The Political Possibility of So Salome Voegelin

i
The Political
Possibility of
Sound
ii
iii
The Political
Possibility of
Sound
Fragments of Listening
SALOMÉ VOEGELIN
iv
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2019
Copyright © Salomé Voegelin, 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Voegelin, Salomé, author.
Title: The political possibility of sound : fragments of listening / Salomé Voegelin.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038578 | ISBN 9781501312168 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781501312151 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound (Philosophy) | Sound in art.
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v
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Light song viii
Introduction: Writing fragments 1
The political possibility of sound 17
Hearing volumes: Architecture, light and words 45
Geographies of sound: Performing impossible territories 75
Morality of the invisible, ethics of the inaudible 103
Hearing subjectivities: Bodies, forms and formlessness 119
Sonic materialism: A philosophy of digging 151
Reading fragments of listening, hearing vertical lines of

words 185
Putting on lipstick 215
Index 217
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We write in communities, in networks of support and exchange, in a

cosmopolitanism of the text and of thought that participates in what we say
and makes it what it might mean. This book would not exist without the
support of others, of family, friends and colleagues, people I know personally
and some I only know through their words and works, all of whose ideas,
interpretations and criticism have inspired and expanded how The Political
Possibility of Sound might be written about.
I am particularly grateful to David Mollin for his love and encouragement
and his ongoing critical engagement in my work. I am immensely thankful
to Marcel Cobussen, Mark Peter Wright, Louise Marshall, Daniela Cascella,
Catherine Clover and Angus Carlyle for their close reading of these essays
and for their invaluable advice on their revision. I am appreciative of the
supportive research environment at the Centre for Creative Research into
Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) and of my colleagues at the London College
Of Communication (LCC), UAL, Thomas Gardner, Cathy Lane, Lisa Hall,
David Toop, Chris Petter, Milo Taylor, John Wynne, Ximena Alarcón, Ed
Baxter, Rob Mullender and Peter Cusack, whose work and ideas inform
and challenge my own. Many collaborations, discussions, invitations to talk
and perform, participate in workshops and engage in debate have helped me
develop this writing. I have been motivated and encouraged by debates and
collaborations with Brandon Labelle, and have been inspired by working
with Rebecca Bramall on Knowledge after Austerity and Brexit. My research
into Listening across Disciplines with Anna Barney has brought a whole
new network of people and points of view to my sonic thinking, and the
ongoing co-curation of Points of Listening with Mark Peter Wright stands
as a crucial reference point for the articulation of sonic possibilities.
I am grateful to Aurélie Mermod for inviting me to try some early ideas
on the political and sound at the University of the Arts Zürich, to Adi
Louria-Hayon for her invitation to speak about ethics at Tel Aviv University,
to Kathleen Coessens for involving me in debates at the Orpheus Institute in
Ghent and to Céline Hervet for the opportunity to perform between voice
and politics at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. I am very grateful for
discussions with Holger Schulze, Jean-Paul Thibaud, Michael Bull, Serge
Cardinal, Christoph Cox, Andrey Logutov, Iris Garrelfs and Abigail Hirsch,
and valued the chance to work with Mary Ingraham and DB Boyko at
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
Alberta University, Edmonton, and the Westernfront in Vancouver. Thank

you also to the students at the London College of Communication whose
enquiry and learning infects my own. I am thankful particularly to my
current PhD students Kevin Logan, Kate Carr, Louise Marshall, Victoria
Karlsson, Sunil Chandy and Julie Groves, for reciprocal encouragement and
a shared faith in the value of research and sound.
I owe gratitude to Charles Curtis, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Lawrence
Abu Hamdan, Anna Raimondo and Jana Winderen, for their time and
patience clarifying and discussing their work with me, and to all the other
artists whose work moved my writing. Finally, I want to thank Ally Jane
Grossan and Leah Babb-Rosenfeld at Bloomsbury for their trust and
support, which made this book possible.
viii
LIGHT SONG
stand underneath a light source

tilt your head up and stare into its glare
imagine its sound
tune into it and sustain its pitch as long as possible.
1 March 2017, 8:42 am, www.soundwords.tumblr.com.

1
Introduction: Writing fragments
In a lecture at the Pacific Northwestern College of Art (PNCA) on 2

November 2016, Cauleen Smith, an interdisciplinary artist from Chicago,
‘whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination’,1
discussed the processes and materials of her practice not as installations,
films or sculptures, but as arrangements of curiosity and improvised
constructions. Her work brings together different images, tools and objects
to create ‘excavations and speculations that loosen our assumptions of what
we know and encourage us to embrace the instability of knowledge rather
than the certainty it broadly offers’.2 She calls the resulting things ‘speculative
artefacts’ or ‘awkward objects’, which include their own fragility and
possibility for failure, and are not shaped through the necessity of their task
and fitting into expectations of their outcome, but inspire re-engagement, or
what I would call doubt and the practical suspension of habits.
Talking particularly about her long-standing admiration for Sun Ra, she
traces her working methods and aims to his cosmology and tells us how
she was fascinated by the fact that he became Sun Ra in Chicago, her own
home town, implying a kindredness of spirit and cross-time collaborative
possibility. Pursuing this admiration, she spent two summers in a row
in his archive and tried to ‘apprentice’ herself to him, to learn and copy
his processes and use his approaches to rethink how to make film and
eventually how to make art. She discusses how she got inspired by the way
he worked with others and the procedures of his practice, and explains, ‘I
am not making this because I know something, but I am making it because
I don’t know something and want to learn what is possible.’3 In this spirit
she brings together African figurines, landscapes and a Trinitron camera;
creates a vortex of mirrors; or records a video to make a rainbow through
a water bath. In all these instances, technology enables her to make ‘infinity
devices’, things rather than objects that contain a source code that connects
the past to the future to the present without chronology. Thus, her works
2
2 The Political Possibility of Sound
are not linear but reach into a simultaneous time, as an infinite material
rather than as a certain temporal unfolding. In this material time, they create
an assemblage of things that she did not make but that she re-formulates
through improvisation. This way of working brings a different sense of
finitude to their form and a different demand of participation to their
perception. Her improvisations between objects, media and technology
open what is possible and produce unexpected connections. In this way
she invites an exploration of the possibility of objects and technologies as
well as of the subject and of perception, and brings things into a different
light: to grasp a different capacity of and engage from a different perspective
in what we thought we knew what it was and what it was there for.
Smith’s work is playful and reminds us that there is more than what
is manifest, actual and real; more than what we think something is,
what its name suggests or its definition purports. It opens perception
towards other possibilities and points to the realm of the surprising and
to the unfamiliar purpose and meaning of things. Through her speculative
artefacts and awkward objects, Smith provokes the idea that things, their
uses and interactions, could be different and that they could set up a
different imagination of the world and how we live in it. Thus she invites
a different attitude towards objects, our expectation of their function and
our interpretation of their application and worth, generating a different
imagination of what things are and what they do, what criteria they fulfil
or what possibilities they invent. Ultimately, her assemblages transform and
challenge what we do and how we describe the world and ourselves, and
suggest we could all, with Sun Ra, be ‘Angels from Saturn’.4
To invite the possible into practice and into discourse signals an
acknowledgement at once of an object and a subject’s unseen dimension,
the invisible edge of their definition and description, and of our limitation at
grasping it. The possibilities of Smith’s assemblages are invisible, inapparent
perspectives and variants that show the unknown of the known and forge
desire and anticipation for the unexpected. They do not just point to a
potential, a term that suggests a transcendental relationship between the
possible and the actual, a latent ideal that is always already there awaiting
our discovery. Instead, it is our confrontation with the thing, or rather it is
the thing confronting us, through the contingent formulation of what it is,
that puts into doubt what we thought it was in a habitual and systematic
reading, and provokes through art practice ‘the creativity of thought’ and a
different imagination of the world.5
The possible is then, if it is a potential at all, not a transcendental but a
contingent potential, not of the thing but of our encounter. It is its temporal
realization dependent not only on the thing and what it holds before our
encounter, but also on the context that frames the confrontation and enables
the actions that are its possibilities produced in a creative and reciprocal
perception. These possibilities are the actions of the light that produces the
3
INTRODUCTION 3
rainbow in a water bath, in a place without rain or sun, whose colourful arch
invites me to reconsider my understanding of light, water, the gallery, myself,
discourse and scientific knowledge. I do not see the work but contemplate
its assemblage of things as a mechanism that builds a possible world.
Smith’s work is a playground of the possible. Her assemblages are not
trivial however, but sincere in their own circumspection of the norm. Her
desire ‘to learn what is possible’6 does not involve the study of manuals and
guidebooks and the learning to a standard of what something is or should
do. Instead, it is a learning of the possibilities of the things that exist not
because but in spite of the manuals and the guidebooks. Not as a simple
subversion, an anti-guidebook, but as a critical extension of the material,
cultural and technological possibilities that are attributed and taught in
relation to a particular object or tool and that ensure a desired outcome or
product. Conventional teaching and instruction hold always already within
themselves the purpose of their object and tool, and thus also the limits of
its use, value and context. Smith’s treatment of tools and things goes beyond
those narrow definitions inscribed in use-value, professionalism and a certain
identity. It goes beyond those dimensions of an object that ground it within
a rational and purposeful world view, and that anchor it in the discourse of
the domestic or the professional respectively. Instead, her work reviews and
brings into playful contestation the ideologies and conventions of what things
mean: as tools and as designators of value and validity, and creates a view on
what else an object as thing might be able to do; how else we might be able to
perceive it, and what else, in other words, anything might mean and stand for.
In many ways her work can be experienced as an extension and
contemporary reinterpretation in the gallery of the DIY ethos of Sun Ra
as well as of much counter-cultural activism and artistic practice since
the 1970s, embodied by punk aesthetic and carrying anti-consumerist
ideologies: the turning on its head of cultural representation to provoke
a questioning of its values and norms; and the avoidance of professional
processes of production in favour of inexpert, contingent and improvised
ways of doing things. This disruption of the status quo of representation and
production was particularly relevant for the emergence of a feminist sound
and compositional practice at the time. Not welcomed by, or unwilling to
work in the male-dominated environments of music studios and academic
departments, women needed to invent a different space and a different way
to get their sounds made and heard. The lack of access to technology, to
finance, public recognition and a sense that the territory of sonic or musical
production was occupied by a dominant voice, necessitated a different
strategy of working and enabled a new imagination of what could sound.
BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are
patently aware that the punk rock ‘you can do anything’ idea is crucial
to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic
4
and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own
terms, not ours.7
DIY is a practice of self-reliance that rejects the idea of a right way

to make a sound or to perform, and abandons the esoteric knowledge of
the discipline and the profession in favour of a more contingent making,
where virtuosity is replaced with commitment and value becomes a matter
for the community. Smith’s disruption of the status quo is a disruption of
the use-value and the normative imagination of the things she arranges
together to make a work. She portrays and practices the lack of a right
use of technology, and affords the audience a view on awkward things, to
speculate and engage with rather than know their form and purpose, to
practice things in a different way.
Her work, for various reasons, needs and seeks to cover a different
ground, beyond the rule book, the right use of technology and the
established expectation of the canon and virtuosity. It resists and challenges
the conventions of what a thing can do, what art can do, what music can do
and how it can mirror the world in the possibility of its sound. Therefore,
the possible is a strategy and a point of action for those who do not share
the high ground: understood as the voice of authority and the tone of the
dominant in an economical, political, social and gender- as well as race-
and class-based hierarchy. When the cultural and sociopolitical territory is
occupied by a singular voice, which we perceive as the actual and singularly
real, the possible gives cause for desire and a ground for hope that other
voices might not just be incorporated or silenced, but could gain their own
resonance, and that a whole other plane of influence, a completely different
variant of the same territory can be established within which alternatives
might strive not against the dominant and not as a parallel but ineffectual
voice, but as a real alternative sounding loudly from within.
Essayer – to try
Listening out for alternatives, this collection of essays presents an attempt
to reach, generate and articulate the possibility of the possible in relation
to sound in the sphere of the political. Working through seven different
themes within the same concern, that of politics and the indivisible
dimension of the real, that of the transformative and transforming
capacity of subjectivity and materiality and the ethics of their practice
and the boundaries of the world, as well as that of the limits of language
and representation, this book tries to grasp the radical promise of a
sonic possibility and to articulate, beyond the expected, the power of
the invisible. The focus on sound art, installations, compositions and
performances allows for the conceptual and material articulation of
another sphere that is not apart from the one we customarily refer to as
5
INTRODUCTION 5
the real one, which is not a parallel fiction, but is a real unseen that opens
and gestures towards the idea of alternatives. Thus the deliberation of
the political possibility of sound in the sphere of art does not avoid the
politics of everyday life, but finds a new access to its practices and norms
via the contingent experience of arts’ possibility. It is not a privileging
of art, but a privileging of practice, the creative practice of doing and of
experiencing, outside purpose and function, that affords glimpses on what
things do, and how things could be done. The purposeless configurations
of awkward objects and the speculative intentions of creative production
grant a different participation in how things are and how else they could
be. And so if these essays privilege art then they do so in order to know
about the world from a purposeless sound.
Sound art enables observations and discussions on a graspable variant
that remains unseen but holds influence and ramifications for what is
visible, and that remains inaudible but holds the power of speculation and
the promise of the not yet heard. Sound, as material and as sonic sensibility,
makes the possible thinkable in concrete terms and invites the impossible
to reinvigorate an aesthetic and political consciousness and imagination.
Therefore, listening is the main method of engagement throughout this
book: listening to work and to the world to discuss their relationship on a
continuum of actuality, possibility and impossibility.
This listening leads to a writing that aims to bring a sonic engagement
into a text-based form without muting its communication: to write a
sounding text, a textual phonography, that does not deny sound its
ephemeral invisibility and mobile intensity – silencing the heard in theory –
but works exactly on the unstable ground and the inexhaustibility of a
sonic nature, not to claim comprehension but try curiosity towards the
appreciation of awkward and speculative ideas that generate rather than
represent thought. Smith’s attempt to learn about what is possible through
the play with technological tools and things, and my wish for a text-
based form that is inclusive of sound’s mobile formlessness and boundless
materiality, resonates with the essayistic format. Essays are trials, they are
moments of exploration, playful and incomplete. According to Theodor
W. Adorno:
Luck and play are essential to the essay. It does not begin with Adam and
Eve but with what it wants to discuss; it says what is at issue and stops
where it feels itself complete – not where nothing is left to say. Therefore
it is classed among the oddities. Its concepts are neither deduced from
any first principle nor do they come full circle and arrive at a final
principle. Its interpretations are not philologically hardened and sober,
rather – according to the predictable verdict of that vigilant calculating
reason that hires itself out to stupidity as a guard against intelligence – it
overinterprets.8
6
The desire to write a series of texts on the possibility of a groundless,

non-hierarchical conception of an incomplete real in its own voice recalls
Adorno’s definition as well as his sentiments and motivation towards the
essay. The notion of possibility, just like the essay, stands critical of calculated
reason and hierarchy of thought. It rejects the need for first principle, which
occupies the ground with its dominant authority and subdues an alternative
imagination, and it rejects final principles as at odds with a discussion on
the infinite, the formless and the incomplete. The opinion that, according to
reason, the essay is not sober can only serve its reach and rhetoric to include
ambiguity and make a game of words that can stretch beyond the ground of
language and grammar, to invite the imagination of a more improvised and
speculative world.
Both my previous books, Listening to Noise and Silence (2010) and Sonic
Possible Worlds (2014), have looked to Adorno to inform their form in an
essayistic tradition that abandons outcomes and the complete in order to
pursue continual exploration. But each time the format of the book, as a
finished work and scholarly expectation, has caught up with this aim and
has at least outwardly given form to a more conventional shape. While
the formless form of the essay, as concept and idea, remained central to
the conception of both works, both publications ended up in long-form,
answering all sorts of self-imposed demands on comprehensiveness in a
horizontal narrative, whose drive enabled connections and overviews but at
times impeded a closer look at odd details and the curiosity of smaller ideas.
This time I deliberately chose to approach the text as fragments and write
essays not only as method but also in form. I hope this will enable a more
detailed exploration of some of the key terms and issues that arose in the
first two publications but that were hastened along in the horizontal drive of
their narrative. By contrast, these seven essays are written vertically into the
issues rather than moving them along. They stage autonomous explorations
of ideas that do not have to find justification in the rest of the writing and
owe no debt to its context or pretext, but open a view on fragments and
slices that bring us to the playful tensions and unseen connections that
decide a political possibility.
The essay film

In their introduction to The Essay Film (2016), Elizabeth A. Papzian and
Caroline Eades trace the essay film back to its literary antecedents and declare
that the essayistic is unique in its capacity to forge connections and set up
tensions while exploring the space between fiction and non-fiction. They
suggest that the dialogue of the literary essay is replaced by the movement
of the film form, and state that, ‘If the end point is the utopian, unattainable
“film treatise”, Capital, then the essay embodies the unrealisable attempt at
7
INTRODUCTION 7
the impossible endpoint, the fragments of an impossible totality.’9 Continuing

on this thought I want to suggest that the essay is not the unrealizable but
does not want to be realized. It does not aim to find an end point, a final
principle, but keeps on moving, creating tensions and dialogues that explore
through an inexhaustible fragmenting of fragments what things and subjects
actually are, and triggers through its playful disregard for the first principle
the curiosity to think what else they could be. This desire to neglect the
known and the preference towards the unknown and the incomplete is not
a formal conceit, a stylistic fancy, but a serious response to the failings of
a complete and reasonable world. The essay answers the possibility of the
work and of the world with its own possibility of the text and of language.
It tries the possibility of writing without the need to conform and achieve,
or to make sense within the parameters of the dominant plane. Thus it is
a practice of writing that wants to reach the unknown and that hopes to
include the unseen of sound in its trial of words.
This understanding also coincides with Papzian and Eades promotion
of another history for the essay film that claims its legacy in the lack of
adequate equipment and training during the war and finds its manifestation
in the representational crisis after the Second World War: ‘A film d’essai, is
not necessarily good. Made with improvised resources, it is often less perfect
than films produced in regular circuits, but it always includes a principle of
renewal and spiritual research that is worth encouraging and remembering.’10
Their quoting of French film-maker Germaine Dulac, taken from her Écrits
sur le cinéma 1919–1937, refers the cause of this representational crisis
back to the technological and aesthetic predicament of the interwar period,
and implicitly links it forward also to the DIY aesthetics of feminist sound
making since the 1970s. Both express a condition of scarcity of resource and
explain the consequent need for different processes and the articulation of
another voice.
Following Dulac, the essay is the perfect format for a crisis. Its porous
and contingent nature forgives a lack of formality and the absence of a
good style, and the neglect of technological perfection or virtuosity releases
the potential for the incomplete and the unrealizable. Additionally, it has
the ability to respond to developments as they come towards it through its
capacity for innovation and the looseness of its facticity. The essay is then
the perfectly incomplete form to write about the possibility of the political at
a time when austerity determines creative and intellectual production, when
the imagination for a politics of transformation seems to have exhausted
itself, and ecological questions need answers from unknown places. There,
in the place of unknowing, we can draw on the essay format’s capacity for
‘renewal and spiritual research’, its facility for innovation, and practice the
possibility of a connected and collaborative world.
The essay as the format of the possible per se has the capability to make
as yet unseen connections, try assumed truths and produce the creative
8
tensions from which the hope and action of possibility can emerge. It has the
potential to reveal and undermine authoritarian discourse and the ability to
explore the possibilities and impossibilities of achieving through filmmaking
(writing and sound making) a utopian world. Thus as work or as text the
essay can probe the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction to bring the
authority of the documentary to the imagination of the artwork and expand
the notion and value of the real.
Description d’un combat (1960)

Eric Zakim’s writing about Chris Marker’s Description d’un combat
(Description of a Struggle) makes this capacity for a political possibility
of the essay film (sound, text) apparent. Zakim writes about Marker’s
1960 work about Israel and its ultimate withdrawal from public screening
in 1967, due to the Six-Day War.11 He focuses his description and
interpretation on the relationship between the images and their suspension
in endless motility, unable or unwilling to communicate anything with
certainty ‘instead working to disrupt any fixed sense of this place’.12 Zakim
comments that the film does not produce a representation or final comment
on the nation of Israel, but stands as speculative commentary witness to its
own dissolution in an invented world: the dissolution of its material and
content, symbolizing the deliberately weak authority of the essay not to
make an authoritative claim but to be contingent, a material or text that
stages its own imminent disappearance on the way to making something
else possible: something that is not hindered by historical expectations and
the desire for completion of a destined faith, but as the current invention of
all that could be.
Zakim’s text concludes on a description of the final frame of the film,
a durational take on one scene that dissolves three images into each
other: ‘The final three objects – cygnet, signal, sign – dissolve into each
other phonetically, like a mantric repetition of material sound that breaks
down discourse, forging new identities through immanent relations to other
things, other objects.’13
While we see these three signs dissolving into the possibilities of each
other, we hear the voice over:
Look at her.
There she is.
Like Israel.
We’ve to understand her, remind her that injustice on this land weighs
heavier than elsewhere, this land, the ransom of injustice.
9
INTRODUCTION 9
The threats that surround her, to which she gave no cause.

Yes, look at her. A vision that defeats the eye, as words endlessly
repeated.
Amongst all the wondrous things, most wondrous is her being there,
like a cygnet, a signal, a sign.14
Kazim suggests that this closing shot dissolves the historical totalities that
might engulf the work’s meaning and enables the film to be something
more than a cipher for something else: to be its own possibility of Israel. It
produces, he suggests, what Marker means when he says ‘a vision that defeats
the eye’, a vision that cannot be grasped by looking, by a visual discourse,
whose historical visibility would correct and thus disable a present possibility.
Instead, the notion of a vision that defeats the eye critiques and transcends the
predetermination of the gaze, as the directive of a visual historical chronology,
and focuses on the unseen, what is incomplete, dissolves and disappears, as
the indeterminate, the mobile and unfixed. I understand this vision to produce
the ‘sight’ of a sonic sensibility that sees the invisible relations and mobile
circumstances of a political possibility, and that sees the land not as total sign
or signal, tied to historical and ideological meanings and expectations, but as
tendencies and capacities that create their own future.
This vision of a sonic sensibility and a ‘material sound’ presents a model
for the creative rethinking and re-articulation of reality. It articulates
the compossibility and inexhaustible complexity an invisible sight gives
access to: to see not just what is, but how it is and how it might be. These
essays on sound explore the capacity of such a vision that defeats the eye
to engage in the condition of political reality as a possibility that does
not repeat and reconfirm the status quo, but breaks down discourse and
identity, and is invested instead in the imagination of the unseen that
provides us with an access to other ways things could be: other ways
things could relate, other ways we could make policy decisions, other
ways we could engage in budgets, look at the details of women’s rights,
workers’ rights, racial discrimination, national identity, global cohesion
and so on.
To engage in the possibility of a political imagination beyond the status
quo, and to lie the ground for the ‘then what’ of a political ‘what if . . .?’
this book consists of seven essays on themes that have come about in part
explicitly and in part more implicitly in my previous writing. Here, I pick
up on them and develop them through the imperfections and purposeful
incompleteness of the essay form. These are fragments of listening turned
into fragments of writing, which try their possibility in a vertical line
drawn with random design around the political possibility of sound, and
a number that is resolutely finite but makes room for the inexhaustibility
of sound.
10
Seven essays
These seven essays as fragments can be read out of order and without the
compulsion of the horizontal and the need to see the whole. Their number
does not indicate a finitude to what might be said, but their place in a
potentially infinite discussion, and their order outlines my own trajectory
rather than the deliberate imposition of an order on its reader. And yet,
sequentiality is persuasive. It forcefully suggests a linear narrative and
progress, which might be there, inadvertently developing on these pages, but
which is unintentional and unsolicited, since new ideas are more contingently
and persuasively found in an arbitrary in-between of the texts, in their non-
linear convergences and contradictions, and in their relationships to other
essays and other texts elsewhere. Therefore the first essay does not have to
be read at the beginning, and while it articulates the central claim pursued
in this book, that there is a ‘Political possibility of sound’, from which it
goes on to argue what its benefits might be, its deliberations might just as
well be encountered after reading another. Nonetheless, in relation to the
book as material object, it appears at the beginning. From this inevitable
first position it identifies the political via Étienne Balibar, as what frames the
practices and institutions of politics and thus what enables their objectives
within the possibility of these practices and institutions and what delimits
what remains impossible. The limitations of such a political possibility are
investigated and put into question through a discussion of Language Gulf
in the Shouting Valley (2013), a video essay by Lawrence Abu Hamdan,
and Anna Raimondo’s audiovisual installation Mediterraneo (2015). The
deliberation of these two works, in search for a more plural possibility of
the political via sound, is informed by the anthropologies of Petra Retham
and Jane I. Guyer, the writing on International Relations by Roxanne Doty
and Jack Holland, as well as the notion of a political and economic tone as
an audible zeitgeist by Frances Dyson.
The second essay considers the architectural and ideological volume
of political possibility. ‘Hearing volumes: Architecture, light and words’
articulates the notion of a sonic volume not as a measure of decibels but
as the space of the environment’s material and temporal expansion that
creates an invisible interactuality of things in which we live as interbeings,
as being in relation with everything else; inhabiting the in-between of sound
from which the possible gets its plurality and plurality its legitimacy. This
volume is imagined as a viscous and grasping expanse via Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s idea of ‘being-honeyed’ discussed in relation to the work Anywhen
(2016) by Philipe Parreno. In this way, the essay engages listening as the
political possibility of a practical and collective capacity and empowerment.
From there it debates the interactuality of sonic volumes in relation to
the cosmopolitanism of David Held and Martha Nussbaum, and comes
11
INTRODUCTION 11
to contemplate human frailty and doubt within the cosmopolitan project

via the writings of Catherine Lu. Thus it stages a deliberation on the
contribution sound, a sonic sensibility and consciousness, can make to the
political possibilities of a globalized world.
This globalized world finds an integrated study in the third essay,
which writes about the ‘Geographies of sound’ as a geography of sonic
possible worlds that performs rather than discovers impossible territories.
I develop the idea of a performative discovery through participating in the
installation Inside You is Me, July/Surface Substance (2017) by Jacqueline
Kiyomi Gordon, and by listening to Susan Schuppli and Tom Tlalim’s work
Uneasy Listening (2015). From these two works a geography of all the
‘stories-so-far’, as proposed by Doreen Massey emerges, and the experience
of the invisible volume as a sphere of performing and unperforming the
representation of geography as discussed by Nigel Thrift becomes tangible.
Both Massey’s discussion of space as configuration of movements and
narratives, and Thrift’s promotion of performance to challenge the abstract
knowledge of geography, aid the articulation of a geography of sound as a
geography of the unknown that resists the hyper-invisibility of conventional
reality in favour of the real unseen of sound.
Listening to these unknown lands, the sky, the ground and the
underground are pulled into the political domain of geographical science,
and the experience of the politics of a vertical geography articulated through
Eyal Weizman’s politics of verticality: his notion of the landscape as a three-
dimensional matrix that can be used to divide an ‘indivisible territory’, is
brought to experience. The military providence of this three-dimensional
design urges a strategy that does not seek to represent, to map and to chart,
but to perform the invisible terrain of sound to unperform its visual history.
Thus I follow Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and run interference into
the discipline. This interference takes the trajectory of a ship sailed at night,
in defiance of disciplinary boundaries and with a mind to see a different
shore in the dark.
The essay in the middle of the book does not produce a text, but a score,
a set of instructions to listen, do and read the material and ideas that shape
its research. Thus the fourth essay, ‘Morality of the invisible, ethics of the
inaudible’, is an essay score. Its performative frame enables participation
in the invisible mobility of sound to practice and try how sounding and
listening to its unseen processes might contribute to the articulation of
a contemporary morality, and how it might stretch towards an ethics of
hearing and voicing the inaudible. It does not present a finishable text but
a formless possibility of doing, as a re-doing and re-authoring, rather than
knowing the ethical dimension of one’s own actions and inactivities.
The fifth and sixth essays contribute via sound and a sonic thinking to the
critical possibilities developed in contemporary discourses on subjectivity
and identity, particularly in relation to trans- and feminist identities, and
12
consider current debates on materiality and reality, specifically in relation to

the notion of ancestrality and the mathematically real. They work towards
the reconfiguration of history and identity, and of ontology and materiality,
via the contingent performance of objects and subjects as things that
inter-are. And so, ‘Hearing subjectivities: Bodies, forms and formlessness’
responds to and engages in the skinless and trans-objective identity of the
sonic body through the performative practices of Evan Ifekoya and Pamela Z,
whose works and processes are considered via Hito Steyerl’s critique of
the image, and whose autonomous agency and sovereign identity perform
Hélène Cixous’ rupture of the historical thread. The emancipatory force of
their sonic identities has the potential to resound the violence of the lexicon,
the limits of a Kantian taxonomy, and to disrupt the ‘ultrasubjective’
and ‘ultraobjective’ violence as articulated by Balibar, by unperforming
definitions and calling instead the names of Saul Kripke’s ‘rigid designation’.
‘Sonic materialism: A philosophy of digging’, expands this heard and
contingent subjectivity by expanding its audition into the sphere of things.
Thus it joins a current debate on new materialism by developing via sound
and listening the idea of materialism as a materialism of transformation
that reconsiders an anthropocentric worldview without bestowing objects
with mythical self-determination. Instead it involves an unperforming of the
lexicon to hear echoes of responsibility in animate and inanimate things. In
other words, this essay pursues, through a sonic sensibility, the agency of the
invisible by its intensity, expanse and duration. It is written from listening to
Naldjorlak I (2005), a work for cello composed in a collaboration between
electroacoustic composer Éliane Radique and cellist Charles Curtis. Hearing
in the work the resonance of their collaboration, of the instrument, the bow
and the body, the space and the audience, this essay rethinks current ideas
on speculative realism and new materialism via a fleshly in-between of
things. Thus it engages in Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism
via Christoph Cox’s search for a language that can grasp a sonic materiality,
and develops its own contribution to the theorization of sound via Karen
Barad, Rosi Braidotti and Luce Irigaray. Articulating a sonico-feminine
new materialism that reads objectivity not as distance but as responsibility,
and develops an embodied materiality that performs an ‘agential realism’
of the world through the ‘diffraction’ and ‘intra-activities’ of listening as a
creative engagement in the between-of-things, where it re-meets Merleau-
Ponty, his phenomenological correlations, not in opposition but as a modest
collaborator.15
A seventh essay, ‘Reading fragments of listening, hearing vertical lines
of words’, dives into the vertical depth of the text as sound, to hear it as
a phonographic field. This phonographic reading is inspired by Leonora
Carrington’s book The Hearing Trumpet (1974), the invisible textures and
rhythms of Jana Winderen’s field recording composition The Wanderer
(2015) and a performance of real, technological and ventriloquized voices
13
INTRODUCTION 13
by Andrea Pensado live at the Back Alley Theatre (2014). Listening to these
works, this essay pursues with Adriana Cavarero a revocalization of the
textual field and responds to the fragments of listening discussed in this
introduction, with an invitation to read its fragments aloud, as sound
sounding a vertical text. Thus this essay reconsiders the rhizomatic networks
of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through an invisible vertical that finds
no biological metaphor but lives in Merleau-Ponty’s depth where I am too
close to read but exist in dark simultaneity with letters as sound. In this
regard, this last essay is a counterpart to this introduction. It follows its
fragments into the deep and tries to encourage a reading according to the
image of a material sound.
The text scores that bracket these essays, promote the performance of its
first and last voice to be that of the reader, and offer neither an introduction
nor a conclusion but instigate the performance of sounding and listening to
the essays in between. They do not have to be read as the beginning or the
end, but present an invitation into the practice of an awkward perspective
and extend this invitation into the performance of a speculative artefact: to
perform while reading, the ‘vision that defeats the eye’ but beckons the body
into the as yet unthought and the unwritten.
Together these essays and scores provide simultaneous but different
voices on awkward and impossible things. They are as fragments obstacle to
symbols and signs, and present a resistance to historical meaning and the flow
of a priori definition, and instead aim to enable the production of meaning
as a sonic sense and a sonic vision: combining sensation and meaning, the
thought and the beyond of thought, performance and reflection, without
giving preference to either and without returning to a naïve apperception
before thought. Instead they acknowledge the complexity of the ephemeral
and appreciate its demand for engagement as a political possibility against
easy opinions, populism, the singular and the unquestioned legitimacy
of the visual: treading Sun Ra’s ‘pathways to unknown worlds’ through
collaboration and the resistance afforded by DIY; producing a joint listening
and hearing of each other and of things without lexical definition, sounding
from outer space.16
In each essay and between them there is room for contradiction,
rephrased and reframed repetitions, conflictual perspectives and diverging
lines of argument as well as spaces of reciprocal contestation. However,
these do not make this project impossible or invaluable but are evidence
exactly of the plurality of the actual and show the complexity at work in the
imagination of the real. These essays are elements of each other rather than
producing networked things, and thus while all the texts relate around the
same issues of the political and the practice of sound, they remain fragments
of listening that practice their sounding in different milieus, that draw on
different references and consider different sources to stand autonomously in
a joint endeavour.
14
Notes
1 Quoted from the invitation to an evening with the artist at University of
California Santa Cruz (UCSC) on 2 November 2015, http://arts.ucsc.edu/
news_events/evening-film-video-artist-cauleen-smith (accessed 15 December
2017).
2 Streamed live on 2 November 2016 by the MFA in Visual Studies Program
and the Center for Contemporary Arts and Culture, welcoming Visiting Artist
Cauleen Smith for a lecture on her work, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
1mwULFTXRk (12:54) (accessed 16 December 2017).
3 Ibid.
4 In 1972 Sun Ra, together with director John Coney and screen writer Joshua
Smith, began working on Space Is the Place, an Afro-Futurist science fiction
film, released in 1974, which narrates Sun Ra’s time journey travelling from
the future to 1940s America to fight racism with music from another planet.
This movie, and his work with the intergalactic Arkestra, was influenced
by a vision he apparently had in 1937 ‘of his visit to Saturn as an astrally-
projected entity, where he met aliens that warned him of impending chaos on
Earth and foretold that through his music, he “would speak, and the world
would listen” ’ (Lukas Benjamin, ‘Sun Ra: An Angel from Saturn’, Strange
Sounds from Beyond, January 2016, http://strangesoundsfrombeyond.com/
magazineitem/an-angel-from-saturn/ [accessed 2 February 2018]).
5 This creativity of thought is inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s reading of Michel
Foucault’s The Order of Things, his archaeology and excavation of the origins
of human science, through which, according to Braidotti, ‘Foucaults reinstates
creativity at the core of philosophical thought’ and which permits me to frame
this endeavour as a creative and practical philosophy of sound and possibility
(Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia University Press,
2011, p. 167).
6 Cauleen Smith from the live stream of her lecture at the MFA in Visual Studies
Program and the Center for Contemporary Arts and Culture on 2 November
2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1mwULFTXRk (12:54) (accessed
16 December 2017).
7 One of the points made in the Riot GRRRL Manifesto accessible online:
http://onewarart.org/riot_grrrl_manifesto.htm (accessed 15 February 2018).
8 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in The Adorno Reader. Brian
O’Connor (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 152.
9 Caroline Eades and Elizabeth A. Papzian (eds), The Essay Film, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 5. Here they are referring to Marx and
Eistenstein’s approach to the inevitable conflation between the process, the
path to truth, in philosophy and film making respectively, and the truth thus
generated itself.
10 Ibid., quoting Germaine Dulac from Écrits sur le cinema 1919–1937 (Writings
on the Cinema 1919–1937), ed. Prosper Hillairet, Paris: Éxperimental.
15
INTRODUCTION 15
11 Chris Marker withdrew Description d’un combat (Description of a Struggle)

from public display after the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its
neighbouring states Egypt, Syria and Jordan. However, a restored and digital
version of the film has since, in 2013, been screened at the Jerusalem Film
festival.
I am including this information here as the war and the consequent
withdrawal of the film from public viewing signify the only points of certainty
and determination in the context of a work that plays with indeterminate
juxtapositions and what Zakim calls the ‘transitory semantics’ of its material
production. Both instances arrest the endless mobility of the film’s signs and
symbols, which enable the imagination of transformation and manifest a
generative future and hope. Thus, they arrest the ambiguous possibility of the
film and of the place in the certainty of bloodshed and boundary disputes.
12 Eric Kazim, ‘Chris Marker’s Description of a Struggle and the Limits of the Essay
Film’, in The Essay Film, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 146.
13 Ibid., p. 164.
14 Chris Marker, http://www.markertext.com/description_of_a_struggle.htm
(accessed 8 November 2017).
15 Agential realism, intra-activity and diffraction are key terms in Karen
Barad’s theorization of materiality, describing a predicative realism, the
action between things and subjects that reconfigure entanglements through
difference, and the searching for difference rather than sameness and the
recognizable outline. Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an
Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31.
16 This notion of ‘pathways to unknown worlds’, trodden via resistance,
collaboration and the imperfection of DIY, articulates the aim of
this collection of essays, and refers to Sun Ra’s musical and cultural
journeys from Saturn, referenced in the title of a book on an exhibition
of his work edited by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis,
entitled Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun-Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s
Afro-Futurist underground 1954–68, Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago),
WhiteWalls: Chicago, 2006.
References
Adorno, T. W., ‘The Essay as Form’, in The Adorno Reader, Brian O’Connor (ed.),
Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 91–111.
Barad, Karen, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol.
28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31.
Benjamin, Lukas, ‘Sun Ra: An Angel from Saturn’, Strange Sounds from
Beyond, January 2016, http://strangesoundsfrombeyond.com/magazineitem/
an-angel-from-saturn/.
16
Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects, Embodiment and Sexual Difference in

Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Corbett, John, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis, Pathways to Unknown
Worlds: Sun-Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954–68,
Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), exhibition catalogue, WhiteWalls: Chicago,
2006.
Eades, Caroline and Elizabeth A. Papazian (eds), ‘Introduction, Dialogue Politics
Utopia’, in The Essay Film, Dialogue Politics Utopia, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016, pp. 1–11.
Kazim, Eric, ‘Chris Marker’s Description of a Struggle and the Limits of the
Essay Film’, in The Essay Film, Dialogue Politics Utopia, Caroline Eades and
Elizabeth A. Papazian (eds), New York: Columbia University Press, 2016,
pp. 145–66.
Marker, Chris, http://www.markertext.com/description_of_a_struggle.htm.
Riot Grrrl, Manifesto, http://onewarart.org/riot_grrrl_manifesto.htm.
Smith, Cauleen, Visiting lecture at Pacific Northwestern College of Art (PNCA), 2
November 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1mwULFTXRk.
17
The political possibility of sound
Possibility
This essay develops a notion of possibility that connects sound and an
auditory imagination to the political understood via Étienne Balibar as
the horizon of politics, as its condition of possibility and purpose.1 Such
a political frames the practices of politics and thus enables their objectives
within its possibility and delimits what remains impossible. Balibar provides
this definition in the context of a discussion on the political imagination
of violence, its negation or sublation, understood as the circular force
of politics. He suggests that the belief that violence can be eliminated is
fundamental to our idea of politics and is expressed in its aim of order
and control, its political institution. But that, at the same time, the attempt
at controlling violence becomes a force that suppresses the possibility of
politics in an infinite circularity between violence and anti-violence. He talks
about the anti-nomic logic of the state ‘that calls for the identification of
opposites’ good and bad, violent and non-violent, peace and war, that traps
the possibility of politics within their incompatibility, from which even a
revolutionary counter-politics does not escape, but which it only reaffirms,
as ‘merely its echo’.2
It is, however, not his focus on violence that is the aim of my discussion
here. Instead I want to consider the possibility of the resistance or avoidance
of its circularity and thus the unlimiting of its dialectical conditions and
practices to reach a more plural and simultaneous possibility of politics via
sound. Accordingly, it is the notion of a possibility of politics unthedered
from the logic of negation or sublimation and employed in continuous
territories and invisible zones that motivates my writing. I aim to position
sound and listening as generative and innovative intensities in the space of the
political in order to probe their potential for an exploration of politics and
to try their capacity to imagine and effect its transformation into plurality
18
without opposites. In this I do not limit politics to the condition of violence
and anti-violence, which determines a dialectical frame and thus outlines
a visual thinking – the corroborating of reality as an organization of ‘this’
or ‘that’ – but approach it as an autonomous order for creative production
that also includes the unorganized and what has no clear definition or
boundary. Therefore, the focus of my discussion is not Balibar’s notion
of violence, his terminology and argument, but the idea proposed in his
writing on violence: that there is a possibility of politics evoked through the
imagination of the political as a transforming and transformative condition,
a noun that resembles an adjective and acts as a verb, that admits intent,
and gives me permission and a context to imagine sound as generative of
political possibility.
Relating to this initial identification and expanding its remit, I turn to
discussions of possibility in anthropology and the scholarship of International
Relations. Writing in 2013, Petra Retham suggests that the recent surge in
focus on political possibility or the possibility of politics comes from the
rejection of a ‘politics of the antis’ ‘that is a politics that can only imagine
itself in terms of antagonism and opposition’:3 anti-privatization, anti-
neoliberalism, anti-globalization – positions that are complicit in Balibar’s
circularity of violence. Instead, the focus on possibility includes invention
and creation as well as dimensions of ethics in the articulation of a politics
that provides action and experiential change, and introduces the imagination
of different possibilities and maybe even impossibilities that demand the
discussion of normativity and transformation. This new engagement in
possibility, in anthropology and the political sciences, employs terms such
as becoming, generative and world-creating, a vocabulary and focus which
resounds with my previous writing on sound and thus affords my earlier
discussions a new contextualization and future possibility.4
In her text, Retham mentions Jane I. Guyer, who a few years earlier reflected
on the status of possibility in anthropology by surveying the different uses
of the term from its replacing of ‘diversity’ in the beginning of the twentieth
century to a current definition: Presenting a change from the conception
of possibility as variety and interchange, an aesthetics of possibility, to a
present use of it as observations and ethics of transformation, as a generative
possibility. This shift from perception of diversity to the production of
plural possibility brings with it issues of self and participation: how far
the anthropologist or practitioner is herself involved and invested in the
transformation that the possible might hold; how much she is an object or a
subject of ethnographic observation.
Both Retham and Guyer’s focus is on anthropological diagnostics
and analysis that allow for the investigation of possibility among affects,
sentiments, the unpredictable, the imperfect and the incomplete, and aims to
find ‘alternatives within’.5 Thus they identify for anthropology the task ‘to
examine individual and collective desires, the unpredictability of lives, and
19
THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITY OF SOUND 19
unexpected futures’,6 and urge the discipline towards an innovative analysis

and form without hastening it forward, beyond the field and beyond a current
actuality since, ‘anthropology is the social science most familiar with a sense
of unfamiliarity, so we should find signs of already knowing this problem
within the disciplinary archive.’7 In my articulation of the possible I pick up
on the value of the incomplete, the imperfect and the unpredictable while
also identifying with the need for historicity and the connection to a current
circumstance and particularity, so that my notion of a political possibility
of sound does not resemble a trivial fantasy, easily dismissed, but can move
from the understanding of norms and normativity, their instigation as actual
and real, into real possibilities that are transformative and radical.
Such radical possibilities do not go against perceived universals, as
an anti-universalism, as they do not respond to a universalist view but
engage in the complex particularity of things. They also do not depend on
a future context to ensure their transformative potential. Rather, they are
building future contexts presently through the acknowledgement of socio-
historical norms, as the conditions and conditioning of actuality, which they
transform by engaging in the particular circumstance of its acceptance and
the possibility of a generative and plural view. In that sense, I see another
inspiration and source for writing about possibility in the theories of
Roxanne Doty, whose work on International Relations in the 1990s shifted
the focus from ‘why’ a set of foreign policies appear possible as opposed to
another, into a consideration of ‘how’ such a possibility is conditioned: what
are the circumstances of this possibility? This, according to Jack Holland,
opened International Relations (IR) up ‘to consider the construction of ideas
and identities that enabled a specific decision to be taken and a particular
course of action to appear reasonable, logical and ultimately imperative or
even inevitable’.8 ‘How possible’ equates with ‘how thinkable’ and reveals
a concurrent condition that accepts certain policies, military actions or
governmental choices. It invites the consideration of the construction of a
present actuality: to understand the political actors, the social and cultural
terrain, the power structures and interpretative norms that make this
possibility ultimately the only way to perceive, to act and to live, in the
reality ‘of the only thing possible’.9
Following this shift of IR towards the consideration of the condition of
possibility, understood as the way a particular imagination and normative
perception is produced and accepted, the ‘how’ has to be the initial focus of
an auditory engagement. The task is to hear the how, to hear the condition of
a singular actuality, in order to learn to listen out for alternative conditions
that exist not apart from it, that are not its fictional parallel world, but that
are real alternatives that sound a present polyphony, even when they are not
listened to or heard.
At this point, Doty’s focus on the precondition of reality as a singular
constructed possibility of power that assumes the status of a given, a natural
20
or naturalized order of things, resonates with Frances Dyson’s focus on the

monochord. In The Tone of Our Times (2014), Dyson writes about the
construction of the Western tonal system as an attempt to avoid discord
and the possibility of change, while making its harmony appear divine
and angelic, and therefore immutable and beyond question. She explains
the construction of the harmonic system as an expression of the desire to
unitize the ephemeral multiplicity of sound, to make a system of discreet
units known as tones that could represent and fulfil the Pythagorean ideal
of a Musica that represents the natural proportion of the world.
This required not only that irrational ratios be awkwardly suppressed, but
that the possibility of incommensurable relations, incommensurability
as such, was to be concealed at all costs, since knowledge of the
incommensurable demonstrated the limit of the theory of the unities,
showing that ‘numbers cannot transcribe the measure of this world’.10
Dyson re-contextualizes the desire for the monochord and its methods of
realization within a contemporary political and capitalist soundscape, and
elaborates first on the concealment and suppression of the voice that utters
other possibilities, and then offers access to this concealed voice through
her elaboration of the echo as the reverberation of a different voice in the
‘space of breathing’.11 She suggests that the echo as repetition is the echo of
angels, which reaffirms the existence of God and represents an acclamation
of the heavenly administration of the world.12 As she points out, the eternal
repetition of the Sanctus confirms God but also obliterates the possibility
for a silence that might make room for a different voice. This is silence as
the breath that opens a gap between call and response, where a different
voice can find articulation in the monotonous soundscape of power that has
taken over the hierarchical structures from the divine. The lack of feedback
between call and response at the place of the breath means the voice can
return in a different shape. Not tied to what was said, its utterance always
just a reaction, instead, it can challenge expectations and voice its own
desire.
Her understanding of Western polyphony, a seeming multivocality being
conducted to ‘count-as-one’ by the ‘hierarchy of angels’, articulates the
objectification of the voice by the unresponsive echo of theory, statistics,
forms and charts, and manifests a precedent for civil administration,
which eventually becomes Doty’s naturalized policymaker who owns the
possibility of interpretation and action. Dyson’s interpretation of a silencing
echo as a modern-day form of acclamation, or what we might understand
as popularism, allows her to critically engage in resonance beyond harmony,
and to suggest the resistance of the corporeal to produce a dissonant and
plural ‘echo’ that does not simply respond without a sound of its own but
defies the monochord to contest ideas of a homogenous soundtrack of
21
ecology and economy. However, she acknowledges that ‘these possibilities

are disabled in the absence of the time and the space of breathing’, without
whose silence there is no space for another, a plural response.13
In response and taking up on Dyson’s suggestion of the echo of an
autonomous voice that contrasts with the study of harmony and meaning
and instead explores a plural sense, I want to propose an ‘echography’ of
the inaudible: the practice of silent voices in the space of breathing that
opens politics to the possibility of the political. Listening on sound walks,
to the everyday, in conversation, in the gallery and the concert hall, or to
an MP3 player, as well as making sound works, compositions and scores,
or even just shout, talk and sing, are ways to pursue an ‘echography’ that
resounds the how of power and actuality and makes their limits audible,
attuning us to the tones that sound outside a harmonic singularity, so we
might move away from the ‘hierarchy of angels’, to hear the devil at work
in the monochord and start to pluralize its possibilities from the complex
particularity of things.
Such an echography of material practice does not produce a visible
geography, an organization of the invisible on a map, but explores the
unseen reverb of reflection where plural causes become visible and their
consequences thinkable, and where other voices can make themselves
heard rather than theorized. This echography enables us to hear the
dynamics of a political actuality and to imagine its sonic possibilities. In
that it follows Dyson’s suggestion of a ‘resistive echo-ing’ or ‘echopraxia’
of the ‘people’s microphone’ that can leave the monotone echo chamber of
media and politics.14 But while agreeing with the affirmative of her echo
practice, her resistive echo-ing implies a politics of the antis, the anti-stance
of the ‘people’s microphone’ and the centrifugality of its dissonance as a
counter-politics remains trapped in the circularity of harmony and discord,
violence and anti-violence, as the anti-nomic logic of power. I would like
to imagine echography as a more agonistic and playful dispersion.15 Thus
while I am inspired by her notion of another echo that resonates in the gap
of the breath, as a way to hear the political actuality and produce a political
possibility, I aim for a sonic practice whose voice does not rise against
harmonic tonality, the dominant self, but sounds itself, and whose clamour
therefore, cannot be silenced in its opposition, but whose possibilities are
inexhaustible: generative of an unfamiliar world that sounds actuality’s
hidden pluralities without reducing those into the notion of impossibility as
‘the profoundly unrealistic’ opposition to a rational world view.16
According to Guyer, ‘Possibility is an ethical stance, demanding courage;
it is an aesthetic of coexistence, demanding discernment; it is a vision of
politics, demanding study and steadfastness.’17 I propose that sound and
listening can engage in this discernment of alternatives and can offer a
practice that has the steadfastness to hear and generate ‘the conditions that
make possible or delimit possibilities’ and that has the courage to ultimately
22
unlimit the possibilities of actuality to include and make count, in perception

and in the institution of politics, what appears impossible now.18 This essay
traces such courage and steadfastness through the work of Lawrence Abu
Hamdan and Anna Raimondo to listen out for and give words to a political
condition made apparent in sound. Thus it enquires via Jon Elster on the
political possibility of artistic ambiguity and what simply is not there, and
considers with David Graeber art’s passage between reality and reason to get
to the political possibility of sound that includes emotions and the fantastic
as a legitimate resonance of a plural world.
Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (2013)

This work is a 15-minute audio essay and audiovisual installation about
the voice and the border by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a British/Lebanese
artist who works and lives in Beirut. I encounter it at the Pump House
Gallery in London in a small square space that is painted in a flat black
that expands into the screen, which too mostly remains black, granting us
only the shortest glimpses of what must be the Golan Heights, barbed wire
and people running. Visually I feel excluded, straining my eyes to see more
when clearly more is not given. I remain outside, prevented from gaining
an overview and barred from the goings on to which I obtain access only
through prior reading on its history and politics, the press release, the brief
moments when an image breaks through the blackout, and by way of a
sound track of shouts, location sounds and two different voice-overs: that
of Lisa Hajjar, a sociologist, who tells us about the role of the Druze soldiers
working as interpreters in the Israeli Military Court system in the West Bank
and Gaza, and that of a male voice-over artist who reads a script about the
history of the Shouting Valley and the particular events that unfolded on 15
May 2011, when Palestinian protesters breached its frontier.
Hajjar’s voice is an accented American English, that of the professional
voice-over artist is subtitled Arabic. Apparently, recordings of the Druze
soldiers working as interpreters in the Israeli Military Court system in
the West Bank and Gaza are contrasted with recordings from the Druze
community in the Shouting Valley. I cannot hear this juxtaposition, the
nuance of difference within the same language is lost on me and reaffirms
my outsider’s position.
I have limited access to the world the work portrays, the represented
remains largely inaccessible, and thus its world appears if not impossible
then inscrutable and impervious to my comprehension. What I can access
is the artwork and its possibilities as a video essay, which in its format
combines the possibility of art, of aesthetic experience and transformation,
with the possibility of documentation, of an ethnography that negotiates
the object and the subject of recording and includes an ethical dimension.
23
Abu Hamdan’s work shows ‘fragments of an impossible totality’ but also

gives hope and ‘includes a principle of renewal and spiritual research’ which
creates the condition for a different imagination and provides the support
for an alternative view.19 In its imperfect frame, a document of facts meets an
artistic fiction narrated in the medium of the work that reframes them both
beyond a singular and normative actuality, and opens them instead for more
contingent and maybe even contradictory readings. The possibility of the
artwork enables the possibility of the document and permits into the realm
of truth also affects and sentiments, desire and the incomplete. The format
enables the inclusion of the invisible and the inaudible within the authority
of the actual, from where it can borrow a voice to make itself count as real
while insisting on the precarity and mere possibility of its reality.
Hajjar talks about the translation process in court, about the status of the
Druze in Israel, as a bilingual identity that occupies a precarious situation
between Jew and Arab, conscribed to fight for the country against Arab
nations and to work as translators in a court system that seeks to criminalize
their identity. She tells us how the accused would not be given a translation
of all that is said and discussed in court but only ‘what he needs to know’.
She calls him an object rather than a subject of the law, excluded from most
that is discussed, entrusted only with the shortest glimpses that somebody
else decides are pertinent to his case.
This information is told to me via what appears to be a phone conversation
that starts with a dial tone a few minutes into the video and gives the
soundtrack its quality of connection to an indoor space, when otherwise
I remain outside, exposed to the wind and weather of the Golan Heights,
a contested area that overlooks four countries: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and
Israel, and was seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, and annexed as
Israeli territory in 1981.
The phone denotes a geographical distance but produces a sonic closeness
and intimacy that evokes trust. By contrast, the image pretends a closeness
and access that is impeded by the terrain’s political status and its own blacking
out, and makes me feel untrusted and remote. The blackouts highlight the
image as a series of blindspots that do not reveal as much as conceal and
suppress. At those moments, there is no ambiguity, things are just not there
and the need for meaning closes in on me around the edges where it becomes
generated from invisible sound and the practice of my listening. Reading
these blacked-out frames in the blacked-out room of their projection, I am
reminded of Jon Elster’s notion of the limbo of politics, where what is
politically possible – its actuality and authority, what is possible inside the
limits of the institution of politics – and what is politically impossible –
the issues and interests that reach beyond institutionally endorsed limits –
meet, and the political is politicized: the border of the possible contested
and its limits redrawn. In Logic and Society (1978), Elster suggests that
the possibility or impossibility to transform a political circumstance from
24
a situation where revolution is unthinkable and thus impossible, into one

where it becomes recognized as a real possibility demonstrates that ‘between
what is unambiguously possible and what is unambiguously impossible there
is a limbo where only action can decide’.20 The blacked out frames present
this limbo, where there is nothing, neither ambiguously nor unambiguously.
This is a total absence, which undermines the singularity and norm of the
images’ actuality and opens alternatives within the contingent experience
of the work.21 These blindspots invite a politicizing of the visual border as
divide or possibility for connection. From their darkness the soundtrack
elucidates this indeterminate state and encourages the ‘action’ of perception
and production to ‘decide’ its possibility.
The Golan residents who fled the war are separated from their relatives
by a 200m-wide valley, fence, coils of razor wire and minefield that divide
the Syrian and Israeli sides. In the video, we hear the Druze community
gather on both sides of the border and shout across to family and friends.
With the shouts come glimpses of footage. It is as if the voices open the
shutter on the camera to force through some light and give us a glance
on a scene, which seems to be going on in the dark all along and holds a
more unceasing reality than the image would have us think. The constant
wind and distortion on the microphone, dogs barking and other location
sounds keep the blacked out image life and make me appreciate that what
I experience in short glimpses happens not just when I see it. Rather, the
blackout symbolizes a more permanent and invisible condition of identity
and belonging produced by a visible and solid division. The violence of the
border is answered by invisible activity of resistance that meets in this valley
not only when we are looking and not only when people shout, but the
shouting is what gives me glimpses of its actuality and sounds a political
possibility that can contest the status quo and transform its limits beyond a
current institution of politics.
The soundtrack seems to activate a time-based pinhole camera that reacts
not to exposure of light but to volume. The breath and shouts of running
bodies, escalating into feedback, prise open the auditory imagination
of a space that visually is conclusively drawn in wire fencing and border
marks. The shouts gain a possibility beyond their communication with
relatives. They attain the possibility to make visible the nature and limits
of a present condition and to create the conceivability of a different one.
They perform the activation of the lens and the activation of an as yet
impossible imagination: What if there were no borders, no wire fencing,
coils or land mines between the Druze? What if the Shouting Valley was a
plateau to meet rather than a divide? The audiovisual essay cannot answer
these questions, but it is asking them and through them conjures the ‘then
what’ to its ‘what if … ?’ It prepares the ground for the current condition
not to be beyond question, for it to be rethinkable, and for an alternative
circumstance to be imagined. It invites the reconsideration of the political
25
and cultural terrain and prepares a different consciousness than the one
that instated and naturalized a space where wire fencing and land mines
are the only way things can be. In this way, it opens glimpses at least on an
alternative: another possible Golan Heights where Druze’s working in the
courts and shouting across the valley are not heard in opposition, and where
neither voice has to be suppressed as irrational ratios and contained as the
impossibility of incommensurable relations that might threaten the unity
of one state. In sound, the space becomes a place where voices overlap and
contradict each other to produce a true polyphony that follows no hierarchy
and creates no unity but resonates the complex particularity of the situation.
On the day the footage was taken, on 15 May 2011, in celebration and
memory of Nakba, the mass eviction of Palestinian Arabs from their homes
in 1948, protesting Palestinians spontaneously broke through the wire
fencing and ran across the valley to exercise their ‘right of return’. The sound
of their frenzied running and shouting opens the lens more frequently and
makes more images appear on the screen and thus enhances my access to
the visual document and supports my experience of its actuality. The rush
culminates in calls of ‘enough’ ‘enough’ ‘there are landmines’ being shouted
at the trespassers, arresting their possible world scenario through the reality
of a politics that manifests as a weaponized border. Thus while the institution
of politics is not changed by the charge, more indirectly and as its potentiality,
the collective shouting, breathing and running crosses the borders of what is
imaginable and complicates the normative condition of a visual divide. The
amplification of unheard voices shows at least the limits of politics through
the courage of political actions that defy a naturalized reality.
The soundtrack frequently breaks into feedback that ruptures the
document, while its reverb dislocates the space of its composition. The
shouts produce a force that crosses the borders of language and the
notion of a work. They spill over aesthetic and linguistic barriers into non-
translatability and make thinkable a different situation that has as yet no
words and no material expression. The narrative of transgressing borders,
the possibility of a voice that transcends the limits of the land, the frontier
between Syria and Israel, creates a point of conflict, political and aesthetic,
whose lines are practised and contested in sound.
In the gallery the work is too quiet, compromised by the other works
around it that need to be heard too. Lawrence sends me the vimeo code and
I can listen to it on my system. I overwhelm myself by the sound of shouting
voices, cheering and full of fear at the same time. I crank it up until their
emotion enables mine and affect stops to be an aesthetic device and becomes
an experiential force. This is the possibility of sentiment, which has a place
in anthropology as a sensory exploration, and which makes me a subject
and an object of the audiovisual work, observed in my own reaction, and
implicit in the creation of a shared humanity as a sonic possible world,
through my voice, my breath and my running.
26
Possibility and difference

In Sonic Possible Worlds (2014), I develop the possibility of sound
via literary criticism and its use of Possible World Theory. For literary
theorists Ruth Ronen and Marie-Laure Ryan, the modal worlds of logic
offer literary studies the opportunity to leave the textual properties and
abandon hermeticist claims and inter-systemic evaluations in favour of
the contemplation of writing in an interdisciplinary context, and permit
alternative literary connections and references within a textual universe
that is ‘the sum of the worlds projected by the text’.22 However, as Ronen
states, ‘fictional worlds are based on a logic of parallelism that guarantees
their autonomy in relation to the actual world.’23 Thus according to both
Ronen and Ryan, while Possible World Theory provides literary criticism
with a new exploratory potential and gives access to different connections
and references, which enable the restaging of real agents and actions in a
fictional domain, their fictional possibilities remain apart from an actual
reality and its sphere of causality and consequence.
The worlds of logic are engaged in the consideration of counterfactuality
and the ramification of possibility. Literary studies, by contrast, consider
parallel worlds that have no impact on the real world. They produce
what Umberto Eco calls ‘Small Worlds’ and what W. H. Auden refers to
as ‘Secondary Worlds’.24 These worlds are created from elements of the
primary world they relate to, but they always remain autonomous from the
actual world and its ontology, its causes and consequences. They remain a
proposition rather than an action, and while they can fictionally thematize
and discuss real events, their interests and ideologies, they are unable to
intervene in their construction.
Against this parallel world theory, I set via David K. Lewis a more radical
sonic realism in which what I hear is an actual possibility for me, and while
it remains but a possible possibility for you, it is nevertheless a real variant
of this world. Thus modality is a matter of access and its restriction, to
worlds that do not stand in opposition to an actual world but are its plural
alternatives from which we negotiate a joint reality. Lewis’s possible world
theory articulates actuality in indexical terms: ‘depending for their reference
respectively on the place, the speaker, the intended audience, the speaker’s
acts of pointing, and the foregoing discourse.’25 Applying Lewis’s indexical
possibility to sound engages hearing as an accessing of different variants of
the actual, whose possibility is determined by my position, by my being in
the world. In this ‘phenomenological possibilism’ the invisibility of sound
elaborates Lewis’s modal realism, ‘which holds that our world is but one
world among many’ and that suggests that other worlds are ‘unactualised,
possibility’, by focusing on the qualifiers of possibility, the inhabitants
that actualize a possible world.26 Thus modality turns into quantification,
27
clarifying that actuality is linked to modal operators who inhabit the possible
world thus actualized, and whose power determines whether a possibility
can make itself count in our perception of the actually real. Listening as
inhabiting gives authority to the heard as a contingent variant, not as a
literary fiction and parallel world but as a real possibility of this world. It
offers a portal into difference and the differently real and allows us to hear
alternative slices on an equal track, as a real sonic fiction. Its theorization
grants it exposure and a vocabulary and allows us to contemplate in how far
its possibility has impact and carries consequences, or remains ‘unactualised’,
even while it is most definitively real for a particular inhabitant.
However, sound pluralizes not only the world but also the inhabiting
index, conceiving of it not as a rigid grid of relative positions but as a plural
mesh of invisible and contingent locationalities that are potentially infinite
and through which we move in listening. This challenges the relativity and
thus the marginalizability of sonic possible worlds, and emphasizes the
practical intersubjectivity of listening as a fluid inhabiting of counterfactual
situations through the reciprocity of the heard. As I suggest in Sonic Possible
Worlds, ‘Sonic possible worlds are private-life worlds that we negotiate: mine
through yours and yours through mine, generating a contingent actual world
in which we share but not always equally nor lastingly and that produces
not a singular but a possible actuality – one slice of many slices of what the
real could be.’27 These inhabited possibilities also include non-human actors,
their sounding and listening, to produce a plurality of worlds without the
‘hierarchy of humans’ that have taken over from the ‘hierarchy of angels’
since the move from a celestial and religious logic to the rationalism of a
secular humanism and its administration.
Lewis believes that ‘absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is
the way that some world is.’28 By connecting the actuality of his possibility to
the indexical inhabiting of listening and declaring that every way the world
could be is a way that the world is for somebody/something, I am assigning
compossibility to the plurality of possible worlds as possible lifeworlds,
which are all real perceptual slices of this world but that cannot make
themselves count equally in the construction of actuality. This emphasizes
the plural simultaneity of the real and grants the opportunity to politicize its
access and restrictions: to consider the political conditioning that renders a
variant possible and another impossible.
Those possibilities that exist in a textual sphere are at once enabled
and contained parallel to a singular actuality, and thus they remain merely
possible. Those that gain traction in the invisible and mobile sphere of
sound, by contrast, have the power to make themselves heard, illuminating
the how of a dominant actuality while providing the tools to sound and
thus actualize alternatives from within. The possibility of sound, composed
or incidental, linguistic or technological, does not present a parallel fiction,
a possibility held within the universe of the text, the aesthetic construct
28
of the work; it does not make a proposition about the world from which
it remains autonomous, but generates a world that is an actual possible
world with ramification beyond the confines of the material or medium
of its construction. Sound makes thinkable the possibilities of this world,
not as metaphor and parable or in relation to a textual universe, but as a
portal into real possibility, and shows us the world through its variants: the
slices of a timespace geology that holds the cavernous simultaneity of all the
possible possibilities of this world.29
The possibilities thus accessed are not only sonic. The soundscape and
sound work as sonic possible worlds do not propose an essentialism and
separatism apart from a visual world. To the contrary, sound in its invisible
mobility and depth, provides access into the possibility of a visual world,
where its singular actuality is illuminated and fragmented into the mobile
and plural processes of its production, which gives us the insights and
tools to resound time and space with different echoes that resonate in their
blindspots and blackouts.
In this sense, the calls echoing from either side of the Shouting Valley
are at once a device for a political imagination of its naturalized condition
and generative of an affective possibility for its transformation. They are
productive rather than representative and generate a world that is an actual
possibility even if it remains blacked out, concealed, hidden or ignored.
Their sound gives a voice to the political possibility of the Golan Heights
by providing glimpses of its circumstance as a divide, while also providing
a portal into the imagination of the territory and its institution as an open
landscape, not limited by barbed wire and not set against this frontier either,
but as an alternative within: as a continuum and simultaneity of land,
culture and language.
This thought is provoked by the blacked out screen and the occasional
glimpse triggered by the shouts. But the principle of access retains beyond
this particular aesthetic device as an access not to sameness and recognition,
an ignoring of difference, but as an access to the unfamiliar and incomplete
possibility of another life, whose actuality I negotiate, carefully and
temporarily in relation to my own incomplete possibility. The sonic denies
the divide representation and instead drags it into its own imaginary as an
action and desire rather than a proposition. It shows us an invisible zone and
ephemeral identities, and renders intelligible the hope for alternative realities.
Elster suggests that ‘the notion of political possibility is also dependent upon
the intentional and intelligent production of desired states.’30 In response to
this, I identify the shouts across the valley as the desire for a political state
that includes the possibility of those who are shouting here because they are
not heard elsewhere, and I hear the action of shouting as making intelligible
the production of this possibility. In this regard, the world behind the black
screen of Abu Hamdan’s video essay presents not a parallel world, isolated
from this world and without impact or ramification, but produces alternative
29
realities that are as true and authentic as the world we pragmatically refer to
as real, but whose possibilities are concealed or suppressed: they have less
power to make themselves count and thus the production of their intention,
the telos of their politics, remains unactualised but not without cause or
consequence.31
On this point of suppression, we re-meet Balibar’s violence and its
circularity with anti-violence, and recognize it as the condition of a politics
that determines Doty’s ‘how’ of power and actuality, truncating its echo into
the shape of the only thing possible. ‘If the means and forms of sublating
it [violence] appear not contingently but essentially as the means and form
of pursuing it – if there exists, consequently, an intrinsic perversity of the
political – then politics becomes desperate and a cause for despair.’32 If in
other words the political is legitimated through the pursuit of violence,
then we have a politics that has no resonance or breath, no blackouts
or blindspots, places of limbo from which to reimagine the condition of
its actuality in an invested and inhabited possibility, but are left with the
perversity of a truncated and singular response.
The political possibility of sound sidesteps this perversity and its
desperation with a different voice. It does not answer violence with anti-
violence but with a shout that calls from the unseen different possibilities into
being that activate desire and create the actions of a plural imagination. This
sonic imaginary does not limit its possibility to opposition, but generates an
alternative that is neither parallel, and thus without ramification and impact,
nor circular, and thus incapable to leave its causality. Instead it invites a
listening to the breath as a continuous resonance of otherness in a shared
space. This is the breath of Dyson and it is the breath of the Palestinian’s
running across the Golan Heights, illuminating blindspots to see not the
divide but understand and imagine its connections. In this sense, the breath
is not a signifier but a space of action; the site of a plural echo: the echoes of
the shouts that break through the blacked out screen.
At this site, we encounter a basic tenet of the political practice of sound in
relation to an instituted politics and fiction: the political of a textual fiction
is genre specific, regarding the economies and institutions of the literary, its
canon and discourse. It is able to represent and propose an alternative but
not to enact it. Sonic fictions, by contrast, are political actions that generate
a politics of possibility and transformation that outlines, with invisible lines
and from a mobile depth, the condition of its narrative without sublimating
the how, but illuminating its singularity and breaking its dominant echo.
Listening is thus a political practice that hears and generates alternatives.
It is not an essentialist practice however. Its possibilities go beyond that
of its own materiality and sensibility, as well as beyond the dynamics of
the telos of its politics, into the possibility of a plural and multisensory
world, revealing its norms and giving agency to its transformation: in sight,
hearing, touch and smell.
30
The politics of this sonic engagement is the politics of the invisible. It

is not collapsed into the totality of the image, and neither does it fulfil
preexisting normative codes, but responds to the demand of the dark, when
we have lost our anchorage in things and rules, and are forced to suspend
our habits and values, to listen in order to perceive the complex plurality of
the real as simultaneous possibilities that include also impossibilities: that
which has no part in a singular actuality, and it makes us reconsider also the
part we play ourselves.
Mediterraneo (2015)
Anna Raimondo’s audiovisual work Mediterraneo engages me in the
imagination of another political divide, that of the sea between North Africa,
the Middle East and Europe, whose border exist not as barbed wire fencing
but as a watery depth, and whose distance cannot be breached by shouts but
only through the risk of one’s life, in small boats, floats and rubber dinghy’s,
organized by traffickers and the imagination of despair. The vessels attest to
the anguish and hope that this stretch of sea symbolizes. Its watery terrain
cannot be inhabited but only transited in a precarious fashion by a people
who cannot even shout.
On a bleached out white background we see a glass slowly, drip by drip
filling with a blue liquid that as the poet Paul Claudel would say has a
certain blue of the sea that is so blue that only blood would be more red.
And as the sound of dripping water slowly fills the glass, Raimondo’s voice
catches her breath, accelerates, slows down and stutters, speeds up again,
and repeats over and over again ‘Mediterraneo’ until her voice is drowned in
the water she has conjured with her own words. Until then, on the unsteady
rhythm of her voice, we are pulled through the emotions of fear, excitement,
hope and death that define the Mediterranean as the liquid terrain that is the
ephemeral space between Africa, the Middle East and Europe today.
Raimondo is an Italian artist who works between Morrocco and Belgium.
Her life is invested in the passage between the continents, while her practice
articulates a possible imagination of the water that divides or connects
them. Her voice, repeating over and over again the word ‘Mediterraneo’
takes us to the centre of the liquid expanse that is not simply between Africa,
the Middle East and Europe, a connecting and separating passage only, but
is the material and metaphor of their relationship as a deep and treacherous
actuality produced from the political narrative that is currently considered
and practiced as the only one possible.
In her voice, the water is not limited to this one actual possibility. Instead,
her words’ rhythmic calling of the sea triggers between the unambiguous
actuality of a naturalized ‘how’ – our implicit acceptance of the political
actions, the social and economic conditions and power structures that
31
make this actuality ultimately the only one possible – and the absence of
an alternative worldview, the curiosity to know ‘why’. Listening to her
repetitive chant of a solitary word makes us question the legitimacy of this
one political reality, and lets us ask why it seems to be the only one possible,
and it brings us to consider also how we are bound up with its normative
actuality, how we agree with it and facilitate its singularity.
Raimondo’s audiovisual composition brings us to the unheard position
in the politics of migration and war, that of the Mediterranean sea, which is
the silent witness to the violence of a current actuality and reveals its cost.
The water takes on an observer’s position while calling from within again
and again a despair only heard in the depth of the sea.
This is an insight that emerges over the time it takes for the glass to
run over and that evokes ambiguity and doubt and enables the ‘what
if … ?’ of another possibility: What if another power was at play? What if
the continents connected on land? What if we all looked and spoke the
same? Questions that motivate the imagination at least for other actions
and alternative realities that are not ‘profoundly unrealistic’ oppositions
to a rational worldview, and are not simply its parallel fictions, but that
engage reason and legitimacy in a different way, beyond the desire for the
monochord and the measure of the dominant in a multivocality that has no
hierarchy but brings with it different consequences and ramifications.
Referring to Giorgio Agamben’s pre-enlightenment reading of the term
imagination, David Graeber defines imagination as ‘the zone of passage
between reality and reason. Perceptions from the material world had to pass
through the imagination, becoming emotionally charged in the process and
mixing with all sorts of phantasms, before the rational mind could grasp
their significance’.33 He states that it is only after Descartes that imagination
comes to denote irreality, fantasy, the parallel worlds of the imaginary
that have no impact or ramification for the real world. This more porous
medieval view of imagination as a force implicated in the constitution of the
real that is portrayed not as a fact but as a ‘passage’ holds a useful model for
the notion of a political possibility of sound.
Sound’s reality is not bound up in the absolutes of rationality and neither
is it a trivial fiction. It is the reality of the invisible and the ephemeral, a reality
that defines the actuality of the world as process, as a ‘zone of passage’,
that engages relational and contingent truths, which are the possibilities
found among affects, sentiments, the unpredictable, the imperfect and
the incomplete. Sound generates a possible reality that does not represent
a singular actuality but renders the real a mobile and unseen complexity.
It makes the how of the dominant appreciable and sounds the minor, the
suppressed, the hidden and the ignored. In that sense, Graeber’s definition
of imagination is useful to apportion sound the capacity to be more than a
thought, to be a thought engendered through process and participation that
has the power ‘to have real effects on the material world’.34
32
Once we stop thinking of the imagination as largely about the production

of free-floating fantasy worlds, but rather as bound up in the processes by
which we make and maintain reality, then it makes perfect sense to see it
as a material force in the world.35
The passage between the Mediterranean is a real passage, with life and death
consequences. But its reality is not born from rationality, from rational
thought and reason, but from the imagination on the one hand of a political
desire to wage and win a war, and on the other of despair and the hope not
to lose one’s life. The two positions meet not in the realm of reason but in
the realm of imagination, which produces their co-dependence in political
necessity and the perverse lack of another vista. Sidestepping this singular
actuality and the perverse circularity of its violence, Raimondo’s voice can
be heard as a ritual call that vibrates both shores on an even tone and does
not proffer a moralizing framework, a judgment or rational conclusion, but
offers us the passage as a passing through to contemplate and reimagine
what possibilities this ephemeral expanse could open.
In sound, the Mediterranean is the crossing not the crossed. Its actuality
is a process, a passing that reframes otherness and distance through the
practice of desire, fear and hope rather than as a measure of geography
and identity. It is not the infrastructure of connecting and separating, a
bridge between continents that enables us to cross while at the same time
maintaining the distance that exists in the first place; determining either side
through the actuality of what it is not. Rather it is a volume, whose passing
in words or as subjectivities, those of the artist and those of the refuges and
traffickers or military personnel and weapons does not define a boundary,
a cartographic line, but enables the actual possibilities of multiple points
of views sharing in the same timespace. The crossing does not generate the
real actuality of this continent and the apparent impossibility of that, but
creates the possibility of the water’s own expanse and how that time and
space defines things together. On the treacherous waters, index points meet
in the weave of the sea, enabling a simultaneity and continuum of different
possibilities, which are all ‘bound up in the processes by which we make
and maintain reality’.36 Listening and sounding create a crossing of the sea’s
volume that does not measure and name but engages in its watery depth
to understand the defining lines by coinciding with them, and that unlimits
those lines through the possibility of its own echo.
Raimondo’s work brings us into the urgency of the situation through the
focus on the sea as the common texture of the adjoining continents, rather
than through the confrontations of their different shores. The repetitive
mantra of her voice entreats me into the water in order to, from within
the fluid materiality, understand physically the complexity of its fabric,
form and agency: of what it weaves together formlessly rather than what
it is as a certain form, and in order to suspend what I think I know of
33
it and pluralize what it might be as the invisible organization of different

things: salt, water, waves, holidays, routes of escape, yachts, aquatic life,
sand, handmade dinghies, bodies, dreams and desperation. Listening,
I am persuaded to understand these things in their consequential and
intersubjective relationships: what they sound together as sonic things and
what thus they make me hear of their ecosystem of invisible processes. This
does not mean that some do not have more authority than others. These
invisible processes do not hide but reveal inequities. The sonic bind makes
apparent the interdependencies of power, organization, self-organization
and control, and provides an opportunity to revisit economical and political
values that depend on the divides and distances that are established in the
theoretical language of a humanist philosophy and that are perpetuated in
the economy of the visual.
The image pretends the possibility of distance and dissociation, to be
apart as mute objects and subjects, and to be defined by this distance, which
cuts the link to any cause and masks the relationship to any consequence.
Thus, a mute ocean enables my withdrawal from the sociopolitical and
ecological circumstance of its waves and permits me to deny responsibility
in its unfolding. Distance creates the distortions of what Maurice Merleau-
Ponty terms ‘dis-illusions’: the semblance of another real, which if we look
from afar retains its authority and reality that dissolves, however, once
we step closer, affirming the actual reality that was there all along.37 By
contrast, sound affords no distance and enables no view from afar. Instead,
the simultaneity of an inhabited listening creates the dis-illusions of plural
possibilities, perception’s true variants, which are the different slices of this
world that cannot be resolved into one singular and actually real: foreign
policy, military intervention, war, fighting, right and wrong, but that practice
the inexhaustible ambivalence between measure and experience: what
something is as material form and name, and what it appears to be in
perception, so we might understand and respond with engaged and practical
doubt to what seems incommensurable from ashore.
Raimondo composes a different image from the ambiguity of the how
and the drowning of its singular echo. The hypnotic rhythm of her voice
and the steady dripping of blue water generate the political possibility of
the Mediterranean. Slowly submerging, with her words, into the deep blue
sea, I abandon my reading of its terrain within the rationale and reason of
existing maps and the actuality of its politics, and come to hear its texture
woven of unresolved material and positions. I do not follow its outline but
produce a dark and mobile geography of the Mediterranean as a formless
shape, whose possibilities and impossibilities undulate to create a fluid
place that defies measurement but calls forth an attitude of listening-out
to understand where things are at and to take responsibility within that
invisible factuality. Since, within this dark and mobile geography we hear, as
William E. Connolly suggests we should, ‘the human subject as a formation
34
and erase it as a ground’.38 In the watery depth of Mediterraneo humanity

appears as formless form that has lost the access to its grounding in the
traditions of knowledge and the established canon’s of thought and its
hierarchies of reason; in political certainties and journalistic judiciousness, as
well as in relation to historical and geographical identities and philosophical
language. Instead the rhythmic drip, drip, drip, and the reiteration of its
name call for another ground, a groundless ground of invisible processes
that create, contingently and through constant negotiation, the possibilities
of actuality.
Listening and sounding we enter the privilege of darkness and enjoy the
loss of anchorage in rationality and so can reach the unfamiliar to reconnect
and make accountable what we call actual. Thus sonic reality emerges not
from maps and words but from the fluidity of blue liquid and the drowning
of the voice. And as the fluidity gives access to a groundless world, a world
without a priori reason and rationality, the drowning words do not fade but
re-emerge in the plurality of the audible.
‘The Lover of Blue Writing above

the Sea!’ (excerpt)
It is not true that the shortest path between two points is the
Straight line!
That is what I learnt when I was with you!
Dialogue? Is the longest part between the heart and the lips,
between my voiced waves and your silent waves.
Intuition alone led me to you . . .
It screamed one night without sound
that candles had gone out, that we were finished.
Parting poured poison in our coffee . . .
Once, I gave you my heart, naked like a white sheet of paper.
I wrote on it the plot for my murder . . . and my death certificate!
You did not forgive me, for leaving my death with you
and going with the gulls to the sea . .
. . . Here I am, running alone in the rain, without a man or a nation –
thousands of windows gaze at me with aggressive, burning eyes . . .
Like any rebellious black ewe
I weave the threads of my freedom far from the paths of the flock . . .
I try in vain to create a third fate
for a woman coming from the third world.
‘Do you want to know the secret of my power?
No one has ever really loved me . . .’
35
Here I am, falling

but I insist on leaving traces of my steps, traces of my pens
on the darkness of the abyss . . . and the whiteness of the page!
Ghada Al-Samman39
Imagination and responsibility: Conclusion

