Positive vibrations – voice, sound, and resonance as insurgency

ABSTRACT

The very idea of ‘critical language studies’ encourages one to develop a sense of criticality; that is, to interrogate the concepts that one uses, to explore the boundaries of one’s professional practice, and to push one’s thinking, if necessary, into new directions. This is typically done with the aim of contributing to epistemic as well as socio-economic justice. In this article, I think with, and through, the sociolinguistic concept of ‘voice’, seeking to move beyond its metaphorical use (as an index of agency) and linking it, explicitly, to sound and resonance, to materiality, affect and the senses. In doing so, I move beyond language, and include different sonic expressions and perceptions. The aim is to develop the broad contours of a ‘sonic criticality’. A ‘sonic criticality’ is also an ethical project: it encourages one to engage in new forms of listening (Robinson 2020), and to explore sound’s insurgent potential, its ability to unsettle and to change the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article is based, in part, on a lecture that I gave in 2023 at the Moving Normativity conference in Berlin. I would like to thank the audience for their thoughts and comments on the original article. Many thanks also go to Daniel Silva for drawing my attention to the concept of resonance, and to the Editorial Team of CILS for inviting me to reflect on the field of critical language studies, ‘taking up current perspectives and looking towards the future’. In this article, I use ‘critical language studies’ and ‘sociolinguistics’ interchangeably as the two fields speak to similar concerns. As with all my writing, my gratitude goes to Nkululeko Mabandla for on-going conversations, deep inspiration, and a shared enjoyment of sound in all its forms.

2. There is, however, a twist to this: the voice of David Cross, a white actor, is sliced into the soundtrack whenever the main protagonist’s ‘white voice’ appears. This creates a body/voice slippage, a resonant and acoustic hauntology (McGuinness and Simpson, 2022).

3. Cavarero (2005) comments aptly on the heterosexual stereotype that underpins this scene, the feminization of ‘song’ and the body versus reason and logos. It is a topos that informs not only patriarchy but also racist-colonial discourses where song/music/affect are positioned as the domain of the oriental or southern other and thus as an alternative to western modernity. When writing about voice as affective, one needs to be careful of not getting caught up in these discourses.

4. Thinking about the voice as unique does not mean that we can identify its stable essence or that it yields cues to a person’s, or object’s, interiority. It simply will be different – maybe in a very small way only – ‘from all other voices’.

5. My approach differs from work in US-based linguistic anthropology (e.g. Harkness, 2015), where qualia are studied primarily through the discourses about them. However, a focus on discourse (and naming) risks seeing a name or word as ‘an index for an experiential phenomenon’ (such as ‘this sound makes me happy’) rather than recognizing that this is merely an instance of discursive externalization, of reducing felt experience to representation (Eidsheim, 2015, p.24).

6. Drawing on a material concept such as resonance/vibration does not imply a return to a universalist ontology in which everyone is affected identically by sound. Rather, one needs to acknowledge that the way one experiences sound is grounded in historical and cultural experiences (as well as in specific physical places/spaces), and sonic experience is not delinked from power (including the systems of (neo-)colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy).

7. Reading this meditation, I was thinking about its monolingual orientation – and started wondering about the experience of resonance in multiple languages, especially in cases where words echo each other.

8. Notes on the text (which is an extract from the full poem): 1652 to was the beginning of formal colonization in South Africa; the Wankie campaign was launched by Zimbabwean and South African guerillas when they crossed the Zambezi; MK stands for Umkhonto We Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress.