Mother’s Day Reflections: The Enduring Power of Primordial Resonance
Exploring the Vital Role of Art and the Maternal Bond in Stabilizing Culture and Resisting the Instrumentalization of Music
Exploring the Vital Role of Art and the Maternal Bond in Stabilizing Culture and Resisting the Instrumentalization of Music
As Mother’s Day approaches, I find myself reflecting on the profound impact mothers have on us — not only shaping our personal experiences but also embedding within every action we undertake an enduring desire for that initial embrace. This primordial impulse, rooted in our pre-individuated state, defines our earliest interactions with the world, mediated by the resonant sounds of a mother’s heartbeat and the melodious cadence of her voice. This sonic embrace envelops us, sparking a lifelong quest for connection — to reclaim and stabilize the sonic bridge forged between mother and child. Throughout history, every development, be it wondrous or monstrous, bears the imprint of this drive to maintain and recapture that initial connection.
As I reflect upon the importance of music and art in our society, amidst profound technological upheaval ushered in by generative AI, I look around and see a culture that is fraying. I strain to hear the nuances of the melodious and rhythmic grammar of a healthy society as an ever-rising tide of noise pushes this grammar out. There is this unmistakable feeling enveloping all we do, a trembling, a quivering, unnerving unspooling of the very fabric of society- We can all feel it resonating deep within our bones. It is here, at this point in time, that I seek our Mothers.
The Primordial Resonance: Reclaiming the Intimate Auditory Experience in the Age of AI
In his book ‘The Aesthetic Imperative,’ philosopher Peter Sloterdijk introduces the concept of primordial resonance — the pre-individuated bond between mother and child. He explores how, as one of the earliest organs to form and function, the ear provides us with our first contact with the outer world through a sonic resonance that begins with the constant, comforting rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat and the vibrations of her melodic voice. Sloterdijk paints a compelling scenario where children make a ‘trivial but incredible discovery: the world is a still, hollow place in which the heartbeat and the primal soprano are catastrophically silenced.’
This insight suggests that being in the world is connected to a terrible loss — an acceptance that we must learn to live without the ‘sonic continuity’ of our initial primordial bond with our mother.
This realization Sloterdijk argues, is when a child first experiences the world as a silent and hollow place. This is a fundamental rupture in our being. From this point onwards, “silence transmits the alarm signal of being,” and initially, only the mother’s voice sustains the bridge between that primordial state of serenity and the ever-present, precarious now.
According to Sloterdijk, music exists because human beings insist on wanting to have ‘the best once again’ — to reconnect with that lost sense of wholeness and continuity.
This insight reveals to me the fundamental driving force behind all social formations and their diverse expressions. From the moment of this primal breach, our ears seek to repair the broken link to our first bond with the outer world. Just as we were nurtured and made whole by our intimate connection with our mother; now we can only recover the essence of this relationship in the present through public collective engagement — through others.
It is here, where we gather in a multitude of cultural expressions to listen, together, to the sounds that seek to maintain that initial bridge— insisting on having ‘the best once again’ — striving to return to that initial primordial state where the bond between mother, child, and the sonic embrace are once again whole.
Sonic Bonds and the Essence of Freedom
According to Sloterdijk, the connection between our primal need for sonic resonance and the shared soundscapes we create together in public is where we discover and sustain freedom.
I find this conception of freedom particularly compelling. Freedom manifests through our shared inheritance — the absence of the sonic continuity and initial intimacy of the fetal embrace that we all must endure. It is here, in the present moment, together in towns, cities, and nations, where we productively construct ever-emerging forms of new bridges between each other, driven by our shared desire to return home. Immersed within a ‘public hearing,’ this public sonoric landscape allows for what Sloterdijk calls a ‘homeland effect.’
However, this public sonic milieu does not have direct musical meaning, as “authentic music only begins where the mere hearing of sounds ends.” Music, then, according to Sloterdijk, serves as a profound response to the silent alarm sounded by our existential detachment; it is an attempt to construct, anew, the lost resonances within the public sphere. It is more than just mere irrational noise.
The Limitations of Language: Susanne Langer’s Perspective on Art and Emotion
Sloterdijk’s emphasis on authentic music as an active re-engagement with the world and a means of reclaiming the primordial acoustic embrace resonates with the work of American philosopher Susanne Langer. While Sloterdijk focuses on the existential dimensions of music and its role in shaping a shared sense of place, Langer explores the inherent limitations of discursive language and the unique capacity of music to rationally convey complex feelings and experiences that cannot be fully expressed through words alone.