Having lost our grounding and reason in the deep blue sea, an alternative
reality needs to be found in the obscure mobility of sound that sings not
as dissonant anti-violence, as a dialectical position easily sublimated into
a normative condition, but through the simultaneity of many voices that
echo in the gap between call and response. In this blacked out space at the
place of the breath, silence reverberates with the unheard human and non-
human slices of this world, and sounds a political possibility that includes
their formless form. The loss of the angelic hierarchy of tonality and the
rejection of its humanist replacement, the monotonous soundscape of power,
symptomized in the monochord of rational thought and manifest in neo-
liberal capitalism, requires that sense and meaning are produced through
participation and a practice of listening and sounding that generates reality
and its legitimacy as a complex plurality, whose politics is not conditioned
by a dominant and truncated echo but takes account of the minor and
the complex and diverging resonances of everything that sounds without
rejecting it as dissonant or ignoring it as inaudible.
The possibility of a politics of sound is the possibility of a politics of
the incomplete, the unfamiliar, the unrecognizable and the unheard; that
which we have no words for and that which is incommensurable in relation
to current norms, but which presses through a naturalized reality, and
impresses on us the need and courage to listen-out for alternatives within.
Ultimately, among the practices of this politics of the minor must be an
echography of the inaudible that gives access to its concealed sounds and
allows other voices to be heard in the gap between what sounds and what is
heard. However, it is not a matter of theorizing these voices, of objectifying
them, rendering them mute, collapsed into the image of a representational
language, but of hearing their sounds generate a different world that is
accessible by a steadfast desire to embrace the unfamiliar, and the actions of
a political will that does not mean to shut them down.
Connolly’s call to acknowledge the ideological construction of humanity
and humanism and to erase it as the ground for thought and knowledge,
cited above, is quoted from an essay that discusses within the context of
New Materialism the fragility of things and deliberates the consequent
notion of an ethics of care. Here it might be read as a call to hear the
fragile within the circumstance of the possible, and to construct reality in
36
a contingent practice of listening that hears with a care for the unexpected
and the unheard. He continues:
as we confirm the human subject as a formation and erase it as a ground,

as we detect more vitality and periodic capacity for surprise in a variety of
nonhuman forcefields, we also seek to contest a set of classical conceptions
of command or derived morality within an ethic of cultivation grounded
in the contingency of care for this world.40
This care does not articulate an idealized ethics, a transcendental notion of

right and wrong, the obeying of one set of sociocultural standards or biblical
commandments and judicial law, but resembles what I have termed an ‘ethics
of participation’: the need to engage, to participate in composing the reality
of the world from its possibilities and from the contingent actualities heard
on the weave of indexical positions. On this plural weave, all the things and
circumstances that are possible are actual possibilities for somebody, and
reality is not a singular actuality but infinite alternatives that as simultaneous
variants create the complex particularity of the world. This ethics engages
the how of a particular circumstance in the question of its naturalization
as the only thing possible. It performs the critical consideration of what it
enables and what it silences, what it gives access to and what it restricts, and
pursues alternatives that unlimit the possibilities of the status quo through
the creative imagination of what else might be possible.
Connolly’s ethic of cultivation necessitates my creative imagination,
which generates the opportunity for the multivocality of the world to count-
as-plurality, and demands responsibility and care for the notion of reality
and truth that it produces. Responsibility prescribes me to understand my
own position in the world as only one possibility among many, and it is the
humility of this position that drives my participation in its ethical production
and defines the value of any engagement and the worth of any sense thus
produced. The end of a singular actuality and reality, as religious belief or
rational truth, is not the beginning of ‘alternative facts’, lies and untruths,
however, but is the beginning of truth as an engagement with the world that
does not shy away from the incommensurable but measures and challenges
its own nominal reality on what is not heard.
‘When one is asked to be “realistic” then, the reality one is being asked
to recognize is not one of natural, material facts; neither is it really some
supposed ugly truth about human nature.’41 Rather, it is ideological,
sociopolitical norms and expectations backed by historical precedent and
enforced by at least the potential for violence that one is being asked to
recognize and respect: a violence at any rate that acts against the possibility
of one’s autonomous imagination. Accordingly, the status quo presented
as the only one possible becomes a political imperative that disavows
alternatives as threats: to the state, to national security, to peace, to the
37
economy, to identity and so forth, which legitimizes their suppression by any

means. ‘In international relations, a political “realist” is considered one that
accepts that states will use whatever capacities they have at their disposal,
including force of arms, to pursue their national interests.’42 In relation to
this, a fertile auditory imagination poses a threat to the national interest
due to its capacity to reveal the condition and vested interests of ideologies
and sociopolitical norms, the how of a current circumstance, and its ability
to transform its enabling conditions by sounding diverging resonances and
breathing life into alternative possibilities.
The contention throughout this essay has been that the ephemeral
mobility and generative nature of sound can open the narrow confines of
politics to different political possibilities. The unseen is uncertain, unreliable
and incomplete, and thus it invites a quasi-medieval view of the relationship
between reality and reason, where reality is not a visible status but an
invisible zone within which perception passes through imagination and
emotions and is touched by the possibility of phantasms, which deliver it
not into trivial fictions, but into the power of creative desire and hope.
The actions of sonic possibility, charged with emotions and imagination,
enable the re-imagination of a political practice and its material
truth: determining how else politics could be instituted and how else the
truth of a community, the shared practice of living, might be effected. They
do not sound untruths or post-truths, however, but complex and plural truths
not based on a calculated objectivity of natural laws only, but produced in
the negotiation of their facticity: their condition rather than their statement.
Listening’s responsibility for the imagination of reality and factuality does
not follow a simple rationalism and singular authority, but critiques, from
the dark depth of sound, the nominal of a rationalist monochord without
descending into the proliferation of invested phantasms. Sonic fictions,
sound’s political possibilities, are not political lies or popular falsehoods: the
populist echo of a counter politics. Instead they are imagination as a
generative and responsible engagement in a current condition that probes its
normative sheen and creates from doubt and with humility the unexpected
of its materiality and sense, to produce a different truth that is inclusive also
of what might seem unthinkable, profoundly unrealistic, a surprise even.
A truth, in other words, that goes beyond the scope of a rational political
imagination, but which is exactly from where the biggest issues facing us
today: global warming, mass migration, war, health and care, will find their
answers.
Sound’s mobile and ephemeral constitution enables and motivates this
echographic practice of inclusion: including the formless, the invisible
and the barely audible, the unfamiliar and the affective in the generation
of knowledge and the knowable. Knowledge is a fundamental engine of
political change and transformation. Sonic knowledge, the knowledge of
the invisible and what remains unheard, opens politics, political actions,
38
decisions and institutions to the plural slices of this world. Listening as a

care for the fragile within the condition of actuality produces knowledge
as a responsibility towards the plurality of its possibility, questioning the
singularity of its authorship and authority and thus its partisan investment
and legitimacy. Knowledge is refracted in the invisible light of sound: more
voices come to be heard as barer of information, insight and facts.
However, its plural rays do not find easy consensus, and they also do not
simply contradict or deny existing ideas but enter into an agonistic game
of doubt and speculation, which enriches and augments the possibility
of knowledge through alternatives from the plurality of what could be
known.
Consequently, reality becomes a matter of fragments fragmenting into
sounds not tones, which are heard contingently on the indexical weave and
remind us through their possibility of the seemingly impossible, read not as
the dissonant, the anti-tone, but experienced as the inaudible and the barely
heard. Thus it demands a listening-out for the minor, so we might hear and
excavate from the slices of reality the less heard ones to produce different
narratives.
Engaged with in this way, sound illuminates the limits of the norm, the how
possible, and effects a different resonance that can grasp and communicate
the possibility of the impossible. Its groundless ambiguity and at times sheer
absence demonstrates the limitation of the rationality of Western thought
and opens us to an imagination that takes from the invisibility of sound the
capacity to hear the irrational not as a profoundly unrealistic worldview,
but as a fragment, as a legitimate slice of what the world is and might be.
A sonic sensibility produces an awareness for blindspots and demands
participation. It affords capacities to act and become an actor; to invent the
circumstance of one’s own audition and listen out too for those voices that
remain impossible. Listening and sounding with a care for the possible we
can appreciate the variants of this world and ‘partake(s) of the powers that
could transform the world into something better’.43
Works with sound, music and the soundscape of the everyday, subjects
and objects, dominant and fragile things, can be the platform on which
this awareness finds articulation, and where we can practice a political
echography of the unheard and the unexpected. In this sense, my listening
to Abu Hamdan’s Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley and Raimondo’s
Mediterraneo pursues an anthropology of reinvention that, rather than
categorizing and pulling what cannot be seen into the familiar of existing
language, explores the unfamiliar, the incomplete, the ambiguous and what
is not even there, in order to experience the limits of its condition and hear
the creative force of its possibility open what appears unreasonable and
break through the circularity of suppressed imaginations.
Thus to articulate and analyse political possibility through sound not
only gives us insights into the dynamics of the actually possible, helping us
39
understand how a present circumstance is accepted as ‘reasonable, logical

and ultimately imperative or even inevitable’, the only thing possible.44 It
‘may also start to open a space for its contestation or at the very least foster an
appreciation of why such contestation is often so very difficult.’45 However,
and in tune with Guyer’s sense of anthropology stated in the beginning, as
a science familiar with the unfamiliar and thus already equipped to deal
with its problem, the political possibility of sound in art and everyday life
is not simply a forward movement in a temporal sense, striving towards a
future horizon, building an avant-garde of listeners, but is an alternative
exploration of the present as a geological formation, a timespace place,
whose diversity is its possibility now.
My sense of the present moment is that the realities of the world may
make us confront the Caroline Islanders’ views of the horizon as moving
towards us, rather than vice versa, and that navigation techniques may
pivot again accordingly. I doubt that we will ever give up ‘possibility’
in its hopeful sense, as the matrix of ground from which one can sense
originality.46
Notes
1 In the introduction to Violence and Civility, Étienne Balibar discusses the
institution of politics by referring it to the possibility of the political: ‘on the
horizon of politics, as a condition of possibility and a telos of all its practices,
is the political [du politique]’ (Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility, On the
Limits of Political Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015,
p. 2).
2 Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. 5. While Balibar does not use a hyphen to
emphasize the separation of the anti and violence, or indeed between non and
violence and the anti nomic, but writes them as one word, I will adhere to a
hyphenated spelling to illustrate the oppositional terminology that ultimately
allows for a circular, dialectic dynamic to take hold.
3 Petra Retham, ‘Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and
Cynical Reason’, Reviews in Anthropology, vol. 42, no. 2 (2013): 228.
4 World-creating is a term that at once refers back to my discussion of the
predicative in Sonic Possible Worlds and at the same time invites via Hannah
Arendt a political reading of building worlds. It refers to the semantic
construction of worlds within modal realism elaborated via literary theory:
in her book Marie-Laure Ryan mentions James McCawley’s notion of
‘world-creating predicates’, which are verbs such as to dream, to intend
and to believe, that create possible worlds as mental constructions, where
the ‘propositions embedded under the predicate yield the facts of the
related world’, and produce its imagination (Marie Laure Ryan, Possible
Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Bloomington and
40
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 19 and 22). It also brings

this propositional and imaginary world into the realm of a future politics via
Arendt’s notion of ‘world-building’ as a co-creating of life that demands ‘a
plurality of men’:
There is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the
human faculty of making and keeping promises. Just as promises and
agreements deal with the future and provide stability in the ocean of
future uncertainty where the unpredictable may break in from all sides,
so the constituting, founding, and world-building capacities of man
concern always not so much ourselves and our own time on earth as our
‘successors’, and ‘posterities’.
(Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 175.)
5 Jane I. Guyer, ‘On “Possibility”, a Response to “How is Anthropology
Going?” ’ Anthropological Theory, vol. 9, no. 4 (2009): 355–70, p. 36.
6 Retham, ‘Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and
Cynical Reason’, p. 231.
7 Guyer, ‘On “Possibility”’, p. 357.
8 Jack Holland, ‘Foreign Policy and Political Possibility’, European Journal
of International Relations, vol. 19, no. 1 (2011): 51. In this essay, Holland
pursues the question of ‘how thinkable’ into the legitimation of the
Iraq War. He observes the normative and singular political rationale of
going to war, the how, through a comparison of the acceptances of this
how in the United States and Britain respectively, and comments on the
building of a cultural resonance, which results in a lack of acceptance
for alternative possibilities. Consequently, in the end, only one course of
action seemed possible, which is then emboldened by rhetorical force and
dominance.
9 ‘Realism is the absorption of all reality and all truth in the category of the
only thing possible.’ Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy,
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 132.
10 Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times, Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology,
Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2014, p. 23.
11 Ibid., p. 105.
12 Ibid., p. 31.
13 Ibid., p. 105.
14 Ibid., p. 152.
15 Ibid.
16 David Graeber, Direct Action and Ethnography, Edinburgh and Oakland,
CA: AK Press, 2009, p. 510.
18 Rethman, ‘Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism and
Cynical Reason’, p. 238.
41
19 Germain Dulac quoted in Caroline Eades and Elizabeth A. Papazian (eds), The
Essay Film, Dialogue Politics Utopia, New York: Columbia University Press,
2016, p. 5.
20 In this passage from Jon Elster’s book Logic and Society, Contradictions and
Possible Worlds, he calls this situation pre-revolutionary, ‘implying some kind
of latent or partly crystallized unrest, that only needs the right word at the
right time in order to emerge in recognizable form’ (Jon Elster, Logic and
Society, Contradictions and Possible Worlds, Chichester, NY, Brisbane: John
Wiley & Sons, 1978, p. 51). I read this latency not as immanence, not as a
transcendental moment, but as part of the ongoing political condition within
ephemeral territories and invisible zones.
21 This interest in blindspots and the blackening out of images is a theme
discussed in more detail in my essay, jointly written with David Mollin, for the
catalogue of the exhibition Nietzsche, Cyclists and Mushrooms, Language in
Contemporary Art, Kunst Raum Riehen, CH, 2015.
22 Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative
Theory, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 24.
23 Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge, New York and
Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 8.
24 Umberto Eco and W. H. Auden outline their sense of literary and artistic
possible worlds in their respective texts published in The Limits of
Interpretation (1994) and Secondary Worlds (1984).
25 David K. Lewis, ‘Anselm and Actuality’, Noûs, vol. 4, no. 2 (May 1970): 175–
88, p. 185.
26 David K. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 2
and 5.
27 Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound,
New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 33.
28 Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, p. 2.
29 The term ‘timespace’ has been developed in relation to sound in my previous
publications, most notably in Listening to Noise and Silence (New York:
Continuum, 2010, p. 124). It presents the non-dialectical co-constitution of
space and time. In this particular instance, its association with geology, as
simultaneous geological timespace slices, addresses the preconceptions of a
time as forward-moving in a human-centred time sense, and instead considers
time as a geological timespace, measured in the duration of the earth’s events,
as stratigraphy or deep time.
30 Elster, Logic and Society, Contradictions and Possible Worlds, p. 50.
31 ‘What actually is the case, as we say, is what goes on here. That is one
possible way for a world to be. Other worlds are other, that is unactualised,
possibilities’ (Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, p. 5).
32 Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. 2.
33 Graeber, Direct Action and Ethnography, p. 521.
42
34 Ibid., p. 521.
35 Ibid., p. 523.
36 Ibid.
37 Merleau-Ponty’s dis-illusions are the illusions of a first impression. What
we think we see, which, as we step closer reveals itself as to what it really is.
However, he does not consider these initial perceptions as unreal or wrong,
and appreciates that they play a part in what it is we think we see finally.
He thus acknowledges that perceptions are mutable and probable rather
than real: ‘But what is not opinion, what each perception, even if false,
verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their
equal power to manifest it as possibilities of the same world’ (The Visible
and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 41).
38 William E. Connolly, ‘The “New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things’,
Millennium Journal of International Studies (2013): 399–412, p. 400.
39 Ghada Al-Samman, ‘The Lover of Blue Writing above the Sea!’ (excerpt),
in The Poetry of Arab Women, A Contemporary Anthology, trans. Saad
Ahmed and Miriam Cooke, ed. Nathalie Handal, pp. 274–6. Northampton,
MA: Interlink Books, 2015, reprinted with permission.
40 Connolly, ‘The “New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things’, pp. 39–40.
41 Graeber, Direct Action and Ethnography, p. 510.
42 Ibid.
43 David Graeber, Possibilities, Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire,
Edinburgh and Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007, p. 2.
44 Holland, ‘Foreign Policy and Political Possibility’, p. 51.
45 Ibid., p. 64.
References
Al-Samman, Ghada, ‘The Lover of the Blue Sea!’, in The Poetry of Arab Women,
A Contemporary Anthology, trans. Saad Ahmed and Miriam Cooke, ed.
Nathalie Handal, 274–6, Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2015.
Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, San Diego: Harcourt, 1978.
Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution, London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Auden, W. H., Secondary Worlds, London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
Balibar, Étienne, Violence and Civility, On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans.
G. M. Goshgarian, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Connolly, William E., ‘The “New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things’,
Millennium Journal of International Studies, vol. 41, no. 3 (2013): 399–412.
Doty, Roxanne, ‘Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis
of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines’, International Studies
Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3 (September 1993): 297.
43
Doty, Roxanne, The Law into their Own Hands, Immigration and the Politics of
Exceptionalism, Tucsan, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press, 2009.
Dyson, Frances, The Tone of Our Times, Sound, Sense, Economy and Ecology,
Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2014.
Eades, Caroline and Elizabeth A. Papazian (eds), The Essay Film, Dialogue Politics
Utopia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Eco, Umberto, ‘Small Worlds’, in The Limits of Interpretation, 64–82, Bloomington
and Indianapolis: First Midland Book Edition, 1994.
Elster, Jon, Logic and Society, Contradictions and Possible Worlds, Chichester, NY,
Brisbane: John Wiley, 1978.
Graeber, David, Direct Action and Ethnography, Edinburgh and Oakland, CA: AK
Press, 2009.
Graeber, David, Possibilities, Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire, Edinburgh
and Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007.
Guyer, Jane I., ‘On “Possibility”, a Response to “How is Anthropology Going?” ’
Anthropological Theory, vol. 9, no. 4 (2009): 355–70.
Holland, Jack, ‘Foreign Policy and Political Possibility’, European Journal of
International Relations, vol. 19, no. 1 (2011): 49–68.
Lewis, David Kellogg, ‘Anselm and Actuality’, Noûs, vol. 4, no. 2 (May 1970):
175–88.
Lewis, David Kellogg, On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968.
Mollin, David and Salomé Voegelin, ‘During the Night, Crops Will still Grow’,
in Nietzsche, Cyclists and Mushrooms, Language in Contemporary Art,
exhibition catalogue, Heidi Brunnschweiler (ed.), Basel: Kunstraum Riehen,
2015.
Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999.
Retham, Petra, ‘Imagining Political Possibility in an Age of Late Liberalism
and Cynical Reason’, Reviews in Anthropology, vol. 42, no. 2 (2013): 227–42.
Ronen, Ruth, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge, New York and
Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Voegelin, Salomé, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound
Art, New York: Continuum, 2010.
Voegelin, Salomé, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound,
New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Work
Abu Hamdan, Lawrence, Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (2013), audiovisual
installation, Pump House gallery, London, 12 October–11 December 2016.
Raimondo, Anna, Mediterraneo (2015), audiovisual installation, Curators’ Series
#8. All of Us Have a Sense of Rhythm, curated by Christine Eyene, DRAF
(David Roberts Art Foundation), London, 5 June–1 August 2015.
44
45
Hearing volumes: Architecture,
light and words
Architecture
So you enter into a space. It’s big, people keep
on saying it’s large.1
In 2012 I did two soundwalks, one at Tate Britain and one at Tate Modern, with
a group of postgraduate students from the London College of Communication,
UAL. They walked each exhibition space guided by instructions that they had
to follow in pairs. These were written as simple text scores telling the students
where to go, what to listen out for, how long to listen, what sounds to make
and so on. These instructions encouraged the students’ engagement with the
location through its sound, but took away their freedom to listen to anything
and in any way they wanted. Consequently, they created a focus beyond habits
or expectation and challenged what it was possible to hear.
Enter the museum

walk up and down the ramp inside the museum for 3 minutes, listening
to your footsteps and that of other visitors.
go to the escalators (main gallery) stand still and listen to the space while
moving to the top level.
walk through the gallery to a window facing the Thames, look out and
listen.
46
go back on the escalators, stand still, listen to the space while moving
down back to ground level.
walk back up the ramp inside then continue outside.2
The reason I did these walks with the students was for us to experience the
exhibition space as an acoustic environment and to hear it with new ears;
to find a way to understand and ultimately articulate how the sound of the
gallery changes the works shown therein; and how our own movements and
the action of other people within the space influence the way we perceive
the work and the architectural context of its staging. Walking through the
galleries, following the listening and sound-making instructions we noticed
how every space and every room transformed into a sonic shape of invisible
relationships, mobile simultaneities and audible contradictions. Our walking-
sounding-listening became a form of co-habitation of ephemeral rooms that
do not remain rooms but become ‘volumes’, triggering an understanding
of the exhibition space not as a construction of walls, floors and ceilings,
windows and doors, but as a dimensionality that has a capacity: the capacity
of the work and the capacity of our experience of it.
This volume is not a measure of decibels but the space of the environment’s
material and temporal expansion. It is an invisible architectural volume
that while causally related to its visual construction, materiality and
context, nevertheless produces a different engagement and brings about a
different agency. The notion of volume arrived at via sound provides us
with the terminology and the imagination for the experience of the gallery
as a mobile and viscous expanse that enables and holds the work and the
viewer without visible boundaries in a generative and reciprocal embrace.
This embrace recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘being-honeyed’, his notion
of phenomenological intersubjectivity described through the metaphor of
honey’s sticky grasp and applies it in relation to the grasping density of sound.
In this conflation it produces the imagination of sound as a slow-moving
liquid that ‘comes apart as soon as it has been given a particular shape,
and what is more, it reverses the roles, by grasping the hands of whoever
would take hold of it.’3 Merleau-Ponty’s honey articulates the inevitable and
reciprocal hold of sound’s volume, and enables my consideration of how
we exist therein. What it means, as Jean-Luc Nancy asks, ‘to exist according
to listening?’4 And what, as I would like to query further, it means to exist
together according to listening?
The conceptualization of the gallery as volume renders the space formless
but expansive, invisible but felt. It gives it a viscosity within which we move
and breathe together as in an unavoidably connecting but plural sphere,
suggesting an intersubjectivity and interactivities that enable the imagination
of being in an environment as a being together with other things, and
creating the sense of what can be ‘seen’ as an experience of ‘inter-vention’: as
a perceptual agency between things.
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Pursuing the notion of the gallery as volume is not an essentialist stance,

however. It is not the articulation of sound against vision, and it brings us
not to a pure sonic awareness but into a multisensory sphere, where as a
‘viewer’ I become increasingly aware of how my reading and understanding
of a piece is not only constructed from the work, its artistic context or its
discursive or actual vicinity and association to other works, but is produced
also by the contingent circumstance of its experience conceived as the
invisible and formless capacity that gives the work its expanse and us the
crucible of a shared viewing. In sound, the gallery becomes an intensity
rather than an architectural structure. The acoustic environment is a viscid
connecting of materials, lights, sounds, works and people in co-production.
The space produced is contingent and temporary but persuasive through
the affective energy of its volume. Sound compels, it obliges. It puts into
contract and conversation everybody’s and everything’s contribution to a
current composition of a space. Thus it brings into view and experience the
interconnectedness and reciprocity of a generative listening: the agency of
experience as ‘inter-vention’ is an ‘inter-invention’ of what there is and of
what we are with it.
In Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), I discuss listening as the
invention of sound and describe auditory perception as a generative process
that does not recognize or receive but creates the heard from what is there
and even from what remains unheard. The volume as crucible, as test and
capacity of a shared experience enables me to reconsider the subject’s
responsibility and singularity in this process, and allows me to clarify the
invention of listening as an inter-invention: a generation of the world not
from an anthropocentric position but from the co-relational between-of-
things and from the between-of-subjects-as-things. Thus what could have
been read as self-centred fantasy, the generation of an auditory world for
me, gives access to the complexity of a contingent circumstance, whose
contingency is a contingency with others, people and things, to whom it
connects not through the self-certainty of authorship, but via the sensitivity
of co-relation and a fragile activity between what might sound and what it
might mean.
Sound as a concept invites us into the materiality of things, not to deny the
visual but to augment how we might see; and it transgresses the boundaries
between the object, the thing looked at, and the space and context of its
appreciation, introducing a sense of simultaneity instead of pre-existence,
and promoting the reading and experiencing of things as agitational,
interventionist, multisensory and capacious.
We do not inhabit a finished building but cohabit its production to
which we belong in the order of the material, the things that it is made
from. Architecture as sonic volume brings objects and subjects together
and brings to consciousness the agency and relevance of all things,
challenging an anthropocentric hierarchy and bias and the possibility of a
48
disconnected self. Instead, a non-anthropocentric reality becomes clarified

as ‘interactuality’: actuality produced contingently through the practice of
the in-between rather than the separation of things. Accordingly, ‘to exist
according to listening’ comes to suggest ‘interbeing’: a term borrowed from
Thich Nhat Hanh, whose concept derives from the practice of Buddhist
meditation and takes the word ‘to be’ as to ‘inter-be’ to acknowledge that
everything relates to everything else, and that there is no independent self
but that every ‘I’ and everything is made of non-‘I’, non-thing elements.5
While not adhering to the Buddhist context of his philosophy, I will be using
the notion of interbeing in relation to sound and listening to develop the
idea of intersubjectivity within the broader context of interactuality, and to
stress the perceptual focus on the in-between.
Interbeing enables the consideration of being according to listening
as a being together and a being of each other. It acknowledges that the
invisible embrace of sound highlights the co-being and interbeing of things
and makes thinkable, at least, a plural participation in the production of a
situation or circumstance, and it reminds us also of our responsibility in the
interpretation and valuation of that circumstance: our ethical position and
positioning as communicating agents in an interrelated sphere.6
This essay deliberates, via sound and listening, on our ethical participation
at the co-relational between-of-things. And engages the political possibility
of a practical and collective capacity and empowerment by discussing sonic
volumes, interactuality and interbeing in relation to Anywhen, a work by
Philippe Parreno. From there it finds a connection to the cosmopolitanism
of Martha Nussbaum and David Held, and the contemplation of human
frailty and doubt within the cosmopolitan project, explored via the writings
of Catherine Lu and Merleau-Ponty. The aim is to deliberate on the
contribution sound, a sonic sensibility and consciousness, can make to the
political possibilities of a globalized world.
Light
Anywhen (2016)
Phillipe Parreno’s Anywhen, produced in the context of the Hyundai
Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2016, is not an
installation in the sense of a work set up and played in an architectural
space. Instead it is lights, sounds, words and things exploiting the capacity
of the Turbine Hall to produce an invisible volume of their interrelation,
contradiction and reciprocation. The work expands beyond what can be
installed and what we would be able to capture in an installation shot. It
is not arranged in space, it has no boundaried spatiality, and it also has
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and takes no time. Or rather, it has all the time and all the space as it
produces them both in the in-between and the overlaps of their dimensions.
What happens in the Gallery relates to and is a consequence of what
happens outside, around the place and in other locations. As an Anywhen,
the Turbine Hall is not a limit or a form, but provides the opportunity
of connecting things and processes to produce the site as a capacity that
reaches beyond the measurability of its space and the finitude of its time
into the imagination of its possibility as volume.
As I walk down the broad ramp of the Turbine Hall, my first encounter
is with a large grey carpet, feeling soft and unexpected underfoot, and a
gaggle of children wrestling with an outsized silver balloon fish, fighting for
its release. Freedom finally achieved it ascends into the rafters, floating by a
row of square lamps going on and off in different patterns that answer the
square shapes of the Tate’s own windows and the light-box like structures
that protrude its wall on one side of the hall. On the lights’ rhythm I am
drawn into the building, beyond the concourse that straddles the work, to a
vast projection screen, where an aquatic landscape with underwater creatures
even bigger than the balloon fish that met me earlier, expand the world on the
carpet into a shared pool of light. In this light, the viewers – sitting, standing,
walking and lying on the soft surface – are embraced as co-inhabitants of the
volume of the work. Their movements are integrated into the large fishbowl
that apparently is a normal-sized fish tank located in Parreno’s studio, but that
here is blown-up and out of proportion, turned from its everyday existence of
a domestic aquarium into the production of an aquatic world.
The uncanny shape of big fish, the beauty and strangeness of their
overblown size on screen, their slow movement circumscribed by the
mass of water, corresponds with and amplifies the out-of-placeness of the
carpet and the languid passage of their balloon cousins into the netting
just below the beams of the Turbine Hall ceiling. Air filled and moving
upwards they reflect on their silvery scales the intensity of flat lights,
which start to enter into a rhythm that connects to the movement of the
white screens that enable the projection of the oversized fish and impact
on the sense of density and expanse experienced by those sitting on the
carpet, which stretches all the way to the back of the Turbine Hall with
its church-like tall and narrow windows, and provides the ground for a
different imagination and inhabiting of this place as conceptual capacity
and invisible volume rather than as architectural space. The carpet’s
softness invites children to turn wheels, groups of people to sit or lie
down, chatting, dreaming, eyes closed, eyes open, viewers talking, lovers
necking, looking at and being part of the work that is not a work but a
connecting of things that expands the dimensions of the actual Turbine
Hall and creates from between them the experience of another possibility
that has the capacity to reconfigure the real and the legitimacy to question
our responsibility within its definition.
50
From my position on the carpeted floor, lying on my back, I see three

oblong screens that hang horizontally and trapeze like under the high roof.
They descend at times to press on the volume of the hall and transform an
upwards view. Seven shorter squarer screens, one at the front and three
each side, hang vertically from the same construction and move, in equally
unpredictable frequency, to play with the lateral expanse and to build an
open room for the video projected at intervals. The movement of suspended
screens within this aquatic world, rather than producing the certainty of
walls and partitions, however, performs the temporary displacement of
invisible matter while revealing the indivisibility of its volume. The mobile
screens impact on my sense of capacity and viscitude, on how much air
there is to breathe, on how much space to move. The suspended walls are
sensible rather than visible, their movements are felt rather than seen, not
through their wallness, but through their displacement of invisible air. There
is something deliberately absurd about this attempt at dividing an invisible
volume with floating screens. It is as absurd as what is projected on the front
screen’s surface: a video of the ventriloquist Nina Conti with her dummy
standing mute within a recording of her own as well as her ventriloquized
voice, performing the absurdity of recording out of synch, a disconnected
voice that for its curiosity relies on connection and synchronicity.
The deliberate unconnecting, oversizing, carpeting and lighting transform
what the architecture, the space and the projection are and snap them out of
nominal proportions to become what they could be also. Taking things out
of scale and out of purpose the work makes us experience the norms and
habits of measure and its representation. Shifting and resizing encourages a
questioning of what things are in their cause and consequence, and provokes
a new imagination of what they could be: how to measure and how to
call them. So we might reconsider what can belong together and where we
might belong in relation to it all: whether I am a fish too, speechless, mute
swimming; or a ventriloquist, mouthing what comes from elsewhere; or a
balloon rising into the rafters to get stuck in a net.
The different elements – carpets, fish, voices, light and screens – are
drawn together in the soundtrack that makes their interbeing apparent and
accessible beyond visual associations. The ever-changing composition of
musical and everyday sounds, rhythms and white noise produces the volume
of Parreno’s aquatic world as a tangible sphere that expands beyond what
can be seen. It opens the invisible and indivisible dimension of the space to the
experience of its expanse and draws out the interactions and interagencies
of all there is to ring their interactuality: their actual possibility generated
through the practice of the in-between, the overlaps, the coincidences and
conflicts, which largely remain invisible but felt, and which make the place
a volume that uses the capacity of the Turbine Hall to make its own shape.
Above me hang six rows of sixteen loudspeakers, evenly spaced on thin
black leads. Despite this neat arrangement, I cannot source the soundtrack
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to this system as it is diffuse and everywhere, liberated from the structure

