Listening below: two variations on fugitive sound

ABSTRACT

In this audio essay, I ruminate on the pedagogical implications of two kinds of deep listening to what lies beneath our taken-for-granted auditory worlds. The first considers the elemental soundscapes and chatty silence of the environments in which we are always already implaced. The second considers the ethical drones and demands of dispossession, especially in terms of social justice. In doing so, I also develop a notion—following Stephano Harney and Fred Moten, Tina Campt, and others—of fugitivity related to listening, sound, stillness, and escape. The essay contains recorded narration that is enveloped in and infused with fugitive sounds of nature, human-made sounds, a beating heart, and low-frequency infrasound that can only be felt but not heard.

KEYWORDS:

• silence
• fugitivity
• listening

Artist statement

The deaf don’t believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.—Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic ¹

“Listening Below” was first formulated and produced for a panel on pedagogy and sound at the 2018 National Communication Association annual convention. ² Earlier that year, I had learned about the One Square Inch of Silence project in the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, WA, and I had been wanting to visit it. One Square Inch is performatively pedagogical at its core, teaching us about the astonishingly wide and intrusive reach of human-made sound (even in places that might appear to be wild, remote, or empty of human presence). It also suggests a logic of reversal with regard to intrusion. To protect a square inch of silence requires protecting an intrusion zone of hundreds of square miles of space around that inch. At the same time, One Square Inch also encourages (and teaches) attunement to natural environments. This attunement requires a respecification of silence itself, which only exists on earth as a human-made production of an absence (as with noise-cancelling rooms). In natural environments, which constitutively encompass human being itself, silence qua quietude is actually a bustling and ongoing flow of layer upon layer of frequencies and rhythms and beats. Even in a room designed to produce a total silence, a live observer’s body, though breath and heartbeat, will produce sound.

During the semester that I visited One Square Inch, I was teaching a course on visual culture. One of the books I assigned was Tina M. Campt’s Listening to Images, which she describes as “a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register,” and then, through analyses of sets of archival images, to use “the conceptual frameworks of quiet, stasis, and refusal to reclaim the black quotidian as a signature idiom of diasporic culture and black futurity.” ³ This book helped me animate two goals that recur in most of my courses: first, to situate our understanding of the present inside the ongoing 400-year event that has shaped the world in terms of European colonialism and its vicissitudes; and second, to engage cultural phenomena as networks of relations that exceed their physical forms. Between Campt’s book and a lot of hiking, I was exploring two variations on listening that turn toward what can be heard below the surfaces of immediate experience. Hidden and fleeting, these are fugitive sounds.

The concept of fugitivity gets its descriptive force from its quotidian sense of being on the run and in hiding; it adds affective force when placed in the context of the violent power the State wields over individuals’ bodies. The first half of the audio essay plays upon the descriptive force, while the last half layers on the affective one. My sense of pedagogy at the heart of this piece is also broad. I am not leading with a classroom orientation, but instead with what tu[r]ning in to sound can teach us about retu[r]ning awareness to elemental forms of interconnectedness. In part 1, this process and focus is environmental, whereas in part 2 it is ethical. The narrative content here emerges in a contrapuntal relationship between attunement and atonement. The ambiguity of the phrase “fugitive sound” is meant to be heightened in aural modalities, deflecting the linearity of academic writing for a time-based sculptural layering of sounds, meanings, and affects. I attempt to compose an experience (admittedly aural-centric) that is simultaneously palpable and in flight, but evading capture.

The primary resonance of fugitivity, of course, is with the terrifying attempts escaping slaves made toward freedom, though wider resonances apply to anyone evading capture, apprehension, containment, and confinement from policing powers of the State. I try to evoke this embodiment of terror and desire through heartbeat sounds in part 2, as well as a layer of infrasound that can only be felt but not heard. I continue the nature sounds across the entire track for continuity of the environmental grounding of all human experience. I hope to evoke a sense of listening in and as a double flight: both fleeing from subjection and escaping to freedom. Fugitive listening tunes in to shrieks and murmurs, unspeakable loss and pain, the elemental pulsing of blood, breath, and bones.

This short audio essay has a lot of scholarly influences to which I am indebted. I consciously place them in the sound work as riffs, samples, gestures, themes, resonances, and frequencies as opposed to the direct citationality of academic writing. I am grateful for the affordance this written statement gives me for a few shout-outs to these influences. For sake of space, I will do this as a flow of samplings. In part 1, the underlying influence is Alphonso Lingis’s take on the phenomenology of elements:

Our hearing is not just a recording of sounds, noises, and words, with silences between them. For hearing to awaken is to listen in to the rumble of the city or the murmur of nature, from which sounds emerge and back into which they sink. … The elements are there by incessant oncoming. ⁴

