If we think of sounds that relate to affectivity, then the scream has a starring role. Screams are imagined to permeate our existence from the very beginning: they are the newborn’s sonorous declaration of life, of its affective capacity – its power to affect and be affected. There is also the screaming body from which the newborn emerges – a body in the process of radical transformation. Screams are an exemplary mode of affective communication. These high-pitched, loud, attention-grabbing vocalizations both enunciate high-level affection and work to alert others, via affect, to our own affective state. The scream is both about affect (or rather, affection – affect as it is embodied, captured and, to some degree, qualified as emotion or feeling1) and is itself affective, insomuch that it seeks to mobilize other bodies by impacting upon their affective registers. The scream, as a sonorous-affective force, is thus responsible for the transference, or contagion of affects from one body to another.
This chapter seeks to untangle three affective ‘modes’ of the scream. First, it will consider the scream as an expression of affection; a sound generated in order to give voice to an affected body. Second, it will consider the scream as affective or affecting, inasmuch as it modulates and intensifies affection in other bodies, as exemplified by the use of the scream in torture practices and horror film soundtracks. Third, and perhaps most speculatively, it will consider the scream as an affect in and of itself, as something that has an existence independent from expressing and perceiving bodies. Drawing on the notion of affect developed by Deleuze and Guattari, it will be proposed that the scream’s affective capacity goes beyond how it is experienced by a particular body. In short, there is always something more to the scream than what we perceive of it. However, while this chapter will focus on each mode in turn, this is not meant to suggest these modes can be cleanly separated from one another, or that they operate in isolation. Rather, as will become apparent, they tend to be implicated in and work in correspondence with one another, as the affected becomes the affecting. Subsequently, it is more appropriate to think of these affective modes as three standpoints or ‘lenses’ from which to consider the scream and its relation to affectivity. This is not to posit the scream as having a particular or exceptional relation to affectivity; it is not that the scream is affective whereas other sounds are not. Rather, the scream here can be thought of exemplifying the ways in which sound can relate to affect. However, to consider this relationship between the scream (as well as sound more generally) and the affective requires us to focus less upon what the scream represents, symbolizes or signifies – the scream as a reflection of the unravelled psyche, the tortured, modern subject2 – and focus more on what the scream does, its extrusion from and impingement upon affecting and affected bodies.
The scream of affection
For a sound as assertive as the scream, there can be much ambiguity regarding its affective origins. While screams are often associated with states of distress – horror, fear, pain, fright, frustration, rage – they may also be the outcome of positive or pleasurable encounters. There are, for example, erotic and orgasmic screams, joyous and excited screams, and screams of surprise (rather than fright). More generally, we can think of screams as a type of ‘affect burst’ – ‘very discrete, nonverbal expressions of affect in both face and voice’ (Scherer 1994: 170).3 These paralinguistic, amorphous outbursts typically occur in high-intensity, highly charged moments – they are responses to radically heightened extremes of affection, whether experienced positively or negatively – as pleasure or pain; or as a not-yet-discernable feeling. Thus there is also a quantitative dimension to the scream that traverses these qualitative differences. As such, it is the amount of affect – how much we are affected – that is first conducive of the scream, rather than how this affection is felt and qualified (as, for example, fear, horror, frustration or joy).
While screams typically occur in response to heightened affection, they can also scramble the imagined or assumed linearity of action/reaction. Rollercoaster designer John Allen has noted that the screams of passengers are often pre-emptive: ‘part of the appeal is the imagined danger. That’s why many passengers start screaming before the coaster takes off’ (quoted in Cartmell 1987: 10). This is not to render the affections of passengers as imaginary or disingenuous, to dismiss their fear as being ‘all in their heads’. Rather, the scream is a response to an imminent threat that is felt but not-yet actualized.4 Yet, equally, the screams of rollercoaster passengers are, to some degree, ritualized screams – much like those of fans at a pop concert, or of audience members instructed by a compère to ‘make some noise’. In these contexts, the scream is not a particular cause for alarm; it is not an irrepressible, exceptional outburst, but is an anticipated and normalized compulsion – an intentional expression of a collective or crowd feeling.
Alternatively, we may not know that we are screaming at all – the scream can slip out before we realize what has happened. Douglas Kahn notes that ‘people who have been in a life-threatening situation often must be told by others that they were screaming’ (2001: 245). In such instances, screams can occur outside of full consciousness – we scream before we ‘know’ that we scream. Thus screams can be instinctive or intentional, spontaneous or ritualized, active or reactive. Yet either way, they remain ‘resolutely communicative’ (ibid.).