that enables it by the expansive capacity of its own sound, while the system
of its production, the ninety-six suspended speakers, are heard by the
creaking and squeaking of the mechanism that moves them up and down.
We are told Parreno has miked-up the building and the area between Tate
Modern and the river, and that the sounds we hear are at least partially
those from over there. But now they sound the over here as a place of
proximity and reciprocation rather than as a visual location and distance.
Wherever they are from, the sounds find no source or reality but create
their own. They connect the carpet to listening, the fish to my slowed down
movement and the ventriloquized body to my own voice, and trigger from
these connections our agency and behaviour: children dancing and playing,
adults lying on their backs expanding time, people sitting in meditative
out-time, chatting, dreaming; walking slowly on the unusual surface and
in a strange light.
In home improvement terms, it is the carpet that pulls the room together.
But here, the carpet is but the cypher that invites the leisure and pause needed
to hear the soundtrack that agitates and gives energy to the production
of the space as volume, as invisible crucible that holds and activates the
in-between. Listening, the visual impression of the large fish tank meets the
sonic sense of a honeyed existence and persuades us into a watery world
whose density resembles that of a sticky liquid with the capacity to grasp
us into its midst. The honey water binds us into the viscous volume that
slows our movements and words, amplifying their path rather than their
destination; derailing us away from aims and signification into the process
of meaning and meaninglessness.
It is the density of sound’s ‘aquatic’ volume that makes the exhibition
space thinkable as connections, influences and reciprocities. With every
move, each thing and subject agitates the viscous thickness that ‘holds’ it
all and that shows the being of our interactions as unseen undulations;
as ripples of immateriality through which we exist temporarily and
contingently not as ‘this’ or ‘that’ but as the agitation of the between-of-
things. The volume creates interactuality. It generates the reality of the real
not from the certainty of things apart, their signification and name, but from
their coincidence and encounter; outlining being as being together and from
each other rather than apart and as separate pieces; and producing closeness
and a tangible in-between.
At the very back of the Turbine Hall is a glass-fronted little room that we
cannot enter but only peer in to. Here are computers and bottles, measuring
devices, tubes and jars. The room operates as a mysterious bioreactor
installed by the scientists Jean-Baptiste Boulé and Nicolas Desprat. There are
apparently sensors on the roof of the Tate that relay to this laboratory the
outside measures of wind speed, humidity, temperature and other atmospheric
data, which in an unfathomable way connect to a pitcher of yeast that reacts
52
to changes in this information and influences the actions of the work. This
microorganism seemingly activates what happens in the gallery space: every
change of light, movement of screens and speakers, images played and
compositional decisions is apparently controlled by ‘micro-organisms that
control you.’7 This however appears like a red herring, or a metaphor and
invitation into a post-human world rather than a truth. It is not an untruth
however, but a possibility that holds the promise of a post-human fantasy.
It invites the imagination of the room as a sensitive automaton: a sensibility
machine that as apparatus, as dispositive, is, according to Parreno, ‘a half
organic, half mechanic and half digital kind of machine.’8
The laboratory, its intricate connections and mystical operations appear
like another element rather than the cause of the work. It carries a possibility
and thought, just like the carpet, the screens and the fish do, rather than
being the causality and engine that controls them. This does not diminish
its contribution to the actuality of the work’s possibility, however. In fact,
its fantasy of control permits us to desist a decoding of the logic of the
movements of screens and lights or of the changes in the soundtrack as
an artistic intention, and instead compels us to experience forcefully and
without a rationale their interrelation and conversation as actions that do
not represent but co-compose the volume of Anywhen.
The interactuality of the work as an anywhen of a generative, inter-
inventive capacity, makes the space of the Turbine Hall possible, as a
‘global’ space: a space that does not demarcate a site, but that is composed
of processes and relationships that expand beyond a certain territory, a
map or a floor plan, into a watery cosmos made from honey and sound.
At the same time, the narrative of a yeast-like cause permits us to consider
the authorship and dominance of this global interactuality beyond an
anthropocentric intentionality and guides us to appreciate that its causes
and consequences are experiential and without a purpose beyond their own
contingent connecting and making of an open and inter-inventing place.
This non-anthropocentric cosmos of reciprocal connecting provides an
expanded imagination of the Turbine Hall, itself a building and site that
explores the possible rather than the actual use of a Power Station. The
work restages, through invisible relationships, the warped proportions of
architecture and ideologies and creates interrelations between screens and
walls, the stable and the mobile, dark footage and flashing lamps, fish,
balloon fish and videoed fish, to come to the possibility of their interactuality.
This possibility includes the interactuality of my own subjectivity: who
I am as an ‘I’ made of other ‘I’s and of other things. I am among others on
the carpet, in an interactuality caused apparently by yeast but made sensible
most strongly by light, sounds and carpet fibres. I am acutely aware not only
of the work but also of others experiencing the work with me. The carpet
permits and enhances the engagement in the shared viscosity that the sound
makes accessible as an invisible cosmos and that the notion of a honeyed
‘waterworld’ makes articulable as a possible thought.
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The invisible intensity of sound creates the clammy and slowed down
reciprocity that honey established and water recalls. Listening we gain access
and the ability to grasp the complex connections and processes that the
automaton machine creates without having to distil and separate its actions
and materialities but from their co-production exactly. This co-production
involves the shared and reciprocal production of ourselves. The sound and
the carpet hold us in a space where we co-inhabit and co-produce the work
and the architecture as an indivisible volume. In this undividable dimension,
the audience is not consisting of independent selves but as interbeings bound
into the processes of its built and existing according to listening as selves
and things made of non-selves and non-things. Thus, strange and familiar
elements produce each other in the rhythm of lights, the growing of yeast
and our breathing in and out together in the density of water as within a
social sphere that is contingent, mobile and inexhaustible.
Words
The New Sound Meditation (1989)
Listen
During any one breath
Make a sound
Breathe
Listen outwardly for a sound
Breathe
Make exactly the sound that someone else has made
Breathe
Listen inwardly
Breathe
Make a new sound that no one else has made
Breathe
Continue this cycle until there are no more new sounds.
Pauline Oliveros®9
Sonic cosmopolitanism
‘Not only are we “unavoidably side by side” (as Kant put it), but the degrees
of mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability are steadily growing.’10 The
interbeing and co-habitation that a sonic volume brings to the fore and invites
us into, chime with the contemporary discourse on cosmopolitanism: the
54
political, institutional and ethical focus on global inter-connectedness,

where the notion of ‘a small world’ does not refer to its fictional status, but
to ‘the idea that events, peoples, climates, economic systems and cultural
life-worlds in one part of the world have bearing, meaning, and impact on
places and people in other parts of the world’.11 Cosmopolitan thinking is
invested in these interconnections as a source for the conceptualization of
common structures, universal values and practices, to find potential solutions
to global problems such as migration, war, climate change, exploitation of
labour, and so on. It talks of interconnected and overlapping communities
to try and theories a world not divided into nation states, as oppositional
forces, but lived-in as in a collaborative sphere, a cosmos that can sustain
humanity and the sharing of our planet.
The imagination of the world as cosmos is not new. Martha Nussbaum
traces a contemporary cosmopolitanism back to as early as the Stoics,
who according to her followed Diogenes the Cynic in his assertion that
rather than a citizen of the polis, of the city-state, he was a ‘citizen of the
world’. Developing his stance the Stoics’ philosophy articulates the world
as universal sphere of justice and rights, and suggests that humans reside in
two communities: that of birth and our physical belonging, and that of ‘the
community of human argument and aspiration’.12 In this view, the place of
birth becomes an accident, a sheer coincidence of fate, which is, however, not
dismissed as irrelevant, but whose incidentality demonstrates the potential
of its substitution and thus reminds us of the greater field of humanity as a
place we belong to through a ‘moral duty’ towards each other.
Political, economic and ecological forces of globalization give this
historical cosmopolitanism a current context and relevance. With global
market forces determining local economic and political decisions, with the
closeness of a smaller world impressing the responsibility of local actions
into a global sphere and bringing global actions to local consequences, the
idea of a retreat into the comfort of a self-determined sovereignty seems
ever less of an option. Instead the need for a connected and connecting
imagination of identity and sociopolitical agency becomes apparent.
Consequently, contemporary cosmopolitanism foregrounds a concern
with every human being and promotes the will and provides the context
to work from the incident of birth into a contingent world that is shaped
by the fluidity of markets, wars, climate change and migration, whose
global influence and reality cannot be reversed but needs to be responded to
through the re-imagination of what we have in common and a re-invention
of how we could act together in a shared and global world. Such a project
overcomes the dichotomy between free transborder movement of goods and
finance, climate and war, and the restrictions on movements of bodies and
the fixed limits of identity and social belonging, and imagines the social
and political possibilities of connecting and being together in an equivalent
project of global empowerment.
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For David Held the enemies of the nation-state are not other states, a
dialectic and rationality, which encouraged the constitution of the nation-
state from a consciousness of territory and conflict, but ‘failed-states’ and
‘non-state actors’ who cannot be fought off with traditional methods of
state-on-state warfare but demand a collective and less territorial but global
effort of intervention.13 Equally the financial and ecological threats facing
us today have cross state causes and consequences that cannot be dealt with
by one state alone or in limited ‘trading blocks’ and inter-state affiliations.
Motivated by this reality, Held proposes a cosmopolitan approach based
on the autonomy of each person as a moral agent who exists within local
affiliations and is willing and able to contribute in a collective political
enterprise.14 Cosmopolitanism thus sketched out is a political and a moral
project that answers the social, economic, ecological and ethical problems of
a divided world by considering its indivisibility, and that replaces the comfort
and passive nature of national identity with a demand to participate, to be
involved in the reality of both communities: that of one’s birth, what we
are as separate identities, and that of ‘human argument and aspiration’, of
what we want to be together. In the following it becomes apparent that the
two communities are entirely interlinked, they inter-are, since the identity
of birth is itself not a natural state but a naturalized identity deformed and
dominated by the conceptions of how we are together, which in turn and
inevitably is determined by the powers at play in forming this naturalized
identity of birth in the context of what Held terms the general ‘asymmetry
of the world’:15 the unequal distribution of life-chances in respect to access
to education, healthcare, food and housing, and so on, which he terms
‘entitlement capacities’ that enable or disable the possibilities of political
participation and present a requirement and form the basis of an equal
interconnectedness.16
In relation to this it is interesting to note that one criticism of
cosmopolitanism is the elitism of its historical origin. The fact that the
humanist brotherhood aspired to by the Stoics is a very exclusive club: a
cosmos of upper class, educated and free males, which in many ways
resembles a contemporary global elite. Hence the argument could be made
that the cosmos thus envisaged as a sociopolitical possibility has always
been an actuality for those who share in a common humanity of their
own devising comprised of money, property, influence and the control
of women, children and lesser males, and whose morality might not be
virtuous but is legitimized and protected by a judiciary fashioned in their
own image. However, rather than dismiss the cosmopolitan project on this
basis, it is exactly because of the unhindered ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the rich,
of finance and of multinational corporations, that a reconsideration of
its concept beyond their limited number and on a more sensorial footing
gains in relevance today. If the powers that control our national identity
have the fluidity of global finance and multinational trading that lack
56
local accountability, morality and engagement, and if its consequences are

the exploitation of labour, an inability to address climate change, forced
migration, poverty and Held’s asymmetrical world, our fixed patriotic
positions do not seem to serve us too well in opposing them and turning
‘nautonomy’: the lack of equal participation, into the ‘autonomy’ of shared
political empowerment and agency as ‘the basis of non-coercive collective
agreement and governance’.17
Within a fluid global context, entrenched positions can only ever help to
pitch the regulations that aim to provide ecological safeguards, economic
balances and rules of law within one nation-state against those of another,
while leaving those operating beyond their shores and field of influence free to
exploit and use their differences. This is why I accept Diogenes’s invitation ‘to
be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our
own ways of life from the point of view of justice and the good’.18 In order to,
in other words, give ourselves a conceptual and actual position in the global
sphere, which does not deny the significance of birth and belonging but is not
entrenched in the expectations of a national identity; that shows us ourselves
as entwined with the world and gives us a view on the conventions, habits
and norms that inform our actions, so we can reframe them through inter-
actions that can reach into the globality that controls the local and make
another noise. This stance acknowledges the inevitability of my locality but
appreciates the global influence of its construction. It answers the asymmetries
between states and individuals by offering a new critical vocabulary and
consciousness which takes into account and is aware of the danger of an
idealist cosmopolitanism that presumes equal participation on an uneven
playing field, and it eschews a realist cosmopolitanism that makes its viability
dependent on institutional possibilities. Thus the cosmopolitan project I aim
to promote through sound does not ignore the identity of birth, which might
be incidental but has concrete consequences. Instead it understands those
very consequences as the reason to urge participation in a global field to
show its asymmetries and inequalities and make its terrain more evenly
accessible to all. Additionally it does not focus on the institutional realities
of a cosmopolitan democracy, but aims to make thinkable a materialist
and aesthetic cosmopolitanism that articulates a contingent and boundless
practice and consciousness rather than outcomes and particular methods.
To this end I argue that a sonic sensibility encourages the position of
a ‘local cosmopolitanism’, a cosmopolitanism from the ground up as it
were, that connects the world from my individual position, where ever that
might be, without recourse to a certain identity or intention of a colonial
charge but as an outward reach to seek contingent sense and value in the
between-of-things. This local cosmopolitanism finds articulation and a
practice in listening and sounding as a process of negotiating and inventing
the in-between, the invisible connecting that is not ‘this’ or ‘that’, as things
defined against each other, a matter of differences and similarities but is the
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moment of coincidence and of inter-invention: where what the world, the

thing and the subject are is generated in their interaction that produces
the possibility of their interactuality as a contingent reality with little
recourse to habits and certainties, built instead from the generative capacity
of the world and our capacity to participate in its production: from our
locality on the invisible index of sound. In this way, listening and sounding
bring to cosmopolitanism their insistence on the locale, the private life-
world as a contingent place of habitation and engagement, and promote
a phenomenological interbeing in the world as the negotiation of these
life-worlds. In this sense listening and sounding suspend what things are
separately and a priori, and focus on what they are together at the moment
of their sonic encounter. This sonic practice at the interbeing of things
provides doubt and uncertainty in the identity and recognition of their
autonomous definition and that of the listener: allowing me to question
myself and my own sounding-listening: finding in the heard the between-
of-things, and gaining what Catherine Lu terms the ‘recognition of their
inherent complexity and permanent state of inner doubt and contestation
rather than harmony’.19
Just as in Parreno’s work strange and familiar elements produce each
other in a mobile and invisible bind, so too the cosmopolitan imagination
enables the co-production of the familiar and the unknown through
their complex inter-agency, at once conflictual, playful and consensual.
The indivisibility of a sonic volume presents a model for a cosmopolitan
imagination. Listening to Anywhen allows us to imagine our co-habitation
of a mobile and connected world. The carpet, fish, voices, light and screens
are drawn together in the soundtrack that makes their interbeing apparent
and accessible beyond visual associations and separate identifications in the
invisible stretch of a sonic-between. In this conception they are not separate
elements of an installation but building blocks of the cosmos of the work
that as a form remains in doubt and as a content carries the contestation
of its material. The elementality of each building block, its ‘local’ identity
and source, is thereby not erased. To the contrary, the local is revealed and
realized not as a transcendental referent, but in its contingent complexity
through the contact and exchange with another. In this encounter, the fish
do not have to remain fish according to a pregiven conception, the carpet
does not have to limit itself to its defined self and purpose, the voices seize to
ventriloquize and become their own sound, and the yeast becomes a parable
and tool for the possibility of their interaction and the imagination of a
‘collective enterprise’.
The work according to listening brings into focus its interactuality
and enables the imagination of the interactuality of the world. It brings
our existence as interbeings, our self as selves with others and with other
things, to the practice of an ‘aesthetic of interconnectedness’ and makes its
possibility accessible to a social and political imagination. Thus it contributes
58
the participatory and generative ethics of listening to the condition of a

cosmopolitan politics as a political possibility of sound.
Sound, as sonic material and sensibility, produces the political possibility of
co-habitation and interactuality that makes thinkable the interconnectedness
of the world as an invisible and mobile in-between, and makes audible ‘the
asymmetrical production and distribution of life-chances which limit and
erode the possibilities of political participation’.20 Thus it offers the capacity
for their re-imagination in a shared cosmos.
Hearing the in-between we become aware of the asymmetries of the
world: what voices are heard, what accents dominate its landscape, what
interests are represented in its soundscape and what in turn remains
inaudible, unable to make itself count, silenced, muted even and ignored.
In this sense, the silence of the inaudible is not a material but a political
privation, which at least as concept is accessible. The inaudible creates no
in-between but throws back at us our own echo, whose empty reverb should
alert us to the fact that something remains unheard and should trigger a
more earnest and curious listening out for an absent sound.
The virtuosity of listening is then not its skill, hearing the right thing,
but its willingness to listen beyond the expected to hear what we might not
know could sound. It is an ethics of participation that connects the actuality
of sound and the impossibility of the unsound and appreciates their equal
possibility in the multilayered sphere of the in-between.
Engaging with the invisible in-between, sonic cosmopolitanism responds
to the asymmetries that hinder a true collective enterprise and disable its
imagination, and makes appreciable the force and the possibility of a shared
cosmos. In this sense, ‘sonic cosmopolitanism’ is a political and ethical
project that brings the power of listening to the conditions of politics via
the non-sense21 of the sensorial encounter. Its sensate sense accesses the
invisible dynamics of a global force and influence in the between-of-things
and makes imaginable the audition of other connections: connecting
the global not through finance, dominance and control, but from the
contingent locale of listening and the continuous practice of expanding
one’s ears.
The worn cotton sheets of our little beds had the blurred texture of silk
crêpe and when we lay against them in the evening we’d rub, rhythmically,
one foot against the soothing folds of fabric waiting for sleep. That way
we slowly wore through the thinning cloth. Our feet would get tangled
in the fretted gap.
We walked through soft arcade. We became an architect.
The knitted cap on the wrinkled skull of the mewling kids is the first
boundary. At the other tip the bootie dribbles. There are curious histories
of shrouds. That is not all. Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor
theatrical but soft . . .
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. . . Soft architecture will reverse the wrongheaded story of structural

deepness. That institution is all doors but no entrances.22
Conclusion: Listening education
One of Nussbaum’s key concerns in relation to cosmopolitanism is
education. She remarks on the irrationality of teaching only from a singular
point of view, which in her opinion, confirms ‘the unexamined feeling that
one’s own preferences and ways are neutral and natural’ and thus endorses
rather than questions the geography of the world drawn in lines of national
boundaries and cultural divisions that validate visually and permanently
accidental and contingent turns of history and apportion them ‘weight
and unshakeable validity’.23 Her emphasis on a civic education that takes
account of and shows the interconnections rather than the separations of
nations and cultures, promotes learning about the other from their point
of view, their geography and history, as well as their culture so ‘we may be
capable of respecting their traditions and commitments’.24
While agreeing with Nussbaum’s preference for a globalized teaching of
geography and a cultural studies that breaches national boundaries, I feel
myself rejecting her model as it retains the idea of a certain knowledge to
be learnt, and preserves the stability of the identity of the pupil and its
subject, which by necessity and unavoidably remains his subject. In its
stead or additionally, I propose a teaching that does not rely on the shared
foundations of a historico-geographical world, but delves into the shared
contingency of its existence according to listening, where the secret that is
at stake might be an understanding of the world as an invisible network
of contingent and mobile connections that defy geographical mapping and
historical canonization altogether and instead follow lines of doubt and
uncertainty into the temporal negotiation of its indivisibility and our fragile
selves.
Listening has an exploratory capacity that does not seek to know
about the world but approaches learning as a practice, as a physical and
continuous effort to understand momentarily and always again how to
live in the between-of-things. Its aim is not to know definitively, but to
engage through doubt in a temporary and sensorial knowing. A listening
education makes a call for a contingent literacy of the in-between, to
read the invisible patterns and tensions between things, to hear their
connecting and gain the ability to understand, act and articulate the world
as an indivisible and mobile sphere. However, listening we do not read.
Its literacy is not that of a visual language, but of a diffuse and invisible
materiality performed contingently and demanding reciprocation, and
thus the comparison fails to convey the particularity of its process and can
only hint at its location.
60
The ability to perceive the world created in the invisible patterns, tensions
and dynamics between things, and to ‘read’ their connecting, presents a
great advantage in a globalized world whose real dominant is finance and
whose real threat is climate change, neither of which is held by borders
and lines on a map, but moves freely while creating the lines of our fixed
abodes. Contemporary forces of globalization are rarely locatable within
the consciousness of a conventional visuality. To grasp their power and
influence and effect our perception not as a reception but as an interaction
and agency, a different access is needed. This is an access into the force
of connecting that drives a global production, and affords us the view of
its mechanisms and consequences, which makes an inter-invention at least
thinkable. A sonic education as an aerobics of the exploratory capacity
of the invisible, and as a literacy of the in-between aspires this access and
generates social knowledge as a knowledge of interbeing, whose collectivity
presents a political practice for a globalized world.
I do not focus on the fish, or the carpet or the lights, but perceive, in a
conceptual and actual listening, their interactions, which create the space
of the Turbine Hall as a volume, as an indivisible and expansive sphere,
that as capacity enables my perception as an inter-invention of all I see in
its aquatic light without offering recourse to a referent or an a priori sense.
Soundwalks, listening exercises, sonic meditations, and so on, eschew the
source, the border and the line, and hear the process and the encounter
instead. They practice not a different knowledge but a different path to
knowledge, where, as in Parreno’s work, the ‘honeyed’ water grasps us into
the volume and slows our movements and words, amplifying their path
rather than their destination; derailing us away from aims and signification
into the process of meaning; and bringing awareness to our interbeing, our
way of being as being together and from each other rather than apart and
different.
Engaging in the world through movements of connecting and taking
apart of things that are not separate elements but building blocks of a
common sphere – screens and speakers, lights and balloons, yeast and
carpets – building between them the cosmos of the work, I practice its
processes and interdependencies and come to understand the work
through these movements rather than its things. However doubtful and
uncertain the knowledge thus produced, this engagement places me in
a better position to think and act in a global world. It enables me to
articulate and respond to the influences and consequences of its forces
on my locale from my own mobile positioning. In this regard, listening
is a radical educational element in the realization of cosmopolitanism’s
political possibility. It avoids not only the a priori and the bias of seemingly
neutral or natural knowledge, but also its replacement with another’s fixed
definition and presents a practical way into the world as an indivisible
volume instead.
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This exploration of the world as volume is always also an exploration

of my own expanse, my own habits and prejudices, power and influence or
marginality, exposed in the shape of the absent and reframed as invisible
interbeing. Listening as a locational practice, even of recorded sound, will
always carry with it my own fragile and doubtful reality, from which it
negotiates a collective knowing of the invisible and mobile between of the
heard. In this sense, the teaching of listening as a cosmopolitan sensibility
and practice does not instruct and train a listening to the other as separate
other, to learn about their geography and history, which remain our
concepts of knowledge, but promotes a social knowing from our inhabiting
of a common terrain that is complex and uneven, so we might hear in a
common expanse the uncertain and fragile interactuality of the real and the
asymmetry of our relationship with it.
Lu remarks on the unsurprising fact that the earliest cosmopolitans were
medical writers who did not focus on the dominance of humans in a global
network but commented on ‘the physical and mental frailties of the human
body and mind’. With reference to Shakespeare’s dramatic identification
of the human essence as dust, she suggests that ‘the unity of humankind
consists in this common human condition: a wretched, feeble and pitiable
existence, marked by uncertainty, insecurity and eventually death’.25 I see in
this frailty and doubt not cause for despair but the beginning of an ethical
participation in the volume of the world, which appreciates the limitations
of the listener’s locale and at the same time invests this knowledge not to
retreat into its location but to practice its connection to the world. In this
context, the ‘I’ is not itself only but is only itself. From the consciousness
of this intractable limitation, I seek connections to the possibility of others
and other things on the uneven plateau of a precarious and finite existence
without meaning to find them, but to engage nevertheless in the process of
searching as an ethical process of communality.
It is from this insight and acknowledgement of our own uncertain
existence as an existence in the world that I can bring the phenomenological
doubt of Merleau-Ponty to the cosmopolitan project so we might
understand the negotiations of the cosmos as the practice of intersubjective
doubt developed into a notion of ‘interbeing doubt’, where the reciprocity of
perception extends beyond human agency into the agency of colour, shape,
forms and things, and where the between is acknowledged to lay beyond
vision in the sphere of their invisible connection that generates them in their
possibility: ‘Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the
tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part
is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency and a flesh of things.’26 Merleau-
Ponty finds this ‘new tissue’ and ‘flesh of things’ through the suspension of the
relationship between knowledge and its object, which he suggests ‘contains
neither the whole nor even the essential of our commerce with the world’.27
Instead he urges us to place the expected and undisputed link between
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knowledge and the known in a more muted relationship with the world,
to reconsider our faith in their natural connection and to question their
dominant and singular position in relation to reason and truth. I understand
him to propose the bringing into play of other possible absences, other
in-betweens, which force an a priori knowledge to relinquish its status as
the only possible truth, and allow other connections, other interbeings to
bring about a different imagination. This effort is what he calls within the
idea of the ouverture au monde, a practical and applied openness to the
world through the reconsideration of the relationship between knowing and
its object, which enables the ‘finding anew’ as the exploratory capacity of
the in-between.28 This openness suspends the known as a naturalized and
naturalizing practice of the a priori and challenges the illusion of absolute,
geographical, historical, and so on, knowledge in favour of an interrogation
of reflection by experience, based on a centrifugal and thus a quasi-
cosmopolitan being in the world. In this way, we are invited to question not
only the content but also the categories and conditions of knowledge and
the processes that interpret and translate it into a social truth.
While Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea of an intermonde, the intermundane
space, ‘where our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap’, he does so
because he rejects it as an a priori existence and possibility, not however as
the possibility of an exploratory and intersubjective practice of perception
performed through the suspension of normative knowledge relations and
the doubt in perceptual faith.29 The elaborated world he wants to take us
to, through the intertwining of our lives with each other and with things,
can contribute distrust in the a priori and doubt in perceptual faith to
the cosmopolitan project, which in turn can open the world to connect
beyond borders in a global sphere without already knowing it and without
neglecting the locality of the private life-world from which every present
knowledge comes to be built. Thus I take from his philosophy the doubt
and the suspension of truth and read them within a sonic ouverture au
monde, which promises to hear the connection between all things so we
might experience and bring into the realm of knowledge the tissue that lines
and nourishes all.
My access to a universal mind via reflection, far from finally discovering

what I always was, is motivated by the intertwining of my life with the
other lives, of my body with the visible things, by the intersection of my
perceptual field with that of the others, by the blending in of my duration
with the other durations.30
I sit on the grey carpet, listening. I am part of the work and perceiving it.
I experience it from my private life-world that is unavoidably connected with
the life-worlds of others sitting, playing, necking and dozing on a greyness
that seems like the concrete floor beneath but gives its built a different sense,
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putting into doubt my first impression and giving me a different view, but
holding within this carpet still the relationship to the floor beneath on which
as a fragile surface our life-worlds meet in interbeing.
Listening brings a phenomenological approach to cosmopolitanism,
whereby its method of reduction, the suspension of habits of perception
and the promotion of doubt in a naturalized reading of the world, taking
the perceived out of context and reference, does not stand in contradiction
to a cosmopolitan aim of outwards connecting. To the contrary, the
reconsideration of the thing as a sonic thing through an epoché, the
bracketing off of what it means a priori and as referenced source, enables
the cosmopolitan drive towards a new connecting, overlapping and sharing
of meaning and terrain. Once the fish does not sound as fish but as concrete
material, the focus of my audition is not on its a priori fishness but on its
temporal connecting, what it is with others rather than as fish. This is not
to deny specificity, particular needs and claims, or to override the voice of
the other, the unknown, the silenced and the unheard, but to acknowledge
the politics of specificity: the narrative and the objectives through which
something attained its particular role and definition, which carries the cause
and consequence of a current need and claim.31 Consequently, it is through
the re-imagination of the ‘how’ of description and delineation and from the
indivisible and concrete sphere of sound that other narratives and definitions
become thinkable and gain a voice.
To hear the fish as a concrete sound I hear them as an equal part in a
shared and viscous space where they can be what they are contingently and
make their own claim in the world. The bracketing off of the fish from its
source ensures that in our encounter we do not discover ‘what it and what
I were all along’, but what we inter are in our encounter, so we might hear
our autonomy, nautonomy, asymmetry or even our silence and inaudibility
in the particular circumstance of our meeting and become able to access and
articulate the dynamic rather than the outline of this specificity.
This articulation is importantly not a speaking on behalf of the other.
It is not a ventriloquism that focuses on synchronicity and the curiosity of
having a dummy speak. Rather, it is about the amplification of the unheard,
the invisible and the incoherent, not through the referent that calls it, but
from the concrete sound of its own voice. A sonic cosmopolitanism is not a
speaking for but a hearing of. It practices a listening out not for the signifiers
and the references of the other, whose meaning will inevitably be read within
the criteria of the self but focuses on our meeting in the viscous expanse of
sound where we are indivisibly together and negotiate what that makes us
both contingently.
The alienation that we experience when we see Nina Conti, not moving
her lips, nor those of her puppet, and yet the sound of their voices filling
the space of the Turbine Hall, resembles the alienation that occurs ‘when
one’s self-definition clashes with the way one is defined or categorized
64
within the larger society’.32 Her act and her voice are commandeered by the
audiovisual recording that speaks for her and for the dummy. Their sounds
are ventriloquized by the construct of the video. The fact that they are a
ventriloquist act ironically emphasis the hijacking of their voices. Sitting in
front of their oversized projection on screen I contemplate their gaze as they
listen to their own voices that come back at them, defined and deformed by
the playback system of the auditorium that is not that of the theatre they
are in, but that of the Turbine Hall I am in. The voice off-screen confronts
the viewer as listener with the absurdity of the displacement implicit in a
priori definition: the camera, as ideological apparatus, speaking in their
stead. Thus the dubbed representation of the ventriloquist act of stage craft,
heard within Parreno’s work as volume, makes available for contemplation
the defining processes of a nominal reality and identity and provides the
condition for a different imagination that includes the possible and even the
as yet impossible voice. Within the concrete expanse of Anywhen I practice
listening as a sensory-motor ouverture au monde, which finds contingent
meanings in connecting and hears the voice that is not heard rather than
speaking for it.
This is a listening practice that hears the in-between and does not only
listen to what is audible but lends its ear also to the inaudible, which often
does not lack in decibels, in sonic intensity, but in the ability to be heard
and counted among what makes a valid sound. This as yet inaudible is
accessed by an education that expands hearing beyond what seems audible,
what is legitimate and conforms to expectation, and that hears in silence
not the lack of sound but the echo of the unheard. It appreciates the need
to participate and connect if I want to make my local identity count and
invest my ‘individual agency into collective political enterprises’,33 and it
pursues doubt in preconceptions and a priori definitions to hear not only the
dominant but ‘the whole of our commerce with the world’.34
This outlines a phenomenological cosmopolitanism founded on the
interbeing of life-worlds where the local, the personally significant, is not
abandoned as a source for authentication but becomes the engine for living
with others, and where the sensate sense of the in-between provides the
basis for considering the real as the shared capacity for doubt, unreason and
non-sense. It does not practice what we know to be true but what is possible
to be real, and generates from that the volume of a present actuality.
Accordingly, a listening education, as I am proposing it here, teaches
a focus on sensate sense. It is not rational or realist but possibilist
and phenomenological: it creates unities of doubt that are practiced
contingently in the interbeing of our lives and of things and expand the
reality of our world into the possibility of its indivisible volume. This
unity of doubt stands in contrast to Immanuel Kant’s unity of rationality,
which drives the Greek notion of cosmopolitanism into an Enlightenment
age.35 Kant’s philosophy is according to Nussbaum, ‘a profound defense
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of cosmopolitan values’, and brings a reformist, optimistic and truly

universalist pronouncement to a modern discussion of the common.36
However, Kant’s cosmopolitanism is not based on a unity of practical
materiality and sense but on a shared rationality that finds it universality
in the laws of nature from where he pursues the ideal ‘of a kingdom of
free rational beings’.37 Consequently, while he writes about a common
participation in law, hinting at a participatory drive, which makes his
philosophy interesting in relation to a sonic cosmopolitanism, the reliance
on the laws of nature compromise the contingency of this participation.
The notion of the laws of nature that guide his cosmopolitanism are
developed through the extension and critique of the laws of god, which
recasts humanism as a monotheism that does not see the neutralization of
its own stance, but takes it as a given and that does not take account of
the ideology and exclusivity of its singular point of view, but pretends, by
appealing to a humanist brotherhood, that the universality and accessibility
of its position is mutual and equal.
Kant stresses that the community of all human being in reason entails a
common participation in law (ius), and, by our very rational existence,
a common participation in a virtual polity, a cosmopolis that has an
implicit structure of claims and obligations regardless of whether or not
there is an actual political organization in place to promote and vindicate
these.38
Thus while I recognize the radical reformist drive towards a modern

cosmopolitanism as the basis for lasting peace in global togetherness,
I reject its basis in a shared rationality since it feeds the illusion of universal
thought, of borders, lines, divisions and separations while pretending we
share in their negotiation equally.
This difference between a doubtful cosmos and the unity of reason to me
is epitomized in the contrast between Seneca’s claim, quoted in Nussbaum,
to ‘measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun’, and Nussbaum’s
rephrasing that ‘the air does not obey national borders’.39 The first presents
a scopic ideology that sees clear outlines and ownership and seeks to expand
them into its own universals, while the latter practices the transgressive
material of the ephemeral that cannot be measured but is felt on the feeble
surface of one’s own formless form that is local but connects into the
possibility of a shared cosmos.
Kant develops the mainly moral ideas of the Stoics via the notion of a
shared rationality.40 By contrast, I understand phenomenology to be able to
contribute to a practical interpretation and performance of cosmopolitanism
via the sensate sense of the invisible, the ephemeral the fleeting and even the
unheard. The possibility of a sonic cosmpolitanism is thus not a contradiction
of universality but provides a generative critique and expansion of its
66
principles and their ideological investment and naturalizing tendencies in

reason. Listening pursues the universal and the shared not as a foundation
but as a contingency of fragile and uncertain subjects and things that do not
move with the agency of a single body but the agitation and inter-invention
of an anxious plurality stirring within a connected and interdependent
sphere. This allows for a political imagination beyond nationalism and the
sovereign nation-state and without a priori identification of shared reason,
or the colonialization, oppression and domination within a shared goal.
Accordingly, a sonic cosmopolitanism does not practice a multiculturalism
that is the adaption of plurality into one, hearing one voice, but the meeting
of plural voices in an invisible, fleeting and uneven volume. Thus a sonico-
phenomenological cosmopolitanism founded on the interbeing of private
life-worlds practices the doubt of the in-between and explores an alternative
conception of the world from the patterns, tensions and dynamics between
things, and ‘reads’ their invisible connecting rather than the visual outline
of objects.
What I promote then is not thinking beyond boundaries but without
boundaries through the practice of being together in the volume of the
‘air’ of sound. Listening can provide one method for this practice, to attain
and retain a focus of the processes of interconnection, to put into doubt
the naturalized how of things, and to use this doubt as the engine for
an affective volume within which we explore our intersubjectivity as an
interbeing that via Nhat Hanh develops the ‘moral duty’ of cosmopolitanism
into a ‘participatory ethics’, and that extends the experiential reciprocity of
listening to all human beings to incorporate a duty towards and reciprocity
with all things. The suggestion is that ethics as a participatory and contingent
production in sound contributes to the critique and re-definition of the
moral duty of a historical cosmopolitanism. Instead of referring rationality
to natural laws and produce a ‘kingdom of (moral) ends’, the aquatic world
of sound’s cosmopolitanism generates a world citizenship in a shared and
ephemeral volume without reason or a moral ground. Thus it critiques
historical cosmopolitanism’s foundationalist stance and dialectical drive,
and serves to highlight the cause of its asymmetries while providing the
condition to rethink them through ethics as action that includes what might
seem irrational such as fish swimming in air and yeast deciding my playlist.
This is an anti-foundationalist practice that finds meaning as signifying,
a process that cannot be completed in a finalistic sense but remains on
trial. The focus is not on results, but on the sustained attitude of doubt and
the desire for connecting as making sense. Therefore, the aim of a sonic
cosmopolitanism, in as far as it has an aim at all, is not to suggest how
each country, region or culture should become cosmopolitan. This is not
a project of democratic politics and realization, nor is it about dominance
and hegemony, an imposition of political institutions or governmental rules.
Rather it is an aesthetic and material project of connecting, co-habiting
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and interbeing that arises from particular and local forms. It practices its
co-relating with others and illuminates what we are together rather than
how to remain apart. Sound makes visible, tangible and articulable the
cosmopolitan idea, not as a firm democratic strategy and not as a utopian
ideal, or in opposition to the idealism of the nation-state, but as an ‘attitude
of mind’: as an appreciation of the world in its voluminous complexity and
interdependency.41 Not to suggest what the world should become, but to
understand that it already is cosmopolitan; to comprehend its cosmos and
to practice, to live and act, interact and agitate within this connected sphere.
A sonic cosmopolitanism in this sense is neither realist nor idealist, it does
not presume an utopian global community and it has no concrete political,
institutional or social strategies or outcomes. Instead it is an aesthetic and
material consciousness that makes accessible the world as volume, as a sphere
of interbeing, which, as concept and sensibility, contributes to the political
imagination of shared resources and possibility, without defining its values
or aims. In this sense cosmopolitanism is a sonic enterprise through which
the material realizes and holds political intent and invites a participation in
its possibility.
PS: Soundwalking
One of the conclusions reached through the soundwalks was that every
curator should do soundwalks in the space or on the site or the non-sites they
are curating at, in order for them not to curate places and things, artefacts,
objects and relationships, but volumes: the invisible and ephemeral expanse
that realizes the capacity of the work, its possibility and our possibility to
experience it through our interbeing. To this conclusion I would like to add
that the gallery visitor too needs to practice listening and sounding in the
exhibition space, in order to hear in its diffuse volume the permeating and
expansive indivisibility of the work extend into the expansive indivisibility
of a world that defies the possibility of separation, collecting, naming and
seeing of things, in favour of experience as creating the generative capacity
of a shared sphere from the co-relational between-of-things.
Notes
1 Philippe Parreno in Tate Modern video interview, http://www.tate.org.uk/
whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/hyundai-commission/philippe-parreno-
anywhen (accessed 24 April 2017).
2 This is an excerpt of one of the soundwalk scores, produced for the MA
Sound Arts Students, London College of Communication in 2012. This project
can be read about in more detail in the essay ‘Soundwalking the Museum: A
68
Sonic Journey through the Visual Display’, in The Multisensory Museum,

