Sounding the “Spirit of My Silence”: Sufjan Stevens’s Carries and Lowell and the Affect of Nothingness

Camera Lucida and Carrie and Lowell stand beside each other in sympathy, as much exchanging condolences as mutually informing each other on the limits of communicating death through new life: as new aesthetic and theoretical creations. They share a similar origin story: they were both conceived in the wake of the author’s mother’s death.¹¹ Paralyzing grief and ambiguous artistic intent connect these two works, and when they are placed in conversation with each other, we find a profound passage of mournful intensities between them that may prompt a new way of articulating time, affect, and death in moments of devastating silence, one that equally foregrounds the individual spectator, their relationship to past traumas, and the aesthetic object.

Carrie and Lowell is composed entirely of a barren soundscape depicting scenes from Stevens’s childhood and his haunting grief at the loss of his troubled mother. His mother abandoned the family when Stevens was one year old, but the Stevens children later spent three summers with their mother and Lowell Brams in Oregon when Stevens was between the ages of five and eight.¹² Carrie’s five-year marriage to Brams in the early 1980s was a point of stability in her life that was otherwise marked by depression, alcoholism, and schizophrenia. Those summers spent together in Oregon formed the majority of Stevens’s memories of his mother. Otherwise, she reconnected with Stevens only intermittently until her death. In turn, Barthes began writing Camera Lucida following his mother’s, Henriette Barthes’s, death in October 1977. The text began to take on its final form towards the end of March 1978, after six months of grieving, and it was published merely two months before Barthes’s own death in March 1980. The manuscript is divided into two parts: first, Barthes outlines his inquiry into the essence of photography, and second, he meditates on the ways in which his theoretical writing might inform his affective response to pictures of his mother. For both Barthes and Stevens, the mourning and the creative processes continued to inform each other long after Barthes’s book was published and Stevens’s album was released. Barthes, for one, collected fragments of his thoughts on his grieving process concurrently to writing Camera Lucida in what was posthumously published as Mourning Diary, and Stevens went on to release several extended versions of Carrie and Lowell.¹³ Although death may seem final, the affective inspiration it brings continues to find powerful new forms of life in aesthetic objects.

Throughout both sections of Camera Lucida, Barthes develops a theory of affect to address his own conflicting emotive responses to photography: that which is culturally engrained in him and that which arises from his own subconscious self-identification. His mediations prompt him to ask, “What does my body know of Photography?”¹⁴ Barthes’s dichotomized responses seem to share affinities with Brian Massumi’s differentiation between emotion and affect, wherein emotion is the “subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which from that point onward defined as personal,” and affect resides in the realm of the ineffable, the protolinguistic, the immediate.¹⁵ For Barthes, affective responses occur on two planes, which he call the studium and the punctum. The studium is a product of indoctrination into a symbolic order, “the order of liking, not of loving…to recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions.”¹⁶ The studium may then be understood as arising from the realm of that which is culturally conditioned to be emotionally evocative. The punctum then, is that which “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.”¹⁷ Often, the punctum is a detail that pierces that observer’s consciousness, a detail that could equally be found in the observer or the aesthetic object, such as in his example of as a necklace worn in a photograph of a family in Harlem from the 1920s that looked like one that Barthes’s aunt used to wear.¹⁸ To Barthes, the affective site is located within the individual subject, both in terms of their cultural position and that which has the potentiality to be activated by/as a punctum in their own memory archive.

The affective intensity of grief and the inevitability of death are central to Barthes’s reflexive responses to the photographs. The most fundamental punctum, according to Barthes, is that of time and death: the reminder that the referents experienced through aesthetic objects have long since passed. The pose struck in the photograph has been broken, the arpeggios plucked on the guitar during the recording session have diminuendoed into nothing. Recording technologies may seem to offer resurrection: a photograph or a song may trigger a memory, allowing the event to happen once more in real time, if only in one’s mind. Even in the midst of these temporally fluid miracles, knowledge that the photograph will fade and the needle will lift becomes more hauntingly present as time goes by. Michael Fried describes the punctum of death as “latent in contemporary photographs, to be brought out, developed (as in the photographic sense of the term), by the inexorable passage of time.”¹⁹ Further, Margaret Olin invokes Jean-Paul Sartre’s mental image in L’imaginaire, to which Camera Lucida is dedicated, the punctum is ‘‘a certain way an object has of being absent within its very presence,’’ or perhaps present within its absence.²⁰ The mortality of photographs and music is inherent in their form, and perhaps their most meaningful moments are those that point to their own death, such as fading ink, skips in a record, or other moments that signal “from dust to dust.”