The scream has often been understood in terms of ‘primal expression’ – it belongs to a repertoire of articulating sounds anterior to the structures of verbal communication that human beings revert to in highly intensive corporeal states: the moments where words will not suffice. This is the premise that lies behind Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, which focused on the scream as a means of releasing pain that could not be conveyed through verbal communication. Emerging as a psychotherapeutic treatment in the early 1970s with the publication of Janov’s The Primal Scream (1970) and The Anatomy of Mental Illness (1971), Primal Therapy used the scream to relieve pain repressed during early childhood, that he believed was the basis of neuroses. In triggering negative recollections from childhood, Primal Therapy allows the patient to re-experience repressed, childhood pain. This pain is felt (as opposed to existing as a memory) and, consequently, the patient feels the urge to scream. After a number of patients responded similarly to his scream treatment, Janov stated:
I have come to regard that scream as the product of central and universal pains which reside in all neurotics. I call them Primal Pains because they are original, early hurts upon which all later neurosis is built. It is my contention that these pains exist in every neurotic each minute of his later life, irrespective of the form of his neurosis. These pains often are not consciously felt because they are diffused throughout the entire system where they affect body organs, muscles, the blood and lymph system and, finally, the distorted way we believe. (quoted in Hoffmann and Bailey 1992: 218)
Janov reported that Primal Therapy led to a decrease in adrenalin levels in patients: ‘at the end of 26 weeks of Primal Therapy there was more than a 200 per cent increase in growth hormone level, while there was a 30 per cent drop in adrenaline levels. During the same period of time, for those who could not get into deep feelings there was a significant drop in the same levels’ (Janov 2007: 235). In response to criticism that understood Primal Therapy’s use of the scream merely as a temporary, short-term cathartic discharge, Janov states:
The primal scream is not a scream for its own sake. Nor is it used as a tension release. When it results from deep wracking feeling, I believe it is a curative process, rather than simply a release of tension. It is not the scream that is curative, in any case; it is the pain […] the real Primal Scream is unmistakable. It has its own quality of something deep rattling and involuntary. What comes out when the person screams is a single feeling that may underlie thousands of previous experiences: ‘Daddy, don’t hurt me anymore!’; ‘Mama, I’m afraid!’ (Hoffmann and Bailey 1992: 219)
Primal therapy has been largely discredited – it remains substantiated by little more than anecdotal evidence.5 However, for our purposes, what primal therapy exposes is the association of the scream with something that is set apart from normative, ‘reasoned’ communicative practices. The scream is understood to possess the capacity to express feelings that cannot be contained by language, which are submerged within pre-conscious, or non-conscious registers: feelings that we may not even know about.
The scream, as affective expression, can be thought of as a bodily response – it comes not just from the mouth but the exerted and affected body. However, some bodies scream more, or are imagined to scream more, than others. Primal Therapy exemplifies the association of screaming with an infantile response. Infants scream more frequently because they have not yet reached emotional maturity, which involves developing greater control over affective expression. In short, infants scream more because they are less able to articulate their feelings and needs via more nuanced (i.e. more complex) modes of expression, such as (but not only) language; hence the violent, and often inexplicable, ‘temper tantrums’ of infants that seem to come out of nowhere.6 The association of the scream with an ‘out of control’ emotional state, or with a lack of affective regulation, has also garnered ‘feminine’ connotations, supplemented by notions of corporeal excess, irrationality and chaos.7 Screaming often accompanies imaginations of femininity at its most vulnerable: from the screams of the mother giving birth, the hysterical madwoman, and the ‘scream queens’ of horror films,8 to the all-too-real screams in of abused women – the beaten wife or rape victim.