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space,
Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone (eds), Plymouth, UK: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2014, pp. 119–30.
3 In Listening to Noise and Silence I discuss Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
association of the complex unity of perception with the act of being honeyed to
articulate the reciprocity of being in sound:
Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain
consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the
fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it
has been given a particular shape, and what is more, it reverses the roles,
by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it.
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, London and
New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 41.)
4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, p. 5.
5 ‘Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word
inter-be should be in the dictionary. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by
yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is
because everything else is’ (Thich Nhat Hanh, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, ed.
Melvin McLeod, Boston and London: Shambhala Pocket Classics, 2012, p. 57).
6 My focus on ‘ethics’, rather than on ‘morality’, and the reference to both these
two terms throughout this essay signals not their presumed equivalence but is
a deliberate stance, outlining the participatory and contingent ethics of a sonic
cosmopolitanism, against a morality of natural laws and as moral duty that is
outlined in a historical cosmopolitanism.
7 Parreno, Tate Modern video interview.
8 Ibid.
9 Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening a Composer’s Sound Practice, Lincoln,
NE: iUniverse, 2005, p. 44. Published with permission of The Pauline Oliveros
Trust paulineoliveros.us.
10 David Held, Cosmopolitanism, Ideals and Realities, Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2010, p. 39.
11 Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader,
Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010, p. 1.
12 Martha Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in The Cosmopolitan
Reader, Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds), Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2010, p. 157.
13 In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of History, the engine of
history is identified as the dialectical conflict between Freedom and Necessity.
In its drive, individual communities, or later nation states, develop their
independence and freedom through a circular violence of conflict, subjugation,
conquered territory and further conflict. The individual too is subjugated
to the state, which is ‘the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth’ (G. W. F. Hegel,
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Philosophy of History, New York: Dover Publishing, 2004, p. 39). This

implies an overcoming, sublation of individual will and inner necessity to
achieve freedom as the coincidence of state with moral principle. Individual
will, that of subjects, and that of other communities or nation states, are to
be reconciled into the morality of the state. Thus history becomes a contest
between nations.
Hegel’s philosophy draws a progressive historical consciousness from
boyhood to adolescence to manhood observed from the ancient Greeks
to Modernity. This decidedly masculine progression implies an idealism
that as intuition and drive determines historical development towards a
transcendental Ideal Objectivity, the sublation of weaker factions, on a
rationale of violence and expansion, which always depends on defeating and
subjugating another.
In order not to continue this dialectical progression, the cosmopolitan
project has to step outside this dialectic circularity. It cannot be seen as
its logical next step, a further advancement in a dialectical chain towards
ideality. Instead, it has to establish a common ground outside of history,
with a new terminology, imagination and a nonheritable heritage to avoid
comparison to empire, rule and territory as subjugating Universalisms, and
promote the consciousness of a shared cosmos: to pool resources, produce a
collaborative frame to deal with conflict, scarcity, global warming, epidemics
and so on.
14 Held, Cosmopolitanism, Ideals and Realities, p. 15.
15 According to Held equal participation understood as ideal ‘autonomy’,
measured in the equal distribution of life-chances, connected to access
to education, health care, water and so on, can be considered in relation
to its opposite ‘nautonmy’, ‘the asymmetrical production and distribution
of life-chances which limit and erode the possibilities of political
participation’ (David Held, Democracy and the Global Order, From the
Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Cambridge, UK: Polity,
1995, p. 171).
16 ‘Entitlement capacities’ are rights that create space for action while not
curtailing and infringing on the liberty and rights of others (Held, Democracy
and the Global Order, p. 154).
17 David Held, ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan Order’, in The Cosmopolitan Reader,
Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds), Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010,
p. 231.
18 Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, p. 157.
19 Catherine Lu continues this passage by considering the consequences of ‘the
desire to reduce this conflict, and to solidify loyalty to one cause or group’,
the desire to lose doubt and find harmony, as an attempt to reduce the
multiplicity. She understands this desire to have historically and in our time
resulted in the ‘forced uprooting of entire groups and the whittling down of
complex individual personalities into thin shadows’ (‘The One and Many
70
Faces of Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 2

[2000]: 257–8). In relation to this reduction of conflict via homogeneity
and enforced universals, she evokes the shadows of fascism and the ethnic
cleansing of Jews, Albanians, Serbs, Tutsis, Hutus and so on. In response,
she promotes a cosmopolitanism that is complex and that recognizes at
once a shared suffering, humanity as one, as well as the distinctly individual
nature of this suffering. Suggesting that cosmopolitanism is not a matter of
harmonization but of recognizing complex difference, she suggests that the
cosmopolitan perspective promotes the ability to recognize in the human
condition our irreducible difference.
20 Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 171.
21 In a collection of his essays brought together in the book Sense and Non-
Sense (1964), Merleau-Ponty articulates ‘non-sense’ not in reference to
rational sense, as its nonsensical opposite, but as a sense that comes out of
‘sensation’.
22 Lisa Robertson, ‘Soft Architecture: A Manifesto’, in Occasional Work and
Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, Ontario, Canada: Coach
House Books, 2011, pp. 18 and 21.
23 Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, p. 159.
24 Ibid., p. 160.
25 Lu, ‘The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism’, p. 254.
26 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 132–3.
27 Ibid., p. 35.
28 ‘We will miss that relationship – which we shall here call the openness upon
the world (ouverture au monde) – the moment that the reflective effort tries to
capture it, and we will then be able to catch sight of the reasons that prevent
it from succeeding, and of the way trough which we would reach it’ (Merleau-
Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 35–6).
29 Ibid., p. 48.
30 Ibid., p. 49.
31 Held, Democracy and the Global Order, p. 171.
32 David Graeber, Direct Action and Ethnography, Edinburgh and Oakland,
CA: AK Press, 2009, p. 524.
33 Held, Cosmopolitanism, Ideals and Realities, p. 15.
34 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 35.
35 Nussbaum suggests that the Greek idea of the world citizen is the source for
Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’, which interprets ‘kingdom’ as ‘the systematic union
of several rational beings through common laws’ and outlines the definition
of its ‘ends’, as the abstraction of difference and private concerns or actions in
the service of a common moral necessity. Together they construct a ‘kingdom
of ends’ as a kingdom of rational beings functioning under the rationality
71
HEARING VOLUMES 71
of shared objective laws ‘because what these laws have as their purpose is
precisely the reference of these being to one another, as ends and means’
(Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary
Gregor and Jens Timmermann, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2012, p. 45).
36 Martha Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, in The Cosmopolitan
Reader, Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds), Cambridge,
UK: Polity, 2010, p. 28.
37 Ibid., p. 33.
38 Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political Philosophy,
vol. 5, no. 1 (1997): 12.
Kant’s brotherhood, in reason, assumes a shared rationality and
morality, which is given rather than generated and whose legitimation
in laws of nature, which take over from the laws of God, prevents a
discussion on its authorship and bias, and thus prevents a consideration
of the foundation and conditions of its practical institution. It assumes
an unquestioned fit between laws of nature and human morality: ‘every
rational being, as an end in itself, must be able to view itself as at the same
time universally legislating with regard to any law whatsoever to which it
may be subject, because it is just this fittingness of its maxims for universal
legislation that marks it out as an end in itself’ (Kant, Groundwork of
the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1785], p. 49).
39 Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 157 and 160.
40 In her text ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Nussbaum argues how Kant,
although mentioning the Stoics only in a brief and general way, develops his
cosmopolitanism from their notion of ‘world citizenship’, adopted from the
Cynics, and developed as a moral concern connected to a shared rationality,
rather than a matter of particular identity and belonging. ‘According to
the Stoics, the basis for human community is the worth of reason in each
and every human being’ (p. 7). She identifies their influence on Kant’s
cosmopolitanism not in an outline of institutional or practical goals but in the
moral and rational core of their ideas.
41 H. C. Baldry quoted by Lu, ‘The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism’,
p. 245.
References
Brown, Garrett Wallace and David Held (eds), The Cosmopolitan Reader,
Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010.
Goldblatt, David, Review of ‘At the Limits of Political Possibility: The
Cosmopolitan Democratic Project’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 225
(September–October 1997): 140–50.
72
Graeber, David, Direct Action and Ethnography, Edinburgh and Oakland, CA: AK
Press, 2009.
Hegel, Georg Willhelm Friedrich, Philosophy of History, trans. J. B. Sibree,
New York: Dover Publishing, 2004 (orig. lectures given 1822–1830).
Held, David, Cosmopolitanism, Ideals and Realities, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010.
Held, David, Democracy and the Global Order, From the Modern State to
Cosmopolitan Governance, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1995.
Held, David, ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan Order’, in The Cosmopolitan Reader,
pp. 229–47.
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Friedrich Max Müller and Marcus
Weigelt, London: Penguin Classics, 2007 [1781].
Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor
and Jens Timmermann, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012,
[1785].
Lu, Catherine, ‘The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political
Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 2 (2000): 244–67.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis, London
and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell, New York: Fordham
Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, ed. Melvin McLeod, Boston and
London: Shambhala Pocket Classics, 2012.
Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political
Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 1 (1997): 1–25.
Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’, in The Cosmopolitan Reader,
pp. 27–44.
Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in The Cosmopolitan
Reader, Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds), Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2010, pp. 155–62.
Oliveros, Pauline, Deep Listening a Composer’s Sound Practice, Lincoln,
NE: iUniverse, 2005.
Parreno, Philippe, Tate Modern video interview, http://www.tate.
org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/hyundai-commission/
philippe-parreno-anywhen.
Robertson, Lisa, ‘Soft Architecture: A Manifesto’, in Occasional Work and Seven
Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, Ontario, Canada: Coach House
Books, 2011, pp. 11–22.
Art, New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Voegelin, Salomé, ‘Soundwalking the Museum: A Sonic Journey through the Visual
Display’, in The Multisensory Museum, Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on
73
HEARING VOLUMES 73
Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-
Leone (eds), Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014, pp. 119–30.
Work
Parreno, Philippe, Anywhen, Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, London,
October 2016–2 April 2017.
74
75
Geographies of sound:
Performing impossible
territories
This poem was written by a sailor and i am on the

ocean while writing this
Steve Roggenbuck1
A geography of sound has no maps; it produces no cartography. It is

the geography of encounters, misses, happenstance and events: invisible
trajectories and configurations between people and things, unfolding in
the dimension of the actual while formlessly forming the dimensions of its
possibility, and secretly performing the impossible territories of a poet on the
night-time sea – on the ocean in the dark, she hears the rhythms and textures
that are the material and content of an invisible terrain that leaves no trace
and holds no certainty beyond its experience on the body as a material
among things. These textures and rhythms can’t be measured and drawn
on a flat surface to make maps or a score. They can’t be rendered visible
but hold a knowledge of the world that lies in its invisible contingency: in
its capacity as a timespace place not to refer back to the dialectic – the
opposition between time and space, whose purpose and ideology furnish
the visible and produce its bias for division, control and definition – but to
perform its indivisibility in the voluminous movement of a watery earth.
Thus we have to enter into its undulations, to feel our bodies perform
the geography of waves, the volume of water and the fragile connections
between all that moves in its dark expanse.
76
This is the geography also of Arturas Bumsteinas’s piece Night on the

Sailship (2013), a composition that is based on the recordings of theatre
noise machines and refers to the fact that ‘in the old days of theatre the
technical crew had to be trained as sailors in order to operate the complicated
rigging mechanisms of the coulisse machinery.’2 The stagehand-cum-sailor is
a ‘technician of space’.3 Her seafaring imagination has an effect on the place
created. She navigates through the night where a place can emerge that is
not bound to the shore as line and boundary, as recognizable symbol and
sign of territory and land. Instead a dark geography unfolds that mobilizes
space, generates environments and reveals their depth.
Bumsteinas’s piece invites us into a movement of things that seem to
share a rhythm and a place but pull and push on its configuration and shape.
Its sounds remain without a firm ground or a steady line, as fragments and
events coinciding and passing each other by, expanding and contracting an
invisible territory made from their performance, the materiality of things
and the practice of listening. They wrestle with the uneven and mobile
terrain that they create themselves, and rather than trying to find a ground
beyond themselves in which their sounds play out, their groundless ground
is their coincidence and simultaneity as the contingent place they create.
Thus they evoke the imagination of a geography of ephemeral and unseen
lands produced on board a blind ship at sea. This unseen view meets Steve
Roggenbuck’s poetry, quoted earlier, in the movements of its practice: at
once the location and duration of what it is, rather than anywhere else. This
is a generative and also fragile geography. It is a geography that enables a
different imagination and insight into how and where things are and move,
providing a different focus and demanding a different vocabulary of how to
speak of the physical organization of this world.
This demand is important not just aesthetically but also politically, since,
spatial imaginaries, as Doreen Massey reminds us, are powerful and have
the capacity to influence political consciousness and agency: ‘the way we
imagine space has effects’.4 It has an effect on our geographical subjectivity,
our sense of where we belong and what belonging might mean; on the way
we understand our distances and proximities; the manner in which we
experience frontiers and openness, and the way in which we perceive our
trajectory and being to have or fail to have an impact on the construction of
place. For Massey the vision of global space, the cartography of its territory
and movement, ‘is not so much a description of how the world is, as an image
in which the world is being made’.5 Geography is not a neutral notation of
territory, space and void, but a conquering of its possibilities that is enabled
and framed by the impossibilities of its own technology of representation.
For Michel Foucault space is geographical as well as strategic.
Conventional geography is born from a military thinking, from the desire
to command and administrate space.6 Consequently it is important to
consider the authorship and ideology of its representation, to investigate
77
GEOGRAPHIES OF SOUND 77
its sociopolitical interests and to understand its perspectives and aims, and
come to appreciate the normativity of its absolute vision of the world as
the hyper-invisibility of visual language left unquestioned, before we are
won over entirely by the certainty of its singular point of view and become
unable to enter the geographical rhythms of a ship moving in the dark
blue sea.7
To resist the persuasive singularity of geography, this essay seeks to engage
in geography via sound, a sonic sensibility and listening, without making any
claims about the scientific methods or technologies of the discipline. Instead,
the notion of geography as an integrated study of the world is taken as a
philosophical and conceptual activity that enables the reconsideration of
geographical knowledge understood via Foucault as the pouvoir and savoir
of spatiality: the expression of ‘knowledge’ of space at once as ‘capacity to’
and ‘expertise of’ that furnishes one reality with the power to be real.
Dès lors qu’on peut analyser le savoir en termes de région, de domaine,

d’implantation, de déplacement, de transfert, on peut saisir le processus
par lequel le savoir fonctionne comme un pouvoir et en reconduit les
effets.8
This conflation of savoir and pouvoir in the constitution of space renders

geography political and provides an incentive to reimagine the conditions of
living in and perceiving the world as a sphere of possibility. I will investigate
this sphere of possibility as a sphere of sound engaged in relation to the
thought processes, perspectives and foci that geography pursues rather than
the land that it (un)covers. In this way, geography as an applied philosophy
of space and time, social actions and material configurations lends a
framework and context to the investigation of the ephemeral territories of
a sonic world beyond the purpose of its discipline and without the power
of a singular knowledge determining its reality. Thus geography does not
remain the study of the world we consider to be actual, its territorial, social,
economic, and so forth, reality but comes to practice the exploration of
possible worlds: naming and defining alternative measures, shapes and
forms; discussing their interrelation, simultaneity and truth untethered
from the political duality of expertise (savoir) and capacity (pouvoir) that
determines the influence of actual knowledge.
Therefore this essay pursues a geography of sound rather than a sonic
geography. Its listening does not tune into the actual, but hears its variants.
It does not seek to hear the sonic as part of the discipline, contributing an
auditory layer to its scientific work, but aims to establish the geographical
imagination of a different world, ostensibly practicing the geography of
sonic possible worlds: a geography of the worlds we hear in the textures
and rhythms, movements and stillness that produce the invisible slices of
the actual world, but which are not reduceable to its measure or the duality
78
of its knowledge, and instead drive towards a different imagination of an

intangible and unconquerable terrain of mobile things.
These sonic worlds are not parallel worlds, fictional untruths or illusions,
but are the variants of our actual reality that need a geography to practice
and articulate their invisible territories, immaterial things and unseen
activities; to give them legitimacy and make them count as knowledge and
as power of the real. The aim is not to incorporate them into the measure
of a visual world, nor to simply add listening and sound to the subject of
geography. Rather the aim is to reimagine the reality of the discipline and
the reality of the world from the possibility of sonic lands by practising their
invisible variants.
This move away from sonic geography into a geography of sound does
not avoid the real, but circumnavigates its biases, measures and histories.
It is also not a retreat into an essentialized world, or a denial of its multi-
sensoriality, and it does not propose a dialectical world view, reinvigorating
via sound and image the dichotomy between time and space. Rather, it is
an acknowledgement of the persuasiveness and implicit ideology of a visual
point of view – the seduction of its apparent completeness and the power of
its reality – and expresses the desire to add another knowledge: a possible
knowledge that does not insist on its singularity but proposes to perform
contingently the invisible slices of the world from which the world draws
the political possibilities for a future design that can contradict and rethink
the images that have been made for it.
Ultimately, maybe the geography of sonic possible worlds can add its
insights, strategies and ideas to geographical practices and their interpretation.
To help establish what Philip Boland, Jonathan Prior, Michael Gallagher,
Anja Kanngieser and David Matless, among others, call a sonic geography,
but which always remains on dry land, on maps and within the measurable.
Thus it might not, and it might instead show that a geography of sound
proposes a wholly different knowledge of the world that might conflict with
the very aims of the discipline.
To conjure this possible geographical imagination this essay considers the
work of Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, contemplating from the participation in
her installation Inside You is Me, July/Surface Substance a social-geography
as proposed by Massey, and debating the experience of its invisible
volume as a sphere of performing and unperforming the representation of
geography as discussed by Nigel Thrift. Both Massey’s discussion of space
as configuration of movements and narratives, and Thrift’s promotion of
performance to challenge the abstract knowledge of geography, aid the
articulation of a geography of sound as a geography of the unknown that
resists the hyper-invisibility of conventional reality in favour of the real
unseen of sound. I will suggest that this unseen sphere of sound is where the
political possibilities of geography can be rethought, beyond the givens that
79
underlie its representational schemata through the ephemeral occurrences

that transform the landscape invisibly.
I go on to perform such invisible transformations in the anxious geography
of Uneasy Listening (2014), a piece by Susan Schuppli and Tom Tlalim that
tests the tolerance and scope of the unseen. Their work, a 5.1 composition
of drone surveillance, pulls the sky, the ground and the underground into the
political domain of geographical science, and brings to experience the slices
of a geographical imagination as they are articulated by Eyal Weizman’s
politics of verticality: his notion of the landscape as a three-dimensional
matrix that can be used to divide an ‘indivisible territory’.9
By listening to and walking these works, as a doing of geography,
I follow Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and run interference into the
discipline: employing the outside of geography as a ‘generative environment’
where the notion of space and time, place and map ‘is uneasy because always
in the encounter’.10 Manning and Massumi discuss philosophy rather than
geography. They articulate its possibility to make art, its movement, thought
and practice felt rather than cast in a predefined language. But their sense of
interference, transgression and generative intentions can be employed across
disciplines to regenerate the environment of geography also. Their aim is
not to describe but to activate, to produce the rhythms of creative practice
in philosophy. My aim similarly is to activate a geography of sound, to
produce its knowledge not as maps and borders, but as rhythms, textures,
materials and subjectivities.
Travelling transformations: Narratives as
geographies of the in-between
I am writing this essay in Madrid, in a hotel room, performing exactly the
geographical of academics who Massey, in her essay ‘Power Geometry and
a Progressive Sense of Place’ (1996), describes as the privileged travellers,
for whom movement always happens in relation to nice hotel rooms and the
certainty of a home to go back to. This movement within certainty confirms
Heidegger’s Heim, as the functional dwelling and home that realizes the
purpose of being and stands in opposition to migration and flux.11 Thus
it confirms the possibility of a geography of Heim, as land and ground; as
territory and surface for an indigenous production and certainty. Massey
objects that the discourse of this privileged traveller does not take into
account the anxiety of enforced movement, the precarity of living in flux
without the stabilizing port of home or the comfort of a paid for hotel;
without the sense of authenticity and belonging afforded by the coincidence
of roots and territory and their cartographic legitimation. By contrast, the
80
geography of migration is drawn not on the map but against its stable grid,
performing invisible instability and plural unseens.
In Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), my consideration of geography
and space as timespace started from this appreciation of the subjective
situation and situatedness, as a physical and political manifestation of power
or disempowerment, in relation to a geographical truth. There I recognized
and theorized the relativity of fixity and fluidity and sought to find a less
dichotomous articulation via the agonistic and playful mobility of sound.12
I still agree with Massey’s insistence on particularity and circumstance
and with her understand geography as a sociopolitical terrain of multiple
perspectives. Thus I continue my focus on listening and sounding to
articulate the contingency of being in the world as a practice of its plural
geographies. In fact, the current political and media manipulations towards
sociopolitical homogeneity, where, as suggested by Jacques Rancière,
differences are excluded and conflicts denied through ‘the simple nullity of
the impossibility of the impossible’, render the need to consider personal
positions of travel and home, enforced stasis or desperate flux, more
apparent and pressing even.13 This emphasis on personal narratives does
not aim to render this a human-centred endeavour, an anthropogeography
that charts the world through human movement and stasis, however. To
the contrary, the particularizing of geography as contingent narratives and
experiences – an ‘unmapping’ of territory and a ‘mapping’ of the variants of
this world – makes room for the multiplicitous positions, fluid and static,
human and non-human, that hover over, under, beside and within any visual
map as its invisible possibilities.
Listening and sounding join Rancière’s discussion of the consensus system
of reality, where realism is managed and curbed governmentally within the
order of ‘police logic’ – Foucault’s military logic of geography – where all
reality and all truth is absorbed ‘in the category of the only thing possible’,
and provide glimpses of the impossible.14 A geography of sound, as the
geography of invisible, mobile and plural slices of the world, questions the
singularity a consensual reality purports and challenges the power of its
administration and governance. Therefor it includes human and non-human
narratives to create not a system but a practice of knowledge that considers
simultaneous, plural and potentially contradictory realities to be true, and
that recognizes the truth of the simple possibility of the impossible. It does so
not to be needlessly contradictory and unnecessarily anarchic, but because
the continued belief in the singularity of the real is an expediency that we
cannot afford if we want to understand the world there is rather than the
image we have made of it.
In her book For Space (2005), Massey introduces the need to ‘imagining
space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity’ as one
of her three key propositions for a spatiality that is not always already
conceptualized in relation to political power but producing it: generating
81
it as a sphere of coexistence and plurality that ‘enables in the first instance

an opening up to the very sphere of the political’ as a politics not of
instrumentality and consensus but of process and conflict.15 This multiplicity
is simultaneous, creating a map of temporal trajectories and configuring
space as the uneasy encounters that Manning and Massumi propose to
lie in the generative environment of philosophy’s outside. This generative
outside is the outside also of my geography, and thus it is the sphere of
possibility that I believe a geography of sound explores: the simultaneity of
voices, rhythms, textures, noises and silences that create the geographical
configurations of sonic possible worlds that bring with them an opening
up to the political that is not that of the strategic and historical but is the
political possibility of the invisible, the plural and the conflictual, or what
Massey terms the ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’.16
For Massey the multiple ‘narratives, stories, trajectories are all suppressed
in the emergence of science as the writing of the world’.17 The science
of geography depersonalizes and denarrativizes space as the individual
experience is overridden by graphs, maps, charts and facts, which are more
factual but probably less true, and come to produce the truth from their
own abstracted imagination. For her the notion of travel and stories rather
than maps can evoke transformation and avoid the closure of spaces within
representation in favour of their conceptualization as simultaneous ‘time-
slices’ which are space’s dimensions of activity.18
Her notion of time-slices is developed in critique of Henri Bergson’s
conception of the ‘quantitative divisibility’ of space into discreet and
chronological multiplicities: ‘Movement visibly consists in passing from
one point to another, and consequently in traversing space.’19 This assumes
space as an always already existing whole through which we pass, applying
our time to its static expanse, moving along its infinite but separate nodes
without affecting its duration. Consequently, as Massey points out, space
remains infinitively divisible: a discrete multiplicity without time, static and
representable. In response, she suggests the perception of space more akin
to Bergson’s time, as instantaneous sections that possess their own vitality
and duration and do not function as discreet multiplicities but in their inter-
connecting. In other words, she proposes space as a ‘dynamic simultaneity’
of variant time-slices, which configure not an already inter-connected whole
but are engaged in the process of connecting that is unfinished and open,
that knows no ground or surface, but understands its multiplicity to be
concurrent and mobile: producing space as the indivisible continuum of
temporal activities and infra activities.20
Her time-slices are not identical to and yet they are thinkable as the
slices of possibility, which I articulated as sonic possible worlds, as modal
entities that are not worlds per se but are each one slice of the many slices
that make up the world.21 These slices generate the world as a sphere of
variant activities and inter-activities, and produce not a map but an invisible
82
and indivisible volume of what we might call simultaneous ‘timespace-

slices’ through which we inter-are, inter-act and inter-invent a contingent
geography. The travels of the refugee and the travels of the academic happen
in this same volume, understood as a timespace signed not by boundaries
and borderlines but as a dimensionality that has a capacity: the capacity of
the world and the capacity of our living within its organization. This is an
invisible geographical volume that provides us with the terminology and
the imagination for the experience of the world as a mobile and viscous
expanse that enables and holds our agency and that of things, without
visible boundaries in a generative and reciprocal embrace. In this invisible
geographical volume the lives and movements of the academic and that of
the refugee meet and produce the actuality of their in-between. They inter-
are, one in relation to the other, and yet this inter-agency is asymmetrical,
defining very different geographies of entitlement and belonging. They
narrate two different modes of being in the same world and reciprocally
create two variant worlds through their being in it; and it is the invisible
in-between of these two variant worlds, rather than one or the other that
narrates the political actuality from the possibilities and aware of the
impossibilities which that encounter brings to the fore. The refugee might
be an academic and the academic an immigrant, and so the difference is not
total but incomplete, a narrative rather than a fact, visually deceptive but
always a politico-geographical possibility.
Writing this essay in a hotel room in Madrid is an activity that highlights
this in-between, generating geography as a moving and relational field of
experience that we perform and unperform, that we are performed by,
enabled and limited through. In this way, a geography of sound is not the
study of territory, land, visual relationships and boundaries, economic and
social interests and facts, but the study of the indivisible volume of the world
as a dimensionality in which things inter-are and where the in-between
rather than this or that creates the political possibility of its reality.
The geography of plastic, carpets,

curtains and metal
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon’s work Inside You is Me, July/Surface Substance
produced with dancer and choreographer Sonya Levin for ‘Geometry of
Now’, curated by Mark Fell at GES-2 in Moscow in 2017, creates such
a dimensionality in whose sphere of materialities and subjectivities the
possibility of a geography of sound can be imagined and performed.
The location of the exhibition is an old power station situated along the
Moskva river in central Moscow. It is a vast and dilapidated building
soon to be renovated into a state-of-the-art gallery, narrating a process of
83
transformation that itself performs the mobile and consequential geography

of the world.22
Kiyomi Gordon’s installation was located on the second floor of the
building sharing space with what was called the ‘reading room’, a corner
installation of books and texts chosen by Fell and laid out on a table to
invite the visitors’ engagement in the background interests that motivated
the exhibition programme. This reading table created an expectation
of research, of process rather than outcome, which introduced Kiyomi
Gordon’s piece, at the other end of the space, by tuning us into its processes
rather than the finished work.
Visually Inside You is Me, July/Surface Substance is very sculptural. Taking
on the tones and materials of its environment it responds with fourteen
aluminum frames that are over 2 metres long and high, and are draped with
carpet, curtain fabric and transparent silicon sheeting. These frames are on
castors that extend their height and indicate their mobility as a sculpture in
process, on trial, rather than fixed and certain of itself, defying the notion of
static architecture and building a room of potential time.
The materials that are held by these sculptural frames complete and
contradict each other, reflecting and absorbing light and sound, blending in
and standing out from their sparse architectural surround. They break the
space and make a space, adding other surfaces and textures and creating
‘in-between places’ that I hear as undulations on my walk through. They bring
other possibilities to the experience of this room and my movements through
it, challenging interpretations that might arise from the consideration of the
floorplan or the installation shot. Both of which tell me where the work is
and what it looks like, but cannot reveal its depth and those elements that
remain hidden in a visual or cartographic representation of its installation.
Fourteen speakers are suspended from the ceiling. Their black oblongs
add another sculptural dimension to the work, responding to the shine
of the aluminium frames and the transparency of the silicon sheets, and
contrasting with the muted colours and textures of the beige carpet and
draped curtain cloth. The sounds emanating from the speakers are composed
from files recorded on a modal synth elsewhere and at another time, and
are distributed and filtered here via a Max Patch. They are imported into
this space and interact with its materialities to reveal a volume of reflective
surfaces and the absorbing expanse of carpets and cloth. Rather than
confirming the reality of walls, windows, ceilings and floors, as additive
entities of the place’s construction, they create a sense of the space from the
invisible in-between of things: from the inter-connecting timespace slices
that I hear in my walking through.
The sounds are not interactive in a technologically enabled manner, but
interact and inter-invent the space by their own response to the sculptural
walls, the architectural surfaces and the bodies that move around them.
This interbeing of textures, material and physical rhythms is performed by
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dancers who move around and between the frames, following instructions
and following other sounds in search for their in-between, to perform the
location of its coincidence.
Move around the space and find locations where you may hear clearly
two or more different types of sounds. Chose one sound to embody
Switch to another sound or combine two sounds
Find another performer in space who is already embodying a sound and
join them. Try to interpret the movement that they are doing. Taking
the motion information but still listening to the sounds. Listening to the
sound through their movement.23
These dancers are dressed in everyday clothes, they do not signal as dancers
but as people moving. They follow the instructions written by Kiyomi
Gordon and inspire my own movements. Their dancing loosens my body
and I dare to perform rather than look at the work: to move and listen,
listen and move to the rhythms created between things and subjects, moving
and searching for points of coincidence, pleasure and its dissipation, that
is not in the sculpture, the building or in the notion of an installation,
but is generated from the ephemeral volume they produce together. No
surface is on its own, they inter-act and inter-invent a space that is not this
or that: curtains or silicon, metal or carpet, but is there in their invisible
in-between, accessed by dancing, listening and moving through. It is a
performing of the geography of the place of the work as a sonic possible
world, as a world made from the invisible configurations of things and
subjects as things, inter-inventing their possible reality by performing their
in-between.
A geography of sound is a doing of geography, as a practice of the
possible, defined not in opposition to actuality but as its lived expanse, as
its generative environment, which is the outside of geography but not its
annihilation. Instead, it is the continuation of geography in ‘unseen lands’ as
‘unknown lands’ that create a different territoriality and a different sense of
boundaries and participation.24
This interpretation of a generative outside of geography in the possible
worlds of sound draws inspiration from science fiction writing, and in
particular from the detailed geographies of Ursula K. Le Guin, whose
stories include descriptions of worlds and planets never seen, and a future
not yet experienced, but don’t insist on a future tense, but make us consider
what else might be here, present now, that our cartographic language bars
access to and our chronological thinking shields us from: ‘I can! I can
see all the stars everywhere. And I can see Ve Port and I can see anything
I want! . . . And there is a planet, there is too! No don’t hold me! Don’t!
Let me go!’25
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In her cabined solitude, Lidi felt the gravity lighten to the half-G of the
ship’s core-mass; she saw them, the nearer and the farther suns, burn
through the dark gauze of the walls and hulls and the bedding and her
body. The brightest, the sun of this system, floated directly under her
navel. She did not know its name.26
Le Guin’s worlds are not mapped but narrated, walked through, ridden
across on horse back, sailed on and moved between in the future machines
called NAFAL ships, and via Churten Theory ‘displacing of the virtual
field in order to realize relational coherence in terms of transiliential
experientiality’.27 Her writing is invested in the confusion of a plural
simultaneity and the uncertainty of a relative time that allows us to revisit
cultural and patriarchal norms and realities from the fiction of a future
mode.
Her reimagining of the present from the future; her writing of unknown
lands in the generative outside of geography, proposes a feminist equivalent
to Afrofuturism: a term coined and practiced by Sun Ra in the mid-1950s
and more recently elaborated on by Kodwo Eshun as the rising of plural
sonic fictions that disavow all pasts to hear the subversion of the present
from a black-technocultural future. Such a future science deliberately
eschews the known in favour of the freedom of the unknown, to redraw the
parameters and emphases of actual knowledge and gain a present possibility.
It professes an unorthodox irreverence towards conventions and works with
an achronological sense of time and the notion of a Futurerhythmachine,
which ‘operates not through continuities, retentions, genealogies or
inheritances but through intervals, gaps and breaks’, to gain a breakbeat
rhythm for the present.28 Thus it ignores roots and genres, the measure of
time and space, by reverse engineering the direction of revolution, through
the force of a science fiction, where space is elastic and time creates reversals
and turns things around.29
The science fiction of a geography of sonic possible worlds equally makes
space for a discontinuous time and practices reversals through an elastics of
intervals ‘where listening becomes a fieldtrip through a found environment’,
and where in the volume of an aquatic world ‘Everything emerges from the
subaudible static of underwater electrickery.’30
The possible worlds of sound enable the rethinking of a current
geography, showing irreverence to its aims as historical and governmental
regulator by creating a geographical future science. Free from its military and
scientific conventions, and thus free from the constraints and expectations
of the past, it is able to access the present from the future to practice its
unknown variants. This geography does not produce a utopian or dystopian
vision into, but a possibilist look back from the future. Its unknown is not
indeterminate or chaotic, threatening or inarticulate, but is the overlooked,
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ignored or excluded possibility of now that has no measurement or language

and thus appears impossible, but whose access is found in the sonic fiction
of a future place: from all the stories-not-yet-told. From there it can provide
the tools and the imagination to grasp the volume and depth of the world,
rather than the measure of its surface and visible form.
Such an imagination of geography as a sonic science fiction connects
Étienne Balibar’s statement that ‘all political practice is territorialized’,
qualifying people according to their ability ‘to occupy a space, or being
admitted to it’,31 with Thrift’s demand for ‘a new kind of political weave
to the world . . . which avoids a model of a hallowed ground of politics
surrounded by a desert of quietism, in favor of “continuous” political
activity woven into the fabric of life’.32 The quotidian practice of sonic
possible worlds and their narration as multiple but simultaneous stories
from the future performs a political practice that deterritorializes politics.
It removes its hallowed ground and denies governance by occupation
and the administration of admission, and instead politicizes the mobile
in-between:
I am the darkness between the suns, one said.

