t breathe’, thereafter asphyxiating on the sidewalk, a video-captured death gone viral on social media; the ensuing chant at public protests, ‘We Can’t Breathe!’, was the anthemic call for justice against the offending officer’s acquittal (Passavant, 2015). Michael Brown, likewise, after a brief altercation with police on his neighourhood street, was shot in the back as he was running away, and upon turning to face the officer with his hands up and reportedly saying ‘OK, OK’, was shot square in the head; protesters adopted the ‘Hands up! Don’t shoot!’ gesture at protests and other public events (Alexander, 2014). As historical cases of police brutality continue to resonate today and as new historical literature is becoming recast in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement (Edwards and Harris, 2015; García and Sharif, 2015; Yancy and Butler, 2015), social scientists are faced with a pressing need to cut through these historical echoes, to expose their rhythms, and to contribute to their eventual prevention.

Echo Subjectivities

This article contributes to non-ocularcentric theory (Janus, 2011) by way of a cultural analysis of echoes, and uses rhythmanalysis as a methodology intended to presurmise echoes in a historical case study while theorizing the phenomenon of echo itself. By exploring the instrumental case study of Steve Reich’s Come Out (which uses tape-echo as a compositional technique) and its encounters with police brutality and civil rights, it offers an expanded and expanding sense and sensation of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis as an ambivalent and contradictory heuristic device, which allows the analyst to enter into new relations between time, history, and possibility. Echoes are generally conceptualized in cultural theory as a disrupting but reinforcing force of subject-constitution. I propose, however, to approach echoes in their rhythmic and historical modulations, insofar as echoes proliferate in varying material, immaterial, abstract, and concrete premonstrations. The essay thus contributes to sound studies, but in a renewed sociological sense of social and cultural history that emphasizes the simultaneous over the successive, the cyclic over the linear, and the rhythmic over repetition in terms of encounters, extensions, becomings, contradictions, and their destinations towards new calculations of social transformation.

Echoes are, simply put, the reflection of a sound source. But echo, as a concept, is also used as a heuristic tool in social and cultural theory for understanding the felt and embodied ‘sense-making’ apparatuses involved in the production of subjectivity. Jean-Luc Nancy, for instance, posits echo as the immanent return of sound to its source, drawing a framework for the ‘double-imprint’ of self-awareness as arising simultaneously from internal and external sources (Nancy, 2005: 148). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe similarly concludes that echoes are a precondition of subjectivity cut from itself, a pre-specular ‘condition of possibility for the subject’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1998: 195), without which subjectivity would float untethered from its requisite auditory technology for self-reflexivity. Gayatri Spivak, meanwhile, claims that the gendered politics of echoing emerges from within the story of Echo and Narcissus that undoes the subject’s original utterance, representing ‘the aporia between self-knowledge and knowledge for others’ (Spivak, 1993: 19). Such material, affective, and figural theorizations share a paradox for echo subjectivity: echo undoes subjectivity all the while quilting it into self-awareness. To expand, the following generalizable postulates about echo arise around the themes of repetition, return, and renewal:

Echoes repeat a sound: At its most basic level, sound is the non-arbitrary by-product of a strike between material bodies, at least one of which must be in motion, an Aristotelian principle which renders sound always in relation to bodies in motion (Aristotle, 2004; Polansky, 2007: 285–91). If sound is perceived at more than 1/10 of a second apart from its source (its strike), it is perceived as an echo (Mehta, 2011: 970). Echo is, thus, a unit of sound relatively independent from, yet tethered to, its source of articulation.

Echoes return to sound: It stands, following postulate 1, that echoes return the imagination to the strike that produced a sound. Of especial importance to Nancy is this original strike, the physical action of body-on-body, to which an echo always returns. Sound, Nancy concludes, thus ‘listens to itself’ (Nancy, 2007: 9) through echo. As an immaterial force, sound traces the contours of the material.

Echoes renew sound: Echo, to return to Spivak’s reading, should not be tied to the letter of the acoustic. It can revolutionize and expand our conception of sound, theorized generally on the level of a figure that returns us to the point of a hit or strike, or articulation. If we are to move forward through echo’s immaterial agency, we should hold the echo as (a) a zone for the possible dislodging of subjectivity and (b) a multivalent object of study.

