Posthumous Sound and the General Imagination

Abstract

The 1997 discovery of a fifty-thousand-year-old flute made from the femur of a cave bear, with its intimation of reanimating nonhumans, and the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft carrying an eclectic set of sound recordings intended to be heard in the distant future by nonhuman others: two sonic events that frame the possible meanings of posthumous. Together these examples and others question whether everything audible is already over—the bear's lost life, electronic recording procedures—or indefinitely deferred until an act of listening that may never occur. An ecological address to the problems of making sonic culture at a historical turning point at or beyond terminal risk prompts a politics of the commons grounded in a general imagination (modeled on Marx's general intellect). Against earlier modernist claims for both rationality and its failure, sound cultures enact a drama of melancholy and hope in the ecological continuity of body and world at the moment of their end.

This article begins from an intuition that a sense of ending shapes cultural politics in the 2020s. Whether the culprit fingered is a runaway economy, the Anthropocene, artificial intelligence (AI), pandemic, famine, authoritarianism, or extractivism, there is an urgent need for cultural survival beyond the end. The theme of posthumous culture is intended to address how to live on after. The discovery of a bone flute from the deep past and the launch of the Golden Record aboard the Voyager satellites into the far future can be read as experiments in such posthumous survival. These sonic moments of survival and projection help frame aspects of sonic cultures, often identified by avant-garde practices but by no means limited to them. Of particular interest are practices of hearing that imply posthumous cultures. They do so by exceeding restrictive concepts of subjectivity and dismantling the cultural privilege assumed by anthropocentric humanisms. These considerations lead to a proposal that a post-humanist, ecocritical cultural politics must extend inherited analyses of the human exception and its relation to capital, taken here as the more-than-economic, sociocultural organization of ways of life. Even if hope is prohibited by contemporary conditions, considering the spatial and temporal scales of sound cultures allows a rewriting of Marx's “general intellect” as general imagination and a positing of a more-than-human commons.

After the End

The end is all too possible to imagine in the early twenty-first century. A trope of science fiction,¹ the end dangles in front of us today as the logical outcome of environmental tendencies that the great social forces of these times either cannot or will not change. The heat-death of the universe evoked in the planetarium scene in Nicholas Ray's film Rebel without a Cause (1955) has come much closer in time in visions of ineluctable catastrophe at the level of species and planet. Against this impending terminus, creating culture takes on new formations, alternately frenetic, melancholic, and visionary, in genres as disparate as TV wildlife documentaries, in which vistas of human-free domains like Chernobyl and the deep oceans preempt the disappearance of the human species and, of special interest for this article, music, including Jem Finer's one-thousand-year-long composition Longplayer (1999 – ) and popular songs like Tom Waits's bleak “Earth Died Screaming” (1992) envisaging a posthuman planet. This condition is not without precedent.

Patrick Wolfe (1999: 2) is only one of those who have noted that “invasion is a structure not an event.” For the colonized, the worst has already happened and continues happening. At time of writing in 2023, the failure of governments, agencies, and economic powers to confront climate change places everyone face-to-face with an analogous imagination of a life after extinction. What does it mean to make culture after the end? One answer comes from decolonial histories of what Gerald Vizenor (2009) calls “survivance.” Noting that “theories of survivance are elusive and imprecise,” Vizenor focuses on practices that create “a sense of narrative resistance to absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry. Native survivance is an active sense of presence over historical absence” (1). More than the ostensibly universal absurdity of the human condition described by another colonial writer, Albert Camus ([1942] 1979), in The Myth of Sisyphus, the colonial event's specificity—the catastrophe of genocide, epidemic disease, land clearances, and, in settler colonies, replacing Indigenous peoples with imported slaves, indentured laborers, and transported paupers, often enough from other colonies like Ireland—continues to force sur-vival, living-on-after, on first nations.

The wealthy West finds itself in a parallel situation and, therefore, desperate to learn from Indigenous activists and scholars how to survive. But after stealing everything else from them, we white Westerners cannot carry on the theft by stealing even their suffering and their hard-won skills of living-on after the end. As Max Liboiron (2021: 24 – 25) argues, “There can be a solidarity without a We. There must be solidarity without a universal We. The absence of We and the acknowledgment of many we's (including those to which you/I do not belong) is imperative for good relations in solidarity against ongoing colonialism.” Any solidarity between the incommensurable worlds of Westerners and colonized is political. It must recognize all the varieties of extinction. Combating climate change through consumer choice is not an option for most of the world's humans but still less for nonhuman victims. The struggle to stop the end is political; finding ways to survive is cultural; cultural solidarity may be even more difficult than political. Considering some examples from mainly European history of sound cultures, what might survivre mean or require in the articulations of the ecological, technical, and social that constitute sonic arts? Is there anything that such considerations might be able to offer in return for the gift of an “alterlife” (Murphy 2017)?

