Introduction: Sounding / Thinking

In the introduction to his 2011 book Radio: Essays in Bad Reception, John Mowitt remarks that the ‘object’ of a given discipline must be understood in two senses: that to which the discipline refers, that ‘thing’ in the world that it aims to study, on the one hand, and the ‘aim or purpose’ of the field in question, that which the discipline ‘hopes to gain’ by turning to this object, on the other.¹ The disciplinary object thus resides in the ‘volatile zone of indistinction’ where these two senses collide and resonate: this space between the world and our knowledge of it, between what our studying is about and what it is for, is where disciplinarity itself is at stake.²

We might ask then, on this basis: what is the object of sound studies? The answer is, of course, contained within the question, at least as regards the first sense: the object of sound studies is ‘sound itself’. But difficulties beset us immediately: do we mean sound qua physical/material phenomenon, a vibration passing through a given medium, conceived ontologically as an element within a broader conception of nature or the real, as Steve Goodman and Christoph Cox have argued?³ Or, do we rather hold that sound is only conceivable in relation to the perception of such vibrations as sound, as Jonathan Sterne and Seth Kim-Cohen have claimed, albeit for different reasons, thereby making the auditory phenomenon, rather than ‘sound in itself’, our object?⁴ And this question is only the beginning of our problems – to take sound as object of and for perception, for instance, is to immediately raise the question of the nature and capacity of sense perception, its scope and its limits and its relationship to conceptual thought.

If we turn to the second sense, our problem is in some ways only exacerbated. The immediate result is deceptively promising: though there is, as yet, no consensus within sound studies with regard to what sound ‘is’, there is, within certain limits, a shared conception of what the function of a discipline called sound studies would be. However, this shared conception in fact concerns an incapacity that is placed at the heart of the discipline: insofar as this discipline is taken to be a novel phenomenon (and certainly it has only attained a degree of self-awareness and self-reference since the turn of the millennium), it rests upon a shared sense that the study of sound is belated compared to, for instance, studies of the visual arts or visual culture. What is more, this belatedness is often attributed to a fundamental mismatch between the nature of sound qua object and the conditions of possibility for knowledge that are rooted in the intellectual traditions of the West, and, according to some, coextensive with them. Thus, we find the exemplary remark by Aden Evens, at the opening of his book Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience: ‘Music resists theorization at every step. […] Western intellectual traditions show a marked preference for vision as the figure of knowledge. We articulate more effectively the fixed image than the dynamic sound.’⁵

In a certain sense, then, we have a clear object, in the sense of orientation or goal, for sound studies: to make sound thinkable, at last. And yet, what is seen here with such clarity presents us not with an obvious direction, but rather with new, and even more extensive difficulties, redounding upon and exacerbating the uncertainty we faced with the initial question.⁶ If our object, in the second sense, is to make sound an object, in the first sense, of and for thinking, we find that our uncertainty regarding what sound is to be symptomatic of a broader incapacity that marks the practice of thinking as such. If we take thought in its traditional sense – that is, the sense defined by the tradition of Western thinking⁷ – then sound studies proclaims sound itself unthinkable, and the ‘zone of indetermination’ between its two objects becomes apparently self-annulling.

Yet appearances can be misleading. This issue of parallax is presented under the title of ‘Sounding / Thinking’ insofar as it attempts to propose, not that the difficulties faced by sound studies are either ephemeral, on the one hand, or insurmountable, on the other, but rather that they are the motor of its continued vitality, and, ultimately, the source of its contemporary significance. Insofar as sound studies is a discipline whose object is theoretically indiscernible, it effectively becomes an immanently meta-theoretical discipline – that is, a discipline in which the status of theory itself is at stake. For sound to become thinkable, it is perhaps the case that thought must become something other than what it has been; at a time when the question of what theory is and what it can do has become of central importance, this ensures that sound studies not only functions as a vital site for theoretical experimentation, a ‘test case’ to explore the validity and fruitfulness of the latest developments, but, even more importantly, a point at which new innovations and orientations can be developed under the constraint of the case itself. Ultimately, then, if sound studies has a pressing contemporary import, it is to the degree that sound is not merely yet another object for thought, taken in its limiting sense; rather, it is a demand posed to thought by that which it has yet been unable to think.