Taken together, however, echoes are more complex. Echoes are not simply repetitions as much as they are the symbiosis of an articulation, an adaptation as a singularity and a process. Echoes are also more than returns because echoes, while they return to sound, are perceived in their immediacy as autonomous, emanating sense and sensation through a process. And, finally, echoes are more than renewals because they do less to permanently dislodge subjectivity than they do to offer a possibility for transformation, or a quilting point of self-recognition, at once unsettling while secure (recall Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that echoes are the requisite grounding for subjectivity to even emerge). This is also why Jean-Luc Nancy qualifies the echo as a form of ‘timbre’, the latter of which he describes as a non-signifying vibration between bodies (2007: 41–3), a pre-subjective requisite for the intertwining of listening and voice: ‘To listen is to enter into that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me: it opens up inside me as well as outside and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a “self” can take place’ (2007: 14). Echoes, in their ambivalence, thus qualify less as any one of these postulates and are best conceived, in their social life, as rhythms, meaning, as Julian Henriques, Milla Tiainen, and Pasi Väliaho write in their introduction to the 2014 special issue of Body & Society on rhythm, that they are ‘not one but many’ (2014: 25).

To further such a conceptualization, rhythm is ‘irrational’ insofar as it ‘can only be looked at and experienced’ (Bode, 2014: 55), making allowance for the habits which make up a body’s internalized social values and norms; rhythm is a crossover of internal and external realities, and is as such ‘quite typical of how bodies work’ (Henriques, 2014: 104). But we mustn’t lose sight of rhythm’s technical features in the context of musical and recording technology contexts, where rhythm is an auditory and embodied phenomenon that arises from a pattern of bodies striking one another.¹ For instance, when different musicians play patterns on instruments, they enter into a collective rhythm, but they do not play ‘individual rhythms’. Rhythm is something of a virtual object that actors contribute to through processions, which themselves become actors that others respond to in a rhythm-network involving the striking, plucking, or rubbing of objects together that (are usually designed to) emit sound. However, though rhythm demands technical attention, we would be misguided to lose sight of a larger ‘project of a cultural history of rhythm’ (Crespi, 2014: 31).

This is possibly why Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004) has proven so highly influential,² because he embraces the culturally embodied constitution of rhythm without losing sight of its technical detail. Lefebvre admits that rhythm is elusive, but maintains that its measurements are palpable. A rhythmanalyst is capable of moving between milieus and measurements and connecting them in such a way that discovers their over-arching ‘rhythm’, which is an issue of empirics. Rhythmanalysis is a method that searches for the general production of ‘freedoms’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 32) that accounts for the auditory mechanics of social transformation (2004: 65); without transformation, rhythm would be no more than repetition. That is, if there is something central to rhythm, and that is repetition, repetition cannot be articulated meaningfully (i.e. rhythmically) without the articulation of difference. While Rhythmanalysis has itself germinated a fascinating array of case studies, ranging from the ‘rhythms’ of social institutions such as museums (Prior, 2011), time-lapse photography (Simpson, 2012), soundwalking (Hall et al., 2008), post-conflict pedagogy (Christie, 2013), to mobility studies generally (DeLyser and Sui, 2012), ‘rhythm’ unintentionally becomes an interchangeable conceptual category with ‘tempo’ and ‘speed’ or, generally, ‘life’ and ‘vitality’. In resonance with Michael E. Gardiner’s (2012) observation that Lefebvre holds a tenuous and non-systematic commitment to the concepts he introduces, Rhythmanalysis’s mechanics of rhythms (i.e. tempo, speed, duration) are equivocated, non-specific, and ambivalent. The rhythmanalyst of postmodernity by consequence seems no more removed from self-reflexive observation than the cliché flâneur of modernity (see Shields, 2006).

As cultural theories of rhythm have, in recent years, both come into existence and resurfaced (see Michon, 2005), scholars have adopted and modified rhythm to suit a wide range of macro-, meso-, and micro-level studies, which constitutes a spectrum of studies from the rhythmic transformations of history (Gardiner, 2012) to the pulses of everyday life (Simpson, 2008). Only recently, and on a much rarer occasion, have we seen attempts at an interlocking rhythmanalysis between local activities and larger historical processes of social transformation (Borch, 2005); indeed, the interlocking of smaller and larger pulses and patterns constitutes a central defining feature of rhythm. The article thus contributes to an expanded and expanding sensation of rhythm as it passes to and from aesthetic, historical, conflicted, concrete, and general milieus. Mainly, the article situates rhythm in the context of a trialectic, keeping with Lefebvre’s other works: that the contradictions of the Real/Possible predestine consciousness towards new formulas of social transformation, that the politics of becoming are entwined between past contingency and future possibility, and that the extensionality of structural elements determines change as a central force.

To return to echoes, they mark a specific rhythm: they are a haunted variety of rhythm. They are not produced immediately with a strike, but trail the strike as though the sound has a permanent fixture that traces the contours of representation. Following Avery Gordon’s influential sociology of haunting, I read echoes as a mechanism which makes the unheard heard again. Echoes are not representations of a sound that is absent, but rather a haunted extension of the strike between bodies dwelling within the complexity of those extensions and relations. In echo, we are in the presence of the strike that made its sound resonate, but in an uneasy distance from its source. Similarly, Gordon argues that ‘In haunting, organised forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make the impact felt in everyday life in a way that cofounds our analytic separations’ (Gordon, 1997: 19). The anxiety that arises, for instance, when one hears their own voice played back in a recording is conditioned by the fact that, as hauntings, echoes return to subjectivity in a form that subjectivity is unable to recognize: this occurs as a wakeful auditory hallucination (Smith, 2007). Tied intimately to speech and subjectivity, Jay D. Glass (2013) observes that, in neurosciences, echoes tether inner speech to self-awareness as precise reflections of the human voice with its idiomatic and subjective inflexions; internal voice is an exact reflection of the voice’s grammatical and idiomatic uniqueness. Simply put, when we speak, we hear simultaneously an external stimulus that returns to the ear and an internal stimulus that resonates throughout the middle ear and the skull. When an echo is returned to the ear of the one who made the sound, the echo comes with a shocking reminder that the subject is the only one who can ever hear their interior and exterior voice(s) simultaneously.

This paper is interested in a particular type of echo: the tape-echo, which has been culturally lodged within a motley assemblage of electronic recording practices since the 1940s and 1950s (Holmes, 2002). Though the echo was deployed in music long before this context, it had become a central dominating characteristic in recorded music as a ‘tape-effect’ after the Second World War. And while the tape-echo occupied popular music as a sound effect which thickened the voices of Rock ‘n’ Roll singers (Doyle, 2005; Vallee, 2015), in classical music recordings they simulated the ‘space’ of a concert hall (Blesser and Salter, 2007), and in avant-garde composition they directly contributed towards the texture of electronic sounds (Holmes, 2002). American composers especially relied on the tape-echo as a central compositional device. Otto Luening’s Low Speed (1952) and Invention in Twelve Tones (1952), for instance, were the first electronic compositions to intimate the sound of a slowed-down flute, which resonated in multiple echoes heretofore unheard without having been drawn out through a recording apparatus. This effect chimes with Eleni Ikoniadou’s (2014) observations on ‘time-stretching’ in digital audio compositions, which she conceives as ‘a new hearing that is not modally bound or purely sensorial but instead intersects different zones of intensity (infrasonic, ultrasonic and subsonic), inventing new ways of rhythmically impinging on a body’ (2014: 147), zones which co-articulate with one another in such a manner that would render echo’s reduction to its status as repetition, return, or renewal missing the mark for its potential contribution to cultural theory.

Echo Materialities

Steve Reich’s Come Out echoes the energy of the Civil Rights Movement (while anticipating the Black Lives Matter movement of recent years) through a splice of recorded testimony by Daniel Hamm, a black resident of Harlem wrongfully accused of murder who, along with five others, made up the well-known Harlem Six (Biareishyk, 2012). Hamm’s case came to public attention after he and a friend, Wallace Baker, had run to the defense of black children being beaten by riot-control police for playing with the discarded fruit from an overturned fruit stand (the 1964 ‘Little Fruit Stand Riot’ as the press called it; see Boyd, 2008: 89–90), which took place three months before the Harlem riots. Hamm, along with Baker and Frank Stafford, were taken into custody, beaten, and released, intent on pressing charges against the Harlem 28th Precinct. Two weeks later, however, Hamm, Baker, and four of their friends (William Craig, Ronald Felder, Walter Thomas, and Robert Rice), were arrested on suspicion of murdering Margit Sugar, a local white Jewish tailor shop-owner. The New York Times portrayed the six as representative of ‘militant and organized bands of Negro toughs … who, after being trained to maim and kill, roam the streets of Harlem attacking white people’ (quoted in Perlstein, 2004: 122), and the courts found them guilty without sufficient evidence (the life sentence would be reversed in 1968, but they were sent to retrial in 1969 and convicted again; see Zion, 1968, 1969, 1970). The mothers of the six, whose efforts to supply their sons with private legal representation were denied, filed for appeal and looked to residents of Harlem for financial support. To raise awareness of the Harlem Six and to report the broader issues of urban injustice, James Baldwin had referred to the case as an example of ‘occupied territory’:

Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces. Furthermore, since the police, not at all surprisingly, are abysmally incompetent – for neither, in fact, do they have any respect for the law, which is not surprising, either – Harlem and all of New York City is full of unsolved crimes. A crime, as we know, is solved when someone is arrested and convicted. It is not indispensable, but it is useful, to have a confession. If one is carried back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is likely to confess to anything. (Baldwin, 1998 [1966]: 736)

The 1964 Harlem riot erupted three months following the ‘Little Fruit Stand Riot’, and was itself triggered directly by an event that echoed the Harlem Six. James Powell, a summer school student and resident of Harlem, on the morning of 16 July was engaged in horseplay with a local superintendent when he was interrupted and shot dead by Police Lt. Thomas G. Gilligan, who alleged that Powell had attacked him with a knife (no eyewitnesses could confirm the existence of such a knife). The activist group Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had already been planning a protest march in support of three missing Mississippi activists, but had shifted their attention to police brutality. Members of the organization had entered into the 28th Police Precinct to demand justice, and left peacefully after hearing Gilligan was being investigated. Others who had joined the protest were unconvinced of the imminent justice and proceeded to pull fire alarms and break storefront windows. These activities ensued for six days as the media inaccurately reported that all residents were rioting in Harlem. Threadcraft notes the ultimate irony that:

Black New York City residents would suffer further indignities during official pleas for peace. Mayor Robert Wagner, on his return from a European vacation, proclaimed, ‘Law and order are the colored citizen’s best freedom’, a galling statement, considering the roots of the disturbance. (Threadcraft, 2007: 479)

Causes of the riot were attributed by the media to individual action, anarchist ideologies, and socio-economic deprivation, which contributed to the further frustration that black residents experienced in their ongoing subjugation. It was in this context that Truman Nelson (1965) wrote an extended essay on the Harlem Six, The Torture of Mothers, a substantial (yet flawed) case study that used 25 hours of sound-recorded testimony (Boyd, 2008: 100). Following its publication, Nelson approached Reich with the tape reels, and asked if he would compose a sound collage, which he did, on the agreement that he could also compose a minimalist sound piece, Come Out, which was performed along with the collage for a Harlem Six fundraising concert at The Town Hall in New York City in April 1966.

Come Out was conceptualized as an electronic minimalist programmatic based on the algorithmic additive process of ‘flanging’ (Fink, 2005: 106): a playback process that produces sweeping swishing echoes by way of two or more recordings of the same utterance played with one another at slightly varying speeds (Watkinson, 1998: 497). While the whereabouts of the solicited collage is unknown, as is any account of the reception of either sound pieces, Reich’s words testify to the fact that Come Out was received, in his own words, as a process over which audience members talked rather than listened, a ‘pass-the-hat music’ (quoted in Gopinath, 2009: 127).

Come Out is a spliced loop of tape that repeats the phrase, ‘come out to show them’, on eight tape recorders, each of which is pro tanto slightly slower than the last. The effect of the ensuing phase is such that the phrase splinters in disarray and the words vanish beneath their own opacity, where all that remains is the contours in various temporalities which, over time, dissolve into pure noise. Lifted from an interview with Hamm, Reich isolated the most corporeally private yet public aftermath of his ‘leaking body’ (Manning, 2009): letting the bruise blood show paramedics proof of need for immediate medical attention. In the interpretive transcription below, I employ the semi-colon in such a manner as Wagner (2012) does to present the micro-political resistance of silence, or a return to the political gesture: letting the bruise blood come out to show them.