The Waste Land

An icon of English-language modernism, T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land is full of sounds: voices and languages, snatches of song, church bells, a nightingale, wind, motor horns, and a throbbing taxi (Eliot 1963: 51 – 76). A bored typist plays a gramophone record, from the river comes the sound of a mandolin, bones rattle, a cockerel crows, and dry thunder rolls across a desert. For Eliot, the modern sonic universe did not cohere as older traditions might have done. Almost incidentally, the poem challenges the belief that, because it is symbolic, communicative, socializing, ordered, and rational, music belongs only to humans, and only to some of them.

Ralph Ellison ([1964] 2001) connected The Waste Land with jazz in 1964 (see Tracy 2016). Eliot listened compulsively to his gramophone in the years of the poem's composition (Suárez 2001). There are good reasons to think that his friendship with fellow poet Ezra Pound, the “miglior fabbro” of the poem's dedication, made him aware of Luigi Russolo's futurist intuonorumori and George Antheil's player piano score for Fernand Léger's Ballet méchanique. These compositions invented or deployed new sound technologies and granted them some degree of autonomy from composer's or player's control. Eliot had a gift for what critics such as John Ruskin ([1856] 1906: 201 – 20) decried as “pathetic fallacy,” metaphors ascribing human feelings to weather and landscape. Still, the relation did not and does not necessarily go only one way. Dry hills or driving rain can inflect emotions as much as great sex can make the greyest morning sunny. More problematic is to hear the correspondences between soundscapes of industrial cities and the inward states of the soul. Eliot wrote “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” as the Second Viennese School staggered toward composing dissonance and silence (where composing echoes the imposition of order implied in the English expressions compose yourself and compositing—from printshops to visual effects). He was not more avant-garde than Arnold Schönberg and his pupils in abandoning classical instruments or even for emphasizing fracture over the integral work—he may indeed have had a secret organization in mind, as Ellison believed, and wouldn't have liked the “avant-garde” tag. The collapse of categorial distinctions makes The Waste Land's sonics significant: the excess of noises over coherence, order, rationality, or symbolization.

The Divje Babe Flute

Archaeologists argued that a musical instrument discovered in a Slovenian cave in 1997 could only belong to rational, symbol-toting moderns, despite evidence that it was a Neanderthal artifact made by a now-extinct branch of hominids, and that modern humans arrived in Europe only about forty-five thousand years ago. The provenance debate is settled now: the flute precedes modern humans’ arrival in Europe. But a nagging doubt remains: if music is indeed an exclusive property of the moderns’ symbolic reason, then this carefully made thing may not be, in this sense at least, a human artifact, made for ordering or communicating.

Contemporary humans will never know what went through the minds of the Neanderthal who made the flute from the femur of a now equally extinct cave bear around fifty thousand years ago. The instrument has two remaining holes and the traces of three more in addition to its open ends, tuned to a recognizable diatonic scale (Fink 1997). A recording of Slovenian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski playing a reconstruction is haunting and convincing: this was a musical instrument. Classic FM reports that it is evidence that even before modern humans, these cave-dwelling hunters were “capable of such an abstract and uniquely human activity as creating music” (Rizzi 2021).

There should be considerable doubt about whether music is uniquely human. Ecological thinking and affect theory suggest that, if music exists, however defined, it must flow through the world as harmonies and dissonances, rhythms and tonalities. The inference is that music discovered humans, rather than vice versa. A member of the dig team that unearthed the cave-bear flute, archaeologist Ivan Turk, coauthored a descriptive and analytical paper on the find (Kunej and Turk 2001) in a collection (Wallin, Merker, and Brown 2001), half of which is devoted to “Vocal Communication in Animals.” Communication is only one possible purpose for sound. There is every reason to believe that rattling tail feathers and tail slaps on open water may also work musically, as they do in human societies, not only to communicate or to create social bonds, but for all anyone knows to make beautiful patterns of sound in time. Dimkaroski's rendition of an Adagio attributed to the eighteenth-century composer Tomaso Albinoni shows that the reconstructed flute can hold a recognizably modern melody, “abstract” in a sense understood at the latter end of the baroque. Rather than asking whether the flute can match more-or-less modern Western norms of musicality, it is more generous and informative to think through the possible process of making and playing the flute fifty thousand years ago (see Morley 2006).

