In Praise of Doubt

Abstract

This paper brings the two fields of performance writing and sound art together. I argue that both performance writing and sound art look to interrogate similar degrees of in-betweenness, where doubt is beneficial and can serve to disrupt our previously conceived frameworks of interpretation. At the same time, both these genres aim to hover outside fixed frameworks or categories of understanding and interpretation. To think about performance writing through and with sound studies, I argue, means to prioritize the sound of language -- and the poetic performance that brings that sound to life -- over its fixed meaning. Consequently, the focus is on language-in-sound, which prolongs our affective engagement with the sonic capacities of language, rather than its subsequent semantic fields of reference.

By way of illustration, this paper also includes a performative exegesis. This piece, titled ‘Say Sibilance’, was composed during the Performance, Writing Symposium in Wellington in March 2017, and aims to explore the ways in which language-in-sound enables us to throw open some of the classifications that have historically governed textual practice, before categorical or semantic interpretation kicks in.

Notes

1 The ‘sonic turn’ in art and theory is said to have its foundations in two seminal texts: R. Murray Schafer's 1977 book The Soundscape and Jacques Atalli's Noise (published in French in 1977 and translated into English for the first time in 1985). For a comprehensive history of sound studies in recent scholarship see, for example, Sterne (2003); Kahn (1999); and Bull and Back (2003).