I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood to come out to show them;

[pause]

I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood to come out to show them;

[pause]

I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood to come out to show them;

[pause]

Reich’s Come Out proceeded in a similar style to his earlier piece, It’s Gonna Rain, which itself was based on a tape splice of a street preacher predicting a flood, the words of which are uttered in unison with the sound of a pigeon flapping madly away from the site of the speech. Reich explicated the flanging process in terms of discovering difference through the repetition and renewal as a ‘perceptible process’ and a desire to ‘be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music’ while facilitating ‘closely detailed listening, a musical process [that] should happen extremely gradually … so slowly that listening to it resembles watching the minute hand on a watch’ (Reich, 1968: 36). Accordingly, in regards to the technique of flanging and It’s Gonna Rain in particular, Reich discusses this process in more concrete terms:

What’s really riveting is this process of starting in unison and gradually separating passing through all these different canonic relationships, these different mini-rounds, and coming to various recognizably musically interesting parts … and then these irrational parts followed by another rational resting part. And, finally, if you let it go, it comes back together again. (Reich, quoted in Timegrinder, 2007: 3:52–4:14)

The effect of listening to Come Out (or It’s Gonna Rain) is akin to studiously listening to a record skipping, which eventually causes a series of sonic hallucinations. Mark A. Pitt and Lisa Shoaf (2002) observe that repeating a word or phrase over time produces a ‘verbal transformation effect’. Simply, as a repeated utterance becomes untethered, its meaning loses ground, and perception reorganizes the sound of the utterance in three degrees: verbal satiation, verbal summation, and verbal transformation. In verbal satiation, words become nonsense and alternate meanings of the sounds are introduced – it is an effect of repetition. In verbal summation, subjects make the newfound meanings relevant to themselves as though they were listening to a ‘verbal inkblot’ – it is an effect of return. And in verbal transformation, the new meanings heard in verbal satiation themselves become new meaningful units, and the process continues until the recording ends. We see in the verbal transformation effect a return to the postulates of echoes: repetition, return, and renewal. Music theorist Sumanth S. Gopinath, for instance, in his own listening experience to Come Out, unintentionally describes this very process as an objective finding revealed through traditional music analysis:

the sonic doubling of the two phase points can be heard as mimicking the sound of police with megaphones calling for someone to ‘come out, come out,’ interpellating the listener as black rioter or ‘criminal.’ (2009: 136)

I prefer a certain distance from any racializing association of black identity with rioter (which would echo media coverage of the 1964 riot as attributed to criminal action), and instead to expand on the bruise that ‘comes out to show them’ – to emphasize the act over the identity. Reich’s choice in tape splice (‘come out to show them’) is a profound one. Given the racial violence, police brutality, the senseless arrest and dehumanizing torture, the repeated focus on ‘come out to show them’ haunts all of these strikes with a return and a renewal, to show what a bruise can do (to echo Spinoza). Come Out can be approached as a sonic contusion, and offers us the opportunity to broaden echo beyond the auditory and towards the figurative. A bruise manifests as a contusion where damaged capillaries haemorrhage into adjacent tissues. But in terms of its social life, it comes to enact an object-like agency as a ‘fragile thing’, an affective object that enters into the agential space of the survivor, the accused, and the public sphere. A bruise, I claim, echoes the strike’s point of origination: it (1) repeats in the form of an extension; it (2) returns to the strike which produced it; and (3) in the case of Come Out, it renews the strike as a political weapon.

The vital possibility of a bruise to politicize the body is itself an intertwining narrative of the body in and of pain. Following Sara Ahmed’s (2004) observations that a bruise is the representation of an at once embodied and disembodied experience of the body, I take the bruise blood in Come Out as the incorporeal echo of violence that blurs the distinction between the body’s internal and external divisions. The body experiences a limit point through the bruise, but becomes a threshold when it opens to the public sphere, where the mark of the bruise negates the autonomous body by virtue of belonging at once to the carrier of the bruise and the one(s) guilty of having inflicted it. The bruise echoes a double negation: the bruise’s negation of the limitations of the encased body, and the accused’s denial of owning the bruise, a ‘no-more’ of the body and ‘not-yet’ of the accused. A bruise echoes as a function, which in Ahmed’s conception of pain in general is ‘bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to surfaces, bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places. Our question becomes not so much what is pain, but what does pain do’ (Ahmed, 2004: 27). That is, the enunciation, ‘come out to show them’, grows into a particular conceptualization of the self and of subjectivity that extends outward in an action to world its situation. In allegiance with Erin Manning’s (2014) recent observations that (1) a body cannot be conceived without the movement that situates it, and (2) the purpose of the self is to world its relations to the outside through the participatory media of the skin, letting the bruise blood come out is something of a strategic rebirth of the ‘common skin’ that Anzieu (1989: 63) earlier attributed to pre-corporeality. Such a strategy was well in place with regards to the open confessional of brutalized bodies in the civil rights and pre-civil rights eras. Daniel Hamm’s testimony was a testimony beyond the inner life of the bruise, and like the proliferation of echoes in Come Out, the testimony demands the listener listen elsewhere than to the immediate scene or the immediate source and into future possibilities.