Reinterpreting Barthes’s theory of photography as being about music admittedly has its own set of complications, which might explain why it has not yet played a noticeable role in studies of music and affect. Barthes’s studium and punctum were highly influential in media arts studies throughout the nineties, but strikingly, the grain of their voices has been largely mute in musicology. One exception is Henriette Korthals Altes, who has explored Barthes’s use of musical allusions in Camera Lucida and its theoretical activation of the Orpheus myth.²¹ Altes draws attention to Barthes’s reference to Robert Schumann’s Gesang der Frühe and the ways in which its affective ineffability mirrors Barthes’s reaction to photographs of his mother.²² Altes’s interpretation relies on music’s power in relation to figurative language, which is in line with the larger trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century affective scholarship.²³ As Roger Mathew Grant describes in the introduction to Peculiar Attunements, contemporary affect scholars have embraced music as a powerful metaphor when words fail, but in doing so, they have turned away from the aesthetic properties of the affecting object.²⁴ In this paper, I hope to push Barthes’s theory beyond its current state as an elaborate musical metaphor into a possible mode of musical analysis.

There is, however, a glaring problem with Barthes’s ideas that provides a particular challenge for musicologists: intent. Barthes tends to be ambiguous about the role of artistic intent as a distinguishing factor between the studium and the punctum, insisting that “certain details may ‘prick’ me. If they do not, it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally,” and as Olin notes, the distinction between the two is often a matter of degree.²⁵ I am hesitant to use artistic intent as part of the criteria for discerning puncta in my listening experience since that would warrant another article in and of itself.

Instead, I take a more holistic approach to the ways in which the studium and the punctum might obscure the line between personal and collective archives during a public performance of mourning, such as at the Carrie and Lowell silent listening party. I look to moments of silence in Carrie and Lowell as rich sites of affective activation in the listener, the slipperiness between the culturally conditioned and the preconscious, the individual and the collective, the sounded and the silent, the affective and the emotional, and, ultimately, the studium and the punctum foregrounded in Barthes’s framework that provide a viable means for articulating the affective potentiality of silence in musical analysis. As Margulis notes, “Silence is unidimensional acoustically (defined only by its length) but multidimensional perceptually (describable as tense, relaxed, too short, arresting, or disturbing, e.g.),” and it is in these moments of sonic absence, these triggering details, that the affective dimension comes to the fore.²⁶ My interpretation, however, puts pressure on Margulis’s above use of the term “perceptual.” The “perceptual multidimensionality” to which she refers seems to indicate cognitive processes (involving memory and reflection) that are, to a degree, independent from (if nonetheless predicated on) perception. Rather, I suggest that listeners perceive the affective dimension in Carrie and Lowell the most in moments wherein the absence of symbolically meaningful input rises to the fore. In doing so, I invoke what Anna María Ochoa Gautier has written about the multi-faceted significance of silence as an artistic tool that has “the potential of questioning the binary logic of apparent opposites by dissolving one in the other (presence as absence, emptiness as plentitude, quietness as expressivity, silence as intensity of life.”²⁷ As such, immediate musical context, biographical context, and the listener’s memory play crucial roles in distinguishing between the studium and the puctum when exploring the affect produced by rests, silences, pauses, transitions, delays, and other phenomena wherein sensory input drops to zero and the listener’s affective response reaches a high in Stevens’s album. Some instances evoke the emotionally ineffable (rhythmic stutters between phrases), some occupy a sonically liminal space with barely audible white noise attempting to negate silence, and some are a call to physical action (flipping over the LP) that literally give us pause.

At the “silent listening party,” a makeshift backyard scene sprawled throughout the glass- encapsulated space, and I almost forgot that it was snowing on my drive over. Turf covered the café’s typical corporate carpet, and plastic woodgrain beams gave the impression that we were meant to feel as if we were accompanying the child Sufjan to Oregon on one of his summer trips to visit Carrie and Lowell. My friend and I collapsed into one of the giant (and by giant, I mean four-person) red bean bag chairs strewn throughout the “pop-up park” scene. We each grabbed a pair of Bluetooth headphones and a print-out of the lyrics (replete with Stevens’s childhood photographs cut and pasted together to look like a scrapbook page) as the Asthmatic Kitty marketing director, John Beeler, gave a brief introduction to Asthmatic Kitty’s role in Indianapolis and the new album we were anxiously awaiting. Beeler dropped the needle, and we listened in silence.