In a beautiful speech she gave in 1958 title ‘The Cultural Importance of the Arts,’ she highlights how language fails when describing an emotion such as ‘joy.’ The word joy describes a general kind of experience, ‘but there is no language to describe just how one joy differs, sometimes radically, from another.’ This makes intuitive sense because we live with different states of joy every day. Yet philosophers, (for the most part) consider the phenomena of feelings and emotions as ‘irrational’ because their conceptual frameworks seek to identify a clear, external cause for each emotional response. In other words, they attempt to understand emotions solely through the lens of the observable events that trigger them, rather than acknowledging the intricate, internal patterns and nuances that shape our emotional experiences.
Langer rejects this reductionist view of emotions, asserting, ‘But human feeling is a fabric, not a vague mass. It has an intricate dynamic pattern, possible combinations, and new emergent phenomena.’ This metaphor — human feelings as a tightly woven, yet flexible and resilient mesh composed of individual threads that rationally encapsulate the unique lived experiences of individuals — illustrates the complex and nuanced nature of our emotional landscape.
She continues:
It is a pattern of organically interdependent and interdetermined tensions and resolutions; a pattern of almost infinitely complex activation and cadence. To it belongs the whole gamut of our sensibility, the sense of straining thought, all mental attitude and motor set. Those are the deeper reaches that underlie the surface waves of our emotion, and make human life a life of feeling instead of an unconscious metabolic existence interrupted by feelings.
Langer argues that these dynamic patterns find ‘formal expression’ that enables art to embody and render comprehensible the internal fabric of our emotions.
Unlike symbols that point to external referents, art, in Langer’s view, presents emotions directly, making them tangible, distinct, rational, and true. Thus, art transcends mere symbolic representation and offers a direct vision of our emotional reality that is inseparable from its expression.
Langer insists that discursive thought cannot properly describe this inner mesh of feelings because its forms are incommensurable with the forms of language, including mathematics and symbolic logic. These linguistic and logical systems lack the ability to capture or quantify the ineffable and numinous aspects of our emotions — qualities that are deeply felt but elude precise definition.
It is art that gives embodiment to the logical forms of inner life, which discourse fails to capture. Our blind spot in modernity is that we presume if something cannot be expressed or formulated within the confines of discursive language, including mathematics and symbolic logic, it must not be rational or true. Yet, it is art, in all its various manifestations, that gives logical form to the inner life of feeling, which is not irrational, but follows its own inherent logic, distinct from that of discursive thought.
We can forgive a man for making a useful
thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless. — Oscar Wilde
Echoing Wilde, Langer argues that art does not serve any objective, instrumentalized purpose. This notion starkly contrasts with the foundational logics of modernity. Art’s essence and very nature are antithetical to instrumentalization and, by extension, to modernity itself. Art exists to provide forms, through which our vitally necessary inner feelings find expression, acting for the sake of imagination rather than utility.
Art presents forms to our imagination, the most fundamental and primordial faculty that humans possess, predating discursive reason. Langer views imagination as the common source of dreams, reason, religion, and genuine observation, asserting that it is directly influenced by the products of art.
In this view, art is not practical, philosophical, scientific, or religious in nature, and it does not serve a direct instrumental purpose like these other domains of human activity. Art, formulates new ways of feeling, and pressages the emergence of a new cultural age. This is very much inline with Jacques Attali’s thesis on the role of music I wrote about in my last piece ‘ AI’s Demands: Why We Are Already Conforming to its Autonomous Needs.’
AI’s Demands: Why We Are Already Conforming to Its Autonomous Needs
The Role of Art and Music in Resisting AI’s Control of our Society and our Futuremedium.com
The Consequences of Neglecting Art: Formless Emotion and Cultural Instability
And Langer warns that this suggests another vitally important reflection on our part: that ‘a wide neglect of artistic education is a neglect in the education of feeling.’ And that art functions to stabilize a culture! This is critical to our discussion here on the role of art, and mother’s.
Neglecting artistic education — the process of refining ones tools and techniques immersed within the flow of time and space — she argues is, in essence, a neglect in the education of feeling. It is through objectifying subjective reality and subjectifying our outward experience of nature that our culture is stabilized and moves through history, unfolding into new cultural epochs. Through art, ordinary sights, sounds, and events are transformed into pieces of imagination, imbued with artistic vitality and emotional import that serves to provide the rational scaffolding for society to function. This process enriches our reality with the significance of created form, making the world itself a symbol of life and feeling.
If we fail to cultivate our ability to find form for our inner feelings and to subjectify nature, we necessarily impoverish our culture and inscribe an anemic arts scene, threatening the very stability of our culture. This is not a trivial matter, as Langer warns that a society that neglects art education gives itself up to formless emotion, and ‘bad art corrupts feeling.’ The consequences of this neglect are far-reaching and serious. As an anemic arts scene leads to an irrational, unstabilized world, one in which as Langer highlights in the very last sentence of her speech ‘the irrationalism which dictators and demagogues exploit.’
The Pure Sound Industry: Confronting the Instrumentalization of Music
As we consider the profound impact of neglecting art, let's shift focus to the contemporary music industry. How do things feel to you right now? Look around—do the threads of our social fabric seem to be fraying? Does our ability to articulate what 2024, this very moment means, feel overwhelmed by the chaos of modern life?
I imagine myself sitting in the passenger seat of a 1970’s Pontiac, driving over a quaint small bridge that traverses an inlet, partially created by the enormous forces of a violent hurricane decades before, and the melody of Joni Mitchell’s song “All I Want” from her album “Blue” fills this imagination. The melody, its rhythm, brings forth a force as real as the keyboard I am typing — a memory of riding with my mother to preschool on a day long past. It is this sonic embrace, reaching across time and the vast accumulation of my experiences, that brings forth a rationality and a sense of coherence amidst the chaos of the present moment — a chaos that an anemic arts scene seems overwhelmed and ill-equipped to articulate.
Sloterdijk warns us of this instrumentalization of music. He calls the modern music industry a ‘pure sound industry,’ arguing that music produced through this modality is not aligned with the authentic music of an active re-engagement with the world. To the contrary, its primary goal is the appropriation of your attention, to remove you from the sonic architecture of your time, which threatens to erode the intimate, individualized experience of hearing through the public engagement of music that is so essential to our well-being. The instrumentalization of music weakens and threatens to sever the stabilizing force that music serves.
Our culture, our politics, our very ability to make sense of this world, begins in the initial sonic embrace between our mother and our pre-individuated selves. It is through art that we not only stabilize our society, it is through art that we honor this initial bond, and enlarge the motherly embrace. Call it a ritual, call it a practice of faith, call it whatever you wish, but as Langer beautifully illustrated, music and art more broadly, provides the forms through which we subjectivize nature, and in doing so, we create a rational world imbued with meaning, emotion, and connection.
In this age of AI, where the instrumentalization of music and the commodification of attention undermine our collective ties to the primordial resonances that ground us and make society legible, it is crucial that we recognize, name, and courageously defend the role of art in our cultural. The ‘pure sound industry’ that Sloterdijk warns us about not only erodes individual freedom and connection with each other, but the very foundations upon which we build and maintain a rational, meaningful world together.
Art as Resistance: Honoring the Maternal Melody in an Age of Commodification
In this age of hyper-commodification, where art is stripped of its essence and nuance for the sake of attaching what’s left to the capital circulation carousel, we must actively resist the corrosive influence of “bad art” and the fragmentation of our cultural landscape.
As Susanne Langer warns, the irrationalism inscribed by bad art dissolves the bridge between the primordial maternal embrace and society — an embrace that, established in the womb before we emerge as individuated beings, forms the foundation upon which we build our connections to others and through this, the world around us.
It is at the moment of that ‘catastrophic’ breach into the world as individuals, we are inscribed with our original drive, an unceasing longing to recapture the profound sense of unity and belonging we experienced in that initial sonic embrace in our mother’s womb. Everything we have- societies, architecture, technology, science, music, art - all of it begins, anew, from this original embrace.
It is only our relationships with others through which we can weave the intricate, resilient fabric Langer describes. Discursive communication alone is insufficient for this task; it is art, in its authentic form, that enables us to bridge the gap between our inner experiences and the shared reality we inhabit. Art are the fibers that make the thread of which we stabilize and manifest anew our culture.
This Mother’s Day, as we celebrate the women who have shaped our lives, let us recognize their role not only in laying the foundation for the connections we forge throughout our lives but also in empowering us to meet the challenges of our current moment. In an age where AI and a totalizing ontology of efficacy and profitability threaten to flatten and annihilate all that cannot be quantified, it is the nurturing and protective power of our mothers that enables us to cultivate and defend authentic art — our last means of reclaiming what remains of our individual and collective identity.