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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN SOUND
A Philosophy of
Ambient Sound
Materiality, Technology, Art and the Sonic Environment
Ulrik Schmidt
Palgrave Studies in Sound
Series Editor
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Musik
Aalborg University
Aalborg, Denmark
Palgrave Studies in Sound is an interdisciplinary series devoted to the
topic of sound with each volume framing and focusing on sound as it is
conceptualized in a specific context or field. In its broad reach, Studies in
Sound aims to illuminate not only the diversity and complexity of our
understanding and experience of sound but also the myriad ways in
which sound is conceptualized and utilized in diverse domains. The series
is edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, The Obel Professor of Music at
Aalborg University, and is curated by members of the university’s Music
and Sound Knowledge Group.
Editorial Board:
Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (series editor)
Martin Knakkergaard
Mads Walther-Hansen
Editorial Committee:
Michael Bull
Barry Truax
Trevor Cox
Karen Collins
Ulrik Schmidt
A Philosophy of
Ambient Sound
Materiality, Technology, Art
and the Sonic Environment
Ulrik Schmidt
Roskilde University
Roskilde, Denmark
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
In memory of Henrik Schmidt
Acknowledgments
vii
viii Acknowledgments
A dear thanks to my mom and dad, Lone and Henrik Schmidt, for their
lifelong support. And above all, thank you to Vera and Kristiane for
patiently living with the loneliness of the project, and for continuously
reminding me of the joys and wonders of everyday life outside of it. The
book is generously supported by a research grant from the Carlsberg
Foundation, for which I am truly thankful. I dedicate the book to the
memory of my father, Henrik Schmidt.
Contents
1 I ntroduction 1
The ‘Problem’ of Ambient Sound 3
The Concept of Ambient Sound 5
Sonic Environmentality 8
Surroundability 11
Onto-aesthetics 16
Perspectives and Aims 19
Bibliography 31
Part I Fields 35
2 E
ffects of Being-in 37
Toward a Material Morphology of Ambient Sound 37
Sound as Furniture 41
Centralization and Decentralization 44
Bibliography 49
3 Environmental
and Surrounding Sounds 51
From Environmental to Surrounding Sounds 51
Objectivity and Environmentality 52
ix
x Contents
Objectlessness 59
The A-figurative Continuum 65
Bibliography 73
4 F
ield Effects 77
Univocity and Consistency 77
Ubiquity 80
Immanence and Immersion 81
Toward the Ground 89
Groundlessness 92
Continuous Variation 96
Bibliography 104
Part II Strategies 107
5 S
onic Mediatization109
Environmentality Without Ecology 109
What Is Mediatization? 112
Mediation and Mediatization 115
Acousmatics and Mediatization 118
Medium Effects, Phonogeny and Mediatization 124
Bibliography 131
6 S
ynthetic Strategies133
From Reproduction Sensibilities to Production Sensibilities 133
Synthetic and Organic Matter 137
Synthetic Sound and Technology 139
Sound Masses 144
Generalized Pop 148
Bibliography 156
7 A
mbient Sound Design159
Sound Design and the Production of Audiovisual Immanence 159
The Sonic Environment in Classic Cinema 160
Contents xi
Part III Frames 181
8 S
taging Ambient Listening183
Technology and Listening 183
The Synthetic Production of the Listening Environment 185
The Double Mediality of Technological Listening 188
Staging the Ambient Listening Environment 194
Bibliography 199
9 Architectures
of Acoustic Immanence203
Mediatization of Acoustic Space 203
Enhanced Reverberation 205
Acousmatization and Mediatization of the Acoustic Interior 207
Anti-reverberatory Purification 211
Bibliography 214
10 A
mplified Surrounds215
Amplified Expansion and Centralization 215
Cinematic Surround Sound 218
Non-cinematic Surround Sound 223
Bibliography 234
11 Mobile
Infrastructures of Everyday Listening237
Headphone Bubbles and Their Surroundings 238
Inside the Cocoon 242
Infrastructures of Environmental Distribution 245
Streaming Infrastructures and Bubbles of Ubiquity 247
Bibliography 252
xii Contents
12 Epilogue:
Generic, Inattentive, Asocial255
Bibliography 263
B
ibliography265
I ndex281
List of Figures
xiii
1
Introduction
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 1
U. Schmidt, A Philosophy of Ambient Sound, Palgrave Studies in Sound,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6_1
2 U. Schmidt
mean for our relationship with the world—with sounds, things, informa-
tion and people around us—when they are felt, and wanted to be felt, as
something we are surrounded by? How do we relate to sounds when they
mainly affect us as accumulative parts of a larger mass of generalized envi-
ronmentality? What does it mean, in a sociocultural and philosophical
perspective, when things, signs and information are no longer seen as
individual occurrences that occupy an independent, particular and
delimited position in time and space, but are brought together and spread
out into the environment as a heterogeneous all-encompassing whole?
Taking such questions as a guiding framework, the book proposes and
explores ambient sound as a key issue and basic philosophical ‘problem’
in sound studies, media philosophy and the aesthetics of sound. I pose
ambient sound as a ‘problem’ not only to stress its inescapable, yet still
partly ignored, formative and affective influence in the general history of
sound and listening: from the aesthetic impact of technological (re)pro-
duction on ambient listening to ambient sound’s role in the general pro-
duction of subjectivity and sociocultural relations to leading ambient
trends in artistic practice to the sociopolitical implications of a spectacu-
lar ambient aestheticization and environmentalization of everyday audi-
tory life. Moreover, ambient sound also constitutes a key problem in and
for sound studies and sonic thinking. Most notably, the theorization of
ambient sound and the sonic environment is for the most part conceptu-
ally obscured by ambiguity and ambivalence. As a consequence, there still
doesn’t seem to be much scholarly consensus about what precisely consti-
tutes the ambient dimension of sound and sonic environments—and
thus how and to what extent this dimension has influenced the history
and aesthetics of sonic technology, music and sound art, listening prac-
tices, and the general sociopolitical impact of environmental sound on
modern and contemporary auditory life.
Sonic Environmentality
If environmental sound is the property of a sound as being in and of the
environment, a sonic environment is the collection and merging of envi-
ronmental sounds into a heterogeneous vibrant whole, which provides a
potentially meaningful, affective and environing medium for a potential
listener. Consider the environmental sounds of, for instance, an air con-
ditioning unit; a big plane flying over the house; the wind in the trees; the
1 Introduction 9
voice of a news reporter on television; the sound of your own feet walking
on the pavement; a dog barking somewhere in the distance; music play-
ing or neighbors quarreling next door; or the sudden vibrant sound of an
incoming phone call. These different forms of environmental sound
point to different environmental processes, functions and activities with
different signifying and affective potentials. Some environmental sounds
are indicators of a specific event occurring in a specific moment and a
specific location, whereas others fill the space as constants permeating the
entire environment. Some sounds are closely related to other sounds (by
shape, proximity, contextual meaning, etc.), others are not. Some sounds
are technologically mediated, others are not. And some sounds express
subjective and social relations, states and emotions, others do not. In this
way, each sonic environment is defined by the specific ways in which it
combines different forms of environmental sound with different signify-
ing and affective potentials. However obvious this observation may be, it
arguably pinpoints some of the most intricate difficulties with how to
conceptualize the functions, meanings and aesthetic potentials of the
sonic environment—and thus of ambient sound more specifically.
R. Murray Schafer, a pioneer in sparking the interest in sound environ-
ments and sonic ecology, famously introduced the term soundscape as a
general, all-embracing term denoting “any acoustic field of study” (1994,
p. 7). He proposed a simple compositional structure for the soundscape
centered around a few significant features: keynote sounds, sound marks
and sound signals. However, as I will discuss in more detail later, this
conception implies a hierarchical understanding of what a sonic environ-
ment is and how it conditions listening, which is arguably limited and,
on crucial points, thoroughly misconceived. Furthermore, the term
‘soundscape’ is, as Jonathan Sterne, Christine Guillebaud and many oth-
ers have argued, notoriously imbued with analogies of visuality, musical-
ity, frontality, flatness, distance, structural stability and cultural privilege.10
The legacy and quality of Schafer’s work notwithstanding, we thus argu-
ably need other—less hierarchical, distant, static and musical—concep-
tualizations of sonic environmentality to truly grasp the sociocultural
impact, functioning and aesthetic potentials of the sonic environment in
general and of ambient sound in particular. We need, to paraphrase John
Cage’s famous dictum with a small alteration, to let ambient sounds ‘be
10 U. Schmidt
Surroundability
As James J. Gibson writes, “to be ambient at a point means to surround a
position in the environment that could be occupied by an observer. The
position may or may not be occupied” (Gibson 1986, p. 65). Accordingly,
12 U. Schmidt
Hence, compared to vision, the auditory system does, after all, argu-
ably possess some inclination toward ambient sensibilities. On the other
hand, though, audition is very far from being exclusively or primordially
ambient. Frontality, directionality and focus on isolated objects, events
and streams are obviously as essential to auditory perception as are sensa-
tions of envelopment and surroundability, learned as they are throughout
evolution and refined and promoted in modern cultural history as a gen-
eral “audile technique” of everyday mediated listening (Sterne 2003).
Learning to direct auditory attention to specific environmental events for
spatial and semantic analysis is not only a central part of the evolution of
perception. It also constitutes a crucial component in numerous techni-
cized forms of modern communication such as telegraphy, acoustic
design of theaters, concert halls, cinemas and other sonic architectures, in
telephony, and in acoustic military observation and sonic warfare
(Ouzounian 2020). Hence, while there may be some evidence in describ-
ing sound and listening as more ambiently oriented than vision, this
week inclination does not explain to any important degree the actual
functioning and impact of ambient sound as a cultural phenomenon, nor
ambient listening as cultivated, aestheticized practice. In audition, as in
other perceptual registers, ambient effects are but one dimension of a
general environmentality, and ambient sensations but one dimension of
a general system of environmental sensibility. Again, some surroundings
are more surrounding than others, and some forms of listening are more
oriented toward this surroundability than others.
But, if auditory perception does not to any essential extent constitute
an exclusive domain for ambient sensibilities compared to other registers,
what is ambient listening then? While the audiovisual litany is obviously
reductive from an ontological perspective, it sketches a set of general dis-
tinctions that are still of great importance for the study of ambient sound
and listening. Beyond the essentialist opposition between vision and
audition, its implied opposition between directionality and surroundabil-
ity thus entails a legitimate general distinction between two basic forms
of environmental affectivity and awareness that arguably applies to mul-
timodal perception on a broad level. Perception—and listening more
1 Introduction 15
Onto-aesthetics
As Ihde acknowledges, directionality and surroundability are not simply
variations in perceptual attitude. They must equally be understood as
properties and qualities of the environment.20 The ambient dimension of
sonic environmentality thus both denote a surrounding property of the
world and a sensation of being in that surround: ambient surroundability
is both a specific ontological property that some environmental phenom-
ena possess, and a potential aesthetic effect that can be actualized in spe-
cific acts of listening. This understanding of a deep and intimate
relationship between ontological and aesthetic registers have often been
summarized in the concept onto-aesthetics, especially to describe the
rethinking of aesthetics, non-representational being and non-subjective,
affective sensation in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. However, the very
notion of onto-aesthetics has also been an object of critique in current
sound studies. For instance, discussing the recent material and ontologi-
cal turn in sound studies (exemplified by Christoph Cox, Steve Goodman
and Greg Hainge), Brian Kane explicitly takes a critical stance against
onto-aesthetics and what he regards as its implied defense of “a theory of
the work of art as a disclosure of its ontological condition” (Kane 2015,
p. 11). Eventually, he argues, this position risks promoting a “sound stud-
ies without auditory culture” (cf. the title of his essay), since the “argu-
ments developed by proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies
neglect the role played by auditory cultures in shaping affective responses
to sound and in ‘ontological’ claims about sound” (ibid., p. 16). Will
Schrimshaw expands on Kane’s argument and takes it in a slightly other
direction, criticizing what he sees as a widespread tendency, in ontologi-
cal thinking about sound and sound art, to equate non-representational
materialism with an aesthetics of immanence and immersion. This equa-
tion builds, Schrimshaw argues, on an unhealthy “conflation of aesthetics
and ontology” (Schrimshaw 2017, p. 110).
However, although Kane and Schrimshaw both draw on Deleuze,
their notions of onto-aesthetics arguably differ in important respects
from the Deleuzian approach I wish to pursue here.21 Most importantly,
onto-aesthetics, in the sense I will use the term, does not entail a “confla-
tion” of being (ontology) and sensation (aesthetics). It merely stresses the
1 Introduction 17
This is evidently the case when ambient sound and listening become
explicit goals in their own right, as in the commercial sound industry’s
promotion of remarkably, and increasingly more, ambient listening tech-
nologies (e.g., surround sound and noise cancelling headphones), stream-
ing infrastructures and portable distribution formats. Or in the full
embrace, within certain parts of contemporary sound art and museum
exhibits, of immersive sound and spectacular audiovisual installations.
But it also applies, albeit more subtly, in the pervasive tendency to employ
mediatizing and massifying strategies as a standard approach in postwar
electro-acoustic music, pop music and sound art since the early 1960s,
and in cinematic sound design, especially after 1970. This widespread,
multi-facetted influence of ambient sound in even the farthest corner of
auditory culture is, I will maintain, not in itself neither good nor bad. To
be ambient and have ambient experiences is a fundamental part of sound
and modern auditory life. Yet, it can of course be criticized, and arguably
should be, in the many cases where ambient practices settle for unimagi-
native, standardized and uncritical forms of cultural expression. For
example, Schrimshaw raises critique of how generic, immersive practices
in recent sound art have “become increasingly prevalent” and developed
into “a new orthodoxy,” especially since the introduction of digital and
interactive artforms (Schrimshaw 2017, p. 1). And in his 2013 essay
“Against Ambiance,” Seth Kim-Cohen makes a similar critique. “I’m not
inclined,” he writes, “to let the ambient off the hook by calling it some-
thing as easily slipped as ‘escapist.’ I think the dangers are far stickier than
that. What troubles me about López’s performances, about Aitken’s pavil-
ion, about Turrell’s installations, are their implications—that is to say,
their knock-on effects—on the audiences and the discourse they attract
and simultaneously produce” (Kim-Cohen 2013, p. 13).
I by and large share Schrimshaw’s and Kim-Cohen’s critical stances
toward the reduction of ambient sound to ‘sensationalism’ and sonic
spectacles of immersivity in recent sound art. However, as I have already
suggested and will substantiate extensively below, ambient sound is a
much more complex phenomenon than a mere trend in recent sound art
can represent to any fair degree, however dominant it may be. First, the
use of ambient sound in the history of sound art since the 1960s is con-
siderably more widespread, significant and multi-facetted than suggested
1 Introduction 21
Notes
1. Sloterdijk (2004, p. 521); my translation from German of “Modernität,
das heisst: Auch der Hintergrund wird Produkt.”
