Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics

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Acknowledgement

I would like to extend my thanks to several people who helped with discussions and comments through various drafts of this article. These are: my PhD supervisors Julian Henriques and John Levack Drever, the editor of this issue James Lavender, and the anonymous peer reviewer, as well as Marie Thompson, Joanna Zylinska, Sarah Kember, and Sandra Kazlauskaite. However, the usual disclaimer applies; all errors, misrepresentations, and omissions are entirely my own.

Notes

1 This has been articulated in Evelyn Fox Keller’s hugely influential work on gender and science where notions of the masculinist objectivity in Western science are analysed. Keller writes of her investigation into how a ‘different subjectivity […] would affect our conception of science’ and alludes to a goal of ‘enabling us to glimpse what a science less constrained by such an ideology might look like’. See Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 70–71.

2 Although ‘listening’ might seem to be a more straightforward term to address, I choose to call this the ‘subject-object relation in sound’ in this article in keeping with the close relation of Haraway’s work to science studies and science and technology studies (STS) and in an attempt to foreground this relation in processes of knowledge production.

3 Karen Barad’s articulation of an ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ is deeply influenced by Donna Haraway’s work. As such, although this term was coined by Barad, I attribute it to Haraway’s influential thought within and beyond science studies. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 185.

4 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.”

5 Reznikoff and Dauvois, “La dimension sonore des grottes ornées”; Scarre, “Painting by Resonance.”

6 For example, the pioneering research of the field was undertaken by Iegor Reznikoff, a mathematics professor and specialist singer of early Christian chants. Another key figure since the 1990s has been Paul Devereux, an author of several books which investigate various ‘earth mysteries’ studies of sacred sites and unusual geophysical events.

7 Haraway, “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, Part II.”

8 Haraway et al., “Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations and There Are Always More Things Going On Than You Thought! Methodologies as Thinking Technologies,” 330.

9 Various theorizations of the role of political-philosophical ‘elsewheres’ in recent new materialism, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology debates can be found variously addressed in Cecelia Åsberg, Kathrin Thiele, Iris Van der Tuin’s “Speculative Before the Turn” and Jord/ana Rosenberg's “Molecularization of Sexuality.” Åsberg, Thiele, and Van der Tuin seek to reclaim the importance of feminist speculation amidst the contemporary flourishing of speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies. This speculation entails drawing on science fiction to imagine visionary past, futures and presents as a practice of Haraway-inspired feminist world-making. Rosenberg, on the other hand, addresses the contemporary evocation of an ‘ancestral realm’ in object-oriented ontologies, which simultaneously implies both the ancestral and futural. Rosenberg reads a capitalist commodity logic into the ontological turn, and undertakes a queer and postcolonial critique of OOO (object-oriented ontology) as a form of fanaticism which acts to marginalize the realm of the social. See Åsberg, Thiele, and van der Tuin, “Speculative Before the Turn;” Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality.”

10 Haraway writes that this term, ‘is intended to portray the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production, without ever implying the immediate presence of such objects or, what is the same thing, their final or unique determination of what can count as objective knowledge at a particular historical juncture’. The pairing of ‘material-semiotic’ emphasizes the inextricable link and co-configuration between meanings and objects of knowledge. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 595.

11 Haraway’s figure of the cyborg is the most well-known of a number of feminist figurations which she develops throughout her writing, for example the coyote, the vampire, and the companion species. These figures are aimed at subverting conventional political-philosophical thought acting as agents through which to think through and beyond the given conditions which Haraway's feminism is positioned against (e.g. socialist, anti-racist, materialist feminisms). See Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.”

12 Waller, “Intentionality of Rock-Art Placement Deduced from Acoustical Measurements and Echo Myths.”

13 Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?

14 Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Tara Rodgers draws on wave metaphors and maritime themes to examine using Luce Irigaray’s writings how the aesthetics and politics of the sound wave aligns with feminized notions of fluidity in audio-technical discourses. Reclaiming these notions back from stereotypically masculinist and colonialist histories into metaphors of interconnection, this essay presents powerful and useful ideas for feminist epistemologies of sound. See Rodgers, “Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-Technical Discourse.”

15 Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 15.

16 Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound.

17 Schafer’s celebration of the ‘authenticity’ of soundscapes experienced by the earwitness is part of his distaste for unnatural sounds co-opting the ‘natural’ soundscape including the role of audio recording technology. See for example, his definition of ‘schizophonia’. Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 8–9; 90–91.

