Tinnitus is one of the most interesting natural phenomenon to occur to the body not simply because there are competing medical explanations for the condition (which is rare it seems for common conditions) but because such a little condition packs so much far reaching, conceptually synthesizing punch.
That is, its existence as an experienced phenomenon perfectly demonstrates
- the synthetic Kantian mind
- the psychoanalytic symptom
- the postcartesian (and probably therefore neokantian or Freudian) discussion of mind-body relations
(and for these reasons, it is therefore also the official Accelerationist condition which we will cover later...).
As anyone effected knows, and as the various hypotheses indicate, tinnitus is in part caused by exposure to excessively loud or prolonged noises. This pattern of sound volume raises the 'noise floor' or the threshold for sound (your ears attempt to adapt to the new loud norm of sound level) in your body which can lead to ringing and thus external silence worsens tinnitus in that it brings attention to the ringing. But this is a tautological and idealist explanation that leaves us wondering 'but what causes the ringing and can we root the cause in a meaningful materialism?'
The theory I have read is that the small hairs in the inner ear that vibrate in order to help send and perceive 'ambient room sound' are destroyed - i.e. the capacity to hear certain frequencies is limited or negated - and thus the mind attempts to fill in the frequency gaps with anything at all over nothing. What the mind in conjunction with the damage body (or how the damaged body translates into the 'mind' - think phantom limb syndrome which is similar but not exact...) comes up with is the most basic unit of sound, a simple singular pitch (to test electronic musical equipment musical technicians will generate a Sine Wave or a steady pitch to test the harmonic response and range of an item; when one tunes an instrument one plays a simple A440hz to tune to. This is similar to how one attempts to use a neutral or clear stand or holding vessel if one wishes to showcase a piece of art. In other words, to emphasize the nature of object external variables necessary to the object are limited).
- Tl;dr: the pitch or ringing in tinnitus is a place holder in the gap of presence and absence, or the attempt to symbolize absence.
For both a reason why I might have tinnitus (making and listening to this kind of music) and a glimpse into what tinnitus itself sounds like (screeching analogue feedback pitches from oscillators), see the above (the reason is itself a mode of what it causes - a feedback loop, a hypearreal horror).
The EP is aptly named 'Time's Arrow' consistent with accelerationism, the theory of time. Dominick Fernow barks 'How does the body still work after all this time...' and elweshere slowly enunciates 'now the smoke goes back into the cigarette...'
This relates to Kant nicely. The mind as conceptualized by Kantians is productive, synthetic, positive yet limited and unable to conceptualize a pure negative. You can't hear nothing, you can hear the lack of, or space created in contradistinction to louder sounds, and when you listen closely to what you think is a 'lack' of sound (silence) you notice quieter, ambient sounds. Thus, your mind cannot conceptualize a gap in sound and uses it productive and synthetic creative qualities to produce a basic pitch (as I have said elsewhere, unless you are schizophrenic, the mind already-always actively and passively synthesizes sense experience into a somewhat sensible narrative). Thus I am tempted to say this pitch of tinnitus is a basic Noumenal experience of Outsideness. The tinnitus pitch is a mind produced experience at its limit in relation to a damaged body.
This explication moves tinnitus from the flaccid medical category to the psychological and philosophical domain - tinnitus is a body-mental (dual aspect monism) event concerned with perception of presence in the wake of absence. For Descartes the mind and body are separate (dualism). For Freud, especially his early work like his Scientific Project, the mind is produced as a side effect or residue of the body's naturally occurring vital processes (internal drives, instincts, how the phenotype unfolds, etc. - Freud cycles between vulgar dualism and dual-aspect monism...). That is, for Freud and many other psychoanalysts physical or bodily (somatic) processes transform into or are translated into mental processes. This is how psychoanalysts arrive at the idea of a symptom - very vulgarly put, there has been a negation (project, disavow, repress, something so that it becomes unconscious) of an internal drive or instinct, thought or feeling, which has expressed itself in a positive way as a symptom (i.e. a symptom is a positive sign for a negative that has occurred in a developmental process). Likewise, ringing occurs as a positive sound in the gap of a negative that has resulted from the destruction (negation resulting in demonstration of a mental limit) of a bodily function.
Tinnitus and Deterritorialization (accelerate your tinnitus)
Rust Cohle from season 1 of True Detective suffers from synethesia, a properly Kantian condition.
He tastes colors, sees sounds, etc. For this condition, the senses are mixed or associated with one another without natural limits. This is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, part of what Kant refers to as a 'categorical' or 'transcendental' error. Bion said its meaningless to say 'psychoanalysis isn't scientific enough,' you need to say 'psychoanalysis isn't psychoanalytic enough.' Similarly, you wouldn't say 'the oval is not yellow enough' you would say its not round enough. A triangle 'does not lack enough salt and therefore it is not a triangle' but rather 'a triangle needs a certain amount of angles,' etc. Certain objects have qualities that pertain them and qualities that it would make no sense to apply to them.
And this is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari challenge (turning Kant in on himself) with their concept of deterritorialization and the BwO (which is just accelerationism). In A Thousand Plateaus they write
"Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly…Where psychoanalysis says, ‘Stop, find your self again,’ we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet."But accelerate too fast and you'll go mad...
When I first got tinnitus I panicked and thought my life was over. I thought I would never hear again. I was lost. The fact that I was faced with a new reality in which I had done irreversible damage to my body and would have to adjust to the consequences shocked and frightened me. But what was worse than this was that, like Cohle, my senses began to bleed into one another because of, unlike Cohle, the hearing loss and ringing of tinnitus. I felt disconnected from the outside human world and felt like I was not in my own body, my sight seemed to have worsened, my taste amplified, and my tendency to use my hands to feel things had increased tenfold. Significantly damaging one sense drastically effected how my other senses worked in giving me sense of integration. Insulated in a dulled, muffled tomb, I felt as if I was melting into the world, becoming one with the impersonal Outside (despite feeling disconnected with the human outside). Looking back I believe the shock coupled with having a completely new experience of myself without a relied upon sense gave me a strange look at myself from someone else's perspective (dissociation - and it did not help that the doctors prescribed me amphetamines that I took with coffee...)
What helped me keep from going crazy (besides my loved ones and accepting that time is irreversible and entropy inevitable [a nice accelerationist lesson]) was the conceptualization of tinnitus as an additional productive force in my body's arsenal - 'fuck it, instead of ignoring the ringing I am going to focus on it and try to make it worse.' I began noticing micro-tonal fluctuations in the pitches, and how there was sometimes a subtle rhythm. I soon began to enjoy my pitches and would notice when they would change and why. Now I realize that despite still wishing I had taken better care of my ears, I carry with me something not all do, an extra component. Not only do I simply passively hear sound, but I actively produce sound only I can hear. It is real, related to the physical body, but only ever able to be experienced by me.
So accelerate your tinnitus and enjoy your symptom....