But equally, there is something altogether inhuman about screams. The scream, posited as so-called ‘primal expression’ is animalistic: wo/man becomes indiscernible from beast. This is not to say that the scream is some kind of regression to ‘primitive’ instincts. Rather, we can think of the scream as what Deleuze (2003) would call the ‘common fact’ between the human and the animal.9 As such, the scream can be thought of as a trans-species mode of expression, in the sense that many animals other than humans will produce high-pitched, high-amplitude and acoustically ‘noisy’ (nonlinear) vocalizations in relation to high-intensity events. In theses instances, screams (or scream-like sounds) function as an alarm call; they are often made when animals are under duress, such as being attacked by predators. There are, for example, the screams of the pig slaughterhouse, or the screams of rabbits in pain or distress. Even horned frog tadpoles emit a (relatively speaking) loud, high-pitched, multi-tonal sound when threatened.10
In Roald Dahl’s short story ‘The Sound Machine’ (1986), the scream is heard as an expression of life in peril. However, this ‘life’ is not restricted to that of the animal kingdom. Nor do these screams typically occur within human earshot. The scientist Klausner has invented a device that makes audible the high-pitched sound vibrations that are beyond human perception, such as the squeak of a bat. When testing his invention in the garden, he watches his neighbor Mrs Saunders cutting flowers. However, as she cuts them, he hears them ‘scream in the most terrible way’:
Suddenly, he heard a shriek, a frightful piercing shriek, and he jumped and dropped his hands, catching hold of the edge of the table […] again it came, a throatless, inhuman shriek, sharp and short, very clear and cold. The note itself possessed a minor, metallic quality that he had never heard before. Klausner looked around him, searching instinctively for the source of the noise. The woman next door was the only living thing in sight. He saw her reach down, take a rose stem in the fingers of one hand and snip the stem with a pair of scissors. Again he heard the scream. (Dahl 1986: 44)
Later, Klausner hears a tree screaming as it is struck by the blade of an axe. Its scream is different to the screams of the flowers: the tree’s scream is a ‘harsh, noteless, enormous noise, a growling, low pitched screaming sound, not quick and short like the noise of the roses but drawn out like a sob lasting fully for a minute, loudest the moment when the axe struck, fading gradually fainter and fainter until it was gone’ (ibid.: 46). While the notion of a screaming plant may seem absurd, for Klausner the explanation is simple: plants scream because they are living things. We humans presume that plants do not scream only because we do not hear them do so, since their screams occur at a frequency that is beyond the range of human audibility. Yet Klausner is cautious not to anthropomorphize with regards to why the plants are screaming. For him, the screams of the plants ‘didn’t really express any of the feelings or emotions known to a human being […] He had been wrong in calling it a cry of pain. A flower probably didn’t feel pain. It felt something else which we didn’t know about – something called toin or spurl or plinuckment, or anything you like’ (ibid.: 46).11
If affect pertains to a sense of ‘aliveness’ (Massumi 2002) – an aliveness not limited to anthropomorphic conceptions – then the scream, as an expression of affection, can more generally be thought of as a sonic (although not necessarily audible) expression of life, of vitality – whether it be the scream of the human, the tadpole or the tree; the scream of pain, surprise or a feeling altogether unknown. At its limit, the scream is an assertion of liveness in the face of death: the scream of affectedness at unaffected annihilation.12 Yet the scream is not simply an affirmative expression of our contemporary being. The scream also heralds the future. The scream of peril, for example, is not just an expression of fear, a pre-emptive articulation of pain. Such screams also contain a cry for an alternative to that which is felt as imminent. In John Holloway’s critical examination of the concept of revolution, the scream is an expressed rejection of the way things are. The violence, exploitation and injustice of ‘the way things are’ moves us to scream: ‘faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO’ (Holloway 2010: 1). However, the scream of refusal also contains a hopeful cry for alternative futures, for the construction of other possible worlds. Holloway states:
Our scream is not just a scream of horror. We scream not because we face certain death in the spider’s web, but because we dream of freeing ourselves. We scream as we fall over the cliff not because we are resigned to being dashed on the rocks below but because we still hope that it might be otherwise. Our scream is a refusal to accept. A refusal to accept that the spider will eat us, a refusal to accept that we shall be killed on the rocks, a refusal to accept the unacceptable […] our scream is a scream to beak windows, a refusal to be contained, an overflowing a going beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of polite society. (ibid.: 6)
There is no certainty that the scream will be met with a solution, that someone or something will answer us, or come to our rescue: ‘the fact that we scream as we fall over the cliff does not give us any guarantee of a safe landing, nor does the legitimacy of the scream depend on a happy ending’ (ibid.). Yet, nevertheless, within the scream lies the hope of change, the possibility of an opening. The scream calls for a response.
The affecting scream
The scream is not just an expression of an affective state; it also affects. For the screamer, the scream ideally brings relief. The infant’s dissatisfied vocalizations draw attention to its needs and desires not being met, with the hope of this being resolved through, for example, food, reassurance or comforting affection. As Darwin notes, ‘infants, if carefully attended to, find out at a very early age that screaming brings relief, and they soon voluntarily practice it’13 (Darwin 1998: 351). Screams mobilize others into action by pressing upon the affective registers of those within earshot. Screams are designed to make an impact upon us; using a combination of high amplitude, high pitch and acoustic noisiness they pierce through the soundscape, cutting through whatever else is going on. The scream is transformative: we may say that hearing the scream ‘sends shivers down our spine’, or ‘makes our blood curdle’. To be sure, when Klausner tries to recall the scream of the tree, he cannot remember what it sounded like. He can only remember that the sound had been ‘enormous and frightful’ and that it had made him feel ‘sick with horror’ (Dahl 1986: 47). In other words, Klausner recalls the feeling of the scream, its affective impact upon him, rather than by the specifics of its sonic qualities.