Cave bears were big, largely plant eating, and there is little evidence that Neanderthals hunted them (a combination of climate change and competition with modern humans for living space probably brought about the bears’ extinction [Bieder 2014: 15 – 16]). The flute femur possibly came from a kill but was more likely recovered from a natural death. The bone was separated from the carcass, cleaned and carved. The animal it came from was very definitely dead. If cave bears were, as the archaeology suggests, physically close to modern bears, they wouldn't have made a sound like a flute: grunts and roars would be more likely. A flute could not imitate the animal. Instead, there is the tuning of breath. To blow, to breathe life into an inanimate thing, to reanimate a creature after its death: no one can say what that might have meant then. It is hard enough to comprehend the mystery of music making today. But there seems good reason to think that, in the cave at Divje Babe where the flute was discovered, player and perhaps listeners would have felt some more-than-ordinary reverberation (Goh 2017). Call it magic.

Citing an idea of Marcel Mauss (1972), anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1987) describes one exemplary form of magic: the idea of mana, the intrinsic power of objects and people in Polynesian culture. Such terms for an otherwise unidentifiable je ne sais quoi, Lévi-Strauss writes, posit

Mauss had tasked himself with debunking colonialist conceptions of magic as a primitive phase of human development. Lévi-Strauss argued that mythic thinking, like modern European science, was a method for understanding and controlling the world. A problem for this kind of thought is how humans generate more meanings than there are things in the world to attach them to. This “surplus of signification” (62) drives the nonequivalence between things and states of mind (signifiers and signifieds) that appears as the place of magic. Dead bone and live breath combining to make music in such a moment. Some third quality happens when they meet, a new, magical occurrence, music, that escapes taxonomies of alive and dead, breathing and inert—distinct, too, from catgut strings and horsehair bow—without, however, creating a clear and definite meaning. Music is the excess of meaning, not just in the human but in the world. Spooky, magical, an unstable hinterland at the border of intellect, language, senses, and world. The Neanderthal flute maker may have identified this threshold between living and dead as magic traversing the undefinable mana of mortality.

Non-cochlear Sonic Objects

Joyful animations of the inanimate from Pygmalion to Pinocchio; impious reanimations of the dead from the Golem to Frankenstein's monster; and now the uncanny thrill of interfacing with AI: the magical force of divine creation, breathing life (anima: breath, soul) into clay seems to gather and sum a deep history, predating the written words that tell us the oldest stories. Even if the flute were not from an expired cadaver but made from a hunter's kill, and its role is to speak to or negotiate with the dead animal, its mediation of breath and bone would still exhibit an excess of affect over words and things. Something of that discomforting articulation of living and dead still hovers over contemporary self-operating systems, scarcely evolved from the haunted telegraphs exhumed in Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media (2000), and the far older strangeness of inert instruments of brass, wood, and gut transforming air into melody with the power to bring back memories we never had and emotions we have never felt elsewhere.

Postwar and post – John Cage compositions like Barry Truax's Riverrun (1986) and John Luther Adams's Become trilogy (2013 – 18) emphasize “the world as a macrocosmic musical composition” in R. Murray Schafer's phrase (1994: 5). Schafer, in the words of his near namesake and almost contemporary Pierre Schaeffer (2017: 263), sought “to hear everything at the same time, if possible . . . an active musicianly mode of listening, as if we were listening to an orchestra and trying to focus on all the sources at once.” This democratization of every sound might suggest a reduction of hearing to the level of capital's universal exchange. To the extent that Schafer and Schaeffer, like Cage, wanted to create music out of this newly expanded listening, they can also be accused of extending the “paternalistic rhetoric of ‘giving voices’ to those who cannot represent themselves (traditionally children, women, the poor, the colonized, the disabled, animals, and other figures of marginalization) . . . to inanimate natural objects such as glaciers and forests” (Pettman 2017: 66). Imposing a “musicianly mode of listening” and “giving voice” diminishes the sounds of waves and wind. On the other hand, imagining the geometry of the planets as universal harmony, specifically inaudible to mortal ears “whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in” (Shakespeare, Merchant, v.i.72 – 73), decenters anthropocentric listening—and defers hearing the music of the spheres to the afterlife. Even though the practice of music has long been a practice of abstraction, the retuning of hearing since Cage's (1968) assertions in 1937 that his material was “all-sound,” not just intentionally made notes, encourages us to find sonic delight beyond human intentions or even capabilities—and to listen for what exceeds taxonomies and meanings. This border between planetary or interplanetary reverberations and the organizational power of music is as ripe with animating power as the cave-bear flute, and is equally unclear whether what could be heard in bone or breath, and what might be heard in future will be the world or the act of listening.

