The Magic of the Bell

How Networks of Social Actors Create Cultural Beings

A Working Paper by William L. Benzon • 2015

1

The Magic of the Bell:

How Networks of Social Actors Create Cultural Beings

William Benzon

April 2015 Abstract: It is well known that music can engender altered states of consciousness that are difficult to interpret scientifically except as odd malfunctions in the nervous system. In this paper I report a phenomenon known among some musicians as “the magic of the bell”: the emergence of high-pitched twittering sounds when a group is playing interlocking rhythms on different bells. These sounds cannot be attributed to any of the musicians and they emerge only when the group is a group is playing bells with passion and precision. I argue that those sounds arise through interpersonal coupling among the musicians and that the ‘naïve’ temptation to attribute them to a ‘spirit’ or ‘spirits’ can be reconciled with a close description that does not presuppose non-physical entities. Those spirits should be conceived as the embodiment of non-mysterious and physically coherent group process. This argument has ramifications for how we think of time and how we think of longer cycles of group life. Introduction: Composing Strange Objects ....................................................................................... 2 Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind ....................................................................................... 3 Time and Again, the Curse of Linear Time ...................................................................................... 7 How to Compose a Spirit ............................................................................................................... 13 Explain or Explain Away? Composition and Cultural Beings ....................................................... 15 Bibliographical References ............................................................................................................ 18

1301 Washington St., Apt. 311 Hoboken, NJ 07030

bbenzon@mindspring.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

2

The Magic of the Bell: How Networks of Social Actors Create Cultural Beings

William L. BENZON

Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of

infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.

—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”

In lieu of an environment that surrounds culture . . . picture an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.

—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Introduction: Composing Strange Objects This essay is doubly grounded. One foot rests on an experience I had some years ago in a basement in Troy, New York, while rehearsing with three colleagues: Ade1, Druis, and Fonda. We were each of us playing bells when at some point we heard high-pitched twittering sounds that none of us were playing. Where did they come from? What were they?

I can easily imagine how someone might think they were hearing a spirit or spirits. The Western scientific impulse–where my other foot rests–is quite different. We know that spirits do not exist and therefore there must be some other, some physically plausible, account of those twittering sounds.

My objective here is see whether or not I can push our conceptual resources a bit and thereby make a plausible argument that those twittering sounds were spirits in some significant sense. To do so I will insist on treating the sounds and their performance context as a single unified entity. Without that context, which of course includes the performers, then, yes, those sounds are just sounds. If we had recorded that rehearsal, only the sounds would be in the recording, but not the spirits of which they are manifestations. For those spirits are intermingled with the performers and are not physically separable from them.

The sounds happened only when we were in a focused state of mind. The sounds existed only through our collective interaction. It is that collectivity as it “attaches” itself to the sounds that I am calling a spirit. The sounds are an audible manifestation of a special and temporary relationship among the four of us. It is that relationship-in-the-sound that is the spirit.

If that sounds a bit obscure and hard to grasp, well it is. It will take the rest of this essay to clarify that formulation. I can say one more thing, however, by way of clarification. When I talk of a spirit or spirits I am not talking about flighty immaterial beings that exist in some ethereal realm “out there” and visit us mortal humans only on special occasions. When I talk of spirits I mean only the sounds and the actions experienced by the four of us in the process of making those sounds.

By way of identifying my most recent conceptual influences I note that I drafted this essay while under the influence of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010), Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (2011), and Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), and other works. I thus regard those spirits as fully real, as real as the sun, New York Bay, complex numbers, a caterpillar, a benzene ring, or the British Parliament. They are real, but also socially constructed, as is the atomic theory of matter. As Latour insists, the fact that some object

1 This is Eddie “Adenola” Knowles, who was an original member of Gil Scott-Heron’s Magic Band; he toured and recorded with the band for seven years early in his career. At the time of this session he was Dean of Students at The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

3

of thought is socially constructed does not mean that it is not real. To arrive at such a judgment we must consider whether or not the thinking has been done well. The atomic theory of matter is so constructed; phlogiston theory, not so well.

I will argue that those sounds Ade, Druis, Fonda and I heard while playing can properly be construed as a manifestation of a spirit. But they are constructed by different means and to different ends than the atomic theory of matter. The purpose of this essay is simply to describe that construction.

In the first of four sections, Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind, I talk about how one plays a simple percussion instrument and then retell the experience of those spirit sounds. The second section deals with time and how, if we think of time in terms of brain states, time no longer appears as a linear succession on instants. The third section recaps the first, looks at some anthropological work on spirit possession, and goes about outlining the details of construction. The fourth and final section considers the difference between explaining these spirits and explaining them away.

But, as I have said above, this essay is not a recipe for making non-physical flitty things that fly around here and there. THAT’s old hat. What I’m up to is a bit stranger and a bit more difficult. And, I submit, more interesting as well. Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind It is well known that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why is it named at all? Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It is one of his voices; it is, in some sense, part of him.

It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You cannot dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. Your musicianship suffers.

As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing one for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.

Let us begin by talking about playing a very simple instrument, the claves. The claves are a pair of short sticks that tend to be roughly eight inches long and an inch in diameter. They’re used in many genres of Latin music to produce a sharp penetrating percussive sound. They’re usually made of hard dense wood. Mine are made of fiberglass (see Fig. 1). You hold one clave in your left hand and then strike it with the other one, held in your right hand (if you’re right handed).

Figure 1. Claves.