But at first, we listened to silence. The vinyl pressing of the album begins with what equates to six seconds of a silent introduction to the opening track, “Death with Dignity.” A moment of silence for the departed Carrie. A point of departure for a mourning Sufjan. The opening lines invoke the absence of both Carrie and sound: “Spirit of my silence, I can hear you.” Further, each verse on this track begins with an uncomfortable split-second pause, a temporal stutter, an uncertainty about whether or not Sufjan should or is able to continue.²⁹ He returns, nevertheless, to the repetitive fingerpicking pattern and familiar strophic melody. As the opening track, Stevens invites us to pay witness to his interiority. The song is fully synthesized with Stevens-the-song-subject, to which Stevens commented:

A similar situation appears at the conclusion of the song “John My Beloved,” which is an anomaly on the album in that it both follows a verse-chorus form (all the rest are strophic) and does not conclude with an extended ambient electronic outro. Instead, the track ends with a final statement of the chorus, the last line of which is “There’s only a shadow of me; in a matter of speaking, I’m dead,” followed by three seconds of silence and then a sharp inhalation.³¹ The irony cannot be lost that an audible breath, the marker of life, follows a proclamation of death. But what comes after Stevens’s inhalation? Five more seconds of complete silence, no white noise, no exhalation. I think again to Barthes, sensing the silence as a wound—“I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think” —and we may well add “I hold my breath.”

Margulis describes similar moments as “liminalizing silences” that “seem to brim with significance, suggesting that the speaker has pushed the boundaries of expressibility. Listeners can pour their own perspectives and histories into the gap, resulting in more empathy than might have arisen had the speaker provided details idiosyncratic to his or her own experience.”³² The listener-centric dependency of the liminalizing silence, with its encapsulation of the ineffable and dualism of sound and silence, can potentially be analogized with Barthes’s punctum.³³ The locus of affect in these silences exists inside my own misrecognition of affective resonance within the duality of sound and silence, of life and death. The silences, like Barthes’s description of photography, “worked within me,” but I must admit that it was not until several years after the initial listening experience that I realized these fleeting silences were crucial to determining my affective response during the silent listening party.³⁴ As Barthes notes, sometimes “the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it,” as was my experience with the brief moments of silence attending to the pressures of the unspeakable in these tracks.³⁵ The lyrical narratives and intimate instrumentation were enough to make anyone in the audience sad, but the liminal silences pushed us over the edge to ineffable grief.

There is the liminal, and there is the transitional. At several points in the album, moments that functionally could have been silences seem to scream into the void, filling it with any and everything to prevent the nothingness from taking over. I cannot do justice to the art of mixing by feebly attempting to reverse-engineer the many intricate layers interacting in this album, but there are several salient features of the mix during such moments that are worth noting. Transitional moments overwhelmed with white noise and ambient sounds punctuate, rather than puncture, the experience of listening to Carrie and Lowell. As Roey Izhaki describes, a mix is “a sonic presentation of emotions, creative ideas and performance,” and the ways in which Stevens sonically stains what could have been silence with his grief ties directly to the melancholic, cathartic emotional (note, not affective) experience produced in the album’s production qualities, which in turn speak to generic conventions that have been cultivated over time to sell ideas of emotional authenticity.³⁶ These instances correlate more strongly with the Barthesian studium rather than the punctum; although both highlight active listening practices and close readings of detailed musical structures, the moments wherein Stevens combats emptiness with technological interference necessitates pre-acquired biographical, technical, and generic knowledge to grasp their significance. As such, I find that the studium is most apparent in the final, mixed-down recording (the moments in which the cognitive, scholastic side of listening is dominant) especially wherein transitional moments are consumed with white noise and ambient sounds that feel like a negation of death, of time ending, and of silence.