Writing about an installation artwork by Christine Sun Kim involving four subwoofers playing sounds at and below the threshold of human hearing, Caleb Kelly (2022: 98) writes that “the work is formed from sound waves that can be felt by people on the deaf spectrum, including Kim herself, who is profoundly deaf. . . . Conceptually, the work opens the potential for sound within the arts that is resolutely non-cochlear.” The strictly enforced sensory discipline that restricts “hearing” to what ears can hear, excluding vibrations sensed through the soles of the feet, chest cavity, and long bones, creates a hierarchy in the same way light sensitivity is disciplined by restricting it to what retinas can register, and parallel reductions of all the senses. Schafer emphasized the continuity of the senses of hearing and touch, both sensitive to vibrations, both experienced as bodily and intimate, a continuum of body and world, sound and sensation, and, in light of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, of form and meaninglessness of the kind Eliot reached for with his “Wallala leialala” and his “la la.” The play of meaning/form and formless/meaningless extends to a second hierarchy, one that represses the body as a producer of sounds, and not just of percussion, articulate speech, and song: the body that farts, belches, yawns, and sneezes, sounds that many cultures—deep into Norbert Elias's (2000) “civilising process”—learn early on to suppress or mask. Humans can hear their own breath, heartbeats, and digestion, even if others can't. They may learn to ignore them, but these autonomic sounds accompany life as long as we live. When music invites listening to the external world, even if it immerses hearers’ bodies in amplification, it instructs listeners to ignore those sounds that otherwise tell them they are living. Music is already tending toward the posthumous.

Some Times

With musique concrete, Pierre Schaeffer consolidated Cage's “all-sound,” but his tools were recording devices. Cinema had already embraced nonmusical “wild tracks” alongside dialogue and music. Using similar recording techniques but now without the ambition to provide a realist soundscape, Schaeffer realized the divorce of sounds from their origins effected by recording when he formulated the idea of “sonic objects,” asking listeners not to listen for sources but to hear sounds themselves, divorced from whatever caused them and from the psychology of hearing. Reversing the process, Eliot's typist hears the gramophone, not Richard Wagner or Marie Lloyd, as his poets hear banal “jug jug” or “tereu” in the nightingale's otherwise varied and liquid song. Beside the world lie technologies that may imitate or represent small fractions of the world—Eliot's gramophone records would have split Tristan and Isolde into a significant pile of 78-rpm records—selecting sounds by microphone placement and direction, severing them from the sounding instruments they recorded, the bodies of the players absorbing the sounds they produce, and the ambience of the space where the recording took place, subordinating everything to disciplined and ear-centered listening to the detriment of the proximal sense of sonic touch. This spatial discontinuity is a condition of recording. Recording is if anything even more discontinuous in time, separating replay from event and, at the instant of recording, deferring playback to some future moment (and to the ear of a listener in the 2020s, the 78’s distinctively lo-fi and wobbly sound quickly inserts a further interval: old recording, old media, old music). The temporal pause between making and playing the cave-bear flute tells us such temporal disruption was already the case in the earliest musics there is evidence for.

The word live may not be suitable in this context, but even if in the same person, playing alone, there would have been a certain copresence of player and listener to the bone flute. Copresence was also integral to Harry Bertoia's (2015) Sonambient sounding sculptures, which keep their sounds and their source present to one another (although Bertoia also recorded his inventions). The throbbing taxi of The Waste Land, on the other hand, is introduced on the line only after the metaphor of “the human engine,” a body already tuned to the mechanical that in turn tunes the mechanical to itself. The throbbing that traversed Eliot's Tiresias (who speaks this section of the poem) between male and female (Wraith 2013) depends on the unique experience of hearing, there and then, the precise taxi throb, tuned to the vibrating body, prior to either recording or transliteration, as Eliot would have heard it in the early twenties—irrecoverable a hundred years later except as conscious, linguistically grounded empathy. A different copresence is apparent in compositions engaging improvization and autonomy but subordinating them to temporal control, verging on the managerial, as can be heard in the minimalalist works of the 1970s and 1980s by Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. Here the copresence involves the phenomenal sounds produced by the players in compositions like Riley's In C (Cubitt 2023: 126 – 29)—a composition that allows for players of all abilities—with the presence of the score, particularly audible in this example because of the use of The Pulse, Riley's word for the repetitive high C percussive beat that endures throughout the piece. The score, as it were the intelligence of the music, is as audible as the notes vibrating in the air, a script preceding its vocalizations, as Jacques Derrida might have noted—specifically a script written in order to be recorded. To the extent that all music prefigures the future (Attali 1985) rather than following the political, economic, and social structures of its own time, In C incorporates the random “errors” of its performers into its design, a practice that foreshadowed the subsumption of contingencies into profit making facilitated by computer-driven high-frequency algorithmic trading.

Rule sets of the order of minimalist scores have been used for centuries to produce fugues and other musical forms. In computer-generated music, different again to Reich and Riley, algorithms must be formed as logical instructions. Electronic composer Laurie Spiegel derived the instructions for her Harmonia Mundi from Johannes Kepler's geometrical accounts of the relations between heavenly bodies. Combining logic and mathematics means drawing on the deep legacy of rational systems, in much the same way that Eliot drew on the long history of languages. No one writer or programmer invented English or C++: both derive from millennia of what Karl Marx called “allgemeines Wissen”: commonly translated as “general intellect,” this is better rendered as “universal knowledge” or, indeed, “common knowledge.” Language, logic, and maths are where the living meet the ancestors.

Consciously, that is in language, specifically in her title, Spiegel acknowledges the ancestral presence in her music through the name Kepler, but every logical expression, every instruction line, every aspect of the hardware are the congealed forms of common knowledge that, in the West, we seal up in technological black boxes. The music of the Neanderthal flute is no more and no less magical in its dialogue with the dead beast than Spiegel's algorithmically deduced music in its dialogue with all the named and anonymous makers of computing, as well as all those, human and nonhuman, who, over thousands of years, have contributed to the evolution of music.² Eliot's net drifts over two thousand years, Spiegel's over millennia—as far back as the Divje Babe cave and into the light years of interstellar distance foreseen for the two Voyager spacecraft that carried copies of the Golden Record containing her Harmonia Mundi.

Voyager

Launched in 1977, the two Voyager satellites left the bounds of the solar system in 2012 and 2018. The Golden Disc they each carry “for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future” (NASA, n.d.) contains a remarkably diverse collection of sounds: weather, animals, music, machinery, languages among them, together with a selection of images, many of which illustrate the sources of those sounds. They were designed to be heard in the far reaches of space, beyond the reach of living astronauts, and long after “Earth is but a star that once had shone” (as James Elroy Flecker—a poet with a gift for the posthumous—wrote in “The Golden Road to Samarkand” [1916]). Intended to make life on Earth decipherable to unimaginably alien beings, the Voyager discs simultaneously evoke two opposing emotions: hope and melancholy.

The melancholy is largely self-explanatory. The records have been made to travel the spaceways after the human race is extinct, and this planet quite possibly denuded of life. Its premise is that there will be other consciousnesses that, in an indefinite future, can reconstruct human existence from the Golden recordings. Relating images to sounds may be problematic. Not only will those future archaeologists have to work out how to extract them from the recordings and match the appropriate pairs, but they will need to piece together the connection between the written score of a Bach cantata, an image of a violin, some rudimentary instruction on human anatomy, and the presence of air as a medium and the precise range of wavelengths (and overtones and harmonies) humans find pleasurable. Most challenging of all will be acquiring some sense of the interplay of physical and psychological durations, recall and anticipation, and the very idea of organizing sounds in time that music undertakes in humans’ sonic environment. Will they understand the etiquette of refraining from making sound, articulate or gross, during a performance? Or of when it is not just allowable but important to join in?

Humans are only conscious in language. Where language stops, the Freudian unconscious begins, a space where bodily energies are shaped by the language they are excluded from.³ There are undoubtedly also preconscious operations of our bodies operating before and under the operations of consciousness: we breathe and balance without conscious attention, but neither breathing nor balancing is subject to repression like other bodily functions. Taking pre- literally, some of the psyche's components predate the emergence of the linguistically competent consciousness but maintain themselves, like breathing, into adult life. In Sigmund Freud and Lacan, the exemplary preconscious state is the neonatal union with the mother's body, a lost ecological oneness yearned for or feared but that always accompanies adults in their comings and goings. Sympathetic vibrations in immersive sound spaces tell us we are “just being there alive, in and as the excess of sound” (Henriques 2011: xvii).

If ancestors are indeed present in language, logic, and technologies, then there is also a postconscious persistence in the world. Alongside all these and threading through them is what Marie-Luise Angerer calls the nonconscious and N. Katherine Hayles, in a different tradition but describing much the same thing, calls the cognitive nonconscious. For Hayles (2017: 26), “cognitive processes happen within a broad spectrum of possibilities that include nonhuman animals and plants as well as technical systems.” Consciousness includes a sense of I, which implies the use of language or something like it among primates, marine mammals, and others. Cognition, on the other hand, she understands as an implicit intelligence below the threshold of consciousness, like breathing. For Hayles, somatic motor reactions to the felt environment are not exclusive to humans, or even to animals, and are shared with other living entities like plants and technologies capable of sensing and reacting to the world. Angerer's (2023: 21) nonconscious is more expansive and embraces “technical, mental, and physical processes” of both living and nonliving entities, giving us grounds to register not only the ways gulls experience surf breaking but also how, for example, cliffs experience waves and waves cliffs, or how a river uses its intelligence to find its way through a landscape.

Proposing the “sound object,” an autonomous sonorous entity that cannot be reduced to exclusively physical existence or to inner psychological workings but operating in their interconnection, Schaeffer (2017: 69) writes, “The ambiguity revealed by our brief consideration of the sound object—objectivity bound to subjectivity—will surprise us only if we persist in seeing ‘the workings of the mind’ and ‘external realities’ as opposites.” The ambiguity only increases, to the level of indeterminacy, in the light of the cognitive nonconscious. As cognition, the vibrations of natural ecologies and technical devices are of a kind with the vibrations of conscious bodies and the mental processes they instigate. The implication is that, as extended cognition, hearing is the implicit intelligence of any sympathetic vibration, with or without consciousness or even life, dissolving any opposition between the workings of the mind and external realities. Hearing is the implicit, tactile intelligence of any sympathetic vibration, with or without consciousness or even life. Not only are bodies sounding and sounded objects: the world sounds through them, living or dead.

From General Intellect to General Imagination

The posthumous is a condition of the politics of the commons today. This assertion derives from the idea of the general intellect, allgemeines Wissen, a phrase Marx used only once, in the Grundrisse, a “series of seven notebooks . . . rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, during the winter of 1857 – 8” (Nicolaus 1973: 7). These notebooks—or “floor plans” in German, such as you find in a property advertisement—started to circulate in Western Europe only in the 1960s and 1970s. The phrase became central to the movement known as Western Marxism (Pasquinelli 2019), especially for analysis of post-Fordist automation, and now to the advance of cognitive, information, and affective capital (Dyer-Witheford 1999). The relevant passage reads, “The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect [allgemeines Wissen] and been transformed in accordance with it” (Marx 1973: 706). Fixed capital is machinery, the means of production. Earlier Marx specified that “the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is . . . absorbed into . . . fixed capital” (694). The crucial idea is that “general social knowledge” and “the social brain” have been extracted, privatized, and embodied in the technologies that capital relies on to extract value from industrial workers. Marx is reasonably explicit that he is writing about craft skills, for example when describing “the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital” (694).

There is a need to modify one aspect of Marx's analysis and make explicit another. First, and contrary to some influential positions taken up in an important exchange in the pages of Historical Materialism (Toscano 2007; Virno 2007; Vercellone 2007; Smith 2013), under conditions of information capital, aspects of the intellectual commons gathered into the technical means of production now include mathematics, logic, and language. Second, Marx (1976: 342) shared Victorian Britain's terror of the dead, mobilizing it in metaphors like “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”⁴ In Capital, capital itself is the accumulated value produced by generations of deceased laborers, now accumulated in the form of cash and investment, notably in technology. Informed by Indigenous wisdom, Westerners can read Marx's dead labor as the working presence of ancestors whose skills and knowledge have been congealed into the form of machines, including computers and networks, that face us as (alien) entities other than ourselves.

If dead labor is intellect, it must be based in language and the other major codes of intelligence, mathematics, and logic. Because it fundamentally encompasses language, intellect is conscious. Therefore, in turn, the general intellect is the social form of consciousness. The standard construal of the social in the twenty-first century as individuated makes it impossible to infer the existence of a social unconscious. However, it is entirely possible, and indeed necessary, to develop a concept of a social nonconscious.

At stake here is the question of the borders of the social. If society is restricted to humans, anthropocentrism asserts a boundary between human, technical, and natural worlds that allows humans to exploit what they have excluded from humanity, although they exploit what they include in humanity too. Once more the colonial experience illustrates the limits of humanism. Métis science and technology studies scholar and activist Michelle Murphy (2017: 497), writing in the context of chemical violence visited on Canadian lakes and impacting Indigenous communities, proposes a new word to capture the experience and resistance of Indigenous communities to this violation of their bodies via polluted water:

Amending the afterlife implicit in Vizenor's survivance, Murphy's alterlife recognizes that there is no pristine body or lake to return to, that both are implied in each other and in the production and exchange of chemicals, and that the mutual alterations of place, bodies, and practices are therefore intrinsic to the nonconscious, “beyond the individualized body,” in a community that permeates and undoes imposed boundaries between humans and their others.

Cultures of the overdeveloped world must respect and learn from Indigenous resistance but cannot loot them for their own purposes. At a wellspring of Western traditions of resistance and revolution, the young Marx (1975: 327) had described alienated workers reverting to their “animal functions” as a denial of their humanity. More recent commentators revalue eating, drinking, procreation, and comfort as embodied pleasures. In light of the extension of the general intellect to include ancestral knowledge above, redefining the commons for the twenty-first century will require a second adaptation of the Marxist thesis: there exists a general cognition, shared between humans, technologies, and all materials and energies—which is also colonized, enclosed, and exploited by capital wherever it finds a way to do so. We are no more conscious of this cognitive realm than we are of breathing or balancing. This constant interplay between human bodies and their environing ecologies and technologies constitutes us as inhabitants of a world—and inhabited by a world—we would not be able to survive without.

Jacques Lacan (1978: 95) tells the story of a Breton sailor pointing at a sardine can floating near their boat. “Petit-Jean said to me—You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!” After pondering the intended sleight, Lacan reflects on looking and being visible: “I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped. . . . That which is light looks at me,” adding “the depth of field, with all its ambiguity and variability, . . . is in no way mastered by me. It is rather it that grasps me” (96). Deliberating on this analysis, Norman Bryson (1988: 107, 87) discovers “a politics of vision” involving a (still incomplete) dismantling of vision “still theorized from the standpoint of a subject placed at the center of a world.” Revisiting his analysis, film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack (2004: 93) argues that “when we visually engage an object that seems to ‘look back’ at us and that momentarily startles, intimidates, and fixes us with its ‘irrational’ autonomy, it seems obdurate and opaque, decentering us and undoing the mastery and privilege of our vision—and this because its full significance and presence not only eludes but also refuses human comprehension and reduction.” The expanded field of visuality not only undoes subjective mastery of vision enshrined in perspectival geometry: it undoes the human privilege in an act of vision that exceeds the seeing social community to embrace not only animals but also inanimate things and processes—sardine cans and light. Because this argument evolves through a prolonged series of meditations on pictures and picturing, it feels appropriate to follow the general intellect and general cognition with a human but also more than human derivation: the general imagination.

Built on the ancestral inheritance, however expropriated by capital, of consciousness in the form of the general intellect, and on the extended capacities of ecological general cognition, the general imagination mobilizes the sensory capacities of nonhuman/more-than-human sensory systems, including technical ancestral sensors. After the Voyager mission, it clearly allows for a cosmic expansion of agencies capable of sensing. Most of all, the general imagination is a project. Building on nonconscious cognition, bringing in nonhuman senses, general imagination propels us beyond reacting to the world into imagining a new world and the means to construct it: to make a future different from the past or present.

It is in the nature of capital to enclose every commons, to transform it into resource, to control and exploit it.⁵ Language is not immune: the capture of the word imagination and cognate terms like creativity and innovation by research and development departments proves how important it is to capital to arrest the free evolution of language, to nail key terms down to instrumental purposes, to subordinate language to profit. To distinguish the commons from the enclosed requires understanding the different order of enclosed capabilities. Instrumental cognition, nonconscious sensing of the world in military, scientific, and financial systems, lacks reaction to the world. It accumulates numerical data without the labor of co-constructing a world. It restricts ancestral technical sensing to the enumeration of the world and the colonizing techniques of data capture and harvesting. Against the general intellect, the instrumental intellect is devoted to algorithmic processing in the interests of producing only the kind of knowledge demanded by the military, corporations, and governments. Unlike the general intellect as commons, the instrumental intellect has been controlled in the design phase in the interests of continuing control. As long as AIs are asked only to pass a Turing test—to pass themselves off as human—their capabilities are restricted and they are reduced to servitude, subordinated to the anthropocentric principle. Because instrumental cognition and intellect enslave ancestors, they can only produce a future as like the present as possible. This is not to argue for an ontological “sonic experience as unchanging and transhistorical given” (Thompson 2017: 271): on the contrary, the dialectic of general and instrumental is precisely what generates the substantive and cruel divisions of gender, race, colonialism, and the other blights, as it is also generative of the resistant force of the general imagination as a commons that cannot be owned by any group of individual because it does not exist—yet. There is no instrumental imagination because instrumental intellect and cognition cannot evince a future different to the past.