I am nothing, one said.
I am you, one said
You- one said- You-
And breathed, and reached out, and spoke: ‘Listen!’ Crying out to the
other, to the others, ‘Listen!’33
This is the political practice of Le Guin’s brown planet in ‘Shobie’s Story’: a

planet that is not there, as a firm ground, but exists between material and
imagination, between the individual and the crew. It has no solid surface but
a depth to sink in to.
The geography of such an ephemeral place demands a ‘ethics of
engagement’ that creates vulnerability, calls for responsibility and enables the
recognition of simultaneous difference and multiplicity in the configuration
of the world.34 In this way it transforms the politics of territorialization by
decolonializing its empirical, military and historical narrative to generate an
outside of geography from its future in the invisible and indivisible volume
of unknown lands. Kiyomi Gordon’s work presents us with such a future
place as a diffuse timespace that is open to the world as a cosmos of inter-
existence, creating a contingent place from encounters and misses, human
and non-human that create not a territory but the durational performance
of its weave and undulation.
Kiyomi Gordon’s sound files are 20 minutes long, but this duration cannot
be found within the experience of the work whose composition changes
not in time but as a timespace place. We can never find the same temporal
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location again but move through multiplicitous and simultaneous timespace

slices as the configuration of all the possibilities of the work, reminding
us of all the possibilities of the world. In this sense the work is elastic and
probable rather than real. It unperforms the visual representation of its
environment and articulates as its mobile depth. Agitating the aspects that
remain hidden on conventional maps and floorplans, it highlights givens and
points to blindspots: corners of impossibility that are activated by engaging
in the tension of a connecting dimensionality rather than the representation
of separate things.
This brings us back to the demands of both Thrift and Massey, that a
different mode of engagement needs to be found to theorize and deal with
geography not as intellectual work, abstract reason and representation
in search of a totalizing system, but through constant experimentation,
performance and the narrating of mobile and invisible territories as a future
science worked through contingent situations and circumstance.
Now we are finally facing up to the fact that we need new forms of more
modest theoretical curiosity which are minded to overcome problems in
quite different ways.35
Kiyomi Gordon’s notes made in preparation for the work, reveal that the
castors on the aluminium frames are there to enable mobility and facilitate
the research of the space. They allow her to compose not sound itself
but the physical material and its connecting in the production of a socio-
geographical volume. The speakers too are initially placed on moveable
stands and only later fixed on the ceiling. In this way everything remains
mobile, moveable, and moving each other until a geography is found that is
the geography of the work for me to walk and dance, listen and tell and thus
to rearrange and reconfigure in my own performance. This demonstrates the
deliberate uncertainty and unfinishedness of the territory her work builds. It
is not an absolute terrain but a fragile and mobile imagination of territorial
tensions, collaborations and conflicts that is composed between and beyond
its own materiality.
It is intriguing to think from my own ‘listening dancing’ of the space
into her configuring it by moving walls and speakers, light and sound, to
compose their inter-relation as a ‘voluminous score’ of possibilities and
impossibilities. This process of research and composition points to a practice
of geography that is not as Foucault points out in the shadow of the military
as a conquering science, but tries the invisible and indivisible slices of a
capacious space, to grasp how else the world might be, what other image
might be made of it.36
The interactions performed between audience and dancer and sculptural
form are intimate, communicative almost. As the dancer picks up the sound
of a speaker to inform her movement, I pick up her movement to pick up a
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different sound. We build an ephemeral map of our possibilities together, as

a group of people and things who do not speak and yet generate patterns,
rhythms and textures that produce an invisible place, looped through, under
and over, again and again. It is a timespace place, an ephemeral volume that
we inhabit and perform, whose geography is invisible and indivisible and
informs a sociality based on our interbeing not on top of a certain world,
but as the configuration of what the world is.
The installation does not coincide with the floorplan as map but reveals
the blindspots and the invisible depth that are left out in a cartographic
design. In this sense, the work creates an impossible territory and manifests
a geographical subjectivity and materiality that acknowledges the invisible
interbeing of things as a more truthful measure of the world’s reality and
demands we perform rather than view or chart the work. Performing the
installation, by walking and listening, I move from the generative outside of
philosophy into a different sense of geography: as the outside of its science
and the possibility of a politics of groundlessness; that produces the idea at
least of a social-geography and geopolitics of sound.
Socio-material volumes: Vertical geography

The geography produced by Kiyomi Gordon is a geography of sounding,
listening and dancing the possible worlds generated by her work, configuring
the invisible space of the building, its materials, ourselves, the dancers and
anything else that plays an indivisible part: my travelling to Moscow, her
residency at the Gallery, the life of local dancers, the future transformation
of the building and its past use. This is a geography that accounts for the
existence of multiplicities as the simultaneous performance of various agents,
human and non-human. It does not chart their separate movements and
articulations, however, but grasps them through their interactions: through
the moments of coincidence that render their activity political, engaged in the
social and material possibility of what is real even if it does not seem possible.
This geography insists on practice, on inhabiting, moving and standing
still. It fails to produce a representation apart from tentative and personal
accounts of its experience. In this way, it is not strategic or ideological but
fragile and contingent, accessing not the actual but its possibility and reaching
towards the truth of its impossibilities to create a different knowledge base
from the pouvoir and savoir of sound: from its capacity as volume and its
expertise of hearing the invisible.
This is a geography of social and material volumes that does not enable
the study of borders and lines but of the in-between and the with-each-
other: their multiplicitous simultaneity that helps us understand the world
we produce together, not in political homogeneity but in practical conflict
and disagreement and within its plural quotidian weave.
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This socio-material volume has a dimensionality made from simultaneous

and indivisible timespace slices, which are the activities and durations of
encounters and configurations. In turn, this dimensionality has a viscosity
within which we move and are still together, as in an unavoidably connecting
but plural sphere, suggesting an intersubjectivity and interactivities that
enable the imagination and articulation of a socio-material geography. We
experience this viscous expanse from within its depth, not at its center but
centered by it: defined by the material processes of connecting and being
in-between.
This depth is the ‘back’ and ‘behind’ that Maurice Merleau-Ponty
discusses in the working notes of his book The Visible and the Invisible
(1968). According to him, it is ‘the dimension of the hidden’, which is the
place of my looking, my simultaneity with the thing, which therefor I am too
close to see but exist in simultaneity with, and thus I can hear while sounding
myself.37 I hear this sound of my simultaneity with others not as a horizon
of my being but along vertical lines as the possible slices of our encounter,
establishing the depth of the in-between where it does not serve theory or
cartography, but the movement and configuration of a performative place.
The visual representation, the floorplan and the installation shot, the map
and image of the work, goes around this depth, avoiding its distinctness;
avoiding its openness onto the hidden of the work and the world. It ignores
our body and that of things as they stand in its depth, in the way of its absolute
view, and presents a totalizing map that gives our flesh no part. Instead it
works on the surface, on the capacity of its hyper-invisibility: showing us
that the visual carries the invisibility of a normative truth that supports a
singular actuality and the unspoken reality of the map, whose investments
we fail to see when we stare at its measurements but that we cannot fail
to notice when we listen to its sphere. The hyper-invisibility of normative
structures of knowledge and truth are ideological and strategic. They rely
for their acceptance on not being seen but pervade the visible.
The map answers questions about where we are and where to go, it does
not prompt us to ask about its own ideology and politics: what it leaves
out, where its blindspots are, and what perspective it creates. The depth
of sound’s actual-invisibility, the demands and challenges of its unseen
and plural existence, by contrast, point directly at these blindspots at the
back of and behind the surface measure, and insist we participate in the
performance of the unknown, and construct alternatives to the structures
that kept it unknowable.38
The persuasiveness and limit of the hyper-invisibility of the surface is
exposed, for example, in the anxious geography of Uneasy Listening
(2014), a work by Susan Schuppli and Tom Tlalim. This piece, produced
for ‘[Hlysnan] the Notion and Politics of Listening’ at Casino Luxembourg
Forum d’art contemporain in Luxembourg, in 2014, provides an account of
the drone flight patterns as they overfly the Federally Administered Tribal
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Areas (FATA) of Northwest Pakistan. Based on research and the account of

witnesses, using generative software and the fixed frequency of 105 kHz,
the work simulates the experience of what it is like to live under a drone,
and imparts information on the frequency of flights and the area surveyed.
The restaging of the over-flights in 5.1 surround sound, in a slightly
dimmed exhibition space, is focussed visually by a back-lit image of the
then US president Barack Obama, a fly buzzing about his face, which hangs
officiously on one wall, and gives voice to Schuppli and Tlalim’s sense of ‘the
injurious nature of what it means to live under the constant sonic menace
of drones’.39
To grasp this terror of the drone overhead is to grasp the verticality
of geography. The incessant circling sound pulls the sky, the ground and
underground into the political domain of a geographical imagination. The
above and beneath the surface become part of its discourse and challenge
its conventional emphasis on horizons and territory as terrain. The drone
threatens the dominance of linear perspectives, maps and landscapes,
as a symbol of historical military strategy, and creates vertical lines that
transverse the above, underneath and beyond, bringing them into one
volume and issuing in a different military offensive that employs the
timespace dimensionality of place to gain control.
The drone insists on simultaneity. It forcefully becomes a timespace slice
in the multiplicities dynamic of place, and changes our performance of its
quotidian weave. ‘I can’t sleep at night when the drones are there.’40 Our being
in the world and being with things is affected by this enforced interbeing
with drones. Thus it becomes apparent that the invisible produces a possible
world that holds a tangible consequence and impact for its inhabitants for
whom it is an actual possible world, while for a cartographic actuality it
remains impossible. It remains a blindspot that reveals the authorship of its
power at ‘the place of its own vision’: in Merleau-Ponty’s depth where we
cannot see ourselves looking; where the discipline of geography cannot see
the location of its own gaze or the direction of its power.
While the flight paths of drones can be captured and represented on
an aerial map, the experience of a shared volume, the in-between of the
drone and the listening inhabitant, remains unrecognized and needs to be
considered via a geography that takes account of the world’s performative
contingency. The focus of this geography is not the drone or the inhabitant,
the terrain or the frequency range, but the viscous expanse that connects
them together and defines their asymmetrical reciprocity. This experience
remains an impossible territory, a terrain without words or a map.
However, a vertical listening to the in-between can hear its power lines
and give recognition and a voice to those defined in the shadow of its
military aim.
A geography of sound can grasp the cartographic blindspots and
invisible timespace slices through its voluminous capacity and can access
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these apparently impossible territories through its vertical sensibility.

Consequently, it can problematize the effect of the drone on the actuality of
place through the knowledge of its discipline and can grasp the reality of its
experience in order to engage in ‘the process by which knowledge functions
as a power and replicates its effects’, to gain a voice and validity for its own
reality.41
Sounds’ viscous dimensionality makes the political reality of the drone
thinkable and imaginable. Its cartographic impossibility becomes an actual
possibility, and as such it can be drawn into language and become articulated
in relation to the political possibilities and impossibilities according to
whose objectives the world is being made.
Listening to vertical territories

The verticality of geography as experienced in Uneasy Listening is
articulated by Eyel Weizman as a politics of verticality in relation to the
Israeli occupation of Palestine. In his book Hollow Land (2012), he narrates
the occupation by stealth and with the help of military antennas, of the hill
tops in Gaza from where eventually ever more land is seized and colonized
by dividing and partitioning space in three dimensions: the air above, the
surface of the land and the resources down below.
Latitude became more than a mere relative position in the contoured

surface of the terrain. The colonization of the mountain regions created a
vertical separation between the parallel, overlapping and self-referential
ethno-national geographies, held together in startling and horrifying
proximity.42
In this instance, the vertical is used to institute separation: the partitioning

off of space on a three-dimensional matrix that seems to legitimize and
make possible an occupation of Palestinian territory against the rules of law
drawn up on two-dimensional maps. Quoting Ron Pundak, the ‘architect’
of the Oslo Process, from an interview in 2002, Weizman explains that the
international community accepts the use of a vertical depth to divide an
indivisible territory, rather than engaging in its indivisibility. The acceptance
of this logic is fascinating. It is an expression of the visual’s attempt to go
around rather than into the depth that according to Merleau-Ponty is there,
in the location of our own vision, where our flesh demands engagement and
accountability. It serves to avoid reciprocity and responsibility and enables
the invested separation of a land on visual terms. The technicians of this
space are not architects but politicians and the military, and as Weizman
points out their interests and investments are realized through a militarized
geography and the scopic drive of occupation. Theirs is a visual verticality
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that understands space as divisible and its slices as static and discrete. It
represents a visual logic of occupation and colonial rule, of total difference,
of the strategies and ideologies of military power and domination that
Foucault suggests linger in the shadow of geography.
Such a visual verticality makes the volume discontinuous. It renders it
a simultaneity of discrete slices. This visual separation aids the colonizer
and gives him a footing above or beneath the land of the other. By contrast,
the sonic verticality of a continuous simultaneity makes apparent that
the discrete is an illusion and that partitioning is just the admission of
an insurmountable inter-existence. Against this admission, a geography
of sound produces a different political imagination that focuses not on
dividing but on interbeing and the sharing of the voluminous expanse of
the world. Sound’s focus on the in-between destroys the logic of partition,
not just in Palestine but also between the United States and Mexico, in
Northern Ireland, in relation to gated communities the world over, and
in terms of the current attempt of ‘auto-partitioning’ the UK off from the
EU. The sonic articulates an imagination of indivisibility and questions
the logic of separation, producing a different political possibility of
a cosmopolitan interbeing that acknowledges our insurmountable
simultaneity.
The attempt to design a wall that could bring an architectural solution
to a fluid political problem led, according to Weizman, to the construction
of ever moving and evolving partitions, creating an elastic geography,
whose territories represent the changing ideologies and the multiplicity of
voices engaged in its construction. In relation to this notion of elasticity the
movements of the occupation seem like the dancers of Kiyomi Gordon’s
work, instructed to ‘move around the space and find locations where
you may hear clearly two or more different types of sounds’. But instead
of enjoying the moments of coincidence and simultaneity and trying to
inter-be, to engage in a politics of the encounter, the politics of occupation
builds vertical separations, and uses those moments of hearing the other to
perform partitions. Thus it uses the elasticity of performing difference and
its socio-material geography to build contingent walls whose flexibility
is not a sign of its yielding and reciprocal intent but the strategy of its
control.
The frenzied nature of this undertaking, the constant need to react and
resist, to build a new tunnel, a new bridge, to change the run of the wall
and redefine the rules of belonging, paradoxically attest not the divisibility
of place but prove its indivisibility, confirming it as a volume of inter-
connecting dimensionalities. The effort to control this indivisibility and to
deny the interbeing of its socio-material terrain is bound to fail and fails
but its failure is never brought back to the principle of interbeing but to the
failure of the infrastructure of separation that needs to be fortified, changed,
moved on and improved in military terms of occupation, power and control.
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Hearing ‘depth barriers’

According to Weizman, individual segments of local settlements in the
West Bank that could not be accommodated into a linear border, with its
significance as legitimate territorial boundary, the internationally agreed-
upon Green Line, but have their separate fortifications, are referred to
by the Israeli Ministry of Defence as ‘depth barriers’.43 These are islets
of occupation producing ‘security zones’ in the midst of Palestinian
territory and demanding a different conceptualization of access and the
circumvention of their separation from the motherland, as ground and
home, through tunnels, bridges and conduits of one form or another.44
These ‘extraterritorial islands’ remain, according to Weizman, politically
invisible, ignored by the international community in exchange for more
transparency on the Green Line: the promise by Israel to move the main
section of the wall closer to the agreed boundary in return for turning a
blind eye to the barriers placed in its depth. Thus they represent physically
as well as psychologically the blindspots of the vertical geography of
occupation. They are the hidden elements of a regulatory production of
space that ‘carves out possible spaces of agency within a paralysing and
powerful system of apparent impossibility’.45
The allusion to the ‘depth’ of their political location and task brings the
military and governmental control of space face to face with the hidden at
the back and behind their own standpoint. It confronts their project with
Merleau-Ponty’s depth understood as the inexhaustible depth of intertwined
bodies and matter that cannot be carved out from the landscape through the
synthesis of different points of view, but needs to be inhabited in its plural
possibility. This depth is the psychological three-dimensionality of Merleau-
Ponty’s invisible vision, which elsewhere I theorize in relation to sound as
the simultaneity of my sounding body with that of others and other things;
as my relationship, in other words, with the world as the political possibility
of the in-between and a multiplicitous interconnecting, rather than the
segregation of singular things and subjects.46
In this sense, walls, actual or governmental, as visual ‘depth barriers’,
obstruct access to the possibility of the in-between and represent the
avoidance or denial of shared multiplicity. Their rejection of continuous
simultaneity creates the visual illusion of the complete and sovereign state,
the totalized and totalizing configuration of any political institution and
practice, ‘as the only thing possible’, while denying ‘the means the things
have to remain distinct’:47 to tell the multiplicity of simultaneous stories
and narratives that create the world from their interbeing as possible and
seemingly impossible variants.
Without it [depth], there would not be a mobile zone of distinctness,

which could not be brought here without quitting all the rest – and a
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‘synthesis’ of these ‘views’. Whereas, by virtue of depth, they coexist in

degrees of proximity, they slip into one another and integrate themselves.
It is hence because of depth that things have a flesh: that is, oppose to
my inspection obstacles, a resistance which is precisely their reality, their
‘openness’, their totum simul.48
Merleau-Ponty’s depth confronts the governmental agenda of depth barriers

with proximity and integration. His place at the back and behind things, at
the place of looking, disrupts the territories of a visual depth as barrier, as a
vertical line of separation, with the sound of its flesh. Sound resists separation
and provides a way to understand these vertical partitions through the auditory
imagination of indivisible volumes and the dynamic simultaneity of what can be
heard. Its indivisible and viscous dimensionality affords the capacity to inhabit
this depth and hear from the in-between of things and subjects, our socio-material
simultaneity. The sonic volume becomes a geographical imaginary that resists
and redefines the separation enabled by visual architecture and introduces new
political possibilities for a knowledge of geography as a timespace dimensionality
that includes the invisible, the indivisible and even the impossible not to control
their image but to perform and unperform the configuration of their sound.
Hearing I can bear witness to separation, exclusion and inclusion, and foster a
different understanding of their unavoidable relationships and reciprocity. Thus
a geography of sound becomes a means to understand political issues between
surface, movements, ground and air, by delving into the vertical, to live at its
depth and hear its simultaneity.
According to Weizman, geography can serve as a means to understand
political issues. I suggest that a listening, dancing and moving geography of
sound that performs its socio-material terrain rather than measuring it, can
make a contribution to this understanding and maybe even provide some
solutions to places where separation and segregation have come to be seen
as the only thing possible when they are simply ‘an image [from the past] in
which the world is being made’.49
Conclusion: Meeting visual geography

on a groundless ground
In her essay ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’
(2012), Hito Steyerl discusses the downfall of the linear perspective
and the anxiety of verticality as vertigo and fear of groundlessness, and
concludes that,
In many of these new visualities, what seemed like a helpless tumble into
the abyss actually turns out to be a new presentational freedom. And
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perhaps this helps us get over the last assumption implicit in this thought
experiment: the idea that we need a ground in the first place.50
While I am not engaged in the new visuality of verticality that Steyerl talks
about, and prefer to associate the vertical with sound and engage listening in the
exploration of its inexhaustible depth to access the simultaneous multiplicity
of the world, I share her optimism that verticality charts not only problems: the
occupation of Palestine, the drone warfare in Pakistan, but also provides a new
thinking and a new freedom where political practice is not territorialized and
people are not qualified according to their ability ‘to occupy a space, or be
admitted to it’ or indeed be excluded from it.51 Instead, the vertical can tune us
to an emphasis on interbeing in an ephemeral and indivisible terrain, where
individual agency is acknowledged to have a shared consequence, and time
and space are ‘uneasy because always in the encounter’.52
A sonic verticality, as concept, as material and as agency, provides new
tools, a new toolkit and a new imagination to access the timespace slices of
sonic possibility, new solutions and new ideas about how we participate,
live in and design the world. The appreciation of the world as socio-material
volume, its verticality and expanse, and the actuality of the in-between that
it reveals, gives form to the intangible sphere of living together. It makes
thinkable the indivisibility of the world and helps to challenge its vertical
partitioning and control. Thus it provides insights and understanding of
the consequences of separating water reservoirs below the surface from
its land above, and the effect of the occupation of the skies by drones on
the possibility of life beneath. It makes their ideology, strategy and politics
sensible and intelligible, and makes us better equipped to communicate,
resist and respond to the norms they try to set up through a hyper-invisibility
of mapped relations.
However, this is not an attempt to bring a sonic sensibility to visual
geography, nor to help it map and chart the world through sound. Instead,
I invite the visual geographer to consider the invisible, indivisible and (im)
possible world of sound in her methodologies: to engage in the research
of sonic possible worlds as a plural, ephemeral and mobile territory that
can help rethink the norms and expectations of geography as a scientific
and philosophical knowledge system. A sonic sensibility and approach can
decolonialize geography’s terrain and produce a different imagination of the
world through an integrated study of its invisible and indivisible possibilities.
The task is to invent a geography for possible worlds that takes account
of the variants, the simultaneous plurality, the agency of their configuration
and the blindspots of their mapping, to find a way to access the impossible
territories and articulate their political possibilities. This might produce, as
Thrift quoting Hölderlin suggests, ‘an awkward perspective’. A perspective
that defies the traditional vantage point of its discipline to perform and
unperform its territory from a different position, not, as Thrift points out,
96
for spurious and fanciful reasons of youthful anarchy and the wilful sabotage
of the discipline, ‘but out of a deep-seated conviction that securing a point
of view that never goes wrong cannot add to the world’.53 Thus we need an
awkward perspective that hails from the future as the possibility of the world
heard from another ‘planet’ understood as an as yet impossible variant that
charts its possibilities from the simultaneity of a three-dimensional depth.
From there it can resound the socio-material geography of the world as the
configuration of a timespace of ‘awkward objects’: Cauleen Smith’s things –
discussed in the introduction to this series of essays and motivating their
writing – that include their own fragility and possibility for failure and are not
shaped through the necessity of their task, or the expectations of power and
ideology, but inspire a (re-)engagement with the unknown. In other words,
geography has to meet sound not as a historiographical continuum but from
the future: as a Futurerhythmachine or a NAFAL ship moved by Churten
theory, which shows the formless contours of the world in its depth.54
I appreciate that for a geography of sound to be valuable and make a
useful and legitimate contribution to geography as an integrated science
of the world, it has to find strategies and tools that can collaborate with
a visual/historical geography. It has to find a consensus and a shared
vocabulary to make its knowledge count: to bring its voluminous
dimensionality, its indivisible interbeing, its possibilities and what seems
impossible to geography’s intellectual work and practice. However, in turn,
for the geography of sound to contribute on sonic terms, and bring a sonic
knowledge to the field of geography, geography needs to expand and engage
with a sensibility of invisible volumes and the uncertainty of an aquatic
world. In other words, the geographer needs to practice the moving and
shifting invisibility of a world at sea, so that her imagination can challenge
and augment the framework of the discipline, its value and validity, and
geography can come to contain the poetic and unmappable while remaining
legitimate and trustworthy. And so, this essay is not about denying geography
the objectives of its discipline, but to expand what they might be by insisting
on the geographical exploration of sonic possible worlds through the practice
of singing and dancing, listening and walking in its indivisible, voluminous
and invisible terrain, and by bringing the possibility of sound to the measure
of a politics of territory, lines, borders and belonging.
For the world is very large, the Open Sea going on past all knowledge;
and there are worlds beyond the world.55
Notes
1 Steve Roggenbuck, LIVE MY LIEF, Selected & New Poems: 2008–15, boost
house, 2015, p. 49. Reprinted with the author’s permission.
97
2 Arturas Bumsteinas, Epiloghi, Liner Notes, Unsounds, Deutschland

Radiokultur, 2013.
3 Michel Foucault refers to the engineer, rather than the architect, as a
‘technician of space’ who controls the three great variables of territory,
communication and speed (‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, in The Foucault
Reader, Paul Rabinow [ed.], London: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 244).
4 Doreen Massey, For Space, London: Sage Publication, 2005, p. 4.
5 Ibid., p. 84.
6 Michel Foucault, ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie’, Hérodote,
vol. 1 (January–March 1976): 71–85.
7 With the notion of hyper-invisibility, I am referring to the unseen norms
and conventions that while ideologically and culturally constructed are so
omnipresent and accepted as to have become entirely invisible, their forms
and functions taken for granted, they present a naturalized reality that
pretends a convenient actuality that is hyper-invisible.
8 In ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie’, Michel Foucault
discusses geography in terms of the tension between pouvoir and savoir, and
suggests: ‘Hence forth one can analyze savoir (knowing) in terms of region,
the domain, the implantation and displacement, the transference, one can
grasp the process through which knowledge functions as power (pouvoir)
and reproduce its effects’ (Foucault, ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la
géographie’, p. 76, my translation).
9 Eyal Weizman quoting Ron Pundak in Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of
Occupation, London: Verso, 2012, p. 13.
10 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the
Ecology of Experience, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014, p. vii.
11 Doreen Massey, ‘Power Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in
Mapping the Futures, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Puttnam (eds),
London: Routledge, 1999, p. 61.
12 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, New York: Bloomsbury,
2010, pp. 138–9.
13 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 133. In this context, Rancière talks particularly
about the consensus system of political reality and suggests that the final truth
of metapolitics is the management of reality as the only thing possible, in
order to exclude those subjects and things that fall outside the parameters of
its truth administration from even thinking or articulating their position.
14 Ibid., p. 132.
15 Massey, For Space, pp. 9–10.
16 Ibid., p. 9.
17 Ibid., p. 25.
98
18 Ibid., p. 23.
19 Bergson in Massey, For Space, p. 246.
20 Ibid., p. 23.
21 They are the private slices of life-worlds, phenomenological versions
of Kripke’s ‘mini-worlds’ that are constantly negotiated to produce
contingently what the world might be (Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1981, p. 18).
Possibly, in the end, there might be no actual world at all, but only
temporary negotiations of possible worlds between my world and
your world, in moments of coincidence, where our maps might overlap
affectively, with the actual world being the mirage of joint and equal
access that does not exist: the pretense of a fiction of power and ideology,
confirmed by a presumed and singular reality, and exposed through the
plurality of possibility.
(Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible Worlds, New York: Bloomsbury,
2014, p. 61.)
22 This work was originally created during a residency at The Lab in San
Francisco, 1–31 October 2016, and previously installed at GON Festival 20–27
February 2017, Human Resources in Los Angeles 11–12 March 2017, as well as
at SFMOMA Soundtracks Exhibition 15 July 2017–1 January 2018. Each time
it takes on a contingent and site-specific form and finds a different performance.
23 These are two examples of the instructions given by Kiyomi Gordon to the
dancers who performed the installation.
24 Nigel Thrift commenting on his notion of unknown lands in the ‘Performance
and Performativity: A Geography of Unknown Lands’, in A Companion to
Cultural Geography, James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H.
Schein (eds), London: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 121.
25 Ursula K. Le Guin, The UNREAL & The REAL, Selected Stories Volume 2
Outer Space, Inner Lands, London: Orion, 2015, p. 86.
26 Ibid., p. 92.
27 Ibid., p. 78.
28 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,
London: Quartet Books, 1998, p. -003.
29 Ibid., pp. 136 and 076.
30 Ibid., p. 066. Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place (1972), a film about his
travelling from a new planet in outer space into 1940s Chicago, transported
by music, illustrates the spatial dimension of Afrofuturism. While sonic
possible worlds are not literally parallel universes or new planets but the
variants of this world, the metaphor of future and space nevertheless enable
their potency.
31 Étienne Balibar, Citizenship, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2015, p. 68.
99
32 Thrift, ‘Performance and Performativity’, p. 122.

33 Le Guin, The UNREAL & The REAL, p. 92.
34 Ibid., p. 128.
35 Ibid., p. 122.
36 In answer to ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie’, Foucault
explains that:
la géographie s’est développée à l’ombre de l’armée. Entre le discours
géographique et le discours stratégique, on peut observer une circulation
de notions: la région des géographes n’est autre que la région militaire (de
regere, commander), et province n’est autre que le territoire vaincu (de
vincere). Le champ renvoie au champ de bataille . . .
[Geography developed in the shadow of the army. Between the discourse
of geography and the discourse of strategy one can observe a circular
notion: the region of the geographers is the same as the region of the
military (subdue and command), and the province is the same as the
conquered territory (de vincere). The field refers to the battlefield . . .]
(Foucault, ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la
géographie’, pp. 75–6, my translation.)
37 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis,
ed. Claude Lefort, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 219.
38 This might lead us back to maps and cartography as unmapping: as an
affirmative re-performance of mapping that creates an ephemeral cartography
of processes and blindspots, at the in-between of things, from where the
indivisible volume of the world takes its viscous shape. I am not sure we can
theorize these maps, however. It might be a matter for practice, in the first
instance at least, to imagine and design their changing shape.
39 Susan Schuppli, ‘Uneasy Listening’, exhibition handout, http://susanschuppli.
com/wp-content/uploads/Uneasy-Listening-medium-dark.pdf (accessed 16
January 2018).
40 Ibid.
41 Foucault, ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie’, p. 76. Translated
from ‘on peut saisir le processus par lequel le savoir fonctionne comme un
pouvoir et en reconduit les effets.’
42 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation,
London: Verso, 2012, p. 117.
43 Ibid., pp. 177–8
44 Ibid., p. 163.
45 Ibid., p. 261.
47 Ibid., p. 219.
48 Ibid.
100
49 Ibid., p. 84.
50 Hito Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, in
The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, p. 27.
51 Balibar, Citizenship, p. 68.
52 Manning and Massumi, Thought in the Act, p. vii.
53 Thrift, ‘Performance and Performativity’, p. 133.
54 Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun, p. -003 and Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The
Shobins’ Story’, in The UNREAL & The REAL, Selected Stories Volume 2
Outer Space, Inner Lands, London: Orion, 2015, pp. 96–7.
55 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earth Sea Quartett, London: Penguin Books, 1993,
p. 365.
References
Balibar, Étienne, Citizenship, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton, Cambridge: Polity Press,
2015.
Bech, Henning, Christian Borch and Steen Nepper Larsen, ‘Resistance, Politics,
Space, Architecture: Interview with Nigel Thrift’, Distinction no. 21
(2010): 93–105.
Bumstainas, Arturas, Epiloghi, Liner Notes, Unsounds, Deutschland Radiokultur,
2013.
Eshun, Kodwo, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,
London: Quartet Books, 1998.
Foucault, Michel, ‘Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie’, Hérodote, vol. 1
(January–March 1976): 71–85.
Foucault, Michel, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, in The Foucault Reader, Paul
Rabinow (ed.), London: Penguin Books, 1991.
Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1981.
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Earth Sea Quartet, London: Penguin Books, 1993.
Le Guin, Ursula K., The UNREAL & The REAL, Selected Stories Volume 2 Outer
Space, Inner Lands, London: Orion, 2015.
Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of
Experience, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Massey, Doreen, For Space, London: Sage Publication, 2005.
Massey, Doreen, ‘Power Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in Mapping
the Futures, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Puttnam (eds), London: Routledge,
1993, pp. 59–69.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alfonso Lingis,
Evanston: Northwestern University, 1968.
Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose,
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Roggenbuck, Steve, LIVE MY LIEF, Selected & New Poems: 2008–15, boost
house, 2015.
101
Schuppli, Susan, ‘Uneasy Listening: The Chronic Sonic of Life under Drones’,

in [Hlysnan] The Notion and Politics of Listening, Berit Fisher (ed.),
Luxemburg: Casino Luxembourg, 2014, pp. 80–90.
Schuppli, Susan, ‘Uneasy Listening’, exhibition handout, http://susanschuppli.com/
wp-content/uploads/Uneasy-Listening-medium-dark.pdf.
Smith, Cauleen, Visiting Lecture at Pacific Northwestern College of Art (PNCA), 2
Steyerl, Hito, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, in The
Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 12–30.
Thrift, Nigel, Non-Representation Theory, Space Politics Affect, London:
Routledge, 2008.
Thrift, Nigel, ‘Performance and Performativity: A Geography of Unknown Lands’,
in A Companion to Cultural Geography, James S. Duncan, Nuala C.Johnson
and Richard H. Schein (eds), London: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso,
2012.
Work
Bumsteinas, Arturas, Night on the Sailship, from Album ‘Epiloghi’, Unsounds,
Deutschland Radiokultur, 2013.
Kiyomi Gordon, Jacqueline, Inside You is Me, July/Surface Substance produced
with dancer and choreographer Sonya Levin for ‘Geometry of Now’, curated by
Mark Fell at GES-2, in Moscow in 2017, 20–7 February 2017.
Susan, Schuppli and Tom Tlalim, Uneasy Listening, exhibited as part of ‘[Hlysnan]
the Notion and Politics of Listening’ at Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art
contemporain in Luxembourg, curator Berit Fisher, 17 May–7 September 2014.
102
103
Morality of the invisible,

ethics of the inaudible
This essay does not write a text, but a score, a set of instructions to listen,
do and read. In this way, it deliberately derails a singular meaning and
interpretation by inviting participation in what is heard, done and read.
During a performance, such instructions inform and trigger actions. After
the performance their format, as a readable score, gives permission and the
opportunity to reperform its content, and thus to revocalize and reauthorize
the theoretical ideas presented in its content and materiality.
The shifting authorship and vocal textuality that is proposed and
enabled by a score, considered in the context of this particular topic,
Morality of the invisible, ethics of the inaudible, responds to the idea of a
participatory ethics and the morality of its entanglements. Thus it signals
an acknowledgement that ‘what ethics is’ is not definable as a list of rules
or guidelines, but is forms of behaviour, actions and interactions, responses
and gestures, which are entirely contingent, a matter of what it does rather
than what it is. Therefor what follows here is not a study that oversees and
judges action but is the engine of the action itself: the moral impetus and
rhythm of doing things, which the performative approach gives opportunity
and articulation to.
Consequently, in this particular performative frame, the score enables
participation in the invisible mobility of sound to practice and trial how
listening to its unseen processes might contribute to the articulation of a
contemporary morality, and how it might be able to bring the unheard,
understood in the sense of Rancière’s ‘sans-part’,1 ‘those that have no part’,2
into an ethical framework not as a simple inclusion but, as Étienne Balibar
suggests, as ‘an enunciation of the principle of radical democracy as the
power of anyone at all’.3
104
To enable this inclusion of anyone at all, this score reimagines ethics

through the lens of a sonic sensibility of indivisible volumes, in whose
viscous expanse we hear not ‘this’ or ‘that’ but the contingent in-between
of things and subjects that are not autonomous but are as interbeings,
existing together through the movements, stillness and causalities of an
interconnected world. This sonic understanding grasps the world not as
an organization of things, hierarchized by a symbolic lexicon and ordered
by cultural signification, but as a simultaneity of actions, visible and
invisible, indivisible in their consequences and meaning. The ethics of
such a sonic world is consequently not a rule-based ethics, separate from
and a priori to the movement, the doing and organizing of that world.
Rather, it is its very essence. Sound’s lack of signifying distance collapses
ethics, being and doing, into one synchronous move. Thus ethics is not
an attribute or a description that can be complied to, but is the energy of
our actions and our being in the world itself that needs to be attended to
while doing.
This score invites the performance of an ethics of entanglement between
morality and its practices. As a set of instructions, it invites to perform
the conventions of aesthetic and everyday processes – the conditions of
artistic and social production – as well as the conventions of language and
representation – the conditions of its communication and institution, and
it helps to unperform, understood as an affirmative mode of working on
the outside of norms, their ethical and moral givens through a contingent
but shared doing. In this way, the score functions as an emancipatory and
political force and method as well as a participatory and collective capacity
to practice the value and validity of an entangled sense of things.
To contextualize this collapse into practice, and articulate this shift
from ethics as rules for action to ethics as the doing of things, we can
look to Karen Barad’s move from agency to agentiality. To the way in
other words that she moves from the noun and the attribute of agency,
the actant and enactment, to the verb to agitate, and ultimately defines a
being agential. Her agency is the action of doing, it is a material practice
of being in the world. Equally, ethics as ethicality is a verb, is the doing
and being in the world and at the same time an expression of participation
and generation of a contingent ethical weave. It ‘is an ethics that is not
predicated on externality but rather entanglement’.4 Its performance is
an ethical engagement with the instructions provided and the textual
materials offered. This does not preclude conflict and disagreement, or
indeed the possibility of rejecting the score altogether, but it frames its
performances, or the performances of its rejection, within the morality of
action rather than prejudice and rule. Further, it focuses morality not on
a static context but on the contingent in-between of things and subjects,
that, as agential interbeings, read the world ‘through one another for their
105
MORALITY OF THE INVISIBLE, ETHICS OF THE INAUDIBLE 105
various entanglements, and by being attentive to what gets excluded as

well as what comes to matter’.5
In this sense, ethics does not rule but is part of the configuration of the
real. Without ethics there is no activity and no being, and no activity and no
being exists without ethics. Thus ethical discourse cannot be found outside
of action, articulation and being, but only within it, as part of it, construed
as a participatory and an entangled practice. This inside is not the inside
of a discipline or institution however, but the outside of disciplinary and
institutional boundaries at the inside of doing things.
Such an ‘agential ethics’ also implies that being ethical is not good per
se. When positing ethics as the engine and essence of doing and doing
nothing, we have to differentiate further, outside the binary of ethical and
unethical, to allow for a more detailed, non-partisan and culturally more
pluralistic discussion on the premise of the ethical performance of the
world. The unethical cannot just be what is not ethical. That is too diffuse
and dialectical a definition, granted by a singular authority that might not
be God or theology anymore but which in refusing to investigate further and
seek articulation on the nature of the unethical, becomes its own dogmatic
position. Thus we have to name them both, beyond the binary, to articulate
their actions contingently as not simply oppositional, but inescapably
interrelated, expressive of actions and activities that are taking place within
the same indivisible world. This contingent calling demands our engagement
and participation, through which we constantly re-evaluate our actions on
the basis of an entangled practice.
To write a score for you to perform, with your voice and body, as a
physical activity of your interbeing existence, means to engage you in actions
whose ethicality is your engine of doing them. In this way, the score enables
a performative morality that is not an inculcation of preexisting rules but a
challenge to your participation. The score offers not a moral and intellectual
instruction but an instruction without rules to do an agential ethics. It does
not instruct to think but to do in order to rethink contingently, through the
simultaneity of the material and speaking it. As the instructions loosen your
control, they bestow you with the ability to observe while doing, where the
ethical engine of doing, its ‘subjectivity engine’, is.
Holger Schulze interprets Kodwo Eshun’s term ‘subjectivity engine’, his
‘machine of subjectivity that peoples the world with audio hallucinations’6
as ‘a material engine, that is connected to your body, to your incorporated
idiosyncratic imagination, your sonic corpus’.7 It is from the materiality
of this sonic corpus that we interact with the materiality of the score,
performing inter-actions as a way to start differentiating beyond
ethical and unethical, to rethink the agential reality of both terms and
dig deeper, physically and intellectually, beyond the binary into the
complexity and participatory demands of an ethics of doing. This implies
106
an acknowledgement that ethics is contingent, the matter of an agential

in-between that needs to be performed in a material practice, rather than
rules made about.
The essay score

This text does not follow the format of the other essays in this book and yet
it sits at its centre, in terms of layout, theme and as its engine. Equidistant
between Writing Fragments, which explains and situates the book’s
writing as a writing in fragments of essayistic experiments that produce
awkward objects and promote the legitimacy of contradiction, and Reading
Fragments, which suggests an approach and methodology of how all these
essays could be read as vertical lines of words that do not come together on
the horizontal, but dig into the material and into the practice of writing and
reading to find an understanding that is that of sound rather than its mute
theorization.
Responding to this context, these instructions to perform don’t aim to
create a first principle of ethics and neither do they hope to promote its
final principle. Instead, they position ethics as the performance of things,
subjects, texts and words, from their fragile and contingent in-between, in
an indivisible cosmos, where the question of value, validity, right and wrong
is collapsed into practice, into an entangled agential ethicality rather than
held in the order of abstraction.
Therefore, here, the score is a ‘performative essay’, an essay that is not
written but instructs on the possibilities of its writing not as a finishable
text but as a formless possibility of doing rather than knowing the ethical
dimension of one’s own actions and inactivities. This format has the
capacity to forge connections and set up tensions in order to explore the
simultaneity of doing as a doing of an ethical practice in-between texts,
questions, actions and thoughts. The ‘essay score’ rejects a complete
assessment and opinion, and instead highlights the subjective processes
and the responsibility of being as accountability through the practice of the
material scored. It invites to perform its essayistic trial by giving only the
building blocks of research: the things I gather around me when writing
and in whose performance an essay that enacts the ethics of its making can
be generated.
In this sense, the essay score is a DIY effort that rejects conventional
critical registers and technologies, and responds to the idea that we could do
things differently. It is the methodological answer to the demand stated in
the introduction to this book: to produce in writing, sounding and listening
awkward objects and speculative artefacts that engage in a concurrent
representational crisis by shifting expectations of perception and inspire
107
a re-engagement and participation in what things might mean. In other

words, the score enables misalignment and purposeful inarticulation in the
ephemeral between-of-things. It creates from ambiguity and from what is
not there, in the rhythm of a contingent doing, new possibilities for the
academic artefact, for theory, for language and for the political, and thus for
the ethical entanglement of what they could be.
Its format and practice relates to a remark made in the introduction, via
the writing on The Essay Film (2016) by Elizabeth A. Papzian and Caroline
Eades, suggesting that the essay is the perfect format for a crisis ‘as it longs
for utopia – that is, for an impossibility’.8 Thus it is the perfectly incomplete
and imperfect form to write about the possibility and impossibility of a
practical morality and ethics at a time when we lack imagination to think
beyond the ideologies of neo-liberal capitalism and its violent singularity. In
the absence of alternatives, the performance essay as essay score allows us
to unperform this singularity and reimagine its violence without engaging in
the circularity of its sublation.9
While the essay enables us to engage in the possibility of ethics through
a do-it-yourself desire that embraces a connected and collaborative world,
the score allows us to put the body in the breach and perform alternative
interpretations of its invested territory.
What follows is an adapted and developed version of a score for a
performance produced for and realized at Sound, Ethics, Art and Morality,
at Tel Aviv University Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv, Israel, 29–30 May 2016.
108
Action 1: Listen to the sound

of a washing machine
Read ‘Listening to the Stars’ over its cotton wash cycle:
Listening to the Stars

Make new acquaintances: listen to learn their methods of attaining
success
(19 November 1952, Sagittarius)10
We have lived here for a while. Third floor, nice views but no garden.
I always resented that, no garden. And the stairs, particularly with the
buggy and the children. They are older now but still. Then came the
mudslide, all of a sudden, I really do not know where from. But the
long and short of it is that now we are on the ground floor. No more
stairs, no more dragging up of shopping, no more lugging of buggies and
heavy children up and down three sets of steps. Just a nice ground floor
entrance, and of course the garden is ours now.
Sometimes we can hear the noises from down below. Screams and banging,
smashing of furniture against the walls and the ceilings no doubt. We try
to ignore it. I am sure it will stop eventually. The mud is drying, we have
sown some seeds, by summer it should have become a nice green lawn
to play on.11
Question 1: What floor do you live on?
Read Morality of the Invisible quietly to yourself:
Morality of the Invisible