I use this sense of the elemental in an environmental context in part 1 and then give it a variation in ethical domains in the second verse. In addition to Campt, part 2 is also influenced by Stephano Harney and Fred Moten’s work on fugitivity as a concept central to Blackness and constitutive of it through an evasion of the disciplinary powers of the State that itself constitutively dispossess Blackness. ⁵ In beat with Campt, Moten also writes of a “musical moment of the photograph” of a posed slave girl in which the moment of knowing slavery by knowing oneself as a slave is when “you know or begin to know or to produce knowledge of freedom, the moment at which you become fugitive, the moment at which you begin to escape in ways that trouble the structures of subjection that … overdetermine freedom.” ⁶ Sliding underneath part 2’s imagining of an expansive one square inch of justice is a variation of scholarly infrasounds: Christina Sharpe on aspiration and breath—an incessant oncoming of police murders of Black people as an “archive of breathlessness” ⁷ and the work of aspiration as “keeping and putting breath back in the Black body in hostile weather”; ⁸ Achille Mbembe on the rebellious nature of time in memory, which “refuses to tire and sets out to trap people”; ⁹ and Saidiya Hartman on the elemental murmurs of the past that constitute the present, in which we “live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it.” ¹⁰

Transcript of audio essay

[0:00 Start audio track of vibrant sounds of the Hoh Rainforest on the west side of Olympic National Park in Washington state. This underlying audio track plays throughout the entirety of this audio essay, except for the final second.]

[0:07 My voice providing narration throughout the track.] Listening Below: Two Variations on Fugitive Sound.

[0:13] In October, I visited Olympic National Park, in the northwest corner of Washington State, to hike among the wide variety of climates offered in the nearly 1,500 square miles of park land: Alpine, glacier, river, coniferous forest, temperate rainforest, and wilderness beach. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest about five years ago [2014] I’ve traversed hundreds of miles of trails in national forests, wilderness areas, and national parks. I go for the breathtaking views, the majestic waterfalls, the solitude, and smells of the forest. I go for the physical challenges of covering distance and elevation gain and navigating diverse terrains. I feel something akin to the terror of the sublime when I realize I am sharing unpartitioned space with bears, elk, mountain lions, coyotes, and wolves. I am awed by the vastness of the backcountry, the power of water to mold the earth, the slow churning aliveness of the earth itself.

[1:18] A large part of the joy and edification of walking in a forest or on a mountain is being in contact with the elements. In my solitude I am enveloped by wind or stillness, by a panoply of smells, by wetness and dryness, heat and cold. And of course, I am immersed in sound. It is everywhere, produced in the frictional interactions and interjections of air, water, earth, plants, and animals. Far removed are the mechanical sounds of human activities and environments. Or so it may seem. Even several miles in from a trailhead, if I still myself and listen deeply, I can usually hear the encroaching rumbles and murmurs of human-made sound: the distant roadways and trains, shipping horns, the droning of airplanes, the machinic grind and cracks of logging, the discharge of rifles and shotguns.

[2:15] At Olympic National Park I was seeking a place free from the intrusion of these kinds of noises. In particular, I was going to a spot called the One Square Inch of Silence. One Square Inch is a research project devoted to the management and preservation of natural soundscapes. Since there’s no air tourism in Olympic National Park, and no roads cross through it, there’s less noise intrusion here than almost anywhere else in the contiguous forty-eight states. The exact location of One Square Inch is marked by a small red stone. It is symbolic in the sense that protecting the silence of a single square inch of natural sound requires protecting an area of hundreds of square miles from here. The spot itself is in the Hoh Rainforest, along the Hoh River. The trailhead is more than twenty miles from the main road, and another three-and-a-quarter miles along a trail into the Olympic Wilderness.

[3:15] Natural silence is not an absence of sound. The soundscape at One Square Inch is vibrant, its backbone built on the flowing waters of the wide, shallow Hoh over its stone riverbed. Bugs buzz around, birds sing and squawk and screech, frogs croak, leaves rustle in the wind, trees creak. At one point I heard a clomping staccato rumble in the distance. I speculated it came from a herd of Roosevelt Elk crossing the river. One Square Inch is effectively a pedagogy of elemental soundscapes, highlighting the relationship between our elemental bodies and the background sounds of the earth that envelop the entirety of our lives. The natural soundscape of elemental sounds is the grounding context of being human and alive.

[4:07 Fade in sound of cascading stream in the Hoh Rainforest ¹¹ ; 4:10 fade in sound of airliner taking off. ¹² ] That it is mostly passed over and un-listened-to, receding and drowned out by the mundane sounds of modern human life, renders it fugitive: it is hidden but everywhere.

[4:21 Rumbling deep electronic bass. ¹³ ]

[4:32 Fade out plane sounds; 4:38 fade out bass] The idea of fugitive sound provides another pedagogical opening to listening to what lies beneath us and around us, to that which otherwise escapes detection. In this case however, I am no longer concerned with listening below in natural environments [4:48 fade out sound of stream; begin audio loop of a human heartbeat that will play continuously for the remainder of the track ¹⁴ ; and fade in sounds of frogs in a Florida pond after a rain storm ¹⁵ ], but instead to listening below in political and economic ones. In her book Listening to Images, Tina Campt proposes a performative way of listening to photographs that is, as she writes, “constituted as a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register.” ¹⁶ Campt engages photographic archives of Black subjects from several sites of the Black diaspora—from Ugandan and British passport photos [5:22 fade out frogs] to South African family portraits and convict photos to American mugshots of Freedom Riders. Poring through archives of identification photographs that constitute Black subjects as subjects of the State, and thereby as subjects always already dispossessed, Campt seeks new modalities of perception. [5:44 Begin audio clip of infrasound, ¹⁷ too low to hear with your ears, but you can feel it in your body; it may cause a feeling of uneasiness.] She takes her cue from the low frequencies of infrasound that we can feel in our bodies rather than hear. She describes the “exquisitely articulate modality of quiet” ¹⁸ of photos in these archives as she listens for their fugitive sounds of refusal. Refusal here is a renunciation of the forces of dispossession imposed on Black subjects.