To repeat, the bruise is quilted into its point of origin, a point unknown without the utterance – that is, the bruise has a political efficacy when it is opened up through Reich’s recording technology, as well as towards the medical professionals Daniel Hamm requested. Thus, by virtue of the subjectivity bearing the name Daniel Hamm, if the evidence of echoes points in the direction of the affective, we cannot simply ‘dismiss’ the subject that has been undone; for the subject is the ground from where its spatial politics proliferate, by way of echoes as an extensional corporeality. The bruise alone (‘I had to, like, open up the bruise to let some of the bruise blood to …) cannot signify the political until it has constricted the world and folded its contents back into itself (… come out to show them’). It is here where the body’s habits are framed by this temporal relocation, entwined as a politics of becoming between past contingencies and future possibilities.

Echo Temporalities

Echoes do more than repeat; they return. Echoes do more than return; they renew. Echoes do more than renew; they become an abstraction that remains grounded in action. Insofar as echoes are non-representational abstractions of sound, they inflect, extend, and contour the strike that produced the sound they repeat; insofar as echoes are ethical and political, less are they simply byproducts of subjectivity but directly contribute to its non-ocularcentricity; insofar as echoes guarantee a theory of difference by virtue of the fact that they cannot be bare nor varied repetitions, they circulate in tandem as pure relationality, a contradiction intended to be lived in and acted upon. Thus, I am not so much interested in what echoes, in all their acoustic, embodied, technological, figurative, and material relations ‘are’ so much as what they ‘do’ in terms of their actions, their relations, and what affects they facilitate as a whole, as references to other echoes that return to other strikes, strikes of a voice on tape, strikes of police brutality, strikes of squeezing a bruise, strikes in rhythm relating to the general condition of a minimalist composition. Echoes certainly qualify as a rhythm of subjectivity, considering they are, first, immaterial agencies; without echo, without subjectivity’s exterior return, the subject is unable to appear and to reflect (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1998). Second, echoes are conceptual apparatuses for dislodging the centrifugal edification of subjectivity; Echo (of Echo and Narcissus), condemned to repeat the words others spoke to her, acted from within the parameters of her punishment, repeating the words of Narcissus but in such a manner that Narcissus ‘receives back the words he says’ (Spivak, 1993: 25, my emphasis), according to her choice in timbre and inflexion. Third, echoes constitute part of a sub-individual process of subjectification that are expressed more through their capricious transmogrifications than through their intended sound effects; sound proffers its own sonic materiality that is reciprocated between individuals, and the orientation of the sonic variations of a strike connote the ‘truth’ of the sound that is returned.

But when we expand echoes beyond the context of subjectivity and when we approach echoes rhythmically, they speak to multiple and simultaneous layers of history. To return to Lefebvre’s methodological and theoretical insights on rhythmanalysis, then, we must listen to echoes as a complex rhythm made of many speeds and tempos, only if we wish to problematize the inevitable repetitions of the everyday that are harnessed by historical processes of reproduction, representation, and repetition. In Rhythmanalysis, as in his other works, it is the possible which infuses Lefebvre’s vision of a trialectic: (1) contradiction – (2) becoming – (3) transformation:

The contradictions of the Real/Possible predestine consciousness towards new formulas of social transformation: The possible is the case of consciousness to come, arising from the contradictions of the Real in a calculable formula that allows for the further examination of and solutions to contradictions (Lefebvre, 2002: 195). Contradictions in turn demand calculations to move beyond them, or a means of repeating the contradictions enough times so that difference becomes a repetition’s only possibility.

The politics of becoming are entwined between past contingency and future possibility: all temporal dimensions, insofar as the present (echo) returns to the past (strike), are future possibilities (Lefebvre, 2002: 168). Becoming is to being as emergence is to event, assuming a form made of its future possibility. This submits echo to the condition of ontology, insofar as echo is neither present nor past, but distributes difference from within its own anticipation for change.

The extensionality of structural elements determines change as a central force: Elements of structuration are multivalent insofar as transformation occupies their central active device (Lefebvre, 2002: 164). For Lefebvre, structural elements are bound yet open, in order to ‘open up through thought and action towards possibilities by showing the horizon and the road’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 63), or by a series of generalized others whose function is to polarize, focus, or convert the elements into convertible units – but their conversions always-only occur as extensions and as possibilities.

Echoes are bare repetitions, but operationalized rhythmically they become activated: they alter aesthetic conceptions of utterance, they render statements utterly incomprehensible through the affective interplay of rhythmic fragments, they proliferate the hauntings of recording mechanisms, they ripple from Emmett Till’s open casket to Daniel Hamm’s bruise to statements, objects, and victims that echo today in the Black Lives Matter movement: hoodies and skittles, ‘We can’t breathe!’, ‘Hands up! Don’t shoot!’, and the names of those unarmed black American youth who are shot and killed by police without cause approximately every 28 hours, such as Alen Blueford, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Gary King, Chavis Carter, Marshall Tobin, Ascension Herrera, Jared Huey, Derrick Gaines, Darius Kennedy, Christopher Middleton – many of them with police bullets having entered their backs, some in the soles of their feet, which suggests they were running away or lying on the ground as they were shot (Martinot, 2012: 52–3). It does not take a considerable effort to theorize the historical and contemporary cases of police brutality, especially the context around which the Harlem Six were arrested, and the new powers police were given in the latter half of the 20th century to interrogate the so-called ‘suspicious activity’ of youth, and to approach them with questions as to their intentions along with demands for their identification (Wilson, 1975).

Certainly, a recent claim that black US citizens are compelled to adopt a series of strategies for avoiding detainment and/or incarceration (Goffman, 2014: 53), as opposed to a Foucaultian self-governance, is well-trodden. But it remains central to black US citizen protests such as the Black Lives Matter movement to make use of ‘counter-rhythm’ strategies and of echoing symbols of violence as political weapons: to use the attack as a point of attack in itself, such as Till’s corpse, Hamm’s bruise, Martin’s hoodie, Garner’s breath, and Brown’s hands. Given the statistics that black US citizens face regarding their potential incarceration, that they are denied the privileges of self-governance in place of strategies that deter imprisonment or death, the objectives of the Black Lives Matter movement could not be more urgent: to be put into a position where one must argue that their life ‘matters’ signifies that they are excluded from life (Yancy and Butler, 2015).

While a mathematical solution (flanging) has, for musicologists (Biareishyk, 2012), a destination towards completion and intention, the rhythmanalyst commits to listening askew, preferring the external dimension to resonate back towards the real contradictions whose solutions further encroach upon the possible, making for new calculations and new measurements. It is this eternal return to real contradictions that precipitates the edification of consciousness as a mediation between the real and the possible.

Conclusion

Echoes are historical, but they come up against other forces and institutions in chance encounters, which have consequences on the unfolding of history (the role of sound art in consciousness-raising campaigns, ambient music, experimental politics, exposure of police brutality, social movements, and historical transformation). Thus, against any perceived schism between ontology and history, I propose that a historicist approach can inform the ‘new ontologies’ that are becoming firmly established within social and cultural theory (Coole and Frost, 2010); a historical approach need not be rejected as overly positivistic or reliant upon a metaphysics of subjectivity. As such, echoes represent an ‘edge method’ for research, expanding the senses of the empirical and new sensations of the possible, insofar as echoes are at once material (off of surfaces or simulated as a tape-effect) and conceptual (as the repeated index of the subjugated, the continued cry for social justice in the form of open caskets or open bruises that return the trace of violence to its strike or its source of articulation). Possibilities echo through their repetitions and, by consequence, alter their historical destinations. There is no sound without its resonance, no event without its emergence, since, in principle, sound is always-already resonance, and events are always-already emergences – in any case of a strike, we are only ever repeated, returned, and renewed through its echoes.

Footnotes

Notes

Mickey Vallee completed his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Alberta in the departments of Sociology and Music. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge.

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