Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies

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Notes

1 Meillassoux, After Finitude.

2 For example see Galloway, “A response to Graham Harman.”

3 Srnicek, cited in Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 132.

4 Bryant et al, The Speculative Turn, 4.

5 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.”

6 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 259.

7 See Jackson, “Animal,” 673.

8 Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 109–110.

9 Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality.” Fanon’s notion of blackness as non-ontological outside has been further theorized by ‘Afro-pessimist’ scholars such as Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For more on this see Marriott, “Judging Fanon.”

10 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 187.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.; Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739.

13 Bryant, Democracy of Objects.

14 Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans on Non Humans.”

15 Leong, “The Mattering of Black Lives;” Jackson, “Animal.”

16 Ahmed, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions;” Åsberg, Thiele, van der Tuin, “Speculative Before the Turn.”

17 Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn.”

18 For more on this see Leong, “The Mattering of Black Lives,” Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality.” Of course, not all ‘new materialist’ or ‘speculative realist’ scholarship seeks this separation, and some seek it more than others.

19 Leong, “The Mattering of Black Lives,” 7.

20 Ahmed, “phenomenology of whiteness.”

21 Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality.” In referring to the ‘attack on the social’, Rosenberg draws on Fred Moten’s collaboration with Stefano Harney in The Undercommons. The ‘society’ that is under attack pertains to the commons (or undercommons) and collectivity. See Harney and Moten, The Undercommons.

22 Chen, “Questionnaire on materialisms,” 22.

23 See also Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality.”

24 Kane, “Sound studies,” 4.

25 Cox, “Beyond Signification and Representation,” 146, my emphasis. Cox’s overview of the theoretical paradigms of music and the visual arts risks repeating the racialized citational erasures mentioned above apropos of the ontological turn more generally. Kodwo Eshun, for example, pre-empts a number of Cox’s arguments (i.e. the call to ‘think sonically’ rather than to ‘think about sound’). However, Eshun uses these ideas to speak to and of blackness and afrodiasporic music. See Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun.

26 I use ‘onto-epistemology’ to foreground the entanglement and co-constitution of ontology (questions of being) and epistemology (questions of knowledge).

27 Cox, “Sonic philosophy.”

28 Cox, “Sound Art,” 25. Cox’s reading of these artistic examples is somewhat selective. Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, for instance, raises ‘socially-oriented’ questions about space and place; and of the invizibilized presence of technological infastructures in social life. Indeed, in an interview with Cox, Kubisch explicitly (though perhaps unintentionally) foregrounds the racialization of listening: when asked about hearing voices when participating in Electrical Walks, Kubisch recalls an experience in Switzerland: ‘I came across a group of people – I think it was a group of Indian people – celebrating a religious service in their own language. Because I didn’t understand the language, at first I thought it was some kind of terrorist meeting, with all this shouting and these rhythmic sounds. But then I heard the “Hallelujah” and “Amen” and I understood what it was’. See Cox and Kubisch, “Invisible cities.”

29 Sterne, “Theology of Sound,” 212.

30 Cox, “Beyond representation and signification,” 155. See also, Thompson, “Feminised noise.”

31 See Kahn, “John Cage: silence and silencing;” Piekut, “Sound’s modest witness.”

32 See Haraway, Modest-Witness@Second Millennium.

33 Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness,” 14.

34 Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950,” 242.

35 For more on the politics of Cagean aesthetics see Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate. George Lewis notes that there is a disconnect between Cage’s ‘very American notion of freedom’ and ‘any kind of struggle that might be required’ in order to obtain that freedom. See Lewis, “Improvised music after 1950,” 222.

36 Cox, “Beyond representation and signification,” 157.

37 Sullivan, “The somatechnics of perception,” 309.

38 Ibid., 315.

39 Kane, “Sound Studies,” 13.

40 Ibid., 16.

41 English, “Various – Airport Symphony.”

42 Kouvaras, Loading the Silence, 161.

43 Ibid.

44 Schrimshaw, “Any place whatever.”

45 Cox, “Sound art,” 24.

46 Ahmed, “phenomenology of whiteness,” 163.

47 OkayAfrica, “NON interview.”

48 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 187.

49 See Marriott “Judging Fanon.”

50 Ibid., 182.

51 Moten, Into The Break, 14. Moten exemplifies the phonic resistance of the object apropos of Frederick Douglass’s account of his Aunt Hester’s scream when beaten by a slave master. The scream is both a reference to and refusal of object status; of fungibility, insofar as the object does not speak. See Moten, Into the Break, 1–24.

52 Amobi has described sonic ugliness as a means of pointing listeners to the violence in society, as a means of working through such violence. See Joyce, “Chino Amobi makes violent music for violent times.”

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Marie Thompson

Marie Thompson is a lecturer at Lincoln School of Film and Media, University of Lincoln. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). Marie is the academic lead of the University of Lincoln’s Extra-Sonic Practice (ESP) research group. Email: [email protected]