Barthes claims that “culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers,” and the generic conventions of lo-fi indie rock have historically cultivated an illusion of emotional intimacy by using pared down instrumentation and boasting accessible recording technology. I knew that I was intentionally buying an assemblage of “sad song” signifiers with my purchase of Carrie and Lowell, which speaks to both lo-fi recording processes as studia and my own predisposed ethical and cultural training as a perennial indie rock fan. Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson note, “artists must speak the truth of their…situations. Authenticity was guaranteed by the presence of a specific type of instrumentation.”³⁷ Nearly every song on Carrie and Lowell features Stevens alone, fingerpicking his acoustic guitar, for which he has drawn considerable comparison to Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, until he washes away into an extended outro of ambient electronics.³⁸ Piano and synthesizers come and go, and percussion is noticeably absent. David Metzer also traces a link between Stevens and Smith, linking the ways that reduced instrumentation paradoxically enhances affect and perceptions of authenticity in indie rock: “[s]olo instruments can seem as direct and intimate as the voices that they accompany. The quiet ensembles also set an ideal stage for the chamber dramas of emotions presented in ballads.”³⁹ According to indie rock lore, reduced instrumentation and lo-fi recording processes clear sonic space for affect to come to the fore. Beeler has commented that Asthmatic Kitty masters recordings according to medium, but in both the vinyl and digital masterings, the spatialization of the mix is markedly static.⁴⁰ There is no panning motion, and throughout the entirety of the album, Stevens’s voice is double-tracked and centered, albeit with a compression effect enacting a sense of breathy distance.

Lo-fi recording processes underscore a sense of nostalgia and intimacy that in turn position Carrie and Lowell as a performance of grief, as a product intended to be placed in conversation with cultural understandings of music and mourning, as a conscious entry into a long catalogue of songs sung in memoriam. Beeler again provides an insightful anecdote on the recording process of Carrie and Lowell:

“Blue Bucket of Gold,” for example, features waves of white noise throughout the entirety of the track. Subtle whirring from a hotel air conditioner opens the tracks and continues in the background throughout its duration.⁴² In confirmation, the lower right corner of the album sleeve indicates that “[s]ome tracks were originally recorded on an iPhone in a hotel room in Klamath Falls, OR [sic].”⁴³ The air conditioner noises provide a sense of intimacy, urgency, and isolation that has been best summarized by Emily Dolan: “Indie pop highlights this idea of temporal and aesthetic disjunction by sounding wistfully outdated, thus preserving the memory of some distant and imaginary past…This aesthetic distance is not cynical but nostalgic; it is not an absence of emotion, but its intensification.”⁴⁴ Sonic peccadilloes intentionally remain present throughout the track, taking me from my bean bag chair right next to Stevens on the piano bench.

A slight buzz underlies Stevens’s voice as he counts off the track, and it never completely fades away. Soft creaking sounds hit on every offbeat, and my best guess is that this is the sound of Stevens’s foot on the piano pedal. His consonants are crisp, but they crack as he switches from inhaling to exhaling at the beginning of each phrase. The vowels are breathy, and overtones audibly whisper above his fundamental frequencies. Stevens’s breathing is kept at the same volume level as his singing instead of being muffled or edited out, as in most of the other tracks on the album.⁴⁵ The song effectively ends halfway through, and for seven seconds, we hear just the crackle and hum of the air conditioner. Stevens abruptly transitions at 2:54 to an extended outro foregrounding the siren-like electronics from the chorus, which gradually rise and fall in pitch to create a Doppler effect, signaling for help. As Beeler notes, “The song has some of mid-range stereo ambiance at the end of the track which makes it tricky for vinyl. The oscillation between left and right tracks bounces the needle like it’s on a gravel road.”⁴⁶ Subtle rhythmically augmented vocalizations from the refrain continue in the background. A low pass filter fades out the sirens until all that remains is an alternating major second in the bass electronics and the white noise from the air conditioner washing cyclically like waves of the Pacific, bringing the album to an end.

We find another such instance of disrupted silence in “Fourth of July.” As Beeler observed during the “silent listening parties” (and I myself noticed from listening to the album on my own less-than-perfect, hand-me-down record player), “if a turntable is even just a little off in its belt speed or pitch, “Fourth of July” goes right into this super creepy off-key minor chord. It’s been quite helpful.”⁴⁷ But how is it helpful? Perhaps Beeler’s comment points to the complex emotional ambiguity that arises from something as small and simple as a technological glitch manipulating the opening tonic triad, a feat that underscores intentionality (“I don’t know musically how Sufjan did this. I’m sure he’s not the first. But it was definitely intentional on Sufjan’s part. What this means is that if you are playing it even slightly slower or off balance, the song shifts into that minor chord.”)⁴⁸ The opening chord as heard in the CD or MP3 versions elicits an entirely different experience: in a perfect data-processing environment, the chord is firmly minor. On the typical record player, the sound…is not quite right. To me, it feels unsettling and ominous. This opening chord sets the stage for an alignment between tonal and emotional ambiguity that continues throughout the track with its ambiguous modal oscillation between major and minor, a liminal space between dualities, between life and death emerging from silence between tracks.