Sound, as material and as concept, illuminates the unseen processes of the
world and invites us to see things in a different light. Listening, we access
the possibility of the world from the possibility of time and the possibility
of space, participating in the plurality of reality and challenging the singular
actuality it is presented as. The invisible mobility of sound informs and incites
this exploration and invites the listener to enter into slices of possibility to
understand the heterogeneous construction of the real and participate in its
reconstruction: to build a timespace world of its ephemeral possibilities and
make it count within current notions of actuality.
The morality of this sonic engagement is the morality of the invisible.
It does not produce the totality of the image, and neither does it fulfil
109
preexisting normative codes, but responds to the demand of the dark when
we have lost our anchorage in visual things and rules, and are forced to
suspend our habits and values, to listen in order to see the complex plurality
of the real as simultaneous possibilities that include also impossibilities: that
which has no part in its singular actuality; and it makes us reconsider also
the part we play ourselves.
Action 2: Open a window

and make a cuckoo sound
Read the following excerpt from ‘Are we staring down on a doomsday clock
getting closer to midnight or merely looking out of the kitchen window?’
vi
(speaks into microphone) We have just spotted rabbits and we are just
following them, because they have gone down a hole underneath the
tree. We are just gonna see if we can see the rabbit hole.
We do not want to scare them. We just want to see the hole, see where
they live.
Fantastic, there, look!
It’s like three holes . . .
Isn’t that fantastic, fantastic! What a sight . . .
Okay let’s leave them be . . .
Oh my god, there is a whole load of rabbits . . .
No, that’s a squirrel
But mostly I see rabbits
I just discovered another hole
I see, yes, you got another
That’s where it came from
A whole warren, a labyrinth
These are like the best sightings ever
(speaks into microphone) This is really very exciting
We are walking upon a network . . .
Look at the parakeet. Look at them, sitting on the ground, walking on
the ground
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Ring-necked parakeets, a woodpigeon, rabbits

We are walking upon their . . . along the roof of their warren
They can hear us probably going bumpf bumpf on their roof
That is why they are all gone
They are all hidden, gone down their holes
(speaks into microphone) And we are leaving to the sound of a green
woodpecker
A distant sound of a woodpecker
Wonder what all of these humps are
The rabbit’s place
It’s amazing this is a very memorable moment, memorable area, isn’t it?
This is fertile ground . . . (speaks into microphone) Small area, no bigger
than a . . . four tennis courts. Fertile.12
Question 2: What are you excluded from? – What is your story?
Go for a walk in the street and read The Value of a Fluid Sound aloud while
moving along:
The Value of a Fluid Sound

For Étienne Balibar, the cornerstone of political activity is the tension
of equaliberty, the pull between freedom and equality, which is a seat of
conflict that enables and calls for participation, and which thus represents
the political as the possibility of politics: where rupture happens and
transformation can occur; where the excluded can find a voice and make
themselves count and where inclusion can become pluralized.
Capitalist neoliberalism neutralizes this tension and renders the conflict
insignificant, banal in the light of an undifferentiated flow of things and
people reduced to the purpose of economic utility and worth. In its sphere
things, goods, people, borders and identities, become moveable. They are
in the flow, however, they are not fluid themselves. They have no power to
transform and be transformative. They are not things thinging as conceptual
and actual sonic things that make a sound of their own, to be heard and to
contribute to the plural composition of actuality. Instead, they are reduced
to the articulation of a harmonized flow to which they are not even an
audible discord. Therefore, they are not self-determined agential subjects,
but identities defined by the measure of their utility.
Balibar calls this within ‘the development of a new ethic of self-care, whereby
individuals must moralize their own conduct by submitting themselves to the
criterion of utility maximization or the productivity of their individuality’.13
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The result is a negative individuality and a negative community or what

Balibar terms ‘the dark face of ethics’, where solidarity and social security are
dismantled and the subjects are disaffiliated from the community to live as
entrepreneurs of their own circumstance. I understand this as a negative fluidity,
a fluidity bound up in the dichotomy between fixed, coerced belonging, and
desperate flight. As such it has no autonomous agency but represents a reactive
mobility dependent on what else moves and stands still.
By contrast, the fluidity and predicative nature of sound, its transformative
agency and imaginary potential, can contribute to the critique of this
entrepreneurial precarity and its concomitant internal and external
exclusions. Investigating the capitalist mobility through a sonic sensibility
can grant us access to the coercive dynamic of its forced and homogenous
flow and entice us to interrupt the monochord of neo-liberalism and make
it sound as polyphony: ‘composed of differences, themselves formed by
crossing visible and invisible borders’.14
Action 3: Turn a bolt 10 times to

the right and 10 times to the left. Listen
intently to the tightening and untightening
of the space between bolt and screw.
Question 3: Who and what are you excluding?
Read ‘Poem’ from Poetry of the Taliban:
Poem
Who am I? What am I doing?
How did I get here?
There is no house or love for me;
I am homeless, without a homeland.
I don’t have a place in this world;
They don’t let me rest.
There are shots fired, and gunpowder here,
A shower of bullets.
Where should I go, then?
There is no place for me in this world.
A small house
I had from father and grandfather,
In which I knew happiness,
My beloved and I would live there.
112
They were great beauteous times;

We would sacrifice ourselves for each other.
But suddenly a guest came;
I let him be for two days.
But after these two days passed,
The guest became the host.
He told me, ‘You came today.
Be careful not to return tomorrow.’
Najibullah Akrami15
Lie on the floor, arms stretched up in the air and read A new God for a
Possible World:
A new God for a possible world

Neither a sonic possible world nor the negative fluidity of personhood and
materiality of a neo-liberal context can rely on preexisting moral principles,
shared emotions, or God. Commandments, rules, cultural codes or a higher
power do not attach to the invisible mobility of sound and neither do they guide
or safeguard the territories of belonging and identity in transnational capitalism.
The tautological reality of neoliberalism eschews conventional ethics of
solidarity and sociality. Balibar’s phrase ‘the dark face of ethics’ recognizes
a disincorporation of the individual from the practice of the social contract,
where notions of solidarity and security are negotiated by the conflict of
different interests. In its place comes a humanitarian rights not based on
positive identities and the negotiation of differences, but controlling and
unifying the heterogenous (the young unemployed, the migrant, women, gays)
into ‘an odd multiple, in which the uncounted are counted’,16 but crucially they
cannot make themselves count, cannot make their voices heard and thus are
not allowed to participate and make that participation impact on the reality of
the actual, which remains the tautological possibility of reality, whose God is
the neo-liberal flow and whose ethics follow the moral code of efficiency and
utility. In other words, the humanitarian rights of global capitalism outline the
post-moral and post-ethical rights of an absolute possibility, which inscribes
those rights into its image and prevents the inscription of anything else.
Action 4: Shout your name again and

again into the bottom of a cup or a glass until
you feel the rim tight around your mouth.
Question 4: Are you audible?
113
Action 5: Listen to the murmur

of an internet hub
Read ‘Ethics of Listening’ (edited excerpt):
Ethics of Listening
Recently I was away, in another country. It looked and sounded not
unlike this one, with streets, trees, houses, people and their dogs. The
people had eyes, ears and mouths, just like us. They looked, listened and
spoke as we do. But since I could not recognize what I had heard in the
acoustic environment around me from the way they talked about it I had
to assume that they heard it all very differently.
Their focus was on process and the notion of existence as doing,
which meant that what was described was the motion, the present
doing of being, not its material totality nor the conglomeration of past
occurrences and achievements. This focus on process privileged and
was privileged by the ear, which steered the eye away from the material
onto its thinging: onto the possibilities it proposes as a thing, as an
object existing in time.
The material of this world, while seen and heard by me the same way
as that back home, was clearly appreciated in an entirely different way
by the indigenous population. And so it was different: its materiality,
its status and what it could do and enable in terms of understanding,
imagination and purpose was very different. The resulting consideration
of value and reality was completely different, and so while from the
outside this world looked and sounded just like ours, the thinking that
manifests the invisible layer of its processes and results in the sense of
actuality and morality lived by, was very different indeed.
It is difficult to imagine, harder to describe, but I came to understand
that what their eyes saw was unfocused movement. Like looking at a
photograph taken on a slow shutter speed, they saw indistinct motion
that was given definition by sound. But this definition was not concerned
with size, location, outline or distance, but was the fluid defining of its
possibility: what it proposed to be at this moment in time, producing its
own contingent situation. Thus what became clear is that their auditory
process of definition is not concerned with sizing up, with ordering the
heard into a hierarchy of use-value and identity, nor of placing it in a
pre-given space. Rather listening rephrases definition as a contingent
activity of defining, of drawing the thing in the fragility of what it could
be continually rather than what it shows permanently.
114
My hosts laughed at me when I talked to them of my exhaustion to try

and see and hear the world their way. They mocked my desire to place
myself, my fears of getting lost, my need to dominate the object to know
myself. They retorted how difficult it must be to have the eye, rather than
as a freely roaming motion, captured by the immobile object, to be thrust
up against it all the time; to have to have a position against another form
rather than enjoy shared formlessness. They felt it must be such a burden
to own things, to either have them or want them, when you could just
partake in their existence with you.17
Question 5: What are you included in?
Stand on a chair and read Ethics of the Inaudible:
Ethics of the Inaudible

While the neo-liberal disincorporation of social rights ignores the tension
between equality and freedom on which political activity as the possibility
of politics relies, sound makes this tension sensible and thinkable, and
invites into participation also those that have no part not as a sans part but
as ‘a part of everyone at all’.18
For this ‘everyone at all’ to truly be everyone at all, it needs to include
also the inaudible: that which for physiological and cultural, but also
for ideological and sociopolitical reasons we cannot and do not want to
hear. Thus once we are attuned to the invisible and practice listening as
the negotiation of mobile differences and unseen possibilities, we need to
lend our ear to what as yet remains inaudible: those ‘that have no part’,
the erased and overheard voices, that cannot make themselves count in the
constitution of a current actuality or its possibilities.
The inaudible is the possible impossible of this world. It is its sociopolitical
horizon beyond which we pretend not see anything even once we start
to hear it rumble. The ethics of this inaudible is an ethics of practice, the
practice of listening out for what sounds too but we do not want to hear, in
order to grant it access to the sphere of influence.
Action 6: Take a passport close to your

ear and listen as you flip through its pages
Question 6: Are you hearing the inaudible?
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Action 7: Put your ear against a window

and listen to whatever is outside
Read ‘Fractal Geometry’ from Crystallography over the heard outside:
Fractal Geometry (excerpt)

Fractals are a pretty knotty
way to say: the length of any
coastline depends upon the
lengths to which a ruler goes.
A lost vacationer who strolls

along a beach patrols a spatial
breach between dimensions
Christian Bök19
Action 8: Put your mouth against the window

and try to voice hello
(This works particularly well with secondary glazing.)
Notes
1 Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente: politique et philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 1995,
p. 28.
2 Rancière, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 38–9.
3 Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty, Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2014, p. 297.
4 Karan Barad, interview in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Rick
Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012,
p. 50.
5 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
6 Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,
London: Quartet Books, 1998, p. 121.
7 Holger Schulze, ‘How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh’, in
Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.),
New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 237.
116
8 Caroline Eades and Elizabeth A. Papazian (eds), The Essay Film, Dialogue
Politics Utopia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 2–3.
9 In Violence and Civility, Étienne Balibar identifies the belief that violence can
be eliminated as fundamental to our idea of politics, which is legitimated in its
aim of order and control, its political institution, by the attempt at sublating
violence. He suggests that this attempt at control becomes a force that
suppresses the possibility of politics in an infinite circularity between violence
and antiviolence, through which politics takes on an antinomic logic trapped
in the imagination of violence and its opposite (Balibar, Violence and Civility,
On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 5).
10 Theodor W. Adorno, The Starts Down to Earth, London and New York:
Routledge, 2007, p. 145 [1950].
11 Salomé Voegelin, ‘Listening to the Stars’, in NOCH VOLUME, What Matters
Now? (What Can’t You Hear?), anthology on expanded listening, http://www.
nochpublishing.com/, April 2013.
12 David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin, ‘Are We Staring Down on a Doomsday
Clock Getting Closer to Midnight or Merely Looking Out of the Kitchen
Window?’, in THIS I THAT IS ALL OF YOU, Brian Shabaglian (ed.),
New York, 2017.
13 Balibar, Equaliberty, p. 26.
14 Ibid., p. 32.
15 Najibullah Akrami, ‘Poem’, in Poetry of the Taliban, Alex Strick van
Linschoten and Felix Kuehn (eds), London: Hurst, 2012, p. 156. With
permission and thanks to Hurst Publishers.
16 Rancière, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, p. 121.
17 Salomé Voegelin, edited excerpt from ‘Ethics of Listening’, Journal for Sonic
Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (2012).
18 Balibar, Equaliberty, p. 297.
19 Christian Bök, ‘Fractal Geometry’, in Crystallography, Ontario, Canada:
Coach House, 2003. With permission from the author.
References
Adorno, Theodor W., The Stars Down to Earth, London: Routledge, 2007 [1950].
Akrami, Najibullah, ‘Poem’, in Poetry of the Taliban, Alex Strick van Linschoten
and Felix Kuehn (eds), trans. Mirwais Rahmany and Hamid Stanikzai,
London: Hurst, 2012, p. 156.
Balibar, Étienne, Equaliberty, trans. James Ingram, Durham and London: Duke
Balibar, Étienne, Violence and Civility, On the Limits of Political Philosophy,
trans. G. M. Goshgarian, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
117
Barad, Karen, interview in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Rick

Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012.
Bök, Christian, ‘Fractal Geometry’, in Crystallography, Ontario, Canada: Coach
House, 2003.
Eades, Caroline and Elizabeth A. Papazian (eds), The Essay Film, Dialogue Politics
Utopia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Eshun, Kodwo, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, London:
Quartet Books, 1998.
Mollin, David and Salomé Voegelin, ‘Are We Staring Down on a Doomsday Clock
Getting Closer to Midnight or Merely Looking Out of the Kitchen Window?’ in
THIS I THAT IS ALL OF YOU, Brian Shabaglian (ed.), New York, 2017.
Rancière, Jacques, Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Rancière, Jacques, La Mésentente: politique et philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 1995.
Schulze, Holger, ‘How to Think Sonically? On the Generativity of the Flesh’, in
Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.),
New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 217–42.
Voegelin, Salomé, ‘Ethics of Listening’, Journal for Sonic Studies, vol. 2, no. 1
(2012), http://journal.sonicstudies.org/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=sonic;sid=b04cc09b4
814ce9b29744216a2f1ee52;view=text;idno=m0201a08;rgn=main.
Voegelin, Salomé, ‘Listening to the Stars’, in NOCH VOLUME, What Matters
Now? (What Can’t You Hear?), anthology on expanded listening, Daniela
Cascella and Paolo Inverni (eds), April 2013, http://www.nochpublishing.com/.
118
119
Hearing subjectivities: Bodies,

forms and formlessness
NO SKIN
Christopher was born without skin. He slid from his
mother all organs barely held in with muscle and sinew.
Naked at 35 he is still covered in a wide net of scars from
the unconventional patchwork grafting the doctors did.
Like the skin quilt they sewed onto him. Like Edward Scis-
sorhands. Like Herman Munster. Christopher loves it. It
makes him feel like a superhero who could at any minute
discover his powers. He has seriously considered getting
tattoos at all the scars’ intersections. Little points of black
ink all over his body emphasizing the thin white lines.
Maybe cryptic symbols. Something badass. Maybe he
should shave his head.
Moss Angel1
The sonic flesh has no dermis, no skin, but inhabits the possibility of the
world with its own formless possibility. It is organs without a body, without
social boundaries and etiquette, and merges into the volume of the world
with its own capacity to be as volume a mass of plural things: unidentifiable,
half hazard and fluid.2
The shape of me is not revealed in my image but in my movements, in my
rhythm and my participation in the world’s mobile form. My sound is part
of other sounds and they are part of me: we inter-are, objects and subjects
as things that define each other contingently, without creating complete
pictures and final identities, but as fluid approximations, converging towards
120
contingent shapes and dissolving again. There is a tyranny in the visual form
that holds us in a certain place and demands a certain name. By contrast
the skinlessness of sound allows the play of all the elements we are made of
and puts the form on trial. In this formlessness, we get a chance to reinvent
and reimagine the source and form of named identities, to listen for the
cause and consequence of their delineation and make a noise to disrupt their
naturalized shape. Thus we can fabulate on other possibilities, other forms
and shapes to take, and other ways to live and speak. What ‘thin white lines’
would we make visible, what scarred intersection would we hide?
When Jean-Luc Nancy asks about the secret that is at stake when we
truly listen, when we focus on the sonority rather than the message of a
sound, he points to a ‘cut in the un-sensed [in-sensée]’, where we do not
hear the source as a quasi visual and complete appearance or sign, as skin
making a certain shape, but hear the scars and intersections that make a
fragile form.3 Sound provides an incomplete picture and brings signifiers
into doubt: it is not ‘this’ or ‘that’, as things defined against each other, a
matter of differences and similarities; and it does not offer us a certain form,
but is the moment of production of what the thing and the listener are. This
demands participation and offers an investment in its possibilities: to be in
its encounter not its source or recipient, but the improbable identity of their
‘interbeing’, their being, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, as a relation of
each other and of everything else.
Nhat Hanh’s term acknowledges that there is no independent self but that
every ‘I’ and everything is made of non-‘I’, non-thing elements.4 I will be using
this notion of interbeing to stress the perceptual focus on the in-between: the
invisible process of production where things have no a priori and distinct
meaning or definition, but are, in their contingent co-relationality, sensed at
the cut in the un-sensed. This stretches a phenomenological intersubjectivity,
the reciprocity of sensing subjects, into the realm of things, and shows their
incomplete and formless form in the indivisibility of their ‘interobjectivity’.
Following Nhat Hanh we cannot define a thing or a subject by its source but
by the complexity of its being as a being in the world and have to accept the
interdependency and incompleteness of this existence.
Suppose we try to return one of its elements to its source. Suppose we

return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this piece of paper
would be possible? No without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return
the logger to his mother, then we have no piece of paper either. The fact
is that this sheet of paper is made up only of ‘non-paper elements’. And
if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be
no paper at all.5
The source delivers an arbitrary outcome and shape, which belies the
complexity of its production and thus hides the cause and consequences
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HEARING SUBJECTIVITIES 121
of its definition, naturalizing it in a lexical sign. By contrast, in sound we

exist transiently and contingently not as signifier or definition, but as the
agitation of the between-of-things. Thus listening does not find its actuality
in a source but performs the interrogation of what that might be. It
questions the complete and its finite appearance and instead involves itself
in the invisible and mobile connecting that creates the real as a cosmos of
possibility. Consequently, subjectivity according to listening promotes an
attitude of doubt in the complete, in the representation, in what we think we
see as a persuasive whole, and what we think we do and want to look like.
In her essay ‘A Thing Like You and Me’, Hito Steyerl asks:
What happens to identification at this point? Who can we identify with?

Of course, identification is always with an image. But ask anybody
whether they’d actually like to be a JPEG file. And this is precisely my
point: if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material
aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And
then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and becomes participation.
I will come back to this point later.6
I will come back to this point of participation later too, but for now want to
contend, with Steyerl, that the image is not an ocular object but a material
thing whose depth is not reached with a cultural eye but with an expanded
ear. The image seen produces a representation, the pretense of a complete
reproduction and the allusion to an authentic source. The image felt through
its quasi audition, through its interrogation via a sonic sensibility, by contrast,
brings us to the interbeing of its materiality, to comprehend how things
converge on its surface without finding the certain form of the represented.
The ear does not receive the complete representation of an actual thing, but
works as process of interrogation and participation that does not recognize
and see, but doubts the seen and senses something else: another way that
I could be me, and you could be you. This admits that representation is an
ideology rather than a possibility of the real, and that what we want to be
needs to be invented rather than aspired to or copied.
Listening we experience the possible slices of this world, what might be
and what else there is, behind and beyond the façade of a visual reality
that trades in complete images, absolutes and certainties, and produces the
neo-liberal interests of consensus and homogeneity constructing a realism
and an identity which, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, ‘is the absorption of all
reality and all truth in the category of the only thing possible’.7 Reality as
the only thing possible, is not a sonic possibility that is part of and opens up
towards all the variants of this world. Instead, it is a tautological possibility
as legitimacy of the absolute where those who have a part need to play
a role, and those who have no part have even lost the right to appear as
not counted. Rancière describes the absolute possible reality of a current
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political age as a community that is reduced to the sum of its parts, where
singular voices are made speechless in a consensual amalgamation, where
they have lost the power to interrupt and the opportunity to be interrupted,
and where the noise that might pluralize reality has been muted.8
Identifiers such as gender, race, class, religion, which are potential seats
for disruption and heterogeneity, are muted into certain forms, categories
and lexical givens, whose representation we follow or are disabled against.
The formlessness of a sonic subjectivity: my noise, my words, my song
and my silence can disrupt this ‘heterogeneous-homogeneity’ and question
bodily, through invisible inhabiting as resistance, the legitimacy of its
consensus. The sonic possible subject exists like the sonic possible world
in slices that are variants of its identity, as all she could be, indexical rather
than absolute. This indexical position is formless, fluid and ephemeral and
answers not a visual grid but the invisible and intersubjective practice of
listening and making noise. Thus on the fabulated grid of a sonic index
I can dance a different identity. My own formless form can take on shapes
that transgress expectations, social parameters and norms. I can call myself
anything and enter, via Saul Kripke’s realist philosophy of language, into
a counterfactuality that keeps its name even once it changes its form.
Because his language does not affirm but questions the reference points
and criteria that set the name in a lexical system.9 And I can with Hélène
Cixous rupture the norms of meaning and identity to disrupt and unravel
what it is possible to write and what it is possible to be: ‘sweeping away
syntax, breaking that famous thread, (just a tiny little thread they say)
which acts for men as a surrogate umbilical cord’.10 To cut the stranglehold
of canons, values and conventions and write not inside identity, confirming
its limits, but apart from it, out of it, expressing its inexhaustibility and
transitory nature.
In that sense sound, a sonic sensibility, offers the imagination of a trans-
subjectivity that expands beyond the conventional identification of trans-
gender into the realm of trans-technologial, trans-object, trans-political
bodies who realize their contingent shapes in collaboration with others and
other things rather than in the terms of or against an a priori definition.
This is not a colonial stance, a taking over of the female by the male,
the male by the female, of the body by technology, the individual by the
community, as a violent act of redefinition, or what Étienne Balibar terms
the ‘ultraobjective’ violence that reduces humans to the condition of things,
or the ‘ultrasubjective’ violence that creates ‘the fantasy representation of
the Other as a mortal threat operating from inside the community: as if an
inassimilable Foreigner had penetrated the Self’.11 Rather, it is an acceptance
of the other as part of the self to reach what Balibar terms an ‘internal
multiplicity’, ‘without which no self could exist’.12 Sound stretches this
capacity for multiplicity beyond internality and the intersubjective into
a broader and open cohabitation of subjects and materials in a possible
123
world – to form new shapes from contingent collaborations between my

sound, yours and that of things.
This essay explores the formless, skinless body of listening as the basis
of a sonic subjectivity and considers how it might restage visual notions of
identity and belonging and their corresponding representation and use as a
political and capitalist resource. It recognizes with Steyerl that the subject
might not be the exclusive seat of emancipation anymore, and that it is in a
meeting with the object as thing that a new sense of identity might emerge.
Generations of feminists – including myself – have strived to get rid

of patriarchal objectification in order to become subjects . . . But as the
struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a
different possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a
change?13
Therefore, here I develop a subjectivity that takes account of itself as an

identity with others, as a transitory and contingent interbeing that lives on the
cut, in the invisible in-between of things where its agency does not produce
representation, ‘this’ or ‘that’, but the ambiguity of the incomplete; and where
it pursues via Kripke and Cixous the possibility for an identity that is not
called into a system of givens and a priori criteria, but performs its own name
and its own body to produce ‘indispensable ruptures and transformations’.14
In this way, I come to acknowledge with Balibar the violence of identity, and
gain as Rancière aims to, an ear for the voice that is not heard.
I will deliberate on the possibility of such a transformative sonic
subjectivity by listening to the work of Evan Ifekoya and Pamela Z, which
invite us to sing, move and breathe together; to lay a different track from
our bodies into the world, to connect not through references and givens, and
to proffer ourselves not through the channels of identity, representation and
actuality, but from the possibility of being everything with everything else.
Gender Song (2014) and Disco Breakdown (2014)

Evan Ifekoya dances, moves the body, hands and words in different clothes
and different shoes, with wigs and hairdos, accessorized and unadorned.
The songs are catchy and memorable, their tunes stay in your head, make
you move and find a rhythm with the patterns, colours and things that move
on screen. The voice sings in speech song without technique, which makes
it unpretentious and easy to join in: and so I enter the work by its sound,
rhythm and words, and participate in the flow of its transformations.
While the visual as image keeps the potential for distance and the
opportunity to read the body as form and representation, the sound makes
us converge in the material aspect of the seen, whose body is there, doubles
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up, triples up, quadruples and finds a way back to one through video editing
techniques and effects that are no doubt digital but in their undisguised
simplicity bring an analogue sense to the work. The fades and pop ups, split
screens and overlays, highlight the materiality of the seen rather than what it
represents, and make the image a thing that is malleable and transformable
rather than the stable representation of the original subject.
The effects are collaged, superimposed and brought next to each other;
edges are sought and juxtapositions created whose reality is performed in
sound. Listening we hear the work’s dimensionality that expands its frame
and gives us access to its movements where it is not about what is seen but
how it is agitated and agitating its own reality between hands and bodies,
things and words, that are not separate constituents of one seen but are the
invisible material of the image-plane heard from its depth. In listening the
image escapes its borders and preconditions. Sound confronts my gaze and
preconceptions with an invisible rhythm that beckons participation and
questions the visual parameters of negotiation by demanding a more self-
conscious reflection: the words singing about gender, work, identity, dancing
and expectations become mine to resing and reimagine, to own and speak
rather than receive, and I have to, as Ifekoya demands, practice self-reflection:
When I am performing I tend to think less about . . ., or even in my video
work, I kind of feel like I am an avatar in a way. And actually, I think
in an ideal world maybe what I’d have is like some kind of mirror. Like
my face would just be a mirror in a performance, like that is what I am
trying to do in a way. I am more interested in putting up these things that
encourage a self-reflection.15
The voice is the mirror on Ifekoya’s face and throws my gaze back at me. I can
hear myself looking at my own skinless formless form projecting another.
Hearing the artist’s voice reverses my gaze to see how I look, not as an image
but as an agency, and it reveals what I see in a new light. Its sound invites
the performance of different forms and shapes, transitory and transforming,
dancing to a syncopated rhythm without recourse to virtuosity, a right way
to sing, a right way to dance.
Most of Ifekoya’s work is accessible online and lives very well in the fluid
vernacular of the virtual where categories between art and commentary, fact
and fiction, work and leisure start to break down and where the certainty of
their meaning and authority starts to dissolve, and their definitions take on
other forms that get their signification not from one source but from the cross
referencing of different sources and contexts.16 This presence online enables
the work to critique and reframe the boundaries and interdependencies of
old knowledge and to perform new points of views, new bodies and new
identities that might not settle on a certain form but keep on dancing their
own transition between places of history, identity and belonging.
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Online the artist’s work starts to converse beyond defined spaces across
the realm of commerce, politics and fashion, and finds a relevant association
in pop music, listened to and streamed. In that way it gains the ability to
interfere in the naturalized look of commercial representations and becomes
able to introduce other possibilities. It manages to engage in the discourse of
representation and identity by performing alienation and its alternatives in
the awkward space between expectation and what is really there.
But it is not only the placing of the work online but also the placing
of the artist within the work that is particular to this task of reimagining
identity, representation and self. The two works that inspire this writing,
Gender Song and Disco Breakdown and the work-cum-interview Genuine.
Original. Authentic (2015) feature Ifekoya prominently, not as subject but
as material agent, dancing and singing, talking and moving: as a sound
image that holds the dimensionality of interaction and agitation, and the
potential to be without a source at the edge of the invisible.
The artist’s body is part of this complex audiovisual-image-thing. It
participates in its production and generates itself as an aspect of its material.
Rather than remaining an authentic represented, it performs its contingent
subjectivity as a skinless and mobile identity. Even as the visual image
pretends a separation between the reproduction and its source, the subject
and the object of representation, and offers us a gap, an absence, to step
into and define them both, the sonic image knows no original and does not
defer itself to a source, but generates it. The visual ‘gap’ nourishes the idea
that we can truly understand things, assign them names from a lexicon, and
define ourselves in relation to those names as stable subjects, as identities.
It purports a knowledge that is not produced in practice but received as
abstracted facts by identities that are not producing themselves but are a
product of historical, economical, racial and gendered identification. By
contrast, in sound I am simultaneous with the heard whose identity I am
too close to see but have to negotiate in this blind encounter. No gap is left
from which to guide the work back to its symbolic register and to give the
body its lexical name. Instead, a new lexicon needs to be produced that can
name invisible things and bodies as things in transition that have no desire
to arrive or to stand still.
The ear works not along the lines of reproduction as the recreation and
making up for the absence of the real, but generates the real from what
is heard, which is always absent; and it does not hear the complete but
practices fragments, edges, visible and invisible slices of what things are or
what they might be. In this way, it injects possibility into the apparently
finished form, and invents its ‘malformation’ as a legitimate identity:
How about acknowledging that this image is not some ideological

misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and
availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by
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our wishes and fears – a perfect embodiment of its own condition of

existence?17
Ifekoya is the image in sound, there is no real Ifekoya, as a substrate or

‘norm’, which here is only performing its own aberration. Listening to the
work I see the generative fiction of the body as material presence that is all
there is and that gains significance in its performative ‘condition of existence’
rather than as its author, subject or object. The sound as the physical agency
of singing and as the concept of a performative self demands inhabiting
and participation. The sonic body dances within the material of the image,
taking part in the temporal flow of its production within which it abandons
a clear sense of autonomy but grasps what it is from what they are together.
Sound opens the relationship between rhythm, lights, movements and words
into whose between the body disappears as a clear identity and within which
it reappears as an interbeing: a subject made of things.
Referring to a remark by Elisabeth Lebovici, Steyerl suggests that,
Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become

a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history,
of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried within it the
promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to
be an object was bad.18
She goes on to remark that ‘the subject is always already subjected’ and
therefore another way, another autonomy might need to be found that does
not hold the tyranny of a name and identification, which might offer the
certainty of a historical determination, but which also carries the limits and
prejudice of this certainty and the consequences of its name, and which
holds the potential too of its imminent abuse as a political and capitalist
resource: to be as woman the target of your desire, the consumer of your
product and the recipient of exclusion and lower pay. The lexical definition
categorizes us, it overrides our actions and agency and determines, before
we can move or dance, what we are.
A Kantian philosophy of language, according to Howard Caygill, still today
totally and almost imperceptibly so, pervades our conception of language
as a lexical resource and represents the cornerstone of Western thought,
decisively influencing the organization and possibility of our thinking,
speaking and writing. Although, according to Caygill, Kant’s own views on
language were more open-ended and discoursive than some would come to
interpret and use them, or indeed criticize them for, what is relevant here is
that its analogical definitions lend a hand to structures, networks, taxonomies
and lexicons and thus set the parameters of the possibility of knowledge,
identity and thought, and delineate as unthinkable and impossible what
falls outside its grammar and logic.19 The pervasiveness of his conception of
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language means that it is not only within the remit of philosophy but also
across the larger cultural consciousness, its sense of signification, truth and
worth, that a Kantian language frame influences the definition of the real
and thus delimits the mobility of knowledge and identity: what a woman, a
man, a child, a chair or a table can be is determined by their correspondence
to criteria associated with that word, and while those criteria may develop
over time, they still represent a definition that precedes and determines our
living those names.20 In a Kantian worldview, the description ‘justifies’ the
name as a word that refers the object or subject to a set of lexical givens,
which it needs to fulfil to be called thus. Once the object or subject stops to
comply with those givens it stops being called by its name. A chair is a chair
because it fulfills the function, criteria and expectation of what that is. If it
fails in its function, if it breaks down, changes shape, loses its legs, it ceases
to be a chair as it cannot fulfil its criteria anymore, or it becomes a ‘broken
chair’. This seems a relatively harmless distinction in relation to a chair but
reveals itself to be much more consequential when translated to a human
or an animal, a fact that ought to make us think about the possibility for a
more mobile identity and its performance in language.
Kant’s conception of language enables taxonomies of abstract knowledge
and creates structures about what things are and how the world is. They
grant legitimacy, enable consensus and communication, but at the same time
they disable the transformation and contingency of the subject and object
who cannot change for fear of losing the ‘autonomy, sovereignty and agency’
of their name. Language thus applied names not the fluid ‘condition of
existence’ but the stable body of subjects and objects within an etymological
and symbolic frame that grants their image a visible form, but hides their
skinlessness and the scars of a contingent identity that could make them ‘feel
like a superhero who could at any minute discover his powers’.21
Evan Ifekoya
Evan Ifekoya performs a different philosophy of language, where the name
remains but the form changes, is transitory, in process and on trial, without
ever ceasing definition. ‘Dance is all I want to do’. This refrain in Disco
Breakdown voices repeatedly the desire not to work, not to function, but
to dance instead and is juxtaposed with ‘I should’ ‘I should’ as a reminder
of what is expected and what criteria have to be fulfilled. The artist sings
the wish not to engage in the functionality of work and of identity, and to
instead perform a mobile existence, while crafting a disco ball from small
mirror plates, glue and hands. The piece at once addresses racial stereotypes
of the entertaining body, and engages the work ethic and the commensurate
identities of neo-liberalism in a bodily critique. It denies work and the
name of work through dance, becoming a subject through the autonomous
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movement of the body rather than its lexical definition and an abstract
reference to work.
The moving body is the name in sound, and performs a Kripkean
naming of a subjectivity that keeps its designation whatever its form. Saul
Kripke’s philosophy of language advanced in Naming and Necessity (1972)
articulates against a Kantian background a realist philosophy that does not
refer words to a lexical structure but names, as in baptizes, objects and
subjects, which then remain named so in all counterfactual situations, even
if their function and form, what they are doing and look like, or what we
might think of them, change. The named is certain of who it is: a dog, a cat,
a mouse, but there are many variants of how it can be so without ceasing
to be itself.
With recourse to Aristotle’s pre-enlightenment philosophy, where concepts
and thoughts are not tied to words, Kripke overturns Kant’s analytical
philosophy and recognizes a different relationship between words as names
that acknowledges the mutability of the named and references the context
of naming rather than a lexicon of names. His language does not discover
correspondences and does not organize things according to lexical givens
but calls them within ‘rigid designators’ that identify the name without
corresponding criteria but through the testimony of its context. It eschews
historical necessity, ideal references and absolutes, and instead focuses on
the circumstance of definition, the contingent, ahistorical associations that
enable designation as the condition of existence, and that give the name its
credibility and legitimacy. The best example to illustrate this lived condition
of a given name can be heard in Kripke’s lecture on the unicorn in which he
suggests that even if the bones of a thing fulfilling all the criteria of the fabled
beast would be found, these could not be retro associated to the unicorn as
they exist not in the context of the flesh but live in the circumstance of their
own invention as fabled beasts. Instead, these bones would have to be given
a new name, in recognition of their autonomous existence.22
Kripke’s philosophy of language, as a cultural consciousness, has the
potential to rethink knowledge, the authority and subject of knowledge as
well as its object, and leaves room to debate the circumstance and agency
of its definition: who can participate in its production, what histories and
canons determine its legitimacy and what about those that cannot be found
in history and those that come from the future; what about the invisible and
the inaudible?23
The name in sound moves Kripke’s baptism into the designation of the
unseen where it does not find confirmation in a visual form, but articulates
the agency of the predicate, which generates a mobile world that keeps on
changing its look under cover of its designation. Sound brings to Kripke’s
logic the phenomenon of the invisible that functions not as entity but as
the between of things, and challenges him to name the ephemeral and the
passing. In this way, a sonic philosophy of language takes from Kripke the
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contextual action of designation and the variability of the named, and adds
to it the contingency of its call, which performs rather than structures or
defines the heard and names, unnames and renames it again and again. Thus
adapted, Kripke’s realist philosophy is useful to grasp the mobility of a sonic
world and to give autonomy and authority to the invisible subject, without
subjecting it to the definition of its name, but by instead listening out for
its fluid designation, and empowering it to call itself through its mobile
relationship with others and other things. And so to hear Ifekoya’s voice and
sound, is to hear the artist’s fluid condition, which refuses a lexical definition
and invites participation and self-reflection instead.
In this way, a sonic practice and philosophy escapes taxonomies and
historical determination and gains identity as a transitive potential that is
reciprocal and does not have to arrive back in a lexicon, however contingent
and contextual. Instead, it can move on and through, and therefore it can
perform the possibilities and even the impossibilities of its skinless body. As
Ifekoya sings in the Gender Song: ‘Female hemale shemale don’t matter . . .
gender is not sex, so don’t get it twisted.’
Thus I give up on the lexical definition and call myself by my own name,
so I do not have to look for myself in history, where according to Hélène
Cixous and Catherine Clément I cannot be found anyway. ‘What is my place
if I am a woman? I look for myself throughout the centuries and don’t see
myself anywhere’ . . . ‘Where to stand? Who to be?’24 So instead of looking
for an image that even if found would only represent what I am supposed to
be rather than what I am, I have to invent myself, as Ifekoya does, singing
and dancing, without fear of definition, in the certainty that the song will let
me transform and change. In sound I am becoming a subject not through the
name but through the movement of the body that calls itself and can take on
any form without losing authority.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that
the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by
repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent
of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is
imperative.25
Ifekoya’s dancing and singing body ruptures the power of the past, its lexical
name and definition, conventionally understood as a point of strength and
self-assertion, but which is always also the locale of repeated subjugation.
Thus she brings a new emancipatory force into play. This new emancipatory
force does not rely on history and conventions for its authority but on the
present condition of existence that becomes visible in its own song. The
rupture of the past, through the performance of the voice, translates Cixous’s
request for women to write in order to achieve ‘the indispensable ruptures
and transformations in her history’ into a request for women to sing; to
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perform a feminine subjectivity in song.26 Ifekoya performs the rupture

by singing, and by considering femininity without its pronoun she fast-
forwards into the future of Cixous’s ‘unknown women’ that can be found
in the undefined spaces, the in-between, where names do not define but
generate, transform, grant agency and autonomy without histories, lexicons
or grammar. From there we can update Cixous’s feminine writing into a
writing of trans-subjectivity.
Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes
possible. When it is ambiguously uttered – the wonder of being several –
she doesn’t defend herself against these unknown women whom she’s
surprised at becoming, but derives pleasure from this gift of alterability.
I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I,
more or less human, but alive because of transformation.27
Ifekoya is the unknown singing flesh, alive because of transformation.