4

It’s more like you cradle one clave (it doesn’t matter which one) in your left hand. You hold your hand palm-up, lay the clave across it, and grip it only so much as needed to keep it in place. You do not need to grip it tightly, nor do you even WANT to grip it tightly. If you do that, then your hand will dampen the vibrations and dull the sound. The ‘crack!’ will no longer be sharp and crisp.

You must of course grip the other clave to keep it from falling to the ground. But, and here is the subtlety, you do WANT it to fall, which is its natural behavior under gravity. It should fall toward the stationary clave and rebound from it. The quicker the two sticks separate after impact, the sharper and louder the sound. There’s nothing you can do with your will and muscle that is more effective than simply getting out of the way. Let natural elasticity do its work.

Use your right hand to regulate how the clave falls. In effect, you’re dropping the clave and using your right hand to follow the fall. For a soft sound, start the fall close to the target clave. If you start the fall further away, you’ll get a louder sound. For a still louder sound, you can impart energy to the clave with your hand. Now you ARE gripping it and dominating it, but just a bit.

Played in this way it is easy to get a loud satisfying crack from the claves with little effort, an important consideration if you’re playing a four or five hour gig. But, if you don’t know this, if you have never been shown or never figured it out, you can exert considerably more effort playing the claves, and get much less sound from that effort.

I witnessed that several years ago when I was working with a street band in New York City. I played trumpet most of the time, but had some bells and the claves for people to pick up and join the band. One young man who said he was a drummer wanted to play the claves. I gave them to him and away he went.

He gripped each clave hammer-style, and then banged the free ends together with fairly considerable force. He hit them so hard that he managed to knock small chips out of them. These claves were made of fiberglass specifically so they could withstand hard use; that’s why I bought them. And yet the man managed to knock chips out of them while not getting much sound out of them at all. As I recall, he noticed that himself and was frustrated, but the situation wasn’t one where I could stop what I was doing and give him a clave lesson in mid-performance. Nor was it obvious to me that he would have gotten the lesson quickly. He seemed determined to demonstrate his will and enthusiasm by expending maximum effort.

The point, then, is that technique matters, and that just what and how it matters is not immediately obvious. The musician must assimilate the instrument to their body schema and play it as though it were their own body. Just what that entails will vary from one instrument to another. For example, the physical aspects of playing the trumpet (my main instrument) are quite different from playing the claves; they are more difficult to conceptualize as they involve the mouth (lips, teeth and tongue); the arms, hands, and fingers; and the trunk and breathing apparatus. But we don’t need to deal with all that, as my primary example is very much like the claves.

It involves playing bells, such as those in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3. You hold the bell or bells in one hand and a beater, often an ordinary drum stick, in the other. But the bells give you more options than the clave; they have more affordances, to use a term from the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson (1979). Exactly where and how hard you hit matters, as does just how you grip the bell. You can also damp the sound with your fingers or by lowering the bell to your thigh (when playing while seated).

5

Fig. 2. Ghanaian bell (top) and cowbell (bottom).

Fig. 3. Agogô bells.

The bells really get interesting when played in a group, for now you have multiple bell sounds interacting with one another. I’ve described how this works in Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 23-24). This paragraph describes the basic phenomenon:

This is a story about me and three other musicians. Led by Ade Knowles, we were rehearsing a piece based on Ghanaian musical principles. Each of us had a bell with two or three heads on it—the bells were of Ghanaian manufacture. Ade assigned three of us simple interlocking rhythms to play and then improvised over the interlocking parts. Once the music got going, melodies would emerge which no one was playing. The successive tones one heard as a melody came first from one bell then another and another. No person was playing that melody; it arose from cohesions in the shifting pattern of tones played by the ensemble. Depending on the patterns he played, Ade

6

could direct the tonal stream perceived as the melody, but the tones he played weren't necessarily the melody tones. Rather, they served to direct the melodic cohesions from place to place.

Those emergent melodies are important. They were and are clear and obvious, a single discrete stream of tones where the individual tones were played by different individuals rather than all of them being played by a single individual.2 Because no one person was playing every note in these emergent melody lines, we can take these lines as a phenomenon and expression of group unity. Indeed, if I understand object-oriented ontology rightly (Harmon 2011, Morton 2013), we can take the group, and its total sound, as an object in its own which cannot be reduced to the sum of its component parts, the individual musicians playing individual lines on individual bells.

In fact, those interlocking and emergent lines in African bell choirs and drum choirs have posed considerable problems for ethnomusicologists (Arom 1991). It is all but impossible to figure out what the individual lines are simply by listening to the whole. At the same time, it is difficult for individual musicians to play a single line without the support of the whole group (Chernoff 1979, pp. 51-53).

Think about those two related phenomena for a moment. The auditory array has a segmentation that is natural to the human ear, but that segmentation doesn’t divide the array into streams each of which is executed by a single individual. At the same time individuals cannot properly execute his or her own component without hearing the others with which it is interlinked. It is not merely that the array is being created by a group, but that the group seems to have entered the mind of each individual so that individual actions require group support and the individual actors one hears, the auditory streams, are the product of group action.

Let’s get back to those bells. Now the event gets even more subtle and interesting (Benzon 2001, p. 24):

Occasionally, something quite remarkable would happen. When we were really locked together in animated playing we could hear relatively high-pitched tones that no one was playing. That is, while each bell had a pitch tendency (these bells were not precisely tuned), these particular high tones did not match the pitch tendency of any bell. The tones were distinct, but not ones that any of us appeared to be playing.

These tones only appeared when we were in the state of relaxation conducive to intense playing, a groove, if you will—a groove I could certainly feel as a “buzz” in my body. Without the relaxation, no emergent tones and melodies. According to Ade, that's how it always is. The “magic” of the bell happens only when the musicians are in a groove. My friend Jon Barlow tells me that a similar phenomenon is familiar to people who gather together and chant long tones in unison. When the chanting is going well, and only then, the chanters hear distinct and relatively high-pitched tones that seem to be located near the room’s ceiling.

It is those magic tones (for what it is worth, about 2000 Herz and above), tones played by no one at all, but emerging through the group to form their own auditory stream, that is what I want you to think about—I certainly did, for years, and I am still thinking about them. If I hadn’t ‘known better’ I would have said, straight up, that they were spirit voices, or some such thing. But I believed then, and now, that such spirits do not and cannot exist.

If I couldn’t call them spirit voices then what could I call them? I searched for written accounts of the phenomenon, but could find none, though I found

accounts of similar phenomenon. I made inquiries of other musicians, ethnomusicologists, and experts in psychoacoustics. No one was familiar with the phenomenon; though some offered an opinion that the sounds may well have been real sounds that one could pick up with microphones and record on tape. That’s what I think, too. But none of us really knows. 2 Streaming is a well-known acoustic phenomenon and refers to the fact the tones tend to cohere to one another so as to be perceived as a single stream from a single source (Bregman 1990).

7

The phenomenon remains something a puzzle. Given that, I will proceed by attempting to construe those sounds as ‘spirit voices’. Not that I

think that explains anything, for it doesn’t. But I am not after explanation. Following Bruno Latour (2005), I am after description, a description that I have been constructing, step by careful step. The critical move in my construction will be to follow Latour in dropping the foundational line between man and Nature that emerged in the West on the eve of the scientific revolution. That line would have us put those magic tones ‘out there’ in the world, next to thunder claps, bird song, and the sound of an automobile engine. Thus isolated from the musicians who produced them, those sounds become either dead sounds or an inexplicable mystery. We need to do better.

Latour has convinced me that the line between man and Nature is an ideological formation. It arose in certain circumstances to enable certain modes of thought and action. On the whole it has served us well. But it is now in the way; we need to get over it so that we can provide an account of those high-pitched sounds that is true to both the phenomenology of the experience and to our knowledge of the physics of sound and the operations of the human body and nervous system. Time and Again, the Curse of Linear Time One of the few things I still remember from having read Marshall McLuhan years ago is a remark on time, something about living in a culture—I forget which—where time is marked by burning sticks of incense. How different that must be from our culture.

And how strange we are, wearing, as many of us do, electromechanical amulets, aka wristwatches, which mark the passage of time down to the second, and often less. The time we so mark is, in some contexts, known as clock time. Certainly, in this context that is what I will call it.

These amulets are conceptually linked to a scheme that conceives of time as linear. This line of clock time extends back into the past to the beginning of the universe and forward until, well, whenever. Time is a line, moment after moment after moment after moment, etc., a containing in which events float, or a frame through which we examine them.

At the same time, there are these myths and stories of time as circular, not to mention Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return. But what if time really were circular? Or, at least, not linear? How could that be? Could the presence of those linearizing amulets make us insensitive to temporal circularity?

That question became very real to me when I was working on Beethoven’s Anvil. There I had to think about the brain and its states. And that is very tricky.

I had decided to follow Walter Freeman’s (1995, 1999, 2000) approach to neurodynamics. Freeman thinks about brain states like a physicist thinks about the state of, say, a volume of gas. In this way of thinking the state of a physical system is a function of the state of each component of that system. So, the state of some volume of gas can be specified by noting the position and velocity of each molecule. If there are 100 trillion molecules in some volume, then you need the position and velocity for each of those molecules. Practically speaking, though, you don’t; that information isn’t available. We have no way of measuring the state of a volume of gas with that precision. But the underlying math is about that kind of object, position and velocity for each particle.3

What happens if we think about brains in those terms? First we have to identify a unit component. The choice is not an arbitrary one, but we don’t know enough about the brain to be sure just what the appropriate unit object is. The individual neuron often plays this role, but one might choose, instead, the synapse (a connection between neurons). For our purposes it makes no difference. Either way, there are a very large number of such unit objects. We have no way of 3 For an informal introduction to such concepts, see Benzon (2014), where I demonstrate self-organization in a simple physical system, a glass of water into which I introduce a few drops of ink, and then follow what happens for several hours, taking photographs at various intervals.

8

directly counting the neurons in the nervous systems, but estimates put the number at roughly 66 billion (Williams and Herrup 1988) with an average of 10,000 synapses per neuron (Sporns 2014). To specify the brain’s state at a given moment in clock time we need to know the state of each unit component, such as a neuron. One convenient way to do this is to say that a neuron is either firing or it is not. So it can have two states. Neurons are complicated things; each is a living cell with the full complement of machinery that that requires. There’s a lot more to a neuron that whether or not it’s firing. But for the sake of discussion let us work with a brain that has only two neurons, and each of them can have only two states. So, our impossibly small brain can be in only one of four states: OO OX XO XX.

Now let us track this brain’s actions through time where we might find the sequence of states depicted in Figure 4, where the left-hand column numbers the individual clock moments while the right-hand column indicates the brain’s state at the moment. I have listed eight moments of clock time, and this little brain has only been flipping between the four states available to it. So, it’s been in OO state for three of those clock moments (1, 2, and 5), OX for one (3), XO for two (6 and 7), and XX for two (4 and 9).

Fig. 4. Table showing succession of states of a simple nervous system.

The next (and somewhat complicated) diagram (Fig. 5) presents the same information in a

different form. Each possible brain state is indicated by a node. The arrows going from one node to another, or from one node to itself, indicate the transitions from one state to another. The labels on the arrow indicate the “from” state (lower number) and “to” state (larger number). The point of the diagram is to make it quite clear that, however many units of clock time elapse, this brain can only move between four states. Over a long series of moments it will thus loop back through each possible state many times.

9

Fig. 5. Network depicting transitions between states of a simple nervous system.

Now, if this was your brain, and you were thus living those states, and you didn’t have a clock-time amulet on your wrist, how would you experience time? I doubt that you would find time to be linear. (Well, if you want to get picky, then you would observe that, with such a small brain, you can’t remember anything, so you won’t remember that you’ve been in this state before. You’ll just BE in one state at a time.)

The point is that, if the mind IS what a brain DOES, and the brain only has four available states, then that’s all the states that mind can have. You can, from outside, clock it through state after state, but that’s meaningless to that mind itself. All that nanomind is doing is flipping from one of its four states to another. That’s ALL it can do. Physically, that’s ALL there is.

Now that is the conceptual game I want to play with a real brain, because it has proven to be a useful way of thinking about real brains. That means we are dealing with trillions and trillions of possible states. Physical states, every last one of them. One after the other, in clock time. But what if some of those states repeat and do so regularly? In a sense, the brain would be looping through time, real physical looping through time.

In this thought experiment, then, we’ve got two moments of clock time, moment 26,104,638 and moment 26,197,753 (see Fig. 6). And our brain is at the same state in each of those moments, say 7J63ΩΩ∂, but it doesn’t visit that state at any point between those two moments. We might say, then, that when the brain reaches moment 26,197,753, that it loops back in time to 26,104,638.

10

Fig. 6. Brain states at specific moments of clock time.

As far as our brain is concerned, moments 26,104,638 and 26,197,753 are one and the same.

Is it as though no time has passed between them? Of course not. But, subjectively, how can you tell?

You might ask: What happens if, at moment 26,197,753, with state 7J63ΩΩ∂, our brain remembers something that happened in moment 26,172,987? Well, then it would no longer be in state 7J63ΩΩ∂, would it?

This is a tricky game, we’re playing, very tricky. And it needs to be played by tighter rules, rules I don’t know how to specify; but then I’m not sure anyone does. Think of it as a thought experiment in phenomenological psychophysics and put it in phenomenological brackets. Let us play with it some more.

Let us push the game a step further into the uncanny. Imagine that, when you are fully absorbed by a piece of music, whether listening to it, performing it, or composing it, that that piece of music fully specifies your brain state. That implies two things: 1) If you become absorbed by that music on two different days, then those two moments of absorption are phenomenologically one and the same moments. You have looped in time. 2) If that piece of music was written by Beethoven, and you are not Beethoven, for the duration of your absorption there is no effective difference between you and Beethoven. Phenomenologically, you are the same individual. You are participating in the same trajectory of mental states.

With that in mind, let us consider a passage by the late Wayne Booth in For the Love of It (1999), which is based on his experiences as an amateur cello player, an avocation he shared with his wife as well. In November of 1969 they were grieving the premature death of their son. In the process of “trying, sometimes successfully, to regain his lost affirmation of life” Booth began drafting a book about life, death, and music. Concerning a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, he said (pp. 195-96):

Leaving the rest of the audience aside for a moment, there were three of us there: Beethoven... the quartet members counting as one....Phyllis and me, also counting only as one whenever we really listened ...Now then: there that “one” was, but where was “there”? The C-sharp minor part of each of us was fusing in a mysterious way....[contrasting] so sharply with what many people think of as “reality.” A part of each of the “three” ... becomes identical.

There is Beethoven, one hundred and forty-three years ago ... writing away at the marvelous theme and variations in the fourth movement. ... Here is the four-players doing the best it can to make the revolutionary welding possible. And here we am, doing the best we can to turn our “self” totally into it: all of us impersonally slogging away (these tears about my son’s death? ignore them, irrelevant) to turn ourselves into that deathless quartet.

11

Each aspect of that account—the merging of selves, the separation from everyday time and space—has a physical interpretation in the models and constructions I proposed in Beethoven’s Anvil. If Heraclitus was wrong, as the above discussion suggests, and we can step into the same stream time after time, it makes little difference whether those steps are separated by two days of mundane time, or a century and a half. If distinctions between one self and another are lost in this stream, then it makes little difference that it was Beethoven then and Wayne Booth and his wife in 1969.

So, imagine an idealized group of, say, 35 people. Every so often they get together to sing and dance together, all of them, children adults and infants. Each time they sing the same songs, dance the same steps. Between those sessions each goes about his or her business, in twos and threes, and sixes and, yes, alone as well.

Could we not say that the life of this group loops through time such that, when they’re singing and dancing together, it’s always the same time, the same region in temporal space if you will? Can we think of that moment as a psycho-cultural home base?

And is that not how religions often operate? Christians celebrate once a week on Sunday; Jews celebrate once a week on Saturday. Not everyone attends regularly, and some attend services on other days as well. Still, to a first approximation one might visualize a congregation’s psychic life like this:

Fig. 7. The Sabbath as psycho-cultural home base.

We can think of the plane in general as representing the group’s psychic space. The central

region, the Sabbath, is the group’s psycho-cultural home base. Just as the young infant regards her mother as home base and lives her young life moving away from and returning home to

12

mother (Bowlby 1969), so I am suggesting that we can conceptualize a group’s psychic life in the same way.