We can think of screams as being affectively contagious – they transfer moods, feelings and intensities from one body to another. To demonstrate:
My husband became so angry yesterday he screamed at me. I felt his anger in my body. I wanted to scream and run away. I thought about it all day – his screaming. It ruined my day, I couldn’t get it off my mind. It made me angry. I had a headache. I was angry at work. I couldn’t get it off my mind. I tried to put it out of my mind. Every time I thought about it, I got angry at him and then I got angry at myself. I couldn’t help it. (Denzin 2007: 73)
The screams of the woman’s husband reverberated and continued to reverberate in her body. She was not just aware of his anger, but, via the scream, felt his anger: ‘his emotion was not just a part of her consciousness, it was part of her’ (ibid.). However, to say that screams are affectively contagious is not to suggest that screams simply reproduce the affective state of the producer in the listener. Our response to the scream may be empathetic; a scream of fright may frighten us, alerting us to a possible source of danger. In this instance, we can, or are encouraged to, discern the causing event of the scream. By contrast, a toddler’s tantrum may make us feel frustrated or angry, yet we are potentially unable to comprehend or identify the source of their frustration or anger. Whereas the former could communicate a shared threat, the latter is an expression of an indiscernible frustration that, in turn, generates frustration. With empathetic contagion, screams may generate other screams. The scream of fright may frighten me, causing me to scream also. Likewise in an argument, voices may be raised in anger and frustration to the point that we are screaming at one another. Once again, the scream appears at the point at which (linguistic) communication breaks down. With the ritualized screams of the pop concert or the rollercoaster, screams may also trigger other screams, intensifying feelings of excited or anxious anticipation.
However, there may also be a dissonance, or disjuncture between what the screamer feels and what a scream provokes in the listener. For example, I may feel guilty for accidentally making you scream with fright by my unexpected presence. Alternatively, I could find (what I understand to be) your misplaced fear humorous, and so your scream may provoke laughter. Moreover, we may not know why there is a scream, where a scream is coming from or what a scream is articulating (whether it is positive or negative, from pleasure or pain): the context of the scream may be ambiguous or indiscernible. As such, the sound of the scream and our not-yet-knowing of its cause or origins may fill us with unease or dread. This affective ‘doubling’ of the scream can be helpfully exemplified by battle cries. The battle cry is designed to arouse aggression and boost morale on one’s own side. Yet it is also designed to intimidate the hostile side, functioning as an expression of aggressive potential. Thus the battle cry aims to increase the capacity of its producers to act, while decreasing the strength of the opposition through fear. On one side, it is heard as joyous and victorious – on the other as frightening and dangerous.
In the context of torture, the scream is the torturer’s desired response, achieved through subjecting a body to extremes of pain. In torture, the body is broken down and this comes, in part, with the denial of the voice. Torture works by reducing the capacity of the voice to act, to the point that it becomes absent. In The Body In Pain, Elaine Scarry remarks: ‘the “it” in “get it out of him” refers not just to a piece of information but to the capacity for speech itself’ (Scarry 1987: 49). This ‘getting it out of him’ often involves making the victim scream, only for those screams to be denied. As such, the voice is integral to expressions of control and dominance. As Scarry states:
Even those screams […] will in turn be broken off and made the property of the torturers in one of two ways. They will, first of all, be used as the occasion for, be made the agent of, another act of punishment. As the torturer displays his control of the other’s voice by first inducing screams, he now displays the same control by stopping them: the pillow or a pistol or an iron ball […] secondly, in many countries these screams are, like the words of the confession, tape recorded and then played where they can be heard by fellow prisoners, close friends and relatives. Again and again the descriptions given by those imprisoned and tortures are full of cries, phrases and fragments of speech whose source cannot be identified – someone was sobbing, someone was screaming […] do those screams come from someone now being tortured, are they the tape recording of someone previously tortured, is it my husband’s voice, my child’s, are these so compelling sounds the sounds of real human hurt or are they sounds made up to mock and torment me? (ibid.: 49–50)
The scream is cut off from the affected body from which it came and is turned into a sonic weapon: a means of circulating what Steve Goodman refers to as ‘bad vibes’ – where sound helps produce ‘an immersive atmosphere or ambience of fear and dread’ (Goodman 2010: xiv). For Goodman, ‘fear induced purely by sonic effects, or at least in the undecidability between an actual or sonic attack, is a virtualized fear’, inasmuch as the ‘threat becomes autonomous from the need to back it up’ (ibid.). The result, as with the pre-emptive screams of rollercoaster passengers, is a rupturing of cause and effect. In these torture practices, the scream is cut off from the causing event or entity, and is used to threaten other enemy bodies, by activating the ‘dread of an unwanted, possible future’ (ibid.). Here, the ambiguity of the scream, of what it might be expressing, becomes its power. Morale is weakened as the recorded screams of past bodies, indiscernible from the screams of the present, become prophetic: they work to forewarn of possible future-screams, caused by not-yet-known means.
In the context of torture, the ‘bad vibes’ of the scream become a means of weakening the capacity of the affected body to act against its oppressors, in the context of art and/or entertainment, these bad vibes of fear and dread may be ‘short-circuited’ into enjoyment or satisfaction. This affective logic is exploited in the soundtracks of films, in particular, horror and psychological thriller films, which frequently capitalize on the ‘seemingly widespread vertebrate response’ to the ‘non-linear vocalities’ (including screams) that are made when under duress (Blumstein et al. 2010). The screaming characters of films work to evoke empathetic affective responses in audiences at key points in the narrative. In the infamous and climatic shower scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho, the anguished scream of Marion, coupled with the musicalized scream of the violin soundtrack helps to create an affective suture between film, character and spectator – audibly transferring the terror depicted on-screen to the affective registers of its audience. As such, the scream helps to create an affective continuity between film and audience: the terror of the victim and the terror of the narrative become indiscernible from the terror felt by the spectator. As Link states: ‘such scores let us know the victim by forcing us affectively to become the victim […] we are in direct contact’ (Link 2004: 2). Subsequently, the film character’s scream is both expressive and affective: the scream contributes to a portrayal of a character’s emotions or affections, sonically depicting their fear, terror or pain, while working to empathetically reproduce these affective states in the spectator. Link notes, apropos Psycho: ‘the dramatic aim seems to be to reproduce the affect rather than the particular subjectivity that experiences or generates that affect. We hear “Rage” with a capital “R” or “Fear” with a capital “F”. That is, we experience fear as a genre of emotion, but we do not experience much by way of an individual’s fear’ (Link 2004: 3). With the blurring of affective standpoints – of protagonist, narrative, audience – such affections become depersonalized, creating a general attack of fear, horror or distress.
Moreover, along with the narrational or characterized screams that correspond with a depicted event, film soundtracks also utilize non-diegetic screams and scream-like simulations as a means of eliciting affective responses from an audience.14 A study by Blumstein et al. found that the soundtracks of films emulate the acoustical ‘noisiness’ of screams and other animal distress vocalizations in order to manipulate the affective ambience or mood of a film (Blumstein et al. 2010). Such screams are not an expression of the affective state of a depicted subject; they belong to nobody in particular. Nor are these screams, and scream-simulations expressive of any particular, qualified, affection – they leave us to infer what could have possibly caused them. It is not so much that these scream simulations sound like a human scream (that they successfully mimic what a human scream sounds like), but that they affect us like screams. These disembodied screams belong to a repertoire of audio-affective tactics employed in horror films to make audiences feel suspense, fear or dread: they chime with the use of ‘repetitious drones, clashing dissonances and stingers (those assaultive blasts that coincide with shock or revelation)’ that ‘affect us at a primal level, perhaps instinctually taking us back to much earlier time when the ability to perceive a variety of sounds alerted us (as a species) to approaching predators or other threats’ (Lerner 2010: ix). Ultimately, these screams are designed to move us to scream in response; as Howard Suber suggests: ‘Just as the object of comedy is generally to produce, laughs, the object in horror films is to produce screams. Both forms of release are satisfying, but while people continue to laugh throughout their lives, they do not generally feel comfortable screaming beyond a certain age’ (Suber 2006: 198). Thus non-diegetic scream sounds help to create both high-intensity affective states (that which lies behind the scream) and cathartic release (that which comes after the scream). This dual movement, between anguish and catharsis, extreme tension and release, creates the seemingly paradoxical pleasure of horror films.
The scream-itself
Thus far we have considered the affectivity of the scream in relation to its emitter and the receiver: the expressing screamer and the re/acting hearer. As such, we have thought about the scream as it relates to a corporeal experience – the body and its (re)actions. However, as a means of balancing but also complimenting this focus on embodied (and primarily subjective) perspectives – how the scream is affectively experienced by the body-as-subject – we can also think of the scream as an impersonal, affective, sonorous force that is entwined with – but also distinct from – the affections of expressing and affected bodies. In other words, we can think of the scream not only as an expression of a particular affection (for example, surprise, fright or pain), or affective in the sense that it gives rise to a particular affection in those that hear it (for example, fear, dread or horror) but as an affect in and of itself. However, in order to do this, a slight change in emphasis is required. Firstly, we need to pay attention to the scream-sound, rather than its relation to its emitter and/or receiver. Secondly, we need to make a corresponding shift in emphasis from a somatic to a metaphysical notion of affect.