The articles collected in this issue are offered, on this basis, as so many sketches as to both the direction in which both sound studies, in particular, might move, and the conditions under which it could do so, as well as, ultimately, demonstrations of the contemporary significance of the attempt. In the remaining part of this introduction, I will detail how the various articles gathered herein pursue this aim, and how they intersect, in this way, with various contemporaneous engagements with the question of theory as such, alluded to above.

The issue begins with three articles that explicitly connect sound studies’ concerns regarding the status of its object(s) to contemporaneous debates over the capacities of theory to think the real. This resurgence of materialist and/or realist positions within cultural theory and philosophy has been presented as a counterpoint to, or sometimes rejection of, the approaches which dominated the Anglophone institutionalization of theory over the preceding decades, which are taken to be, in hindsight, focused upon language, signification, and culture to a degree that was both explicitly anthropocentric and implicitly idealist.⁸ Insofar as sound studies constitutes itself around an uncertainty regarding the thinkability of its object, then, it is no surprise that sound studies has found itself caught up in these debates. Yet, as asserted previously, this does not simply place sound as an example upon which the validity of these positions can be tested, but rather allows it to propose critical revisions and re-orientations of these broader debates.

In her article ‘A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption’, Eleni Ikoniadou turns to an underexplored vein of theoretical engagement with sound that exemplifies this latter claim. In her encounter with practices of ‘sonic fiction’ that are indissociably theoretical and musical, Ikoniadou draws on a range of philosophical and sonic precursors in order to shift the terms of the debate over the status of the sonic object at both the empirical and transcendental level. At the same moment that sound ceases to be a case for the application of theoretical judgments and begins to not only propose but to actually produce its own conditions of thinkability, it, by extension, forces us to reconfigure our sense of the ready distinction between what is and what might be the case, between certainty and possibility, between fact and fiction. This is a distinction already unsettled by many of the precursors of the speculative turn, Nietzsche and Deleuze amongst them, but who are too rarely read from this angle.

Annie Goh and Marie Thompson, in their respective articles, take this critical engagement with the ‘speculative turn’ and its limitations further by investigating its conditions of theoretical possibility – that is, what must be rejected and overlooked in order to conceive of such a ‘turning’ in the first place. For Thompson, sound studies’ appeal to a re-turn to ontology, exemplified by the work of Christoph Cox, retains the ‘racialized erasures and exclusions from the realm of ontology’ that vitiate this broader trend, with regard both to its diagnosis of the problem and its proposed solution. That is, in basing its claim to novelty and innovation upon an opposition between the supposedly out-dated attention to culture and language and the correspondingly novel possibilities of a renewed ontology, such an articulation of theory’s future manages to, at one and the same moment, situate concerns with race within the ambit of theoretical problems that are now superseded, and fail to attend to the rich seam of ontological investigation that has been formulated within critical engagements with race. Thus, in absolving itself of ‘cultural’ issues, theory reaffirms the invisibility of whiteness by incorporating it within a presumed neutrality. In so doing, it limits its own capacity to engage with the richness of ontological thinking across a range of traditions – a limitation which is audible in and through the exemplary cases with which it furnishes and demonstrates its own pertinence.

Annie Goh proffers a related but distinct engagement with the occlusions of the speculative turn by emphasizing its problematic retention of a distinction between nature and culture, whatever its professed aims. For Goh, the way in which sound studies has registered the impact of the speculative turn by attempting to thematize the ‘nature’ of sound – or to position sound within a broader naturalism – not only retains an implicit subject-object division, against its own intentions, but in so doing perpetuates the fiction of the non-situated observer that has been the object of extensive critique within feminist science studies. As with Thompson, then, Goh seeks to reconnect contemporary debates within sound studies to a rich and overlooked tradition of thinking, not in order to argue that we need to turn back from broader ontological pursuits to a narrower cultural realm, but that this opposition itself limits the scope and possibility of such enquiries. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway in particular, as well as recent work in the field of archeoacoustics, Goh proposes the project of ‘sounding situated knowledges’ as an alternate route for registering the challenge proposed by sound to thought in a manner that not only evades the re-inscription of the subject-object dualism, but does so by reaffirming feminist challenges to the ‘view from nowhere’ that the speculative turn has failed to incorporate.

