Cryptic Meditations: the Resonance of Ether

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Introduction
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On the 5th of June 1995, 23 years ago, a time-matter compound called the Bose–Einstein condensate was produced for the first time in history. With this condensate, quantum matter stood completely still for a split of a second, as if time stopped and rendered matter motionless once and for all. In this Cryptic Meditation: the Resonance of Ether we want to mark this mythical moment by inviting you to an outdoor séance. The main topic we will address relates to the notion of matter-as-waveform, transcendence and their arcane relation to medium-isms. So today, moving from the Salon, we are going outside—to meditate.

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Transcendentals: The noise of meaning
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Our languages have meaning [German, English, Danish, French]. Yet, this meaning transcends something. There is something beneath language. Beneath language—beneath all languages—their is sound, or rather, music. Music lives beneath meaning and before it, it is its pre-condidition and its physical medium.  It is before meaning, as a pre-condition as well as standing in front of it—or rather beneath it. Meaning presupposes music, and could not emerge without it. Music inhabits the sensible. In fact, it carries all senses. It vibrates in this very microphone at this very time, and reverberates in the innermost secrets of our conversations. The transcendental dimension of our communication is nested in music. Before any exchange of meaning, even false meaning, deceptive utterances, and lies, music knows in advance harmonies and discords. Thus, beneath language there is a layer of music. 

Language needs music — though, music doesn’t need language. 

Yet this music covers something else. It covers the chaos that precedes it. Music needs noise. Noise is music’s  essential condition. While music may know harmony and discords, noise doesn’t know such thing. Noise is all that vibrates, may it be harmonious, discordant or otherwise. Noise makes music undifferentiated. It no longer carries any specific meaning; but carries all, or none.

Music needs noise — though noise doesn’t need music. While music transcends noise, noise immanates form the depths of matter. 

The transcendental dimension of music is nested in noise—its physical condition.  There is thus a double transcendence from this global passage from noise to meaning. In other words,  there are two local passages that link noise to language: (1) the first passage is the one from music to language — whose corridor is guarded by the mythological figures the goddess Muse and traversed by Orpheus — and (2) the tumultuous passage from noise to music — whose corridor is traversed by Ulysses and populated by the mythological figures of the unknowns Sirens. 

Like Orpheus’ Muse, noblewomen and noblemen excelled in the French art of conversation in the Salon. With tact, taste and acuity, they mastered the art of the pitch — this passage from music to meaning — from the soothing layer of harmony to the subtleties of meaning.

On the other hand, before or below these séances in the Salon, the Sirens always control the mandatory local passage between the noisy din and the beginning of music—waves crashing, filtering white noise into distant, hypnotic songs. Sirens are born in sharp toothed-chaos, yet their mesmerising chant from the din, and do also have perfect pitch, which may not know harmony, yet cuts through chaos—only to return back to it.

Michel Serres once wrote: “Eloquence begins my standing on coarse sand, facing the chaotic ocean and breaking pebbles in your teeth, and ends with the sublime. We should define sublimation as the passage from solid to gaseous, a softening.”

Noise is hard — meaning is soft. — The soft smoothes out the sharp edges of solids, while the hard flattens out meaning. 

Serres continues:

“Take a black box. To its left, before it, there is the world. To its right, or after it, travelling along certain circuits, there is what we call information. The energy of things goes in: disturbances of the air, shocks and vibrations, heat, alcohol or ether salts, photons… etc. Information comes out, and even meaning. We do not always know where this box is located, nor how it alters what flows through it, nor which Sirens, Muses or Bacchantes are at work inside; it remains closed to us. However, we can say with certainty that beyond this threshold, both of ignorance and perception, energies are exchanged, on their usual scale, at the levels of the world, the group and cellular biochemistry; and that on the other side of this same threshold, information appear: signals, figures, languages, meaning. Before the box, the hard; after it, the soft.”

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