To take a step backwards momentarily: as has been seen, torture practices and film soundtracks make use of the disembodied and depersonalized scream; the scream-sound that has an existence cut off from the embodied act of screaming. Screams remain transformative, irrespective of whether we are aware of who, what or why someone is screaming. On the one hand, the persistent affectivity of the scream, even (or perhaps especially) when cut off from causality, has been explicated in relation to its sonorous properties. To make appeals to a crude sonic materialism, screams grab our attention and make an impact upon us because they are loud, high pitched and noisy (in the acoustic sense): they sound ‘harsh’ (Blumstein et al. 2010). It has been suggested that sounds which are acoustically chaotic, irregular and unpredictable are ‘particularly evocative and difficult to habituate to’ (Blumstein et al. 2010: 751). Vocalizations with these acoustic attributes are thought to be more evocative than those without them. Thus we are not only affected by the potential cause of the scream (what the scream may signify for us), but the sound of the scream as an asignifying, acoustic force.
However, just as we do not need to know the origins of the scream for it to remain affective, the scream can also be considered apart from its relation to affection and autoaffection: its capacity to induce particular affective responses in the hearer. This should not be understood as an attempt to render the scream, apropos Pierre Schaeffer, a ‘sonorous object’15 and listen to it solely for its qualitative, sonorous properties, stripping it of any significations it may derive from its source (see Schaeffer 2004: 79–81). Rather (borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari’s description of art), we can think of the scream-sound as a sonorous compound of affects, as a ‘bloc of sensations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164).
However, if we are to take up Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of affect, then there is an important distinction to be noted between affection – the relational state of a particular body, manifested as feeling, emotion or perception – and affect as an intensive force. Guattari defines affect as ‘a pre-personal category, installed “before” the circumscription of identities, and manifested by unlocatable transferences, unlocatable with regard to their origin as well as with regard to their destination’ (Guattari 1996: 158). As Seigworth points out, the ‘unlocatability’ of affect means that it is best conceived of as both a-subjective and a-objective, as well as a-representational and a-signifying (Seigworth 2003). Subsequently, for Deleuze and Guattari, affects have an existence independent from the affections of a particular body:
Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164)
Put differently, we can think of affections or emotions as a snapshot of affect. As Steven Shaviro states, ‘emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject. Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions’ (Shaviro 2010a: 3). Similarly, Flatley notes that ‘where emotion suggests something that happens inside and tends toward outward expression, affect indicates something relational and transformative. One has emotions; one is affected by people or things’ (Flatley 2008: 12). Affects work beyond, behind, in between, alongside, and within their manifestations as (subjective) affections, emotions and feelings. Yet there is always a surplus of affect that escapes us, that remains in excess of their capture within a body. For Massumi, ‘emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something always and again escapes. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective’ (2002: 35). Affect always spills over what we consciously know, or feel, or experience of it.
If we are to think of the scream as a bloc or compound of affects and if affects always go beyond their manifestations as affections or feelings, then, by extension, there is something of the scream that remains irreducible to the embodied perspectives of emitter and receiver: something escapes. In his thesis on the artist Francis Bacon, Deleuze states that ‘if we scream, it is always victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle and that even lie beyond pain and feeling’ (Deleuze 2003: 43). These inaudible, invisible and imperceptible forces that ‘produce the scream, that convulse the body until they emerge at the mouth’ are not to be confused with ‘the visible spectacle before which one screams, nor even with the perceptible and sensible objects whose action decomposes and recomposes our pain’ (ibid.: 42–3). For Deleuze, the scream is a combination of perceptible force (the sound of the scream, emitted from the mouth) and these inaudible and imperceptible forces that sustain the scream. If art is to capture the scream, then it must not simply revert to representation – it should not depict the spectacle of the scream, the symbolic or narrational scream ‘of’. Rather, in the words of Francis Bacon, the task of art is to ‘paint the scream more than the horror’; to paint the scream-itself, isolated from that which makes the body scream. As such, the artist’s task is to establish a relationship between the perceptible and imperceptible forces of the scream. Music’s task, for example, ‘is certainly not to render the scream harmonious, but to establish a relationship between the scream and the forces that sustain it’ (ibid.: 42).
For Deleuze, then, the scream is a compound of perceptible forces (the scream-sound) and imperceptible forces that cause a body to scream. However, as stated above, we are trying to move away from thinking about the scream-sound, understood here as a sonorous affective force that is – to some degree – independent from embodied affections. To be sure, it is the corporeal act of screaming that is the primary focus in Deleuze’s thesis, rather than the scream-sound. Thus, to push things a little further – and bearing in mind affect’s excess – can we think of what Deleuze views as the perceptible forces of the scream (the scream-sound) as also having an imperceptible remainder, which is distinct from the imperceptible forces of contortion that cause the body to scream?