18 Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science.

19 Though the projects of scientific and philosophical epistemologies cannot be posited as interchangeable, feminist critiques of masculinist knowledge production from within science studies and philosophy are often viewed as joint efforts. Most commonly cited are the foundational texts by Evelyn Fox Keller, who investigates notions of masculine domination and control in science writings, and Susan Bordo, who describes the masculinization of philosophical thought in Cartesian objectivity. Later work specifically on feminist epistemologies reflects this joint inheritance. Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science; Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity; Alcoff and Potter, Feminist Epistemologies.

20 Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 42.

21 Nancy, Listening, 37.

22 James, “Affective Resonance,” 68.

23 Nancy, Listening, 9.

24 Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification,” 146, 157.

25 Ibid., 147.

26 Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity, 5–13; Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, 23.

27 There are a variety of positions which are brought under the terms “Speculative Realism” and “Object-Oriented Ontology.” My usage of the two here is not intended to conflate these philosophical movements but instead to point out the commonality to which a feminist critique of an invisibilized male subjectivity and separation of subject and object of knowledge remains highly pertinent.

28 van der Tuin, ‘Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology’, 233.

29 Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification,” 146–47.

30 I have intentionally left the “N” of “Nature” capitalized here as I read it to refer to “Nature” as a proper noun, which reinforces my argument of Cox’s slippage between “n/Nature” as common and proper noun. Ibid., 147.

31 Ahmed, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions.”

32 Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification,” 146.

33 Dennis Bruining elaborates in more detail on Ahmed’s argument describes how even within feminist new materialisms, there is a tendency to perpetuate this misrepresentation of postmodernism and poststructuralism as caught in endless relativism and as an ‘allergy to the real’. Bruining cites examples of this tendency in the editor introductions to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost New Materialisms and Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman's Material Feminisms. See Bruining, “Interrogating the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism.”

34 Cox refers to Casey O’Callaghan’s when asserting, ‘Sounds are intangible, ephemeral and invisible; but, O’Callaghan shows, they are nonetheless real and mind-independent’. O’Callaghan, Sounds; Cox, ‘Sonic Philosophy’.

35 As Dennis Bruining suggests, one of the problems of new materialism is ‘its highly problematic conception of matter as a thing in or of itself with its own identifiable agentic drives’. The founding gestures of new materialism are ‘premised on the conceptual separation...of matter as a thing that is somehow separate from the background against which it emerges’. Bruining, “Interrogating the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism,” 33; 37.

36 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 183, 185.

37 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 589.

38 Due to limitations of space, I will not address in detail the large body of feminist theory and philosophy on embodiment and corporeality and their relation to subjectivity and identity. Insofar as Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” theorizes how embodiment and situatedness crucially underpins the subject-object relation of feminist epistemologies, I instead refer to Haraway’s cyborgian reading of the body which advocates an anti-essentialist and political-ethical theory of embodiment. To distinguish the Haraway notion of the body from others, I use “embodiedness” over “embodiment.”

39 Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, 581.

40 Ibid., 589.

41 Ibid.

42 Haraway, How Like a Leaf, 103.

43 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 588.

44 Haraway, How Like a Leaf, 71 (my emphasis).

45 Jonathan Sterne notably criticizes the rigid separation of characteristics concerning seeing and hearing which are often presented in a factual manner as the ‘audiovisual litany’. Sterne considers these to perpetuate unhelpful dualisms which do not need to be a starting point for cultural analyses of sound, furthermore suspicious for their theological underpinnings. Relevant for the present argument are ideas about hearing tending towards subjectivity or being about affect, whilst seeing tending towards objectivity or being about intellect. Sterne, The Audible Past, 15.

46 Feld, “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.”

47 Henriques, Sonic Bodies.

48 Sounding as described by Henriques, leans on Christopher Small’s concept of ‘musicking’ to emphasize the processes, activities, and multiple actors of a sonic sociality. Small, Musicking.

49 Haraway uses Robert Boyle as the archetypal white, male and self-invisible (unmarked) subject of European technoscience. The ‘modest witness’ espouses a specific form of virtuous masculine modesty born in modernity during the so-called scientific revolution. The modern laboratory is the epistemological space which signifies a highly regulated ‘culture of no culture’. See Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, 23.

