Echo Location

 

Gym Music

When I get to the gym, I don’t put my earphones in straight away. I wait. I start to get things sorted for the workout. I listen. I hope. I decide where to position my bag in relation to whatever exercise I am doing – to the side of the squat rack, behind the bench. I open my training app on my phone that records my sets, reps and weights. I get my water bottle out and put that down next to my bag. I listen. I hope.

I live in hope that I will like the music that is being piped through the speakers, or at the very least that it will not irritate me. But, almost invariably, the music is ‘library music’, ‘production music’, ‘royalty free music’, ‘in-store music’. It’s horrible. It sounds a bit like one or another genre of pop music, if you don’t listen closely. It sounds a bit like this or that pop, dance, electronica, ambient, or [insert-other-bland-genre-of-music-here] hit.

But this music is muzak, a gym-upgrade of elevator music. Background music. Never really meant to be noticed. The kind of thing that would give Kant or Adorno palpitations. Worse than Kant’s hated ‘tafelmusik’, or Adorno’s detested ‘pre-digested pop’, this is a hyper-corporate echo of such music. It’s monstrously bland double.

There are traces of recognisable songs there, wispy ghosts of their former selves, their plaintive howls mere intertextual rasps from beyond the grave. I find it offensive because it is so clearly designed to be inoffensive. It makes me feel kind of claustrophobic because it is a kind of ‘uncanny valley’ perversion. Once you notice it, you start to feel trapped.

I put my earphones in. To escape. This is not even to escape to music I like. It is to escape from music I don’t like, mainly because it is not really music.

Music Miniaturised

Rey Chow once wrote a great essay, called ‘Listening otherwise, music miniaturized: a different type of question about revolution’. This appeared in the first edition of The Cultural Studies Reader, but it was omitted from all subsequent versions. I think this is because it seemed dated too quickly, as what was being theorised as revolutionary or disruptive in the late 80s and early 90s simply became the new normal.

In it, Chow argues that personal stereos like the Walkman produce a ‘miniaturized’ form of music that creates a revolutionary shift in how we listen, ultimately serving as a ‘silent’ sabotage against the oppressive, collectivizing forces of official history. In contrast to traditional forms of music played through loudspeakers or gramophones – which enforce public participation and contribute to a ‘gigantic’ official state culture – the Walkman introduces a deeply interiorized, portable experience.

Chow argues that the most important feature of this miniaturization is not the physical size of the machine, but the paradox of its hiddenness: because the music is compacted and hidden from others, it allows the individual to hear it ‘full blast’ internally. This creates a deliberate barrier between the listener and the outside world.

Chow asserts that the Walkman gives the individual the ‘freedom to be deaf to the loudspeakers of history’. By tuning out the external world, the listener is able to ‘disappear’ and actively become a ‘missing part of history’, successfully evading the state’s demands for collective participation. (She’s mainly thinking about China here.)

Furthermore, Chow characterizes this Walkman-induced state as ‘openly autistic’. This intense, self-contained listening practice frustrates onlookers because it reduces them to mere observers; their voyeurism yields no secrets because they cannot penetrate or consume the listener’s private experience.

Ultimately, Chow argues that through miniaturization, the emotions of music become ‘dehydrated, condensed, and encapsulated’. Because these emotions can be carried anywhere and summoned instantly at ‘self-service’, the Walkman allows individuals to use music as a mundane, portable ingredient for independent ‘self-making’ rather than submitting to the forced collectivization of the state.

If we replace ‘state’ with ‘commercial gym chain’ here, I think the argument still stands. It’s just that it seems to be more than the new norm. It seems actively encouraged.

Squelching Out

I rarely vary the music I put on. It just needs to be familiar, to be in the foreground and yet to blend into the background. To produce a non-irritating sonic background. It needs to wash over me – and more importantly to wash over the other sounds in the gym.

I have four more or less randomly cobbled together playlists that I draw from. They have slightly different moods. I click between these. These used to be Spotify playlists, but I moved them over to YouTube Music, for the sole reason that I heard that YouTube Music pays slightly better royalties to the artists than Spotify. This knowledge allows me to feel like I occupy the moral high ground, like I’m some kind of activist.

(Actually, that ‘sole reason’ bit is not strictly true: I gained YouTube Music as an incidental extra when I signed up for a paid version of YouTube, in a doomed attempt to stop adverts popping up whenever I play YouTube clips to students during lectures. FYI: it is not possible to get rid of the adverts if you play YouTube clips through Microsoft PowerPoint on a Windows PC, even if you pay for no ads. See some shitty little subclause about ‘third party software’. So, I really only acquired my moral high ground as an incidental extra when all I was really trying to do was eradicate irritations in the classroom. Just like the situation in the gym.)

The muzak in the gym is constructed from echoes – traces of real music. The music I stuff into my ears via my noise-cancelling headphones is thus, in another way, ‘incidental’. I would be happy to do without it. But I choose music from my past. From happier times? Ha! Certainly, at least, from times when music functioned much more actively and passionately in my very different younger life, or lives. Its affects echoes through the years, sometimes stirring specific memories, sometimes just vague feelings.

But I could do without it. I have a fantasy that I am in a gym in which the weights plates are still metal – chipped, scratched, sometimes even rusty – not rubber or plastic coated like now. In my fantasy – part memory, part idyll, total nostalgia-fest – the steel weights are clanking and sometimes crashing down. There are many voices – joking, cajoling, ridiculing, laughing, shouting, screaming. And what’s that in the background, behind the din? Heavy metal? I don’t really like metal, but that’s what it should be.

Was it ever like that? Yes, it sometimes was. A bit. This is how I remember Ron’s Gym in Byker in the 1980s. And the echoes of those clashes and clanks and jokes and insults reverberates down through the decades, telling me what I am missing.

My music now serves principally to blot out the muzak. My memories fan out and disperse freely, until they condense into moments of effort. I may be alone in the gym now, or I may have been with a training partner or partners in the distant past, but as the effort rises with the approaching the end of a heavy set, the intensity becomes all-consuming, and it is all the same, whether here or there, then or now, alone or in company – the feeling never really changes. Consciousness condenses to a pinpoint; the background expands to an irrelevant ultra-object. For a moment. And then we are back.

The Two Voices

Lonely crowds. Separation perfected, as Debord put it. Sometimes I think that they play shit music to force people to wear headphones to further disconnect them from each other. Cue one of those Deliveroo Žižekian readings, one of those Marxism-by-numbers interpretations that Verso might publish.

But let’s drown them out. They’re no use to me here and now. They are as formulaic as the muzak.

Sometimes, when a real conversation breaks out, or if it looks like I might have to exchange pleasantries with someone, I’ll subtly double tap my left earphone, and pause the music. This allows me to surreptitiously listen to the conversation; or to listen for words directed to me, if it looks like an interaction is impending, whether that be a quick ‘alright mate’ or a more formal ‘are you using this’.

Do I avoid taking interactions further? Or do they just not go further? I know I put the brakes on. I’ve tried to have chats with people, but they never go anywhere. They’re both too bland and also get me fretting about time. And surely it’s just me, but to me these brief encounters only ever feel like echoes from the real world, simulations of real conversations or real relationships… But, saying things like this opens the door to those ‘radical’ Marxian interpretations again. I can hear the Marxist minions at the door. Let’s turn up the music again, to squelch them all out.

I try to squelch out all the inner voices too, except the only two that are really allowed to be in the gym with me: the one that says what we are doing next and the one that says how it felt. ‘How did that feel? … OK. In that case, we’re doing this next’.

All the other voices can ‘do one’. I feel like Russell Crowe at the end of A Beautiful Mind, occasionally glancing over at all of the hallucinated entities that used to bother him, but that he has excluded and forced to keep twenty feet away from him. These are my other voices, my concerns, my worries. They can shut up and keep their distance. There is no time or space for them here. There are only two of us allowed here: the one who gives commands and the one who gives feedback.