[6:14] To approach an image through listening helps undo the ocular bias of knowledge and the politics it engenders. Thereby we become attuned to the ways that all of our physical senses are rooted haptically—in, with, and through touch. Our lives happen between two zero-points of orientation to the world: our bodies and the Earth itself. All of our treatment of others flows from these two places. Like the natural soundscape that points to the grounding context of life, there are deep frequencies of ethical being that constitute the grounding context of human commonality, relationship, and justice. The fundamental commons of human relationality is thus enveloped in the felt sound of quietude—breathing, humming, murmuring. Our bodies mediate quiet intensities [7:13 end clip of infrasound] that lay open this form of the commons—and undercommons—always beneath us and among us. [7:23 Begin faint recording of chain gang members singing “Hell Down Yonder” ¹⁹ ] By listening below surfaces, we can hear and feel refusals of dispossession. Listening to the lower frequencies of images requires, as Campt argues, “being attuned to the connections between what we see and how it resonates” ²⁰ [7:43 end singing].

[7:44] In other words, we have here a pedagogy of sound that asks us to refuse the disciplining practices of visuality and the legacies of European colonialism. Regimes of vision have a deep history of dislodging us from the sustaining commons of embodiment, memory, and the future. [8:05 Fade in sound of loons at night on a lake in Maine. ²¹ ] This pedagogy of sound asks us to listen below for the enveloping hums and murmurs of elemental contexts, and thus to slide along to the ethical primacy of the haptic commons. Social justice is in this sense a form of being in contact with the elements, one that can be accessed through low frequencies that refuse and refute the noisy intrusions of dispossession. In this way, I come to imagine in each person the potential for an expansive one square inch of justice, and to listen for its low frequencies and resonances of the future [8:48 end narration].

[8:58 Fade out loons, then end Hoh Rainforest track, then end on a single heartbeat.]

[9:02 End.]

Notes

1 Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic: Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), 109.

2 “Listening Below” is a multilayered audio essay/performance composed of several different kinds of recordings of nature and culture sounds, along with my own vocal narration. One audio layer runs throughout the entire piece and was recorded on a typical spring morning in the Hoh Rainforest. This layer is excerpted from a longer audio recording, “Sounds of Spring” (https://onesquareinch.org), by acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton (aka The Soundtracker), who is founder of One Square Inch of Silence and cofounder of Quiet Parks International. I use the recording with Hempton’s permission. I use it instead of my own for aesthetic reasons. My visit was on an October afternoon in 2018 during a dry spell, which is atypical for the Hoh Rainforest. The time of the year, the time of the day, and the drier conditions all made for a much less vibrant sonic experience at that moment, especially compared to Hempton’s rainy spring morning. At places throughout the audio essay, however, I add some of my own nature sound recordings for additional layers of rushing water, frogs, and loons.

3 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 9.

4 Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 13–15.

5 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). In the audio essay, the interplay of commons and undercommons is a double riffing. The former is a riff on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s grounding of transformational global democratic possibility in the notion of the common(s) as both “the common wealth of the material world” (i.e., the elements and all that the natural world produces) and as the “results of social production that are necessary for social interaction” (i.e., knowledge, language, information, and the like) (Commonwealth [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009], viii). The latter is a riffing on Harney and Moten’s concept of undercommons, which is a living subterranean critique of and resistance to prevailing mechanisms of social, economic, physical, epistemological, and political control. The undercommons is rooted in the “irreducible performativity” of Blackness and Black aesthetics (The Undercommons, 48). For my purposes here, I am inspired by Moten’s claim that a reading or listening engagement is not just always already intertextual, but more profoundly and fundamentally that “text is a social space” (108). The undercommons asserts a primal embodied living materiality of human being constituted in struggle against the dismissal of Black life matter(ing).

6 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 76 original emphasis.

7 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 109.

8 Ibid., 113.

9 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 125.

10 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 133.

11 My recording.

12 “Airplane sound” by Thalamus_Lab, on freesound.org.

13 “Bass atmosphere deep rumble” by Thalamus_Lab, on freesound.org.

14 “Heartbeat loop” by .name, on freesound.org.

15 My recording.

16 Campt, Listening to Images, 9.

17 “20Hz sine wave” by headphaze, on freesound.org.

18 Campt, Listening to Images, 4.

19 “Hell Down Yonder,” recorded by John and Ruby Lomax, June 11, 1939, near Sand Springs, SC (Library of Congress audio collection).

20 Campt, Listening to Images, 33.

21 My recording.