Sonic Superjection

By Andrej Antonič

Media, Arts and Performance Studies

Utrecht University
7243545
Contents

Introduction...............................................................................................................3

Beyond subjectivity, towards the superject...............................................................5

Expanding boundaries of perception.........................................................................9

Deep Listening as a practice of worldly sensibility.................................................11

Works Cited.............................................................................................................12

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Introduction
Nowadays technology mediates human experience in a post-phenomenological way meaning that
the differentiation of subject and object collapses in favor of a “cross-scalar conception of
subjectivity” (Hansen, 2015), namely the “modulation of matter and temporality introduced by
digital technology, calls the subject into being as an effect of its own materiality” (2015).
In order to develop a post-phenomenological understanding of human experience mediated by
digital technology, it is useful to take in consideration how humans relate and make sense of
sonic phenomena. According to Paoline Oliveros (2005) humans sense sound through hearing
and listening, two distinct yet related aspects of sonic sensibility and awareness. While hearing is
involuntary (subconscious activity), listening is active, as it involves directing attention to what
is heard. Thus listening operates an exclusion of potential sound, leaving some aspects of the
sonic experience as not actualized. The practice of Deep Listening can serve as an ecpansion of
sonic awareness, meaning that listening can be ‘trained’ to include a vaster account of sonif
manifestations.
The promise of Deep Listening is to actualize an expanded account of experience in which the
human agent finds itself entangled in a relational process with the environment and technology,
that shapes experience not exclusively from an anthropocentric perspective. The sonic field and
the experience of it, comes into being as an assemblage of various phenomena which relate to
each other, thus the human agent is merely one of such aspects that shape the sonic experience.
On such an account, a parallelism of Deep Listening practice and Whitehead’s process
philosophy can be traced. The parallelism will be based on the assumption that both theories
present a ‘neutral’ account of experience and consciousness, which arise from a complex
entanglement and relationality of various agents, in the case of this essay, human, environmental
and technological. The common phenomenon shared and sensed by these agents is sound.
In what follows I will exemplify the parallelism between the practice of Deep Listening and
Whitehead’s process philosophy by performing a post-phenomenological account of experience
through the interpretation of sonic sensibility and awareness, with the ultimate aim of defining
(open-endedly) Deep Listening as a practice of worldly sensibility, namely a sonic-
environmental nervous system. The first part (Beyond subjectivity, towards the superject)
introduces Whitehead’s ‘neural’ processual ontology and its post-phenomenological account of

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experience that transcends the dialectical dichotomy of subject-object towards a multi-scalar,
quantum entanglement of superjective rationalities, through which worldly phenomena actualize
themselves. In the second part (Expanding boundaries of perception) the parallelism between
Whitehedian process philosophy and Deep Listening Practice gets exemplified by considering
two specific moments of Paoline Oliveros’ practice and research as a musician, which will be
through the prism of process philosophy. And the last part (Deep Listening as a practice of
worldly sensibility) is focused on the theorization of a sonic-environmental nervous system,
which configures as a complex system of entangled and interrelated agents, comprising human,
environmental and technological aspects of sensibility and awareness, which co-constitute and
co-create experience and consciousness.