We have already noted that for Deleuze and Guattari, the work of art exists as ‘a bloc of sensations, which is to say, a compound of percepts and affects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 164). Consequently, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the artist’s challenge is to make the artwork ‘stand up on its own’, insomuch that it is ‘independent of the […] hearer, who only experience it after’ and ‘independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created’ (ibid.). Likewise, in the thesis on Bacon, Deleuze notes that it is not so much that sensations simply arise in the body of the spectator, rather, ‘as a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the painting […] Sensation is what is painted’ (Deleuze 2003: 35). Thus the artwork, as a compound of affects, percepts and sensations, has an existence that is distinct from the affections, perceptions and sensations of both the artwork’s creator (what the artist may have been feeling at the time of creation) and its spectator, or listener.
If we apply Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetic theory to the scream-sound, then it provides us with a means of understanding the scream as an affect, or rather a compound of sonorous affects, that can ‘stand up on its own’ apart from the affections and perceptions of the body-as-subject. To be sure, if we state that the scream is a compound of sonorous affects then it does not follow that these sonorous affects are audible. Just as affects have an existence independent of affections, sound has an existence independent of what is heard by a particular listener: it does not need to be perceptible in order to exist.16 There are, after all, those screams that we do not hear, but which reverberate nonetheless – the ultra- and infrasonic screams that Klausner discovers which (to human auditory systems at least) circulate in silence, for example. These screams silently exist in the register of ‘unsound’; the term Goodman uses to describe the ‘not-yet-audible’ (Goodman 2010: 191). More broadly, unsound refers to ‘sonic virtuality, the nexus of imperceptible vibration’ (Goodman 2010: 191). Here, virtuality can be understood to refer to unactualized potentiality, the inaudible segment of a sonorous-affect exceeds any lived affection.
Consequently, if we think of the scream as a compound of sonorous affects, then what we hear and feel of the scream, how the scream impacts upon us, is only a snapshot of its affective power – the scream has an affective capacity that goes beyond the extent to which the listening subject is affected; it remains independent of both its originating source, and its exertion upon a particular body. Thus the affections, sensations and feelings the scream induces or intensifies do not simply originate in the body of the subject. They arise, rather, from a particular relation with an affective-sonorous force that comes from outside and spreads beyond the body. But the scream resonates beyond our capture of it – our hearing and our feeling of it is always inevitably limited. There is always something of the scream-sound that evades us, that remains unheard, unfelt and imperceptible: the scream-unsound.
It perhaps seems strange to think about the scream-sound as having an existence independent of affected and perceiving subjects, especially given the associations of the scream with notions of ‘primal’ expression and instinctive reactions. However, it is often the scream-sound that we often lose sight of when we think about screams in relation to the body-as-subject; it is subordinate to, for example, the psychological turmoil of he or she who screams, or the fear of he or she who hears it. Yet, equally, this is not an attempt to render the affecting and affected bodies of the scream unimportant or insignificant; thinking about the scream in such terms is not meant to be an ‘instead of’ but an ‘as well as’. In allowing for the autonomy of the scream-itself, we can have a fuller picture of the scream’s affectivity that includes but is not limited to the affections and perceptions of an embodied subject.
Notes
1 As will become apparent later, I am largely following the distinction between affection as a particular bodily state, and affect as an intensive, impersonal force, which is made in alignment with the affective linage that runs via Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Brian Massumi.
2 These tend to be tropes that surround the use of scream in art – particularly with regard to Expressionism’s explorations of the subject’s psyche, of which the screaming Woman of Schoenberg’s Ewartung and Munch’s The Scream are exemplary. More broadly, the scream in art is telling of notions of the scream as a original and authentic response: ‘all aestheticians who despise fakery in the arts, who seek authenticity, will tend to be connoisseurs of screams: for a scream is, arguably, the primal human response to the world, a response in no way prevaricated, or dissembled or embellished. The reality that music seeks to convey, to embody, lies in that noise’ (Albright 2000: 20). While these (Modernist) appropriations of the scream are intimately related with its affectivity, and affective capacity, there has not been space here for a full aesthetic analysis of the scream within this chapter and to consider the resonances and tensions between Expressionist aesthetics and principles and the concept of affect that is being used here. For more on the scream in art see Albright (2000: esp. 8–22).
3 Scherer also adds that affect bursts occur in relation to clearly identifiable events. While Scherer gives the example of facial and vocal disgust expressed upon seeing a black hairy worm emerge from an oyster shell as it is brought close to one’s mouth, in the case of the scream, the stimulus of outbursts may not be so clear. For instance, if we experience night terrors, we may scream without consciously knowing that we are screaming, or what is causing us to scream.