2. For example, the experience-oriented economic perspective that still suf-
fuses today’s cultural industries is, as B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
argued in their influential book from 1999, in large part distinguished
by the commercial tendency to think and stage its products as an “envi-
ronmental relationship” (Pine and Gilmore 1999, p. 31). “No wonder,”
they noted, “so many companies today wrap experiences around their
existing goods and services to differentiate their offerings. […] They can
enhance the environment in which clients purchase and / or receive the
service, layer on inviting sensations encountered while in that company-
controlled environment, and otherwise figure out how to better engage
clients to turn the service into a memorable event” (ibid., p. 15). Taking
another approach, Yves Citton has more recently argued how contempo-
rary societies have moved from attention economy to a broader and
more affectively complex “ecology of attention.” The current “ecosys-
tem,” in which media, communication, entertainment and commerce
take place and blend, Citton argues, “functions as an echo chamber,
whose reverberations ‘occupy’ our minds (in the military sense of the
term): most of the time, we think (in our ‘heart of hearts’) only what is
made to resonate in us in the media vault by the echoes with which it
surrounds us. In other words, media enthralments create an
ECHOSYSTEM, understood as an infrastructure of resonances condition-
ing our attention to what circulates around, through and within us” (Citton
2017, p. 29).
3. For an analysis of the basic, yet contradictory, habituation demanded
and nurtured by contemporary media between the new and the same,
the exciting and the boring, control and addiction, see Chun (2016). For
a discussion of media as elemental habitats, see Peters (2015). As Peters
argues: “In the life sciences, ‘media’ already means gels and other sub-
stances for growing cultures, a usage growing from the older environ-
mental meaning of medium, and in a similar spirit we can regard media
as enabling environments that provide habitats for diverse forms of life,
including other media. […] We are back to the age-old […] communi-
cation environment in which media have become equipment for living
in a more fundamental way” (2015, p. 3–5).
1 Introduction 25
4. According to John Durham Peters, the idea “that media are message-
bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the
Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history. […] The elemental
legacy of the media concept is fully relevant in a time when our most
pervasive surrounding environment is technological and nature […] is
drenched with human manipulation. In a time when it is impossible to
say whether the nitrogen cycle or the Internet is more crucial to the
planet’s maintenance, I believe we can learn much from a judicious syn-
thesis, difficult though it be, of media understood as both natural and
cultural. If media are vehicles that carry and communicate meaning,
then media theory needs to take nature, the background to all possible
meaning, seriously” (Peters 2015, p. 2).
5. As Casey O’Callaghan argues, “sounds are distal events in which a
medium is disturbed or set into motion by the activities of a body or
interacting bodies” (O’Callaghan 2017, p. 3). And later: “Sounds are
public occurrences in which a moving object or interacting bodies dis-
turb a surrounding medium” (ibid., p. 8). While I am in general agree-
ment with O’Callaghan in his realist (and implicitly ecological)
understanding of sound as distal mediatic disturbance, his general phi-
losophy of sound, however, is arguably somewhat weakened by the igno-
rance of (the use of ) technology and the mediatic complexity it brings
forth. By contrast, Brian Kane (2014), discussing the ideas of Pierre
Schaeffer, also argues for an understanding of sound as an evental rela-
tionship between cause, source, effect and medium, but he does so pre-
cisely to stress the complex role of technology in mediating, and
potentially disturbing, this very relationship. As we shall see, the ‘eco-
logical’ relations between a sound’s cause, source and effect are, in a
media-ecological perspective, always also potentially synthetic, phantas-
magoric and deceptive, and artificial operability and manipulability is
part of its nature. In other words, all aspects of a sound—cause, source,
effect, medium—are ‘effects’ and can be deployed and manipulated as
such to control the affective potentials of sound. Following Mack
Hagood, we can thus distinguish three different sonic potentials: “(1)
sound is mediated as mechanical waves in an environmental medium,
such as the air; (2) sound can also be mediated and altered as a signal
through electroacoustic and digital processes of transduction and signal
processing; and (3) sound is also mediatic in itself, a sensory-spatial pro-
cess of interaction though which subjects and objects emerge in modes
26 U. Schmidt
8. Spitzer (1942a, b). In the later history of the concept of the ambient,
Spitzer notes, “this word cannot be separated from that of medium =
milieu” (Spitzer 1942a, p. 2). As an example, Spitzer describes how Isaac
Newton’s concept ‘ambient medium’ was translated into French as milieu
ambient (ibid., p. 1). He later concludes that ambiens and medium “have
come to have a strange and indissolvable relationship: indissolvable
purely, yet never constant or restful. They have met from time to time
(even in Greek the περιέχον [periēchon] was the μέσον [méson ~ middle,
medium] of perception), perhaps just to touch each other, and as if elec-
trified by this contact, each starts anew in a direction of its own” (Spitzer
1942b, p. 199).