Consider the case of Christmas music in the United States and, I assume, at least some of the other countries where Christmas is the occasion for major social activity of various kinds. I am thinking in particular about the way Christmas music runs together in my mind’s ear. All of those songs, traditional carols (e.g. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”), popular songs about Christmas, (.e.g. “White Christmas”), and particular pieces of classical music (e.g. the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah) run together like threads in a ball of yarn; you pull one, and all of them come out together, one after the other in no particular order. That’s an annual cycle. Beyond, that there is quadrennial presidential election cycle in the United States which, to a Martian anthropologist, would appear to be a species of religious ritual. It’s not merely that these events occur at regular intervals as marked on the linear time of a calendar, but that certain events always occur at those intervals so that those cycles become “written” into our nervous system and the closely related endocrine systems, which are also coupled to seasonal variation in length of days and types of weather.

If those neural states constitute our psychic being, then that being would seem to be cyclic on various time scales, from the seconds-long scale that defines musical structure up through weekly cycles defined by work and worship, to annual and even longer cyclers, variously defined by typical society-wide events and practices. One might say that, well, sure, but that’s just a metaphor. A metaphor, yes, but not just a metaphor. Given the prior discussion of brain states, I suggest that we are dealing with something that is both physically real, in terms of the nervous systems of members in the group, and psycho-culturally real, for it is in these central psycho-cultural spaces that basic values are re-affirmed and bonds between group members are strengthened (cf. Freeman 1995, 2000). From my point of view, we have only just begun to understand these phenomena in fully contemporary physical and scientific terms.

Beyond this, we need to think about time itself, for I’ve come to believe that “clock time” is something of an illusion. It is shorthand we can use for all sorts of practical purposes, but when thinking ontologically, clock time does not exist. When thinking ontologically, I’m with Timothy Morton: “Viscosity is a feature of the way in which time emanates from objects, rather than being a continuum in which they float” (2013 p. 33).

What does this mean: “time emanates from objects”? In the phenomena we are considering the object consists of the entire social group along with whatever devices are involved. In the case of those magical bell tones we’re talking about four people plus the bells and beaters. In the case of a social group and its weekly cycles we’re talking about the individuals in the group and all the plants, animals, artifacts and devices involved in those cycles, the entire actor network (to use Latour’s term) of the society. Along with Morton I am suggesting that time emanates from the whole assemblage and is not merely a container in which things happen.

The position that Morton has taken on time, and that I am taking as well, has roots in Aristotle (Markosian 2014):

Aristotle and others (including, especially, Leibniz) have argued that time does not exist independently of the events that occur in time. This view is typically called either “Reductionism with Respect to Time” or “Relationism with Respect to Time,” since according to this view, all talk that appears to be about time can somehow be reduced to talk about temporal relations among things and events.

That is time as it exists in the process of playing bell rhythms or celebrating a Roman Catholic mass.

The opposing view is time as we use it to tell people when a mass is being performed or when the New African Music Collective (through group Ade, Druis, Fonda and I had formed) will be performing:

13

The opposing view, normally referred to either as “Platonism with Respect to Time” or as “Substantivalism with Respect to Time” or as “Absolutism with Respect to Time,” has been defended by Plato, Newton, and others. On this view, time is like an empty container into which things and events may be placed; but it is a container that exists independently of what (if anything) is placed in it.

Let me go a bit further and suggest that we are dealing with different regimes of time, where each regime is typical of particular class of objects. Clock time belongs to the regime of electromechanical objects. Those objects and their temporal behavior are sufficiently different from living beings, and societies of living beings, that it is easy for us to use clock time as a tool for measuring various phenomena of living beings. But it would be a mistake to think that the temporality of living beings can or should be reduced to that of inanimate objects. It cannot. How to Compose a Spirit We began this paper with musical sounds, the repetition of the claves, the sounds of bells, and in particular, certain mysterious high-pitched twittering sounds that arose during a certain rehearsal I attended some years ago. As I explained, there were four of us, each playing a different bell. Three of us played set patterns, time and again, while the fourth improvised freely over those patterns. At a certain point, when energy was high and the music was rocking, we all heard these high twittering sounds that one of us was playing. They somehow arose through the interaction of the patterns the four of us played.

I want to explore what is involved in asserting that they are some kind of spirit. Conceptually, we are going to describe them–indeed, we have already been describing them–in physical terms and assert that description characterizes something than can properly be termed a spirit. Let me further suggest that that physical description bears the same relation to the informal notion of a spirit as the concept of sodium chloride bears to the common sense notion of salt (Benzon 1991). The common sense notion of salt is defined in immediate sensory terms: shape, color, and taste. Sodium chloride is a technical notion that is defined in terms of atoms and the bonds between them, things we cannot see but which we know to exist. People have known about salt for thousands of years. Sodium chloride has only been recently conceptualized in human history.

The two concepts, “salt” and “sodium chloride”, have roughly the same extension in the world, though we should keep in mind that sodium chloride is, by definition, a pure chemical substance while salt (such as one uses in cooking) will inevitably contain traces of substances other than sodium chloride. The two things, salt and sodium chloride, are conceptualized quite differently, but are more or less coextensive physically. So, I am arguing, it is with spirits in the ordinary sense, and spirits in the more technical sense that I have been developing in this essay. Conceptually they are different, but they refer to pretty much the same state of affairs in the world.

So, just what is it that we are trying to explain? We can begin answering the question by proposing to draw a boundary. The easiest place to

draw the boundary–dare I say it?–the natural place, is around the sound itself. If we had had a sound recorder playing during that session, bounding the phenomenon in this way would be very easy. What we’re interested in would be what’s on the recording; nothing more, nothing less.

Then we could examine the recording to determine just what those pitches were like, their dominant frequency, just when they happened, and so forth. That is to say, we would be treating those sounds as nothing but mechanical vibrations, which we are examining in the ways standard to the investigation of ‘natural’ phenomena, things ‘out there’ in the world. This is, of course, an entirely legitimate thing to do. It’s done all the time.

But that is not the phenomenon that interests me. That is not where I want to draw the boundary. That is only one feature of the phenomenon that interests me. It is the feature that tells

14

me that there’s something else going on. And that something else is happening in the minds and bodies that are putting the bells in motion.

Remember my description? I said that this happened when the energy was high and the music rocked. That doesn’t always happen. It is not rare, but it is not automatic either, and for some purposes it’s neither necessary nor desired. So high rocking energy, that’s within the boundary of the phenomenon I am now talking about.

Just where and how do we draw that boundary? That would seem to require that the entire group, all for of us, be inside the boundary. What matters is not simply the sound, but the ensemble responsible for that sound.

Even so, when the boundary is drawn that way, the boundary isn’t tight enough, not precise enough. For those twitterings didn’t always happen when the music rocked. They happened only that one time, though, as I indicated in the earlier post, Ade (the leader) recognized the phenomenon. He had experienced it before, but the others of us had not. Ade was (and is) a very experienced percussionist. He had toured and performed professionally in his youth and has a wide circle of musician friends, including drummers expatriated from West Africa. He knew those sounds, and simply called them “the magic of the bell.”

Other than the sounds themselves, what’s the difference between rocking music and magic music? Whatever that difference is, I will call it spirit. That spirit “emerged” from the full ensemble, but only at a certain time and under special conditions that we do not know how to specify. I assume, however, that those conditions could be specified in terms of the motions of our bodies and the neuromuscular activity needed to support those motions. I am thus excluding the possibility of some ethereal being entering into the music making from some other “dimension” or “spirit realm”. If we are going to understand what happened, the place to look is in the micro-timings of our movements and in the neural activity in subcortical regions of our brains, perhaps even in the core of the core of the brain, the reticular activity system and, certainly, in the cerebellum. In particular, we need to consider the relationship between those timings and the physics of those bell sounds. For those sounds are not simple; they have many components, as do most sounds. I’m guessing that those twittering sounds emerge when components in the sounds of different bells interact with one another in a constructive way so that those components are heard as distinct tones rather than as “colors” in the overall sonic array. That is where I think the action is, but that is no more than an educated guess.

So in saying that those twitterings are manifestations of spirit, I am, in effect, projecting some subtle group-level neuro-muscular activity onto sounds themselves, where those sounds serve as a diagnostic indicator of the phenomenon. To say that those twitterings are spirits, or voices of spirits, is to speak figuratively, where the figure is synecdoche, using the part (the twitter sounds) to stand for the whole (group locked in very intense musical activity).

Now, let us increase the conceptual ante. There are musically driven ceremonies all over the world in which people are said to become possessed by spirits. Such ceremonies have been observed and documented in photographs, sound recordings, film and video. The details of these ceremonies differ from place to place, but the central phenomenon is the same: some person or persons become possessed by some other being.

These other beings are generally well known to the community. They have been entering people for generations. Often many such beings will be known in a community with different people being devotees of different spirits. Let us turn to Gilbert Rouget’s classic Music and Trance (1985 p. 325). There are many rituals where the principal celebrants are said to become possessed by a spirit. These celebrants are not themselves making music. They are dancing to music made by others:

The trance itself, in other words the period during which the subject settles himself, so to say, into his other persona and totally coincides with it, has, on the contrary, quite a stable relation to music...Here the function of the music is obvious. It is due to the music, and because he is

15

supported by the music, that the possessed person publicly lives out, by means of dance, his identification with the divinity he embodies. The music ... is essentially identificatory. By playing his “motto” [a rhythm characteristic of a particular divinity], the musicians notify this identity to the entranced dancer, those around him, the priests, and the spectators....Music thus appears as the principal means of socializing trance.

Rouget was thinking about social function, not neural foundations. The celebrant identifies with the divinity, and that divinity is signaled by characteristics of the music that are specific to the divinity. The music functions as a vehicle for a collective intentionality, one that slips beneath the barriers of individuality and the imperatives of autonomous selves. In music thus shared, my rhythms and your rhythms are the same. And thus we are the one in spirit if not in body.

Spirit possession is thus quite different from the bell spirits I have been talking about. For one thing, in the particular case of bell spirits, none of the four musicians were raised and socialized in a bell-playing culture. Hence, perhaps, the adventitious nature of the phenomenon. It was a one-time occurrence because none of us was raised in a culture where such experiences are available almost at will.

For another, there was no possession. We all retained our individuated identities. No one disappeared into a spirit identity.

Thus, an adequate explanation of the bell spirits is not likely to extend to spirit possession. But it might help, because it will be an explanation about how music works, and it will have details about timing, timing of the sounds, timing of motor activity, and details about the nervous system, in particular, about those parts responsible for elevated mood. Similar factors will, I believe, play a role in any explanation of spirit possession. What would such an explanation be like? Explain or Explain Away? Composition and Cultural Beings We don’t know. What interests me, however, is making a difference between explaining and explaining away. By ‘explaining away’ I mean the search ‘beneath the surface’ for ‘hidden causes’ which Latour (2005) finds characteristic of the sociology of the social, and, I might add, the psychology as well. In such thinking what is said to really be going on is group solidarity, or resistance to hegemonic forces, perhaps the unconscious, or, more recently, the activities of neural modules being used for purposes for which Nature did not intend them (this last is a favorite of evolutionary psychology). Whatever it is that is really going, it cannot be spirits because spirits do not exist. We have defined them out of existence.

I must admit a certain attraction to these modes of thinking. After all, I’ve studied them all my life; they are comfortable and familiar, and of course they are widely accepted in the intellectual world. From my current point of view, however, one big problem with all these explanations is that they do not account for the surface phenomena in any interesting way. Sure it is the brain, sure it is social structure, but just how does that work? We do not know. I note also that we cannot even account for ordinary mundane consciousness, the color taste feel and smell of an apple, for example. So one might be tempted to say that pretty much most of psychology is explaining things away.

One reason I’ve been at pains to present a variety of details about bell playing is simply to indicate a range of tangible phenomena we must take into account, that indeed we can take into account if we are so willing. Even more phenomena must be brought into play to account for spirit possession, some of which I’ve indicated here and there in Beethoven’s Anvil. I don’t know how far we could get by pursuing these lines of investigation, but I’m pretty sure we will learn something new.

I’m also sure that some of what we learn is going to seem very strange, which was the point of discussing time in some detail. That discussion is buried deep in ideas from Walter Freeman’s neurodynamics, technical ideas I just barely understand (and I am not the only one who just

16

barely understands them), but exciting ideas. I think we are on the verge of crafting empirically grounded (and computer modeled) explanations that are every bit as foreign to us as the idea of ghostly beings inhabiting our world and possessing us.

And yet the idea of such otherworldly beings is not really strange at all. It too is quite familiar. But it is also distasteful to us scientific materialists wise in the ways of reductionism. I’m not at all suggesting that we must learn to swallow such distasteful ideas. I’ve not done so myself, nor do I urge you to do so.

But I am suggesting that we dispense with reductionism. And I am suggesting that the better explanations, the deeper ones, the ones about the nervous system and high dimensional state spaces, that those explanations are genuinely new and strange, perhaps even a bit frightening. I know I quivered a bit when I pondered the implications of what I was writing in Beethoven’s Anvil, and in some of my blog posts and working papers.

Those explanations, I submit, will allows us, no force us, to move away from explaining these phenomena away–bell spirits, possession. They aren’t going to be over there any more. They’re going to be in here.

Let me quote another passage from Music and Trance. Rouget is quoting a long letter about opera written by “a young ethnomusicologist from Benin” who is writing about the opera. Here is the letter’s opening (1985, p. 242):

What an adventure! I went to the Opéra yesterday. I thought I’d gone raving mad! No one had warned me, so I had no idea what I was in for: imagine my surprise when I found myself bang in the middle of a possession ceremony! You would have thought you were in Porto-Novo, in the Place Dèguè, attending the annual feast for Sakpata, or at Alada attending the ceremonies of Ajahuto, or at Abomey for “The Grand Customs.” Of course it’s not the same thing at all, that’s obvious. Of course the differences are immense. Never mind! I still think that a performance of at the Opéra and a vodun ceremony in Benin are in many respects fundamentally quite comparable.

The letter goes on to make the comparison a great length, talking of the singers, those very intense singers, as being possessed.

If we are going to explain spirit possession and bell spirits away, then equity demands that we explain opera away, and drama, and all of literature. And of course, we do so all the time. We’re very good at explaining it all away—capitalism, patriarchy, the unconscious, signs signs and more signs, that’s what’s really going on—all this explaining away, as though we know what we’re talking about.

We do not. We’re just familiar with opera and novels, for example, and familiar with our modes of explaining them away. And so we take it for granted.

Now, it is not that I want to dismiss all these hidden causes. Sure, I think some are nonsense, some not. But I don’t know how to draw the line, not in any systematic way. What’s important is how we think about these ‘hidden’ causes, how we frame our thinking.

I suggest we think in terms of construction, of composition, to follow Latour (2005, 2010b). Those hidden things, the ones that stand up to further investigation, are not really hidden. They’re just not obvious on the surface. We need to think of them as some of the ‘stuff’ from which spirits and such are constructed, with collective neurodynamics also being on the bill of construction materials and in the list of approved methods. The very challenging task of getting ‘right’ on the neurodynamics will force us away from explaining away and toward explaining. For that attempt will estrange us from our comfortable intellectual platitudes.

And so we return to that bell spirit I invoked at the beginning of this investigation. We have the iron from which the bells are made, and the wood from which the beaters are made. The physical properties of those materials are important. They each play a role the little drama through which a group of people enact, compose, a spirit.

17

And it is because those sounds have those certain physical properties that those twitterings–that I am interpreting as spirit voices–emerge. The beaters do not, of course, hit the bells automatically. That requires people, and the people as biological beings, with certain motor and sensory capacities. Their motor capacities allow them to manipulate the bells and their sensory capacities allow them to hear the sounds made by the bells.

Those people–Ade, Druis, Fonda, and me–stand in a certain relationship with one another. And they share a history that gives them the means to interpret the sounds that they hear. It is only when the sounds are just so, and are interpreted as just so, that we can talk of spirits. It follows that those evanescent spirits imply a history that trails a long way into the past.

Indeed, it trails back to the origins of humankind. I include myself in a growing chorus of thinkers who place music early in human origins, even before language (Benzon 2001, pp. 169 ff.; Benzon 2005; Merker 2001; Mithen 2005). Both biology and culture are historical phenomena, with recent entities linked to earlier ones in an unbroken chain of inheritance. The story of human origins is the story of how groups of very clever apes were able to create cultural phenomena, if you will, that were so stable that they could accumulate over time and could in turn shape the biology of those apes. The story of human origins is one of the co-evolution of biology and culture.