Philosophy’s Echo

There are always two voices. This fact is something that has – according to Jacques Derrida, at least – always haunted Western philosophy. There are always two voices. But neither is properly or completely ‘one’. Each entity is in a complex constitutive and subversive relationship with its other, its own ‘source’ and/or ‘echo’.

In ‘Tympan’, at the very start of Margins of Philosophy, for instance, Derrida observes that one thing philosophy has always been desperate for, is the ability ‘to hear itself speak, in the same language, of itself and of something else’. Achieving this fantasy univocity, by cleanly separating out the ‘self’ from the ‘something else’ has always been the problem, and has provoked much passion, conflict, and confusion, says Derrida.

Repeatedly, Derrida notes that philosophy has always been unable to establish what a singular self-consciousness is or might possibly be, without doubling things up. He points to the ways that philosophers have been forced to imagine their own singular (self)consciousness in the form of a little ‘mini-me’ inside their heads, and so on (as he discusses in ‘Voice and Phenomenon’).

While Western philosophers have chased the dream of the singular and fixed identity and meaning, to Derrida’s mind, what the quest for the holy grail of singularity of voice, presence and identity actually attests to is the inescapable character of incompletion, fragmentation, the lack of unequivocal and univocal presence or self-presence.

To stick with Margins of Philosophy: in the essay ‘Qual Quelle: Valery’s Sources’, Derrida invokes the figure of Narcissus (as he will often do, throughout his career), and the auditory phenomenon of ‘echoes’ (or indeed Echo), to deconstruct Paul Valéry’s concept of the ‘source’ and the philosophical illusion of pure self-presence.

Derrida uses Narcissus to illustrate how the ‘source’ (representing the pure ‘I’ or the absolute origin of consciousness) is inevitably divided and alienated from itself when it tries to apprehend its own image. When the mirror of the water intervenes, Narcissus’s source does not actually return to itself; instead, the mirror ‘manifests in this double loss the singular operation of a multiplying division which transforms the origin into effect, and the whole into a part’. Derrida argues that the imaginary is broken up by the glance, meaning that ‘as soon as it performs Narcissus’s turn, it no longer knows itself’, because the source is always carried away outside itself and cannot be present to itself as an object.

Because the eye fails to capture the origin, the figure of Narcissus turns to the voice and to echoes in an attempt to achieve self-presence. Referencing Valéry’s poem Narcissus, Derrida points out the paradox of the source that shouts ‘to the echoes’: ‘I do not see myself, said the source. But it says so at least, and thus hears itself’. Through this gesture of Narcissus, Derrida demonstrates that while pure consciousness is blind to itself in a mirror, it attempts to bypass this exteriority through the intimate, instantaneous circuit of the voice – the act of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’.

Ultimately, however, Derrida argues that even this vocal echo is a lure. Just like the visual reflection, the sonorous source can only attempt to rejoin itself ‘by differentiating itself, dividing, differing, deferring without end’, proving that an undivided, instantaneous self-presence is impossible.

Where Derrida says Western philosophy has constantly sought the singular, and where he constantly finds simultaneous doubling (or proliferation: dissemination) and incompletion, my own efforts around music in the gym seem to take the form of attempting to squelch out – to construct a background or context or ambience or milieu that is simultaneously immersive and yet non-distracting. I need it to drown out the traces of the ghosts that offend or irk me – the barely concealed plagiaristic intertextuality of the gym muzak, the babble of pairs of training partners; or, more common in my gym, the babble of client and bored personal trainer. And I need it to drown out the ghosts from my own pasts, who whiz around me, like a murmuration of swallows, sometimes fanning out and diffusing in huge arcs and spirals, and sometimes condensing into a fixed point for a moment, quoting lines from my past at me, trying to interject and interrupt the only conversation I want to have in the gym, which is that between the me who says how what we’ve just done felt, and the me who says ok then, this is what we are going to do next.