These emotional idiosyncrasies, and others on the album, did not tear through me in the same way as the liminal silences. They had been carefully cultivated to conform to Stevens’s melancholic brand image, to appeal to my own consumer profile as someone who knows enough about music production to appreciate the artistry of manipulating technology for nostalgic ends. With Carrie and Lowell, Stevens was selling a sonic amalgamation of the emotions associated with grief. I was sold.

As I slumped further into the bean bag chair, surrounded by thirty or so other Sufjan fans, I felt inexplicably alone in my experience, a feeling I am sure was shared with others around me. Unlike Sufjan’s previous works, the album was more than a listening event or a collection of stories; it was the careful curation of a thick atmosphere suggesting all of the branching potentials available to a grieving body at any given moment. I am reminded of Richard Elliott’s blog posts about Camera Lucida and turn-of-the-century Fado performance, he describes the studium as a song’s “setting and narrative: what it is about” and vocal outbursts disrupting the listener’s consciousness as puncta.⁴⁹ How might puncta inform larger interpretations of narrative, and in what ways might non-teleological artworks frustrate the lived experience of the studium and the punctum in real time, and how do the material conditions of those experiences facilitate the aural passage of intensities from one body to another?

Carrie and Lowell, in its many forms, cannot be understood as “a work,” but is better seen as a body of work, and a traumatized body at that. Its track listing varies subtly with each of its different formats (CD, vinyl LP, MP3, and bootleg concert recordings), shown in figure 2. There is no ur-text of Carrie and Lowell, and any one encounter with its multitude of mediums may provide a baseline from which each listener engages with it in the future. I do not wish to dive too deeply into the ontological considerations of all that can be understood as the imaginary musical mausoleum that is Carrie and Lowell, but I do hope to direct the conversation toward the material aspects that either condition the individual response to a studium or enable a punctum to tear through. Rather, returning to Massumi, we find that the power of affective intensities lies in “nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future.”⁵⁰ The inconsistently ordered track listing provided across the multiple mediums for listening to Carrie and Lowell speaks to the many potential, branching ways of experiencing the track ordering of the album points to issues of subjectivity and temporality undergirding Barthes’s affective theory.

Medium plays a significant role in shaping what temporally driven narrative the listeners encounter and how that experience informs their affective engagement with the album. Despite what some critics have suggested, Carrie and Lowell foregoes a complex plot line and narrative progression, so it does not speak to a teleological development toward hope or closure.⁵¹ What might have been a narrative that follows the five-stage grief cycle instead traces Stevens’s own non-linear bereavement experience. Stevens reflected in an interview with Pitchfork that he found his bereavement process to be “lacking in any kind of natural trajectory. It felt really sporadic and convoluted. I would have a period of rigorous, emotionless work…my niece would point out polka-dotted tights at the playground, and I would suffer some kind of cosmic anguish in public.”⁵² With the sense of affective rupture implied in Stevens’s interview, I could not help but wonder to what extent the puncta is beholden to materiality, temporality, and medium. How might the mode of encounter and the medium through which the listener encounters an aesthetic object mediate whether the subject perceives a given detail as a punctum or studium?

As psychologist Judith Herman has described, trauma victims tend to relive their trauma nonchronologically, and through these disordered experiences, new meanings and connective threads may emerge.⁵³ Despite its internal disorder, the album always begins with the line “Spirit of my silence I can hear you” from “Death with Dignity” and ends with “Just when I want you in my life” from “Blue Bucket of Gold.” From end to end, Stevens is not any closer to catharsis. Beeler reflected in a Reddit post that the track listing was originally much more harrowing:

With the vinyl version I encountered at the silent listening party, the transition from side A to side B interrupted the narrative flow with a devastating silence, a classic Barthesian punctum of time and death. As indicated by the lyrics on the vinyl sleeve and on the track listing for the CD version, “Eugene,” a thoughtful, major-mode meditation on Stevens’s desire to be close to Carrie as a child, is listed as the fifth track of the album, followed by “Fourth of July” and then “The Only Thing.” Due to timing restraints, however, (Beeler noted that the sound engineers started the pressing process with side B, since it clocked in at a dangerously long 24 minutes), the ordering was revised for the vinyl pressing: the first three tracks remain the same on both formats (“Death With Dignity,” “Should Have Known Better,” and “All of Me Wants All of You”), but side A of the vinyl pressing proceeds from “Drawn to the Blood” to “Fourth of July,” then picks up with “The Only Thing” at the start of side B. “Eugene” is moved to the eighth track position, in between “Carrie and Lowell” and “John My Beloved.” Side B of the vinyl and the CD version otherwise follow the same ordering. What began as a material necessity has truly gutting consequences for vinyl listeners. My experience at the silent listening party has haunted me; I still feel slightly surprised when I stream the album, waiting to be heartbroken after “Drawn to the Blood,” and instead am met with light, lemon trees, and major modes in “Eugene.”

Mentally, I find myself turning back the calendar pages to the “Fourth of July,” where we stumble into one-sided a conversation between Carrie and Stevens on what is presumably her deathbed. They trade pet names (“my firefly,” “my little hawk,” “my little dove,” “my little Versailles,” “my dragonfly,” “my little loon”) as Carrie reminds Stevens that death is natural and there is nothing he could have done to prevent the outcome. With each repetition of the instrumental refrain, more floating electronics accumulate. The outro is the most emblematic of the bathetic ambient endings featured prominently throughout the album. The chord progression from the refrain returns with Sufjan singing, “We’re all gonna die” halfway through the fourth bar of each four-bar phrase. This repeats twice in the established pattern, then five more times an octave higher with the ascending last note of Stevens’s phrase rising a minor second instead of descending a major second as in earlier statements. The track abruptly cuts off after Stevens’s last statement of “we’re all gonna die,” ending side A with three more seconds of silence.

A disquieting confrontation of mortality and the finite lingers into the silence as the needle lifts, and the listener must confront their agency in continuing forth as they get up to turn the record over.⁵⁵ Massumi has written that affect implies “an augmentation or diminution in the body’s capacity to act,” and both effects seemed to apply to me.⁵⁶ I must get up to continue listening, but I am paralyzed. Breaking from my immobility, I turn again to Margulis’s thoughts on the contextualization of silence and its role in affective development. If silences that occur mid- phrase or mid-section are meant to heighten dramatic tension and their impact directly correlates with their temporal length, as Margulis suggests, then in the case of pauses between sides of a record, the listener plays a pivotal role in crafting their own affective experience.⁵⁷ Silence, she argues, “encourages this kind of meta-listening—in which the listening itself, rather than actual sound, has become the focus of attention—when it all but startles.”⁵⁸ These types of silences are points of closure as well as points of departure, and the difference rests in part on the listener’s perception.

Deep into the age of technological reproducibility, I was struck by how, try as I might, I could never recreate my experience of that devastating, disarming punctum, that silence between sides on the vinyl copy that the Asthmatic Kitty representatives chose to subject me to. The “silent listening party” curated a particular affective environment that only consumers of a certain type of media format might experience. The many versions of Carrie and Lowell and conversations surrounding the immanent relationships between its fans and its music speak to the ways in which the lived experience that is listening to the album informs the listeners’ affective engagement and activates their individualized puncta-like responses to the moments that pass where they hear and feel nothing. The experience of an aura is something that can be created by performance, and the ways in which this record was presented in a specially curated listening environment clearly places it in the realm of a performance, that is, an exhibit in enhanced circumstances.

The complicated nature of audio technology marks another significant departure from Barthes’s two-dimensional photographs: conventionally, photographs have a film negative, an original that precedes and unifies all subsequent versions, whereas any existing prints, such as the photograph’s reproductions in books (like Camera Lucida!) can be compared to a vinyl or CD copy of a musical album. Individual listeners construct their own relationship to time and affective expectation based on their accumulated, cultivated listening experiences. For example, my own experience listening to the album, regardless of format, relies heavily on my knowledge of this side A/side B split, just as Beeler’s knowledge of the initial proposed track listing shades his interpretations. To that extent, our internalized exposures elicit puncta: personalized and subconsciously mediated affective responses that were wholly dependent on the medium through which we consumed the album, in turn shaping our proprioceptive responses.