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Beyond subjectivity, towards the superject
Phenomenologically speaking, subjectivity arises through sense perception. Such paradigm
envisions the coming into being of the subject as differentiated from the material world, as
perception characterizes the conception of a system that is distinct from the environment. Yet,
the complex human sensorium is always situated within a field of phenomena that affects its
functioning, and, thus changes our experience of the world.
With the advent of with the advent of twenty-first-century technology, considered as tools that
operate through computation, such phenomenological paradigm is limiting, as the technological
mediation of materiality operates in ways that are not accountable by human conscious
awareness. On such an account Whitehead’s process philosophy forwards an “expanded scope of
phenomenology” (Hansen, 2015) that interprets experience through a perspective that “includes,
but is not exclusively (or even primarily) channeled through human modes of agency” (2015).
This processual metaphysics enacts an interpretation of experience that is radically relational (or
environmental, or cosmological), which moves beyond the limiting dualistic dialectics of
subject-object, in an attempt to re-write an ontology that is based on relativity and quantum
phenomena.
Whitehead’s ‘neutral’ account of existence does not base itself on substance, material objects, or
phenomena, but rather focuses on actual entities or occasions, understood as actuality of
realization (Stenner et al., 2008). Realization and actuality both entail a processual quality, such
processual quality is understood as “the becoming of actual entities” (2008). The process of
becoming is realized through actuality and potentiality, where actuality is understood as a
specific realization of potentiality in concrete form. Potentiality when realized in an actual form,
through the process of concrescense (becoming concrete of potentiality), actualizes, concretizes
a specific discernable form (2008). Through this process of concrescense things as objects, data,
phenomena are prehended or understood in their form. This formalization of actual entities
performs a reduction of the complexity of potentiality, meaning that the process of concrescense
into actuality is a ‘decision’ that frames and realizes potentiality, which excludes what has not
been ‘selected’ for actualization (2008). The excluded aspects of potentiality are called ‘negative
presensions’ while the actualized aspects of potentiality are called ‘positive prehensions’ (2008).
Thus the concescense of actual entities effected through the creative synthesis of positive

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prehensions, constitute a conjunctive unity, adding something new and concrete in the universe
(2008).
Whitehead’s category of subjective unity states that “an actual entity is a creature that creates
itself” (2008), through a ‘local’ actualization of potentiality. On such a score, it is important to
differentiate the process of ‘self-realization’ and its product, of actual entities. Whitehead
proposes a distinction of subject and superject. The subject entails the “internal self-becoming of
the actual entity” (2008) (through the local creative synthesis of concrescense of potentiality),
while the superject is “the objective product” of this creative synthesis, a phenomenon amidst
other phenomena. Thus, actual entities are always ‘bi-polar’, they manifest a relativistic or
quantum quality, involving a subjective process of prehension and at the same time its objective
product, meaning that “the experience of the subject is expressed through the superject, as an
object (a phenomenon amidst other phenomena)” (2008). Once an actual entity becomes a
concrete superject, it “in turn becomes an object for a new subject” (2008), an endless processual
metaphysics of cosmological (or environmental) rationalities realized through a creative
synthesis of actualized potentiality.
This processual metaphysics of experience enacts a shift from agent-centered perception towards
environmental sensibility (Hansen, 2015), that enables the development of a non-exclusively-
anthropocentric model of experience. This radical environmental and relational perspective on
agency expresses that every actual entity (or occasion) implicates the entirety of the universe,
“whether through actual engagement (positive prehensions – subjectivity) or through active
exclusion (negative prehensions – superjection)” (2015). Such perspective of existence forwards
a re-thinking of consciousness where the dialectical dichotomy of human and nonhuman is
transcended, for a theoretical (relativistic) model that envisions the ontological interrelatedness
of entities and phenomena on multiple cosmological or environmental scales. As Hansen (2015)
puts it, humans
can not but come to appreciate our participation in a cosmology of process, which is to
say, to embrace our superjective implication in a plethora of process of all sot and at all
scales (p.17).
The importance of Whitehead’s process philosophy lays in its speculative potentiality which
expands experience towards a cosmological rationality and implicatedness, that re-frames the
epistemic and ontological bearings of experience. Which, following Hansen’s reading of

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Whitehead, also helps in interpreting the relationship between humans and technology in our
current time, by exposing the ‘doubleness’ of technology, i.e. technology as “a mode of access
onto a domain of ‘worldly sensibility’, and at the same time a contribution to that domain of
sensibility” (2015).
At the present time our world is pervaded by wireless transmission, networked systems and
computation, all technological aspects which operate ‘below’ human sense perception. Such
technologies ‘reinvent’ phenomenology and experience, it is for this reason that Whitehead’s
radical processual and relational ontology offers a fruitful theoretical frame to interpret the
current state of experience.
To exemplify the aforementioned claims I find useful to describe the first mean of wireless
transmission, this being radio technology. Although the radio was invented at the beginning of
the 20th century, it is relevant to note that such technology presented a crucial development that
changed experience and phenomenology.
What is of crucial importance of radio technology is its ‘doubleness’ (Hansen et al. 2015). The
medium operates on two spheres: the acoustic sphere, concerning human transmission of
messages, but also on a electro-sonic, electro-magnetic sphere. In other words, radio is sensitive
of sound waves, but also of the electro-magnetic field of the Earth (radio as a transducer of the
electro-magnetic field (2015). On such an account radio is a human technology but also a
cosmological technology, as it gives access to “a domain of worldly sensibility and also
contributes to that domain” (Hansen, 2015). Radio allows humans to hear cosmological noise
which before was not sensible.
Another example of an expanded sonic experience, mediated through technology, comes from
Paoline Oliveros first application of a sound recording device. During the 1940s she used a
sound recorder and noticed that the microphone was picking up sounds that she did not hear
while the recording was in progress (Oliveros, 1999). The medium expanded her experience of
sonic sensibility and changed her sonic awareness. Such experience led her to develop the
practice of Deep Listening, which entails “listening in every possible way to everything possible,
to hear no matter what you are doing” (1999). Such practice includes “the sounds of daily life, of
nature, one’s own thought as well as musical sounds” (1999).
What I find compelling about her theories is that the technology she used enhanced her
sensibility and allowed to tap in the sphere of ‘worldly sensibility’, through sound. To further

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elaborate on the example is important to note that she distinguishes hearing form listening, where
hearing happens involuntarily, and listening “actively directs one’s attention to what is heard”
(1999). Moreover, Oliveros (1999) claims that
we hear order to listen. We listen in order to interpret the world and experience meaning
(…) through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to
the sounds of our daily life, the environment or music (p.6).
This perspective forwards a quantum (or relativistic) quality of listening as “what is heard is
changed by listening and changes the listener” (1999). Such understanding simultaneously
creates and changes what is sensed, as “the perceiver and the perceived co-create” (1999),
though such listening effect. Finally, “the field of sound can be felt as potential force” and “ here
is active participation by the listener and co-creation of this form, between the listener and the
sounds” (1999).
The practice of Deep Listening creates a radical processual relationality between human agents
and the environmental (or the cosmological) agency, they are in a constant ever-changing
process of relation which shapes experience. In what follows I will further exemplify the
parallelism between Deep listening and Whitehead’s process philosophy and ultimately theorize
the idea of Deep Listening as a practice of ‘worldly sensibility’.

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Expanding boundaries of perception

“The world of possibilities is sound” – Paoline Oliveros (2005)

In what follows I will exemplify a theoretical ground that is relevant for advocating the notion of
Deep Listening as a proactive of worldly sensibility. Such theoretical frame will take shape by
interpreting two specific moments of Oliveros’ practice and research in musical experience, seen
through the prism of Whitehead’s process philosophy. The aim is to argue about the parallelism
between perception in the mode of casual efficacy and the practice of Deep Listening (which,
essentially, entails listening to more than one reality simultaneously).
The two moments, which are relevant of the argumentation, are the first Deep Listening project,
a musical improvisation performed and recorded in an underground cistern in 1988; and the
second being the presentation of the software simulation of the acoustical properties of the
cistern held in 2012. While the first case focuses on the processual relationality between the
musicians and the environment, the second presents the implicatedness of computational
technology within the relational framework, de-centering even further the human agents from the
processual ontology of experience.
In 1988 Paoline Oliveros, Suart Dempter and Peter Ward (Panaiotis) descended five meters
underground into the Dan Harpole cistern situated in Port Townsend (Washington, USA), to
record their musical improvisation performance. The concert was released as a full length album
in 1989 by New Albion Records, entitled ‘Deep Listening’.
Performing in such an unusual space led the musicians to inspiring realizations, as they had to re-
learn and re-interpret their relationships with the instruments, but also the environment and
sound itself. The cistern environment presented a forty-five second reverberation time, which
affected the sounds produced by the musicians. Their musical ‘utterances’ were transformed by
the environment, making the environment itself an active performer, so to say. On such a score
the environment radically influenced what the musicians wear hearing, this relationality
actualized or concretized a ‘new’ prehension of the act of listening. The situation brought to the
realization of a quantum sonic sensibility and awareness as the relation of environment and
humans simultaneously generated and changed the experience of the manifesting sound. The

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musicians had to embrace their ‘superjectal implicatedness within a cosmological actualization
of potentiality, during which they were merely one of the agents within a field of other
environmental agents which co-constituted and co-created experience.
Twenty-three years after the first Deep Listening experience, the researcher Jonas Braash, of the
RPI1 institute, measured the acoustical properties of the cistern and created a software simulation
of the environment. The computational simulation enabled the recreation of the Deep Listening
experience for a larger audience, but also the ‘presentification’ of the sonic experience in any
given time and space. On such an account it is useful to consider Hansen’s reading of
Whitehead’s process philosophy as he argues that a “new sensory reality arises from the
relationality of contemporary computational media and dispersed, multi-scalar subjectivity”
(Hansen, 2015). At the basis of such claim is his interpretation of the operationality of
computational tools, which function ‘below’the register of human sense perception and
conscious awareness. Through computation, “space becomes rewindable, manipulable and fully
simulated at all available times” (2015). Such aspect of computational media present to humans
‘new’ ways of interpreting and understanding experience, through the sensibility of data, an
account of experience that is not human-centered. Thus computational technology presents a
post-phenomenological account of experience though its ‘doubleness’. Hansen (2015) argues
that contemporary media allow “a mode of access onto a domain of worldly sensibility and a
contribution to that domain of sensibility”. Such aspects of operationality of computational tools
present a machinic account and interpretation of worldly phenomena, in the sense that data gives
access to a non-human sensibility and at the same time data manifest as a ‘new type’ of
sensibility, which shapes the understanding of experience, in an expanded non-anthropocentric,
cosmological way.
The technological mediation of sound expands the way humans sense or prehend its properties,
giving access to nuances which go beyond sense perception. Precisely for this reason humans
can practice an expanded sonic awareness and reciprocity with the environment, which results in
a, as Hansen (2015) describes
far richer understanding of the broader environmental confound that is in play
independently of the modes of access furnished by higher order processes (p.9).

1
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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Deep Listening as a practice of worldly sensibility
The practice of Deep Listening aims to expand awareness of sound, by devoting attention to the
processual relationality and entanglement of humans and environment. The practice of
expanding sonic awareness implies a radical interconnectedness and co-creation of experience,
which arises from the reflection of the listener with the environment. On such an account the
technological mediation of worldly phenomena also contributes to an expansion of sensibility as
contemporary media add a non-human interpretation of worldly phenomena.
Such framework forwards a processual re-framing of phenomenology as human agency is
dispersed across various scales and operational divisions, meaning that human activity is one
element among other environmental and technological activities (Hansen, 2015). On such a score
Whitehead’s process philosophy helps in theorizing a neutral account of experience by
expressing that actual entities arise as a creative concrescense of potentiality. Thus experience
and consciousness arise from a relational entanglement of worldly phenomena (where the human
is merely one of the agents among an assemblage of agents). The practice of Deep Listening is
one of the means towards the expansion of awareness, aimed towards the development of an
environmental (cosmological) nervous system, which configures as a complex system of
entangled and interrelated agents, comprising human, environmental and technological aspects of
sensibility and awareness, performing, co-constituting and co-creating a post-phenomenological,
radically relational and environmental account of experience and consciousness, carried out
through sound.

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Works Cited
Hansen, M. B. N., Haff P. K., Hörl E., Renn J., Schneider B. (2015, Sep 30–Oct 04). Triggers:
Introducing the Technosphere (The Technosphere, Now) (Conference presentation). Haus der
Kulturen der Welt 2015, Berlin, Germany.
https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2015/technosphere/technosphere_contributors_1/
mark_hansen.php .

Hansen, B. N. M.. (2015). Feed-Forward: On The Future Of Twenty-First-Century Media. The

Univerrsity of Chicago Press.

Oliveros, P.. (1999, December 9). Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice
Practice). OER commons. Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-
attachments/736945/19af465bc3fcf3c8d5249713cd586b28.pdf .

Oliveros, P. (2005). Deep Listening. A Composer’s Sound Practice. Deep Listening Publications.

Stenner, P., et al. (2008) A. N.Whitehead and Subjectivity. Subjectivity. 22(1), 90 -109.
http://doi:10.1057/sub.2008.4 .

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