From these more specific engagements with contemporary theoretical problems, as manifested within sound studies’ meta-theoretical concerns, the issue turns to broader problems regarding sound’s amenability to theoretical articulation, adding new lines of engagement to the aforementioned claim, widely articulated within sound studies, that sound in some sense resists thinking. Rachel Devorah’s article suggests that sound’s persistent occlusion as both object of thought and model for conceptual activity can be understood more fully by aligning it with a coextensive and, she argues, structurally analogous exclusion of the feminine (as normatively defined and constructed). Thus, providing further confirmation for Goh and Thompson’s arguments, Devorah suggests that any theoretical attempt to recuperate sonority must, at the same moment, challenge and unsettle prevalent gendered assumptions about what it means to theorize, to conceptualize, and fundamentally, to think – as well as, by analogy, what it is to listen.

Michael Eng, for his part, turns to the very motive of theoretical activity itself in order to expand and to clarify the sense in which such activity has sought to exclude sonority. Eng, in an exploration of the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, exposes how the ‘denigration of vision’ in twentieth-century French thinking, to use Martin Jay’s phrase, may not be easily converted into the positive impetus to think sound anew, and think it differently. Rather, in the case of Lacoue-Labarthe, the possibility is raised that theory can only define itself as theory by a constitutive exclusion of music. In other words, the subject of theory is defined precisely by the pursuit and the inaccessibility of sound as its object. This possibility cannot be circumvented, and must be confronted by any attempt to make sound into an object of and for theory, ‘at last’.

The final three articles all focus on distinct cases upon which sound studies has insistently focused, returning, in this sense, to the concerns of the opening article, but from a series of distinct and illuminating angles. Mickey Vallee turns to the field of voice studies, in order to propose that, beyond the binary framing in which the voice either represents the subject’s interiority or its estrangment, it can instead be figured as the site of what Deleuze and Guattari term an ‘incorporeal transformation’, a claim that has significant implications not only for the political function of sonic acts more broadly, but for the political status of sound studies itself.

Finally, Charles Eppley and Iain Campbell both engage with a figure whose work has been an inescapable reference point for defining the object of sound studies – John Cage. For Eppley, the attention paid to Cage’s work within sound studies can be deepened and extended by exploring more extensively the musical genealogy of which he is a part, beyond the more limited readings of his work that have been prevalent in an art historical context. Sound studies, in this sense, would serve an exemplary transdisciplinary function – allowing the procedures and results of two different disciplines to resonate with one another, and thereby open up new directions. In Campbell’s work, the question of disciplinarity emerges through a Deleuzian emphasis on the nature of philosophical practice – that is, what it is to do philosophy, as a concrete activity with an object of its own. If, following Deleuze, we claim that the concept is the object of philosophy, then the question follows: What relation does this object have to the object(s) of sound studies enumerated at the outset? In exploring Deleuze’s response to this question through an engagement with Cage’s work, Campbell intervenes within what Brian Kane has described as ‘the ontological turn’ within sound studies in order to pursue an alternate possibility, providing a demonstration of what an alternative Deleuzian approach to the sound/philosophy relation might be.⁹

To conclude, this issue offers a series of varied engagements with current debates in sound studies, united by a sense that the significance of this discipline lies precisely in the challenge it offers to existing accounts of what theory is and does. It is a challenge that is found to occur not simply as a practical result but as a condition of theorizing as such. If theory has still not become adequate to thinking sonority, it is now more than ever clear that it is not a question of turning our gaze upon yet another object of analysis, but of raising the question of what relationship between thought and its object would be adequate to sonority, or if, indeed, this relation itself may not be part of the problem.

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Notes on contributors

James Lavender

James Lavender received his PhD from the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on the relationship between sound and philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the work of Gilles Deleuze and John Cage. He was previously co-editor of parallax. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Mowitt, Radio, 1–2. It must be noted here that, for Mowitt, the object, in the first sense, is never a "mere" thing in the sense of an inert physical presence, but also implicates 'an unwieldy array of cultural institutions and practices. Further, in his most recent book, Sounds: The Ambient Humanities, Mowitt effectively provides his own answers to the questions that I pose on his behalf here – answers that bear productive relation to some of the approaches taken in this issue, not least Annie Goh’s engagement with the figure of echo. In emphasizing the ‘sound/sense snarl’, and asserting that ‘[s]ounds, whether in the world or on the page, are Text’, Mowitt suggests that he, like a number of contributors herein, find the current emphasis on an oppositional binary between textualism and realism/materialism an unpalatable and limiting forced choice. Mowitt, Sounds, 1.