50 Henriques, Sonic Bodies, xxviii.

51 Ibid., xvii.

52 Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 244–246.

53 Feld, “Acoustemology,” 12.

54 Ibid., 15.

55 Chilisa, Indigenous Research Methodologies; Feld, “Acoustemology,” 14.

56 For example, Feld speaks of the ‘potential of acoustic knowing’ and his initial realisation of the Bosavi peoples’ sophisticated communication through sound as ‘bodily, powerful and gripping’ and Henriques speaks of the process of ‘sounding’ as offering a ‘different understanding of the nature of rationality itself’ and of sonic logos as part of a ‘criticism of representational meaning and linear causality’. Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra, 126; Henriques, Sonic Bodies, 246.

57 Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint”; Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters.”

58 Although this ‘simply’ is to be understood with a deconstructionist playfulness typical of Haraway. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.

59 Ibid., 579.

60 Haraway speaks of ‘polluted inheritances’ as the wide-reaching political, philosophical, ethical notions and values which one inherits from patriarchal, racist, capitalist, militaristic society which her work is pitted against. This position is also often referred to as working from ‘within the belly of the monster’. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/D Others,” 70.

61 Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, 16.

62 Ibid., 273.

63 Haraway, The Haraway Reader, 2.

64 Haraway, How Like a Leaf, 71.

65 Smith, Hearing History.

66 Sterne, The Audible Past, 19. Some historians of sound insist upon the use of printed records to verify the meanings ascribed to sonic experiences. Smith, “Echo,” 61–62.

67 Devereux, Stone-Age Soundtracks, 12.

68 Schafer’s close affinity with McLuhan’s theories is well documented, and his palpable influence can be noted in the direct resemblance of ‘acoustic space’ in Schafer’s notion of the ‘soundscape’. Paul Devereux makes direct reference to McLuhan’s concept of acoustic space. See McLuhan, Laws of media; Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, 11; Devereux, Stone-Age Soundtracks, 25.

69 Reznikoff, “On Primitive Elements of Musical Meaning.”

70 Some researchers use a variety of the methods mentioned.

Till et al., “Songs of the Caves: Sound and Prehistoric Art in Caves Initial Report on a Study in the Cave of Tito Bustillo, Asturias, Spain.”

71 Personal Communication with Iegor Reznikoff. March 2015; Devereux, Stone-Age Soundtracks, 89 (original italics).

72 See for example: Conkey and Spector, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender”; Moro-Abadía, “The History of Archaeology as a ‘Colonial Discourse’.”

73 Scarre and Lawson, Archaeoacoustics, viii.

74 Reznikoff and Dauvois, “La dimension sonore des grottes ornées”; Devereux, Stone-Age Soundtracks, 17–19, 20, 95, 120; Watson and Keating, “The Architecture of Sound in Neolithic Orkney,” 259.

75 Waller, “Intentionality of Rock-Art Placement Deduced from Acoustical Measurements and Echo Myths,” 31.

76 Sterne, The Audible Past, 2.

77 Reznikoff, ‘JMM’; Devereux, Stone-Age Soundtracks, 15.

78 Sardan, “The Exoticizing of Magic from Durkheim to ‘Postmodern’ Anthropology.”

79 See for example, entries on “Echo,” “Delay,” and “Reverberation.” Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, 47, 37, 111.

80 Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, 1–2.

81 However it can be noted that other Greek poets such as Aristophanes, Philostratus, Callistratus, Apuleius, and Nonnus have alternatively described Echo by herself (in Greek myths Echo appears invariably as a female figure) or in relation to the god Pan.

82 Spivak, “Echo”, 19.

83 Conkey and Spector, “Archaeology and the Study of Gender”; Wylie, “Doing Social Science as a Feminist: The Engendering of Archaeology.”

84 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 89–90.

85 Spivak, “Echo,” 26.

86 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

87 Spivak, “Echo,” 23.

88 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.

89 Haraway, The Haraway Reader, 69.

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Annie Goh

Annie Goh is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Media and Communications as a Stuart Hall PhD fellow and funded by CHASE/AHRC. She holds an MA in Sound Studies, MFA in Generative Art and a BA(Hons) German; European Studies. She has recently published in MAP - Media | Archive | Performance; n.paradoxa; and Flusseriana. Goh has co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival since 2013 and has lectured at Berlin University of Arts (Art and Media) and Humboldt University (Media Theory). Email: [email protected]