Given this, is it too much to assert that there are unbroken chains of influence extending from those origins forward in time to that basement in upstate New York where Ade, Druis, Fonda and I heard those magical bell tones. For Druis, Fonda, and me, that occasion was the first time we heard those tones. But Ade had heard them before, with other percussionists. And they, in turn, heard them before, with still other percussionists. If we trace those links back in time they must end up in the African savannas, for that’s the common well from which all cultural lineages flow. To be sure, at some point we will no longer have iron bells in the lineage, for they are relatively recent in human history. But there are obviously other ways of making music, other forms of percussion, and there is music other than percussion. Above all, there is the human voice.

But it is not simply the magic of the bell that brought the four of use together that day in Troy, New York. It was music in general. Each of us had our own history with music, our own set of influences. If we trace those back, one set of lineages will go back to Africa through Europe while another set will go directly back to West Africa. By the time either of those sets of lineages set sail for North America each had been influenced by lineages from the Middle East, which had in turn been influenced by, well, who knows?

If I string this tail out to perhaps tedious length, it is to remind us that culture is a living thing and, as such, must be renewed from moment to moment. We live surrounded by the physical artifacts of culture, artifacts that have some degree of persistence independent of us. Yet those artifacts are meaningless without us. We bring them to life, and the mental and physical actions through which we do this consume energy. That life is evanescent and fluctuating, like flames, or the high-pitched twitterings emerging from an ensemble of bell players. They are thus more like spirits than they are like words on a page–in themselves, mere marks on a surface–or like sticks, stones, and broken bones.

Would it be too much to call such spirits cultural beings? It is a term I have been exploring in some recent thinking on cultural evolution. Stories, poems, plays, songs, symphonies, oratorios, statues, paintings, rituals, all these things are the foundations of cultural beings, where by “cultural being” I mean not merely the physical “texts” but also those many acts of body and mind that give them life. As such they persist beyond their presence in the minds of this or that individual. Taken all together, texts and acts, cultural beings are shared collective entities.

That Beethoven quartet that so moved Wayne and Phyllis Booth, the C-sharp minor quartet; it is a cultural being in this sense. Beethoven conceived it and notated it. It had and continues to have an existence independent, not only of Beethoven, but of each of those individual others who have performed it and heard it. To be real it must be performed and heard by someone. But it makes no difference who performs it and who hears it. All performers and all auditors are

18

participants in the cultural being that is Beethoven’s C-sharp minor quartet. As such it is of a temporal regime that is different from but intertwined with that of the lives of those many people.

As these phenomena exist in society and constitute the cultural glue that holds it together, it seems only appropriate to call them cultural beings. That is what they are. The term is perhaps a little strange, but only a little. The two words are common enough; it is only their conjunction that is strange. But that strangeness is good. It reminds us that our familiar concepts are no longer adequate to our understanding of these beings. They are so familiar to us that we do not think them strange. It is only when we attempt to understand how they operate, and to pitch that understanding in the material tent of science – the horror! the horror! – that we find ourselves confronting just how strange they are.

Those bell spirits, those people possessed by spirits, they’re no stranger than Shakespeare or Verdi. And we no more understand Shakespeare and Verdi than we understand spirit possession and magic bells. It is time to admit our ignorance and boldly venture toward new ideas. Bibliographical References AROM, Simha (1991), African Polyphony and Polyrhythm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press BENNETT, Jane (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. BENZON, William (1991), “Ontology of Common Sense”, in BURKHARDT & SMITH (eds.) Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Munich: Philosophia Verlag.

– (2001), Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, New York: Basic Books. – (2005), “Synch, Song, and Society”, Human Nature Review 5, pp. 66-85. URL =

<http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html> – (2014), A Primer on Self-Organization: With some tabletop physics you can do at home,

informal working paper: URL = <https://www.academia.edu/6238739/A_Primer_on_Self-Organization> BOWLBY, John (1969), Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1, Attachment. New York: Basic Books. BREGMAN, Albert (1990), Auditory Scene Analysis, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. BOOTH, WAYNE (1999), For the Love of It, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CHERNOFF, John M. (1979), African Rhythm and African Sensibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. FREEMAN, Walter (1995), Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.

– (1999), How Brains Make Up Their Mind, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. – (2000), “A Neurobiological Role of Music in Social Bonding”, in WALLIN, MERKER &

BROWN (eds.), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 411-424. GIBSON, James J. (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. HARMAN, Graham (2011), The Quadruple Object, Winchester, U.K.; Washington [D.C.] : Zero Books. LATOUR, Bruno (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press.

– (2010a), On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham [NC] ; London : Duke University Press.

– (2010b), “Steps Toward the Writing of a Compositionist Manifesto”, New Literary History, 41, 471-490. MARKOSIAN, Ned (2014), “Time”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in ZALTA (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/time/>

19

MERKER, Björn (2000). “Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins”, in WALLIN, MERKER & BROWN (eds.), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 315-327. MITHEN, Steven (2005), The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. MORTON, Timothy (2013), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press. ROUGET, Gilbert (1985), Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. SPORNS, Olaf (2014). “Connectome”, Scholarpedia, 5(2):5584. URL = <http://www.scholarpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Connectome&action=cite&rev=141341> WILLIAMS, Robert W. & KERRUP, Karl (1988). “The Control of Neuron Number”. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 11, pp. 423-53.