2 Mowitt, Radio, 2.

3 See Goodman, Sonic Warfare, and Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification.” Brian Kane aligns both Goodman and Cox with the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies, broadly reliant on a particular reading of Deleuze in order to postulate a non-anthropomorphic and non-essentialist conception of nature as a material flux; see Kane, “Sound Studies Without Auditory Culture.” Iain Campbell, in the concluding article in this issue, offers an alternate approach to Deleuze’s work and its possible use in thinking sonority, while Annie Goh and Marie Thompson both directly challenge Cox’s conception of a sonic naturalism that is counterposed to narrowly socio-cultural concerns.

4 Sterne’s approach, formulated most succinctly in the introduction to his influential study The Audible Past, appeals to a functional equivalence between sonority and audition: the field of sound is delimited by the possibility of audition, which separates it from the broader field of vibratory phenomena, many of which are not audible and, therefore, non-sonic. What is more, Sterne stresses that audition itself is a historical phenomenon shaped by socio-cultural and technical conditions (he invokes Marx and Engels’ appeal for a ‘history of the five senses’ on this point). Kim-Cohen, for his part, offers a more straightforwardly anti-realist argument regarding the impossibility of speaking about that which exceeds representation in his In the Blink of an Ear, and for this reason is taken as exemplary of the idealist premises of cultural theory by Cox. The phrase ‘sound-in-itself’, upon which this debate has turned, is taken by Kim-Cohen from the work of Douglas Kahn (see in particular Noise, Water, Meat), who develops it to characterize certain tendencies in the work of John Cage. Cage in fact uses the term himself in an interview with Daniel Charles. Cage, For the Birds, 78.

5 Evens, Sound Ideas, ix. It is important to note that there are two distinct but inevitably related positions involved in this broad claim regarding the primary role of vision in the intellectual history of the West. Firstly, it is the preference for vision as the clearest or most direct source of sense-perception, over and above the other senses. Secondly, it is the use of visual tropes and figures to define and determine thinking as such. The former position is often explicitly avowed, while the latter usually remains implicit, insofar as it is often contrary to the intended argument. The classic example here is Plato. Though he refers to vision as the ‘keenest’ sense in the Phaedrus, for instance, Ideas are nevertheless presented as exclusive objects of intellection to the degree that they cannot be perceived by the senses, and as such we must turn away from the visible world in order to apprehend them (Plato, Phaedrus, 31). Yet Plato’s language often deploys visual formulations with regard to this apprehension – not least the use of theoria, which has its root in visual contemplation – which implicitly import a visual model into an account of thinking that is supposed to transcend sensation. As Eric Havelock puts it, ‘one can say that repeatedly, in striving for a language which shall describe [a] new level of mental activity which we style abstract, [Plato] tends to relapse into metaphors of vision’ (Havelock, Preface to Plato, 270). The famous allegory of the cave draws the full consequence of this ambiguity: sense-perception and intellection are counterposed as two distinct forms of vision. For a fuller discussion in relation to ancient and medieval philosophy, with an interesting excursus on the role of the cave metaphor in particular, see Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth.”

6 Language itself, of course, attests to both the veracity of the diagnosis of ocularcentrism, and the difficulty of extirpating it. For an amusing demonstration of this point, see the opening paragraph of Jay, Downcast Eyes.

7 As the quotation from Evens above indicates, that there is such a tradition, and that this tradition privileges vision, is a foundational premise within sound studies. Its fundamental, most polemical formulation can be found in Jacques Attali: ‘For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing’ (Attali, Noise, 3). I will neither challenge nor justify such a claim here, given that my overall aim is to explore sound studies’ self-understanding on this point, and so therefore simply wish to register its prevalence.

8 The clearest articulation of this position can be found in Bryant et al, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy.” Cox also provides a clear expression of this claim with specific reference to sound studies in “Beyond Representation and Signification.”

9 For my own tentative exploration of this question in relation to Cage and Deleuze, as well as the problems raised in this introduction more generally, see Lavender, “Objects, Orientations and Interferences: On Deleuze and Sound Studies.”