SOUND ART AND THE ECOSOPHICAL OBJECT: SOME AESTHETICO-ONTOLOGICAL REMARKS ON MACHINIC PRODUCTIVITY

When confronted with the problem of chaos and meaning in the context of the production of subjectivity, sound art emerges time and again as a privileged space for the rearrangement and production of new subjective consistencies. Faced with the processes of increasing subjective homogenization of late capitalism, the sonic imagination, in the centre of an ontological tension between the dissolution of meaning and its structural and phantasmatic redundancy, allows us to carry on “turning over the ground”. We have thus tried to explore sound art as collective enunciation, as a form of excess that goes well beyond the human realm and into the machinic plane of consistency, and we have done this through the prism of a-signifying semiotics. The conclusion we have reached is that of the need for a non-humanist, trans-species, machinic comprehension of sound art and its collective assemblage.


Introduction
L'oeuvre d'art, pour ceux qui en ont l'usage, est une entreprise de décadrage, de rupture de sens, de prolifération baroque ou d'appauvrissement extrême, qui entraîne le sujet vers une recréation et une réinvention de lui-même. Sur elle, un nouvel étayage existentiel oscillera selon un double registre de reterritorialisation (fonction de ritournelle) et de resingularisation. L'événement de sa rencontre peut dater irréversiblement le cours d'une existence et générer des champs de possible "loin des équilibres" de la quotidienneté. 1 1 Guattari, Félix (1992). Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée,181. Throughout the vast work of Félix Guattari, art is understood as a space of resistance and a machine of and for the future. 2 The production of aesthetico-existential consistency, ultimately the production of subjectivity -and vice versa-, is the only truly possible metamodelization in a late-capitalist context marked by a growing, by inherent, subjective homogenization. For this biopolitical force, as Guattari said, operates within the interiority of subjects, arranging the mechanisms of control within each individual, miniaturizing their logistics.
However, art shows us precisely in this sense a positive correlation, or rather, possibility: to internalize a positive chaos, associating ourselves with other, positive, joyful, productive mechanisms, far from capital, manipulating the machine against the machinery of capital, internalizing mechanisms against the miniaturization of domination, letting the apparatus in precisely to save ourselves from external intrusion.
In Guattari, thinking from and with the affects -as art does-without concepts, is necessarily a space of resistance. Faced with the processes of increasing subjective homogenization of late capitalism, art could help us in the production of new subjective consistencies, the construction of a new life.
One of the problems that most insistently appears in his work, and that we will address in this text, is the relationship between chaos and meaning, with all its delights and all its horrors. This is frequently ignored or too quickly noted: both Guattari and Deleuze -for different 2 I would like to express my deep gratitude to fellow Guattarian Christian Alonso both for organizing the Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art symposia (in whose fourth edition, "Machinic Capitalism, Molecularized Selves & Subsistential Territories", I presented an earlier version of this text) and for his generous comments. reasons, both theoretical and biographical-warn us against the dangers of an absolute deterritorialization, insisting on various processes of passive synthesis as the genesis of this pre-egoic order. This is the meaning of the Guattarian expression that we have quoted at the beginning of this text: art supposes a radical unframing of our subjectivity. And subjectivity was precisely at the very centre of the ecosophical project of Guattari throughout the eighties, when he "aimed at regenerating depleted existential territories and making them newly inhabitable". 3 The founding principle of this whole venture was to reflect on capitalism and its limits in order to "promote resingularizing subjectivations". 4