9. To highlight just a few prominent examples, we can consider the implicit,
partial blurring of the terms environmental, ambient, ambience and atmo-
sphere in Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature (2007); for instance
in his description of the book’s key term “ambient poetics” as “a way of
conjuring up a sense of a surrounding atmosphere or world” (Morton
2007, p. 22). A more direct and explicit equation of ‘atmosphere’ and
‘ambience’ in environmental aesthetics is found in Yuriko Saito’s Everyday
Aesthetics (2007). And as an example of a consistent translation of the
French ambiance into the English ‘atmosphere’ in a key philosophical
text, see Jean Baudrillard’s Le système des objets (1968) and The System of
Objects (1996). For an extended discussion of the distinctions between
ambient, ambience and atmosphere in relation to sound, see Lacey
(2022, p. 87–96). And for a discussion of the same conceptual distinc-
tion in relation to aesthetic culture in general, see McCormack (2018,
p. 140, 223n).
10. Sterne (2013); Guillebaud (2017, p. 3). Schafer’s work has been widely
criticized beyond the scope of my present argument. For example, Sterne
(2003) and several others have drawn attention to Schafer’s contempt of
technological reproduction because it, according to Schafer, promotes a
state of ‘schizophonia’, and to his anti-modern preference for acoustic
hi-fi sounds (conceptualized, at least in part, with a wittingly intended
contradiction in terms). Schafer has also been criticized for promoting a
bias towards special types of soundscapes observable in, for instance, his
“personal aversion to urbanism” (Toop 2004, p. 62), or in what Dylan
Robinson describes as a latent racism and cultural appropriation in
Schafer’s work (Robinson 2020, p. 1). In addition, mainly because of
soundscape’s connotations to visuality, flatness and distance, Guillebaud
28 U. Schmidt
19. Yet, since evolution has in part predisposed humans to frontal vision (in
contrast, for example, to animals with omnidirectional vision like deer,
horses and rabbits), visual physiologists have, according to Gibson,
mainly studied the act of looking-at and tended to overlook acts of
looking-around. This, Gibson argues, is in part due to habits of cultural
practice since “we modern, civilized, indoors adults are so accustomed to
looking at a page or a picture, or through a window, that we often lose
the feeling of being surrounded by the environment, our sense of the
ambient array of light” (Gibson 1986, p. 203). This claim, however, is
arguably challenged, and quite distinctly so, by historical developments
in modern urbanized and mediatized culture (Schmidt 2013; Crary
1990, 2001, 2013).
20. Directionality and surroundability are not only noetic acts of the inten-
tional mind, to use the phenomenological vocabulary Ihde adopts from
Husserl, but possess a noematic correlate in the phenomenal world:
“Both these dimensional aspects of auditory presence [directionality and
surroundability] are constant and copresent, but the intentional focus
and the situation varies the ratio of what may stand out. There is also a
noematic difference in relation to what kind of sound may most clearly
present itself as primarily surrounding and primarily directional without
losing its counterpart” (Ihde 2007, p. 77–78).
21. The term ‘onto-aesthetics,’ it should be noted, is not originally coined by
Kane (as he claims, taking inspiration from Nelson Goodman). It is a
term that is applied widely by Deleuze scholars and in Deleuzian inspired
scholarship—along with similar terms such as ‘onto-ethics,’ ‘onto-
epistemology’ and ‘onto-ethology’ (Alliez 2004; Zepke 2005; Buchanan
2008; Hetrick 2019)—to emphasize the aesthetic potentials implied in
Deleuze’s realist, materialist, non-subjective, non-representational, and
in some respects anti-phenomenological, philosophy.