4 For more on virtualized fear, see Goodman (2010). We will return to this idea later.
5 Many critics have pointed to the lack of controlled test histories and scientific verification of effectiveness. For more on this, see Holfman and Bailey (1992), Clare and Thompson (1981), Starker and Pankratz (1996).
6 I am aware that the infantile cry or scream also has an important role within Lacanian psychoanalysis, associated with his notion of demand. For Lacan, the infant’s cries to its mother are not an instinctual signal but, rather, organized in a symbolic system. As such, the cry is organized in a linguistic system that is prior to the articulation of recognizable words. However, due to space limitations, there is not the appropriate means of considering the applicability and limitations of such an approach in relation to the affective analysis of the scream that is taking place in this chapter. To be sure, the infant’s cry in Lacan remains largely bound to notions of identity, representation and also regression; concepts that, in this chapter, we are trying to deemphasize, as a means of finding an alternative angle from which to consider the scream. For more on Lacan’s notion of demand and the cry see Evans (1996: 35–6).
7 For an examination of the scream and femininity in relation to female vocalists see Gladwell (1995).
8 In his analysis of the scream in cinema, Michel Chion notes that the scream is depicted as a particularly feminine phenomenon. A man’s cry is typically considered a ‘shout’, a sonic expression of power and mastery, whereas a woman’s cry tends to be labelled a ‘scream’. The female scream, for Chion, ‘poses the question of the “black hole” of female orgasm, which cannot be spoken or thought’ (1999: 78). While the man’s cry is ‘centrifugal and structuring’ the woman’s scream is an undoing: ‘the scream gobbles up everything into itself – it is centripetal and fascinating’ (ibid.: 79).
9 In Francis Bacon and the Logic of Sensation Deleuze describes Bacon’s paintings as giving rise to a zone of indiscernibility between the forms of man and animal. This is achieved not through the combination of forms, or through a regression to the animalistic but through an exploration of ‘the common fact of man and animal’. Deleuze argues that the common fact between animal and human form is meat – the body as meat: ‘meat is the common zone of man and beast, their zone of indiscernability; it is a “fact”, a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion’ (Deleuze 2003: 17).
10 For more on this see Blumstein et al. (2010) and Walker (2010).
11 The notion of plants screaming might not be as far-fetched as it sounds: it is thought that plants have an equivalent distress response that is emitted through chemical signalling. Moreover, physicists at the University of Bonn have made these chemical stress ‘cries’ audible, by translating the plants’ chemical signals into sound waves. See Anhäuser (2007) and Charles (1997).
12 Bruno Latour has also remarked upon the relationship between life and affectivity and death and unaffectivity. In ‘How to Talk about the Body’ (2004) Latour gives an anecdote in which he asks conference attendees to write down an antonym for the word ‘body’. For him, the most arresting were ‘unaffected’ and ‘death’: ‘either you have, you are a body, or you are dead, you have become a corpse, you enter into some sort of macabre body count’ (Latour 2004: 205). Latour sees this as a direct consequence of Vinciane Despret (drawing on William James on emotion), in which to have a body ‘is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motions by other entities, humans or non-humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead’ (ibid.). Thus to be a body is to affect and be affected, to be affectively engaged, and the opposite of this is to be a unaffected non-body – to be dead. See also Gregg and Seigworth (2010: 11).
13 Relief may also come with the act of screaming itself, which may bring about a cathartic release. Darwin also notes that infants scream or cry out loudly ‘partly as a call to their parents for aid, and partly from any great exertion serving as a relief’ (Darwin 1998: 175).
14 For an example of such uses of non-diegetic screams see the opening sequence from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
15 The notion of the sonorous object (objet sonore) comes from the composer and founder of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer and his philosophy of listening. Schaeffer notes that the sound object is not the sounding instrument, since the sonorous object remains independent of any causal reference or sonorous source – its physical origins (2004: 74). The sonorous object ‘is not an object except to our listening, it is relative to it’ (ibid.). The sound object is revealed in the ‘acousmatic’ experience, which is to ‘hear with another ear’, to separate the sound signal from its source and its associative connotations, so that the sound ‘of’ becomes a sound-itself. With the listener ‘deliberately forgetting every reference to instrumental causes or pre-existing musical significations’ (ibid.: 81). The sound of the violin, for example, is heard as ‘pure’ sonority. As such, the sonorous object is primarily phenomenological insomuch that it is ‘contained entirely within our perceptive consciousness’ (ibid.: 79). However, it is this reliance upon the perceiving (and constitutive) subject from which we are actively moving away in the final section of this chapter.
16 I am largely indebted to the ideas of Will Schrimshaw in this final section. For an extended examination of the relationship between sound and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect, and a consideration of the inaudible and intensive component of sound, please see his chapter ‘Non-Cochlear Affect’ in this volume.