Consistency, chaos, and composition in late Guattari's aesthetics
At the core of all this, we find the question of the relationship between chaos and meaning, something that appears constantly in Guattari, and particularly in his last works. We could even say Guattarian aesthetics starts from here, from the assumption that art emerges from the composition of chaos. 5 We should note, however, that the notion of chaos -central to Guattari, for whom it represents the force that feeds the fundamental tension of thought, the raw material of virtuality, the infinite reserve of determination-is as important here as that of composition, since it is always a question of formlessness, determination and will -doubtless, in a very Nietzschean sense. Dossier | Rodríguez-Mouriño, M. G. | Sound art and the ecosophical object: some aesthetico-ontological remarks on machinic productivity As we have said, Guattari's later work seems to give free reign to chaos, which was a consistent obsession of his. We find references to this in articles, books, diary entries, and even literary pieces, throughout his last years. Be that as it may, this presence and ambiguous fascination with chaos and dissolution casts a shadow that was already evident, however, in his early work. In a way, the radical Lacanian "speedy-Guatt", as they called it, of the fifties is not that different from the aesthetics theoretician who wrote Chaosmosis.
Of course, in Guattari, rather than the old confrontation between socalled Order and so-called Disorder, chaos is not defined by mere disorganization, but by its velocity: chaos "is" an infinite speed which dissipates any form that emerges therein, a void. Deleuze and Guattari say in What is Philosophy?, "that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance". 6 There is a feeling of excess, of something which not only exceeds it all, but which is firstly characterized by this very aversion to control. There is also a sort of dizziness in the face of the seemingly absolute powers of chaos, powers which at same time remain somehow attractive. For dissolution is the enemy of thought, but, at the same time, chaos is the very form which allows for the possibility of thinking to even emerge. But which is the link between the two? Composition, creation, the metamodeling of bringing something into the realm of existence by turning over the ground.
"Composition", they say, "is the sole definition of art. Composition is aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art". 7 If the artist is the composer of chaos -someone who is able to build something out of chaos-, then the primordial sense of both art and architecture reveals itself: "Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts." 8 This is why aesthetico-existential production allow us to build planes of consistency without losing the very infinitude out of which art is materialized, and why aesthetic creation allows us to build bridges -or, indeed, constituting those very bridges-over the ontological tension between the dissolution of meaning and its structural and phantasmatic redundancy without which life is just not possible, not liveable.
This is the meaning of art as chaosmic metamodelization, as well as the core of the danger in Deleuze's warning in Difference and Repetition: turning over this ground is "the most dangerous occupation", but also "the most tempting in the stupefied moments of an obtuse will". 9 And what "will" could be more obtuse, what existence more stupefied and homogenized, than that of our capitalist contemporaneity? Dossier | Rodríguez-Mouriño, M. G. | Sound art and the ecosophical object: some aesthetico-ontological remarks on machinic productivity Some lines along sound art I. Ontological tensions. If an artist is someone who reminds us that this groundless ground never leaves us, someone who reminds us that chaos never runs out, contemporary sound art is one of the most interesting spaces for the formulation of an ecosophical aesthetics, for it is in this field where this fundamental ontological tension between the dissolution of all meaning and its phantasmatic-structural redundancy most violently occurs, thus revealing itself as a joyous affirmation of subjectivity as chaosmic metamodelization, that is, as heterogeneous production of new forms of life, whether human or not.
By turning off the light of totalizing consciousness, the thousand tingling lights of collective enunciation, irreducible to any ego, are turned on. The plurivocity of the machinic phylum exceeds all Subject-synthesis. In the diversity of its forms, sound art places us in front of this very problem.
The blind activity of intensive depth, of the body without organs, of this groundless ground, is indeed the very ground of sound. The sound plane, as an a-signifying phylum, is constantly reminding us of this fragile equilibrium: neither is there such a thing as a quiet place outside of us, nor is there such a thing as an identity within.
If desire exists before the subject/object and representation/production come into the picture and oppose themselves, then playing with sound is a privileged way of stirring and turning over this ground. The points of subjectivation, the names, are of little importance here: the relevance belongs to the multiplicities that create -constitute!-populations between those lines.
II. Sonic proliferation. The proliferation of sound is, by itself, a collective organization of a-signifying semiotics. Its desiring economy knows neither subject nor object. It is not a different, unknown language, for it is simply not a language in any human all too human sense.
III. A-signifying semiotics. Signifying semiotics, in the Guattarian sense, correlates with systems of mediation which represent intensive multiplicities, subjecting them insofar as they force them to shape formsubstance couples. These strata of double articulation are inherent to any signifying semiotic consistency. Signifying machines are based on a representational system, that is to say, the kind of semiotic redundancies which know nothing more than icons. Negativity, identity, analogy, opposition, resemblance... Out of this modelling, anything else -such as real multiplicity-is out of the picture.
A-signifying semiotics, on the other hand, knows no possible "signification". Whether they are mathematical, economical, or artistic, this kind of a-signifying machines function independently of any meaning they could represent or constitute to anyone. Those sorts of machines still need signifying semiotics as a kind of ground for it is true that any semiotic architecture depends on a signifying language in order to function, but this very signification is nothing more than a tool of semiotic deterritorialization, as a condition for new connections to be established with the most deterritorialized material flows.
A-signifying semiotics simply implode the overcoding functioning of representative semiotics. In this world, signs and things purely arrange one another regardless of any subjective seizing of individuated agents of enunciation. Collective assemblages of enunciation depose speech as an imaginary support of the world and, with that, the illusion of a specific Dossier | Rodríguez-Mouriño, M. G. | Sound art and the ecosophical object: some aesthetico-ontological remarks on machinic productivity enunciation of the human individual, an adjacent effect of utterances produced and manipulated by socio-economic systems.
In the end, to disabuse ourselves of the humanist illusions around individual subjection means also to get out of the constant subjugation of the world, a world that was not made in our image.
Here, collective does not (only) mean part of any group, but constituted by flows of every kind, whether technical, ideal, aesthetic... Sound proliferation is, in and of itself, a collective organization of a-signifying semiotics. Sound precedes any subject and any object. Likewise, the desiring economy of sound, as desire itself, knows no subject, for it is of no representative condition. Signification -and all the "interpreters" that come with it-is thus abandoned. We are not dealing with a different language, not even with a very differently structured language: it simply is not a language in any human, all too human sense. connecting, flowing, dissolving, becoming. Chaos and composition. We can control the device, but only up to a certain point; we can "know" the device, but only up to a certain point, and it is precisely in this dynamic that everything is played out. The modular synthesizer, a true Deleuzo-Guattarian machine, is also a Nietzschean machine, emitting the myriad tingling lights of collective enunciation, irreducible, alien to all ego. Going through the forest, Robert Walser became "wave and wet", for he was as flowing as the forest itself; he was, indeed, "forest itself", "everything". 13 11  It is therefore important to always remember this vital correlate of resistance and health. For deterritorialization also means losing the anchor. Many of these artists do precisely that: they compose a sea, just to then proceed to lose themselves in it, in the becoming-flow of the world, in the becoming-ocean of themselves, in the becomingimperceptible of everyone and everything.