22. For Deleuze, sensation and the sensible is not a capacity of the sensing
subject, but something which transcends it as a potential (onto-aesthetic)
‘effect’, embedded in the empirical fabric of worldly being: “It is strange
that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what
can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not
much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible
from representation and to determine it as that which remains once rep-
resentation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody
of sensations). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics
1 Introduction 31
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Noin hirvittävässä asennossa ja näin julmana ei kotiväki koskaan
ennen ollut nähnyt aina rauhallista ja hyvää pappaa.
— Kyllä tämä on hullu aika, sanon minä. Kuka meistä enää uskoo
Jumalaan?
Jos et tunne puutetta, voisit heille nauraa. Sillä Pietu harppaa kuin
nälistynyt koni ehyt käsi edestakaisin heiluen ja aina väliin housujaan
ylös nykäisten. Tiinalla lipokkaat jaloissa lonkkuvat, jotta näkyy paljas
kantapää sukan rikkeymässä, ja Asko venyy käärönä hänen
käsipuolessaan. Pentti ja Tahvo pojat näyttävät paremmin tulevan
toimeen. He pitävät toisiaan kädestä kiinni ja kyllä ymmärtävät, mikä
arvo on nuorilla jaloilla.
— Pietu oli äsken kovin ylpeä. Joutaa nyt palella, huutaa rovasti
Pietulle jälkeen.
— Mitä sinä turhia parut? Eihän tässä vielä ole niin hengen
hätää…
Tuolla on mökki. Siellä on lämmintä… ja leipääkin. Helei, ämmä!
Juokse, kyllä jaksat! Ja, pojat, nyt täysi mustalaisen kyyti, kokee
Pietu panna leikiksi, vaikka tunteekin, että nyt jo on kuolema
kantapäillä.
— Mutta Asko! Voi taivaan jumala Askoa! Nyt… nyt, Pietu, tulee
rangaistus, kun sinä herjasit pappia… ja niin hyvää pappia… Asko
raukka! huutaa äkkiä Tiina ja kallistuu Askoa kohti.
*****
— Hopearaha!
— Mitä sitten?
— Annan.
Nyt saa Pietu esille palvatun sian lavan. Hän sitä heiluttaa taas
Tiinalle.
— Kost' jumala.
— Kost' jumala.
— Nyt voikämpäle.
— Kost' jumala.
— Nyt vehnäistä.
— Kost' jumala.
— Nyt kahvia.
— Nyt sokuria.
— Nyt emäntä keittää kahvia, kun sitä kerran meilläkin on, pyytää
Tiina ja laittelee jalkoihinsa kellervää väkevälle tuoksuvaa voidetta,
mitä rovasti oli lähettänyt.
— On niin rumaa?
— On.
— No missä palkat?
Kun Pietu oli syönyt, alkoi hän katsella uutta testamenttia. Korea
kirja se oli ja se oli hänen kädessään hyvin outo, kuin kultakello
kerjäläisen kourassa.
Eikä hän ymmärtänyt, mitä hän sillä oikein tekisi. Muut kai sitä
semmoista lukivat, mutta hänestä tuntui niin hassunkuriselta
ajatellakin itseään testamentti kourassa muka sitä lukemassa. Se
aivan nauratti Pietua. Ja toisekseen hän oli kovin huono lukija. Aina
lukusilla oli siitä lukemisesta ollut rovastin kanssa nätinää.
Tiina kyllä luki. Mutta olihan niitä muiden kirjoja Tiinalle luettavaksi.
Tämä nyt oli heille liian ylellinen.
— No neljäkymmentä?
— Suutarin markan.
— Kirjoitus hävitetään.