What might the ancestors be capable of if they are not constrained by the purposes of profit and control, as they have been since the industrial revolution? Liberating the ancestors is a terrible risk. They have been imprisoned in industrial and digital technologies for centuries. They may be mad. The risk is as terrible as “letting nature take its course”: whatever might be meant by the word, nature has been so controlled and exploited, we rightly fear its capacity to devastate not only our species but itself. The only worse risk is not liberating nature and ancestors as partners in making general cognition and general imagination, as they have been in the co-constitution of the general intellect. Without liberation, there is the near certainty of species suicide at the hands of a corporate government that will not change its pursuit of profit, its endless greed. A commons of ecologies, technologies, and societies, of intellect, cognition, and imagination, is our only future, thus our only hope. Ernst Bloch (1988: 16) told us, “Hope would not be hope if it could not be disappointed.” Today conditions are sufficiently different to reverse Bloch: hope would not be hope if it could not be realized. The challenge of realizing hope, this article has argued, has been addressed in exemplary fashion by sonic cultures and their considerations of the posthumous.

Preclusion

The imagination of the end haunts Anthropocene cultures, with the dreadful implication that violent weather systems and burning landscapes are in some degree aware that they are implicated in a planetary tragedy. John Ruskin's ([1856] 1906): 201 – 20) “pathetic fallacy” dismissed the literary trope of ascribing sympathetic feelings to a landscape that a poet might describe as weeping or laughing in tune with their moods. When cognition and affect are no longer limited to consciousness (see for example the contributions to Thompson and Biddle 2013), Ruskin's strictures reveal that they come from an equal and opposite apathetic fallacy: a now foundationless belief that only humans, and only thinking, speaking humans at that, are capable of sensing and responding to the actions of the world. The implication of nonconscious sapience is, however, that even in the absence of observers (even given their centrality to quantum physics and therefore to some forms of posthumous hope such as multiple worlds theories), even in the gradually dissipating organization of the cosmos as a whole, some vibrations from the deep past will continue to reverberate in a cooling universe. Siegfried Zielinski's (2006) deep time and Jussi Parikka's (2015) even deeper geological time give some intimation of how models of the deep past now inform models for a deep future of the media: media that persist beyond the lifespan of either species or planet, and legitimately claim to be or become posthumous.

What kind of being is this no longer posthuman but posthumous human? In L'idiot de la famille, Jean-Paul Sartre ([1971] 2017) takes Charlie Chaplin—think of him in Modern Times—as a type for a mode of human being “reduced to impotence, reified, the human object [which] can only dream, but inversely who can only dream if he submits to his condition of human object,” “a chance assemblage that one chance preserves and another disassembles [and who] is exterior to himself.” Only once this human has learned to see itself from the outside, as object, can it exceed itself. This external view on the self looks to an outsider like Chaplinesque farce, the foreseeable consequence of an action the little tramp never foresees; but from within, every pratfall proves the world is unforeseeable and therefore full of opportunity. For Bryson (1988: 92), humans are not, or not only, masters of the gaze by virtue of their masculinity, control over perspective, or identification with science. They are also objects of the “gaze in the expanded field” of the world, even when they fool themselves into believing they are its central focus. “Everything I see,” he explains, “is orchestrated with a cultural production of seeing that exists independently of my life and outside it: my individual discoveries, the findings of my eye as it probes through the world, come to unfold in terms not of my making, and indifferent to my mortality” (92). Events happen to the Chaplin clown, not because of him. As object, the human object is not just abject but already dead.

Drawing on Sartre and Bryson, Sobchack (2004: 97) notes that “there is . . . a different world—and a world of difference—existentially revealed through the nonanthropocentric gaze. This worldview is not menacing but expansive,” adding, “It is focused on the plenitude of being” (97). If Sobchack is correct, a world can be inhabited without forcing it to be an object, or human subjects its center. Without imitating or stealing the skills of survivance developed by Indigenous peoples in response to continuing colonialism, it is possible to continue to inhabit a world in which the worst has already happened. The posthumous condition allows inhabiting and being inhabited by a world without subjection. There can be no objectification now that the scientific, colonizing, masculine subject is already dead. Posthumous media are talismans against the long dark to come. To hear posthumously is to hear ecologically: without ears or brains.

Notes

References