Barthes wrote with film-based photography in mind, and the processes of digitization, as Fried notes, transformed the ontology of the photograph. We need look no further than Jonathan Sterne’s influential work on the MP3 to discover the altered ontology of the musical object.⁵⁹ The voices of the dead return with the press of a button, so death and a confrontation of it seem slightly less permanent when moments that have long since passed are readily available to stream in the here-and-now.⁶⁰ Barthes labels younger (presumably non-Polaroid using) photographers as

My decaying Polaroid turned out to be a beautiful, ethereal limited edition clear-colored vinyl copy of Carrie and Lowell in a post-event goodie bag. Asthmatic Kitty has frequently sold vinyl pressing of Stevens’s music in novelty colors and shapes (a six-pointed red star 45 for the 2016 special 10th anniversary release of the single “Chicago” comes to mind), but for an album like Carrie and Lowell, clear was clearly the only color that could capture the music’s affective nothingness. The album was originally going to be a double LP, but production costs and issues relating to the clear vinyl factored into its reduction. Beeler noted that his “personal agenda on editing to a single LP was to keep the album as a vinyl product affordable while carefully protecting Sufjan’s creative intent with the album.” Beeler recanted his conversations with Josh Bonati as Bonati cut the lacquer, relaying concerns about the dynamic levels of “Blue Bucket of Gold” and its placement at the end of the record where the grooves needed to be tighter:

The clear color archetype, symbolizing both nothingness and clarity, seems to visually analogize silence and Stevens’s overwhelming emptiness and search for peace. The production quality challenges of clear vinyl also combine with the lo-fi indie rock aesthetic to maximize the authenticity and affect of Carrie and Lowell. We might take Barthes’s comments one step further and add the initial musical utterance and its technological reproduction as agents involved in the modern crisis of death.⁶³ My clear pressing of Carrie and Lowell preserves Carrie’s memory, Stevens’s grief, and my own experience at the silent listening party, but after so many odd times spinning the record at home, the sound quality has steadily begun to decay, much more quickly than any regular old black vinyl that I’ve owned (Asthmatic Kitty acknowledged later on that the clear vinyl pressings would not last as long as their black counterparts and were willing to replace any copies that did not hold up). With Carrie and Lowell arises a temporally finite but endlessly reproducible reconstruction of Carrie and the silences that marked Sufjan’s interactions with his grieving process and aesthetic reproductions of his grieving process through material means that, too, are all gonna die.

When the album ended and my friend and I removed our headphones, everyone in the room remained silent. Beeler broke us from our stupor as he cleared his throat and gave the cursory thank-yous to the Indianapolis Museum of Art personnel and to those of us in the audience for supporting an independent musician and his independent, locally connected record label. On the car ride back to campus, I asked my friend, “So, what did you think?” He responded, “All of the songs are the same, but I think that was the point. It was all just so sad. It’s just a lot to digest.” I stared at my shoes and replied, “Yeah, he really knows what feeling nothing feels like.”

Julia Kristeva notes that “(s)adness leads us into the enigmatic realm of affects—anguish, fear, or joy. Irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions, sadness (like all affect) is the psychic representation of energy displacements caused by external or internal traumas.”⁶⁴ I believe that Barthes’s studium and punctum speak to the ways in which the individual can be an affective archive, navigating culturally coded and pre-cognitive “energy displacements” (or, physiological responses) to aesthetic objects. Through Barthes, I try to develop an infrastructure for approaching affect as it relates to musical listening, although given the relatively little written on Barthes’s affective theory and music, I look forward to seeing where this foundation may lead. As I continue to develop this project, I hope to continue exploring the limits of Barthes’s dichotomous theory, which seemingly contradicts his claims against dialecticism. If affect is interpersonal and the punctum is dependent on the individual subject, how might Barthes’s theory confront the always already intersubjective neoliberal listener?⁶⁵ Further, I wonder about the effects of media specificity and network formation on the cultivation of affective environments. Asthmatic Kitty “updated” Carrie and Lowell several times, first with a live recording and then with an album-length EP of extended cuts and outtakes. Such questions about the lifespan and ontology of the musical work have already been addressed by Lidia Goehr, among others, but projects by other artists (Kanye West, for one, comes to mind) have joined Stevens in challenging the solidity of Goehr’s claims and how the work-concept might be further complicated by Barthes’s affective considerations.⁶⁶ Does a networked listening experience that synthesizes several versions of the same album enhance or negate the potential for a punctum marked by the passage of time and death if Carrie and Lowell as a project did not begin in one place and never truly ends/dies?

But for now, we must try to find closure.