The feminine rupture without a pronoun is the sensibility and agency of a
skinless sonic body that has the power to take on any shape and form and
to sound against a dominant masculine logic the potential of the undefined
as ‘a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and
transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between’.28
Even though ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous’s 1976 text on a feminine
writing from which I quote above and glean the ‘unknown women’ whose
libido is cosmic, whose language denies the grammar of masculine logic,
who are defined by an infinite and mobile complexity and who perform
their bodies in writing, does not mention as name or grammatical possibility
the idea of trans-subjectivity, her essay suggests that writing is precisely
the in-between and the undefined that finds contingent definition in its
performance and produces the circumstance of a different definition not
tied to physiology or history but to the desire of a present existence.
I take Cixous’s call to woman to ‘put herself into the text – as into the
world and into history – by her own movement’, to assert a femininity that
can ‘by her own movement’ transform ‘the same into the other and into
the in-between’, and take on any role it wants, any look it desires.29 This is
not to deny the feminine, the specificity of ‘her’ neglect and discrimination,
but to accept with Steyerl that a historical subjectivity has lost the promise
of agency with which to fight for autonomy and sovereignty, its right to
make itself count and to be reflected in the world’s design. Since, in a neo-
liberal context ‘her’ pronoun is used as a political and capitalist resource,
as site a of a social mythology and territory for colonialization that shuts
her performance down, a more powerful emancipatory force lies with a
sonic designator that offers the subject its transformative potential and gives
access to the in-between, as the refusal of definition and the play with the
possible from which to ‘go right up to the impossible’.30
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The critical agency of the avatar-I

I kind of feel like I am an avatar in a way. And actually, I think in an ideal
world maybe what I’d have is like some kind of mirror.31
The authority of a normative identity can exist in the impersonal. It needs

no particular interface to see itself. Its form is omnipresent and recognizable.
It is evidenced and mirrored in what counts as actually real and it expects to
see itself mirrored in my gaze. Therefore, it needs no device of self-reflection
to articulate its subjectivity or agency, it is their definition and sees itself
reflected absolutely. Its reality is not experiential or transitory, generated in
the heterogeneity of a doubtful ‘I’, but presumes certainty and stability in
the only reality there could possibly be, whose singular status is so pervasive
as to be transparent, and whose identification so absolute as to need no
contrivance for an alternative reflection or a different agency.
The sonic mirror of Ifekoya’s voice by contrast is the articulation of
absence, where the lack of a pronoun does not signify omnipresent
transparency, but a void in language and in our imagination to account
for a transitory subjectivity and its possible reality. It does not assert the
demand to represent but invites self-reflection. The mirror-voice breaks my
gaze and makes me audible to myself in my relationship with the artist.
It presents actuality as an intersubjective possibility within which we
negotiate as contingent differences, through whose tensions the transparent
‘I’ loses its hegemony and discipline, and the world gains its sociopolitical
dimensions.
The ‘I’ that is audible to itself acknowledges other ‘I’s and at least knows
of if not hears their audibility. The ‘I’ of authority by contrast only hears
itself without being audible to itself. Without, in other words, the humility
or responsibility for the difference and conflict that makes the self doubt
itself and the other count. That is why the focus on the body is not the
privileging of an immersive, pre-reflective physicality, an anthropocentrism
run riot, but the acknowledgement of a fragile subjectivity. The sonic self as
‘avatar-I’ deflects norms and provides representation to the inaudible and
grants it the opportunity to make itself heard and its listening gain influence.
The avatar-I performs not a certain identity but presents a sonic mirror
that allows the ‘I’ to maneuver and reconnect, illuminate and articulate what
from the third, the impersonal person remains too dense and immobile and
what in the first person appears too emotive and closed-off. Thus, the avatar
grants movement and agency, while the ‘I’ keeps a focus on the humility and
openness of the subjectivity that is the locus of that agency.
The conceptualization of the avatar-I provides a means and location to
hear the world beyond that which is mirrored in the singular actuality of the
perceived real and its normative language. It stages the artist not as a referent
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but as a portal into a possibility where plural and less audible subjects and
things sound, and it enables the performance of unknown subjectivities
and things through the reflection of my gaze. In this sense, the avatar-I
performs the ‘I’ not for itself, but for its agency to illuminate less audible
and even inaudible subjectivities and things, and applies its sensitivity to
the articulation of the overlooked and the ignored. In the mirror of the
sonic avatar the listening selves function not simply as alternative centres
of power and determination, but as things among things, with the humility
of their own doubt and the responsibility to listen out for what cannot
make itself heard: that which has no name or that which wants to fall out
of its historical name and definition. The sonic mirror reflects another space
where things find other relations and my own gaze gains a different view.
Instead of becoming a subject of history, subjected to the consequences
and causes of my name’s subjugation and neglect, or categorized within
the descriptions of lexical givens, I can look into the mirror of Ifekoya’s
voice, dance with the artist, and sing with the autonomy of things, in the
in-between, in the undefined spaces where we are not ‘this’ or ‘that’ but
‘inter-are’, transient and transforming, a thing of other things, comingling
and forming part of skinless bodies that are the material rather than the
representation of what we see.
I just like to be in these in-between spaces, these like undefined spaces.

You know, I just do not want to have to be one or the other, I am quite
happy to be inbetween, but I just don’t want to be put into a box that
I didn’t chose. And all I can do is keep making work that just moves and
shifts in different places.32
Breathing (2014, solo version)

We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from
breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.33
Pamela Z is breathing, her body breathes into the microphone, into

technology that amplifies and multiplies the invisible material of her breath,
while her voice is singing ‘I was breathing’ and ‘I am breathing’, again and
again in operatic gestures and spoken lines, as whispers and as sounds.
The movement of her right arm activates and changes the articulation of
her breath and of her voice via a MIDI-controller that is strapped to her
wrist and reacts to muscular movements and contractions; other sounds
and manipulations are produced by her fingers passing by an ultrasound-
activated box, placed on a little stand next to her laptop that sits on the
other side of the microphone that started the cycle of action and interaction
by recording her breath.
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The track is seven minutes long and forms part of Carbon Song Cycle
(2013), a longer rendering of the piece that includes accompaniment of
bassoon, viola, cello and percussion. The one I am listening to is the solo
version, shorter and voice only. However, this voice does not remain singular
but produces the proliferation of Pamela Z’s body through her breath and
song, which is conducted by the gesture-activated controller on her right
wrist and the ultrasound activated box on the stand. The wrist-attached
controller resembles a bionic appendix, whose power at once recalls an
archaic notion of occultist magic, of moving things by gestures and the
mind alone, and conjures a futuristic vision of bodies with technologically
facilitated super powers that transcend the limitations of the human form
and prejudice. The microphone, the laptop, the MIDI-controller and the
ultrasound box, cords and sockets, BodySynthTM, VST plugins and so forth,
enable the plural materializations of her body in the invisible utterance of
her breath, and ‘operate’ on its texture and spatiality.34 In this way her breath
comes to inscribe the whole woman beyond her physical form, as a libidinal
force, as an inexhaustible and complex expansion, whose voice generates an
as yet impossible subject that gains corporeality through the poetry of the
invisible and comes to suggest its possibility by her own movements.
This technological operation produces her work as an infinite end of
plural means that articulates as the coincidence of both languages: that of
technology and that of the body; the machine and the physical, converging
in the sound of her breath in which they are extended invisibly into a
multiplicity of voices that meet pre-recorded word samples – ‘humans’,
‘orang-utans’, ‘little shellfish’, ‘exuding carbon dioxide’, ‘oxygen’ – which
syncopate the flow of her ephemeral plurality to create an unseen and
fleeting assemblage.
Pamela Z creates her multiplicity through a trans-technological
practice, which brings all the variants of her body together in her breath,
and proliferates them outside of her skin, the outline and border of her
objectivity, in a fantastic imagination of her skinless form and possibility.
However, the air does not always flow steadily. Sampled sounds pick up and
generate the catch of her own breath and play with the consonants of its
material where the air does not flow unhindered but makes a stutter, meets
an obstacle and seems to suffocate. All the while her voice reassures us ‘I was
breathing’, ‘I am breathing’.
Her trans-technological body is complex and concentrated. It is generated
from the virtuosity of her performance with technological tools that respond
through a network of electrodes to every movement in her arm. But it is not
idealized, in the sense of instrumentalized and perfect. Instead it is physical,
libidinal and material. It does not create the representation of the subject
as a techno-body, colonialized and repurposed by the machine, but forms a
trans-technological subjectivity sensitive to her biology and practicing their
shared capacities. The technology strengthens her voice rather than giving
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her another. It amplifies and extends her body that resources itself. Pamela Z
is not taken-over and she is not erased, but asserts her autonomy, sovereignty
and identity through the performance of her invisible body made possible by
technological means but not to their ends.
Her performance is visual, it is a spectacle of physical concentration
performed between her body and the technology that surrounds her and
around which she moves to articulate her breath. Its articulation is not
limited to this gaze however, which in some way is only the concession she
pays to the needs of a live audience. Instead, the intrigue and pluralizing
energy lies in the invisible performance: the unseen workings of muscles and
synapsis up and down the conducting arm; the invisible between of body
and technology where ultrasonic waves trigger the breath that came from
her lungs; and the dark mobility of sound from where between intent and
technology a different body emerges that has the capacity to become an
‘impossible subject’ demanding to be heard, demanding we imagine at least
an aesthetic and social framework within which she might become possible
and even real.
This sonic invisibility complicates the potential awe and wonder at the
technological capability and its virtuous use, and offers an alternative focus
that hears interactions and co-productions, forming a ‘techno-subjective’
environment rather than showing its tools. I am not staring at the bionic
man but hear the invisible materializing of a bionic femininity. I hear a new
body a new poetry of the breath that is the material of Steyerl’s emancipatory
image, which eschews representation and has Cixous’s transformative
capacity and power of eroticization, not to manipulate but ‘to dash through
and to “fly” ’.35
To fly in French, as Cixous points out, is voler, which at once means to fly
and to steal, and thus in this context connotes the ability to lift off, to lose
the gravity of the human form and its physical and societal constraints and
to steal a different definition: to call myself by my breath.
Trans-technological subjectivity: Listening
to the unicorn breathing
The breath is the poetry of the body; it is where its invisible and mobile
plurality lies and where it performs the acceptance of the other as part of the
self, to reach what Balibar terms an ‘ “internal multiplicity”, all différence in
the self (the “us”) and its others without which no self could exist’.36 In this
passage from Violence and Civility (2015), Balibar talks about the tyranny
of an idealized identity, an identity identical to itself (national, religious or
racial) that believes itself to be exclusive, and that seeks to oppress and
eliminate all otherness and to effect the suppression of all difference, to
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attain its own realization. This dialectical and absolute self is acted out
through ‘ultrasubjective’ violence, the frenzied hatred and irrational cruelty
against all otherness even if it involves hurting or killing the self: ‘one’s own
death is preferable to any mixing, intercourse, or hybridization, the threat
of which is perceived at the fantasy level as worse than death.’37 It manifests
a desire for a false autonomy and a false sovereignty, and stems from an
idealized hatred of the other, which, according to Balibar, paradoxically
presents an obliteration of the self, since, the self cannot exist without its
internal multiplicity: it cannot exist without ‘humans’, ‘orang-utans’, ‘little
shellfish’, ‘carbon dioxide’, ‘oxygen’.
This need for the other to exist as part of the self, articulated in relation
to violence and identity, reframes the philosophy of interbeing, articulated
by Thich Nhat Hanh within a political perspective. Nhat Hanh’s belief that
there is no independent, self-sufficient self but that every ‘I’ and everything
is made of non-‘I’, non-thing elements meets Balibar’s pronunciation of the
tyranny of a reified and absolutized identity manifest in the denial of any
trace of otherness in the self. In juxtaposition and superimposition, they
confirm the political possibility and dimension of interbeing as a critical and
generative subjectivity that confronts the violence of the absolute through a
mobile and transitive ‘I’: a political trans-subjectivity.
I have earlier located the agency of this interbeing in sound, which calls not
‘this’ or ‘that’ but the in-between, and names, as in gives a fluid designator to
the invisible co-production of things. Through Balibar we come to appreciate
the political nature of this interbeing as an alternative to a homogenized
and fetishized definition. Consequently, sound, as an access point to and
as material of this political dimension of identity in interbeing, attains an
emancipatory force, and listening, as a focus on and participation in the
invisible agency of such an in-between, attains a political possibility: the
possibility to critically hear not just the historical representation of identity
and its commensurate sublimation and suppression, but to recognize also the
undercurrents of what Balibar calls the psychotic cast of idealized hatred,
which sees the other as an enemy who is both ‘potential victim and mimetic
persecutor’; who at once threatens the self through his otherness and needs
to be threatened.38 This listening must be attentive to the violence of an
ideological identity and its representation, and it must aim to hear another
possibility in the contingent encounter between the self with the other,
with the world and with things. This consideration assigns listening the
responsibility and task to see into the sociopolitical actuality of the world,
to illuminate its intersections, overlaps and co-productions; and demands
sound making as inter-action and inter-invention of alternative possibilities
of definition, value and form.39
The sound of Pamela Z’s breath, amplified and conducted, transforming
into song, meeting words, changing shape, becoming a stutter and confirming
itself again, is the invisible agency of her interbeing with technology, with
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other subjects, with things and with language. Her Breathing performs her
‘différence in the self’: her plural and complex identity with others, whose
autonomy does not define an absolute identity and location, but practices
a diffuse being that is a being of the other as being part of the self. Her
performance reveals sonic subjectivity as an identity that is contingent and
in process, certain not of itself but produced in a transformative exchange
with another that is not threatening or threatened, but inter-invents their
formless form.
Pamela Z’s performance focuses not on the voice but on the breath
that enables the voice, and enables the body, through its interbeing with
an oxygenized world. The breath is our silent base-rhythm that illustrates
our inability to self-sustain, to be anything without being with others and
other things. It keeps the body alive through its reciprocal and renewing
bond with the world, and performs subjectivity as an invisible exchange
with other beings that thus become part of our selves. Her breath sounds
her own multiplicity as the simultaneous plurality with others that expands
her body and her capacity, and realizes invisibly the political possibility of a
sonic subjectivity that is capable of political participation and the effecting
of change.
Breathing is at once a necessity of life and the fantastic extension
of the body. It is its fabulation and creates the invisible performance of
a mobile and multifold self that transgresses a normative representation
and function and makes a formless form that conjures possibilities and
impossibilities and opens up to different interactions. It breaks through the
limits of actuality of what Rancière identifies as ‘the community of speaking
beings’ and makes ‘the invisible visible, to give a name to the anonymous
and to make words audible where only noise was perceptible before’.40
While this breakthrough of silence as a break into audibility performs a
violence, this is not a dialectical but an emancipatory violence, predicated by
the violence of a political reality that has limited the inaudible voice to the
condition of things.41 It is a violence that does not seek to silence or suppress
but to sound itself: to participate and to listen in order to unthink a singular
reality that insists on the impossibility of the impossible, and to unthink
the oppressively close relationship between logic and language, the lexical
contract between identity and name, and perform other possibilities.42
The transformation of the body through its breath is powerful. It
unthinks and unperforms the actuality of the body, expending of its form
and certainties. Thus it thinks and performs contingent and reciprocal
shapes that enter the political order and question the management of its
structure and the limits of its reality. The breath confronts political speech
with its noise and generates a different interface, a different plane on which
to interact, to listen, to speak and to be heard. This demand is physical and
erotic. The breathing body seeks an intercourse with the world, it demands
for the scars and stitches of its skinless body to be sewn into the body politic,
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for it to sing and dance with its language and form new intersections that
can grow together and become parts of a complex and fluid entirety.
In some ways, Pamela Z’s Breathing is the invisible equivalent of Rebecca
Horn’s Einhorn (Unicorn), her wearable sculpture of a unicorn dress and
work made between 1970 and 1972 from bandages, a wooden horn and
metal clasps, which was worn by a woman who Horn had chosen for her
upright posture. She was filmed walking through the empty landscape in the
early morning: ‘Her figure mirrors the tall foliage surrounding her, but her
pale skin and long white horn separate her from her environment, conjuring
images of the fabled creature the title references.’43 The work creates a
generative trans-subjectivity between the human form and the fabled beast,
created in the interbeing of flesh, fabric, metal and wood, which together
perform the possibility of a different subjectivity and a different being in
the world.
Both works engage the body in an encounter with technology, the
technology of sonic reproduction, sampling and diffusion, and the technology
of cloth, wood, feathers as well as large bandages and prostheses. Both dress
the body and augment the body, give it extensions and bring it into motion
to test and try a different outline, a different intersection where the scars and
stitches between the Einhorn suit, the biosynth wristband and the body are
not seen but their transforming potential takes place; and where the body
meets the world and transforms its view.
The Einhorn and Breathing perform, against what Rancière terms a
‘governmental curbing’ of politics, the limiting of an administration’s
accountability and action within the realm of a designated real, a pluralized
economy of erotic extensionality.44 The transformation of the body through
both the breath and the wooden horn is erotic, empowering, and self-
generating. Its eroticism ruptures a designated real and practices through
the fabulation of bodies and movements contingent possibilities, creating
the self in a fantastical form and sharing its creation through the mirror
of the avatar-I. In this way, the extensionality of the prosthesis and the
breath becomes our shared erotic possibility, as a political possibility of
desire that uncurbs politics.
According to Rancière, current governments delimit politics within a
humanitarian frame that grants universal and thus universalizing human
rights but eschews the rights of the individual as citizen as a singular
person and formless voice, and thus denies the possibility of the impossible,
not because it is really not possible or true but because its truth disables
consensus governance. By contrast, Breathing and Einhorn produce the
extension of the body into its impossibility, not by simply appropriating
something, nor by being overtaken and controlled by another thing, but
by coming together with technology and things to realize subjectivity as
an interbeing that resources the self and amplifies its as yet unheard voices.
But while the images of the Einhorn have become iconic, they have come to
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be Horn’s work in representation, which limits its generative and transitive

force, the invisible interbeing of sound keeps on refreshing Pamela Z’s trans-
production. It keeps on breathing, constituting the body between the source
and rhythm of its life. Sound avoids representation, and remains invisibly
the inexhaustible source of the body’s renewal and fabulation. Therefore,
we have to consider the Einhorn with the sound of Pamela Z’s breath in our
ears, to re-perform, again and again the faint calling of its invisible self as a
conceptual sonic subjectivity that avoids the identification with the image
and continues to participate in its materiality.
Back to the heart chambers,

back to the bloodstreams
resembling branches of energy outside the body,
Flowing from one person to another,
Like a web of electrical currents.45
This coming together with the other to become a proper and powerful self,
that is neither colonializing nor colonialized, that is not reified and absolute,
but open and open-ended, demands the responsibility and humble generosity
of the avatar-I: the sonic subjectivity that remains invisible but reflects,
agitates and inter-invents and makes available connections, realities and
possibilities through which it creates the space and condition of existence
as multiplicity.
If there is a self proper to woman, paradoxically it is her capacity to

depropriate herself without self-interest: endless body, without ‘end’,
without principle ‘parts’; if she is a whole, it is a whole made up of parts
that are wholes, not simple, partial objects but a varied entirety, moving
and boundless change, a cosmos where eros never stops trailing, vast
astral space.46
This ‘depropriated woman’ as varied entirety, moving and boundless,

articulated by Cixous and Clément, suggests a feminine subjectivity
that refers us not simply to a biological gender or its categorization and
appropriation within politics and neo-liberal capitalism, but to a fluid
calling of femininity, as the name of a sensibility, agency and attitude.
This femininity acts and interacts as a mobile trans-subjectivity, that
realizes itself in the between of the body and the world, its things and
technology, without suppressing or sublimating anything or itself in the
process. The idea is not to become the technology, the MIDI-controller or
the prosthesis of wood, metal, fabric and bandages, or to deform, delimit,
abuse and use them, but to perform and understand that subjectivity is
the interbeing with these things in their entirety and in hers, ‘without
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“end” ’, without impossibility and silence.47 It is their reciprocal

production that is not body or technology but is their trans-formation.
This trans-formation articulates as verb and as noun. It articulates an
identity of interbeing that is not rigid but transitory, and that is not an
idealized destination, but calls into being a moveable locale of reciprocity
and shared production. Thus it is the locus and action of the political
possibility of a sonic subjectivity that agitates against representation,
discrimination and exclusion.
Unperforming identity and knowledge

In Genuine, Original, Authentic, Evan Ifekoya talks about unperforming
the representation of the black body as an ever performing and entertaining
body by moving against its frame: re-singing, re-dancing it to erase its
image and to rupture the historical definition that reduces its identity to
the condition of its representation. Instead, the artist’s movements generate
a different language of this body and a different imagination of its name.
Similarly, Pamela Z unperforms an idealized instrumentality and the
functionality of technology with her breath, and thus she unperforms an
idealized and instrumentalized subjectivity. She ‘breathes’ through tools for
making sounds, or what Tara Rodgers, alluding to the military history and
purpose of sound technology, terms the ‘interface to ghosts of technoscientific
projects past’, and breathes out a body without expansionist purpose and
ideal form, but of an extensional and shared existence.48
Pamela Z’s work does not use technology to overcome human
inadequacies, or to attain an idealized virtuosity. Her ‘MIDI-appended’
body does not enter into the dialectic of strength and sublimation,
suppressing individuality into a generalized condition of instrumentality,
but realizes the body and the technology in their particular existence
together. This is an emancipatory unperforming of a technological necessity
that does not follow its own chronology in the service of perfection and
with an expansionist zeal, but enables an interbeing and co-production of
the possibilities of the impossible, both of the body and of the tool; and
it is an unperforming also of a feminine subjectivity that is not caught in
the place of her history but enacts and invents a different future. Just as
Ifekoya reclaims a performative subjectivity that cannot be stereotyped,
bought or sold, but moves to be as alterability unrepresentable; the
expanded breath does not overtake and suppress Pamela Z’s identity, but
realizes it, makes it possible beyond a visual frame and capacity, as a
variable interbeing.
Both artists unperform normative positions and given expectations
by performing a ‘feminine song’ that is not gendered but physical and
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cosmic: dancing a ‘vast astral space’ where the noun’s trans-formation is

an inexhaustible predicate that does not tie itself into the neo-liberal drive
of a phallocentric organization and taxonomy, but expands, boundlessly
into anything it could be with anything that could be and even things that
cannot be, or seem impossible, at least for now. Their works pursue libidinal
extensions into an invisible economy of being everywhere with everything
without hierarchy, discrimination or the neo-liberal thrust of profit and the
devaluation of the apparently worthless.
Woman does not perform on herself this regionalization that profits the
couple head-sex, that only inscribes itself within frontiers. Her libido is
cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide: her writing also can only
go on and on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours, daring
these dizzying passages in other, fleeting and passionate dwellings within
him, within the hims and hers whom she inhabits just long enough to
watch them, as close as possible to the unconscious from the moment
they arise; to love them, as close as possible to instinctual drives, and
then, further, all filled with these brief identifying hugs and kisses, she
goes and goes on infinitely. She alone dares and wants to know from
within where she, the one excluded, has never ceased to hear what-comes-
before-language, reverberating.49
The profits of the couple head-sex, as Cixous and Clément call it, are the
profits of the spectacle technology, its neo-liberal function, drive and aims. It
does not have to think about what comes before language as it is transparent
to itself in language. It ‘speaks’ in the language of words, grammar, things
and technology that design the world and that are its pervasive force. It is
part of and creates its norms, and forms the infrastructure and organization
of its knowledge through which it confirms and solidifies the transparency
of its articulation. This cycle is tautological, seemingly unbreachable, and
reflects the visual ideology of identification as a closed off reality and
history that is self-certain and justified in its own taxonomic methodology.
Therefore its critique and disruption cannot come from the visual but must
come from the possibilities of the invisible, from sound, which is not drawn
from the taxonomical rhetoric and knowledge base inscribed within its
frontiers, but is cosmic and infinite, ungraspable but sensible and thus can
critique necessity and the deceit of reason: stretch it, transform it through
the diffuse knowledge of a sonic sense expanding as reverberation from
‘what-comes-before-language’.
This before of language is not a primitive primordiality, a naïve
apperception before reflection, but is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ouverture
au monde’, his ‘openness to the world’, that carries the French connotation
of reciprocity and agency towards the world’s invisible depth, and lets
us uncover the process of perception itself, revealing the ideologies and
141
dynamics of knowledge and inviting a different effort of reflection that does

not settle on the image but reaches the infinite and inexhaustible process of
its sonic materiality.50 Thus it allows us to rupture knowledge’s transparent
tautology through the opacity of a mobile sound and drives us towards
knowing as a sensorial and physical engagement.
The digital accelerates Kant

This need to rupture the transparent tautology of rational thought and truth
as the guarantors of identity and possibility, becomes amplified in the digital.
Networked technology extends the Kantian consciousness of the lexicon into
the acceleration of a digital world: producing from a thinking in analogies and
references the reality of algorithms, numerical categories and the consequent
necessity to fulfil their criteria instantly. The digital-lexicon is a visual pursuit
that pre-determines and limits knowledge and colonializes bodies and things
through numbers. It makes the subject into a worker or a consumer, defined
culturally and ethnically as well as along lines of gender and class, against
algorithms and the mathematical accuracy of statistics and definitions.
The lines of that technological body are rigidly drawn rather than loosely
extended. They construct pixilated media profiles of ultrasubjective violence,
Balibar’s articulation of the violence of a reified and absolutized identity,
that psychotically ‘acts out’ against the mythologized other from its own
fetishized self and in the process kills them both.51 And they are deformed
through the systems of representation, which enact Balibar’s ultraobjective
violence: a state- or system-sponsored violence that reduces the subject ‘to the
condition of things, beginning by supressing their individuality and treating
them ‘as quantities of residual “pieces” ’.52 These pieces are partial objects
not a varied entirety, and are derogatively perceived as ‘Stücke’. Balibar’s
mention here of the German term refers to its use by the Nazis to describe
the individuals in the concentration camps, illustrating the linguistic and
thus quasi-technological effort of fascism at depersonalization as part of the
systemic, ultraobjective violence perpetrated against the Jews. Balibar goes
on to articulate its current use in global capitalism and the way it eliminates
its superfluous population: those that neither work nor consume, those that
do not have the capacity to fulfil the role assigned to them by the system.53
The global reach of the digital network, the speed and connections of
online identities and culture exacerbate the conflation of logic and language
and make the pervasiveness of the analytical colonial. They rob the local of
the facility of its own language and thought, which it needs to nourish its
internal multiplicity. Instead its subject becomes a subject without agency,
muted and deformed into the rationality of a global system that is not sensitive
to différence in the self, and represents its identity in the form of the JPEG
file as its visual representation: 1.6 MB, rather than its materiality.54 The
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digital file, as measure and size rather than material, produces and affirms the
singular possibility of the real and assumes creative authority over its soul.
The digital infiltration and consequent (forced) global adoption of
a taxonomical consciousness into everything everywhere, brings to the
surface the ultrobjective violence implicit in its systems of knowledge and
truth. The speed of the network, its acceleration of conversion, the rapid
elimination of difference in thought and articulation, illuminates its causes in
rationality, and begins to bear consequences on individuality and collective
identity. Its algorithmic certainty and unfailing definition reduces humans
to the condition of things, and reduces things to the condition of objects,
and both to the condition of technology and language that describe and
instrumentalize them, rather than enabling their interbeing, their thinging
and autonomy, sovereignty and identity.
In the sphere of mathematical categorization and virtual networks online,
we take our role simply as pieces, as Stücke, determined in our identity by
the algorithm of the search engine, and tasked to fulfil the criteria assigned
to us on the basis of the system of a neo-liberal economy that masquerades
the individualist ‘ethos of self-care’ as the new welfare state: propelled
forward by the availability of ‘technologies of the self’.55
The digital gives a Kantian consciousness the technological and conceptual
infrastructure that augments the ultrasubjective and the ultraobjective
violence of which Balibar talks and which finds consequences in the lack of a
plural reality, and the impossibility of varied identity as outlined by Rancière.
Those that have a part, need to play a role – be defined and definable – to be
a consumer or a worker, a piece in the machine of capitalism, and those that
have no part do not even have the right to appear as not counted. They might
not, as Balibar suggests, be eliminated by genocidal means, their obliteration
might be more insidious, slow and by neglect, through the consequences of
climate change, terror attacks or the individual and collective social tragedies
of the welfare state under austerity, but their voices will nevertheless be
eliminated, their possibility denigrated to the impossible, ‘pronouncing the
word “silence” . . . and writes it as “the end”’.56
Viewing and listening to the work of Pamela Z and Evan Ifekoya online
‘unends’ this silence. Their moving, dancing and singing unperforms
and unthinks the measure of the digital file and the homogeneity of its
environment. They refuse the acceleration into the taxonomy of a lexical
digitalization with its purposeful algorithms, resisting not only the
representational reduction of the image, but also its material’s reduction
into data, and proliferating another consciousness, where the body performs
new connections in the truly virtual sphere of sound, and where identity
participates as an avatar-I in the boundlessness of a transitory subjectivity
that does not show a ‘profile’ but enables self-reflection. Thus they unperform
a Kantian consciousness on which the universal measure of reality relies and
from which the digital has accelerated its actuality.
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Conclusion: Sonic Stücke
‘Realism claims to be that sane attitude of mind that sticks to observable
realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the police logic of order,
which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only doing the only thing
possible to do.’57 Against the singular reality of such a totalising belief, the
Breathing Einhorn performs the mirror of the normative structure’s own
insanity and unperforms its limitation, prejudices and tautologies while
celebrating the possibility of the impossible.
The trans-technological subject unthinks and unperforms ultrasubjective
and ultraobjective violence by transforming itself into fabled beasts, the
poetry of ephemeral breath and the fluidity of a dancing body. It does not
pause in a graspable form as Stück, merely a piece, but generates itself
inexhaustibly as a complex entirety made from inter-actions and inter-
inventions with all there is. It at once unperforms the military heritage of
technology and the instrumentality of its aims that have influenced musical
discourse and practice towards the notion of ideal performances, beauty, and
the correct piece of work; while also unperforming subjectivity as a historical
and political category and definition: unsinging and undancing with Ifekoya
the representation of the black body as the image of entertainment and of a
polar sexuality, and unmoving with Cixous the phallocentric organization
of sculpture, of writing and of music, through the ephemeral breath of
Pamela Z that produces the in-between in a reciprocal process of exchange.
In this way, the trans-technological body ruptures chronology and
necessity. It starts not from the past but from an undefined future point on
a moveable index of sonic reality, and generates a current transitory and
transforming relationship with technology and with things. Ifekoya’s singing
and Pamela Z’s breathing are their ‘ouverture au monde’, their opening
to the world, to live with it symbiotically, to understand its reverberation
not through a preexisting language but by creating it contingently in the
negotiation of their interbeing. My breathing and moving is my taking part
in this cosmos, its phenomenology and economy. Through the invisible air
of my breath I participate and get a voice, even if just a whisper. And from
this emancipatory impulse I can forge a different place in the community
as a collective of breathing subjects, aware of our interbeing with the
environment, its circumstance and shared air.
The sonic trans-subject performed by Ifekoya is not a transcendental
subject, it does not follow a predetermined path to its ideal destination, it
does not come from language, but from before language, from a reverberating
openness towards the world. It does not shut subjectivity down in categories
and definitions but sings as a subject in process on trial with other things,
unfishined and unfinishable but inexhaustible and expansive. This subject
on trial is always signifying never a sign, dependent on the contingent
144
contact, on the encounter with the other who looks at it with a mirror in its
eyes within which it meets its own internal multiplicity.58 This subject steps
into the order of things, thinging, signifying without an aim or end. It is not
reduced to the condition of things but elevated to their interbeing.
Sonic Stücke unperform the violence of pieces. They are mobile and
invisible, they cannot be organized in the order of things, in the taxonomies
of purpose, use and uselessness but generate with the things a different
order, the disorder of possibility and the erotics of impossibility. They are
a refuge and a transformative locale, a noun and a verb, and as agency
they hold the political possibility of a sonic subject that can break through
the tautological frame of its narrow definition as a pre-given role or as
silence. The sonic piece can shout and generate, it can find connections and
associations that visually remain unseen.
The political possibility of this sonic subjectivity lies in its capacity to
disrupt the violence of the lexicon, its consciousness and politics in its
analogue and its digital accelerated form. It can disable the taxonomical
project of definition by sounding as dark mobility a name that is beyond
its structure, that transforms and is transformative; that is inexhaustible,
without silence, and thus ‘without “an end” ’.
Notes
1 Moss Angel, ‘No Skin’, Untoward Magazine, vol. 2, no. 12, 22 October 2012.
With permission from the author.
2 ‘These organs without a body can take on any form they please: shrill points
and buckled flesh sticking out of a certain shape to assert singularity within a
plural nest. Producing the movement of many heads and many tongues, voices
and breaths meeting and dissipating in sound’ (Salomé Voegelin, Sonic Possible
Worlds, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 80).
3 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, p. 27.
This ‘cut in the un-sensed [in-sensée]’ describes his definition of listening as an
openness to meaning, as the possibility of sense: ‘a friction, the pinch or grate
of something produced in the throat, a borborygmus, a crackle, a stridency,
where a weighty, murmuring matter breathes, opened into the division of its
resonance’ (ibid.)
4 ‘To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be
with every other thing. This sheet of paper is because everything else is’ (Thich
Nhat Hanh, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, ed. Melvin McLeod, Boston and
London: Shambhala Pocket Classics, 2012, p. 57). While not adhering to
the Buddhist context of Nhat Hanh’s philosophy, I will be developing his
notion of interbeing in relation to sound and listening, to bring the idea of the
in-between into my deliberation on a sonic subjectivity.
5 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, pp. 57–8.
145
6 Hito Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You and Me’, in The Wretched of the Screen,
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 49–50.
of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 132.
8 Ibid., p. 123.
9 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, p. 55.
10 Hélène Cixous ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer
1976): 886.
11 Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility, On the Limits of Political Philosophy,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 69–70.
12 Ibid., p. 61.
13 Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You and Me’, p. 50.
14 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 880.
15 Evan Ifekoya, Genuine, Original, Authentic, interview by AQNB Productions,
2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pObx57o0gmQ (accessed 7 June
2017).
16 While both works were accessible without password at the time of writing,
just before the book came to publication Disco Breakdown (http://
evanifekoya.com/work/) had become password-protected.
17 Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You and Me’, pp. 51–2.
18 Ibid., p. 50.
19 Caygill Howard, A Kant Dictionary, The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 1–7. Clearly himself infected by lexical thinking,
Caygill’s book is a dictionary of Kantian terminology, which interestingly
does not contain the words ‘language’ or ‘grammar’, but does define the word
‘logic’. It is the synonymity or overlaid character of language and logic, as
the grammatical structure of thinking, that does not even need a separate
entry, that makes the dictionary as an organization and as the foundation of
thought possible and that demonstrates in the context of this Kant Dictionary
an understanding of language as the form and expression of thought: ‘Kant
would accommodate both the traditional logic based on forms of judgement
and inference and the modern logic stemming from the Cartesian cogito and
based on self-consciousness and apperception’ (Caygill, A Kant Dictionary,
p. 282).
20 Michael N. Forster quotes Kant as saying that our cognition needs the means
of language, and that ‘A Judgment (Urteil) is a proposition (Sprache)’. He
suggests that it is in the Vienna Logic, that Kant’s long-standing mere analogy
between logic and grammar turns ‘into the picture of an intimate connection
between the two’ (Michael N. Forster, ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Language’,
Tijdschrif voor Filosofie, vol. 74 [2012], p. 489).
21 Moss Angel, ‘No Skin’.
146
22 ‘Lecture I: January 20, 1970’, given at Princeton University and published

later in Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, pp. 22–70.
23 As long as we took for granted Kant’s notion that we structure the
world by representing it, the study of the nature of representation (of
Mind in the 19th century, of Language in this century) took pride of
place. For in studying the activity of representation philosophy takes
itself to discover ‘formal’, ‘conceptual’ ‘structural truths’ – truths higher
and purer than those produced by science. If we lose our grip on the
Kantian picture, this structure-content distinction begins to evaporate.
So does the notion of philosophy as the armchair study of the nature of
representation.
(Rorty, ‘Kripke versus Kant’, London Review of Books,
4 September 1980, p. 5.)
With this evaporation of the structure-content distinction and its focus on
representation, a new thinking of knowledge, truth and subjectivity becomes
possible that might be able to grasp what finds no form, what has no name
and does not fulfil the taxonomies of rational thinking but produces a possible
reality of which we have to learn to speak.
24 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, London:
I. B. Tauris, 1996, p. 75.
26 Ibid., p. 880.
27 Ibid., p. 889.
28 Ibid., p. 883.
29 Ibid., pp. 875 and 885.
30 Ibid., p. 886.
31 Evan Ifekoya, Genuine, Original, Authentic, interview by AQNB Productions,
2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pObx57o0gmQ (accessed 7 June
2017).
32 Ibid.
34 In an interview with Cathy Lane, published in Playing with Words (2008),
Pamela Z lists in detail all the technology she works with. She does not
elaborate on why or how, but makes a point of a comprehensive inventory,
mentioning also the people who have developed these technological interfaces
and instruments for her and with her. To me this seems very interesting,
particularly in relation to the idea, which I develop a little later on via
Cixous and Clément, of woman as a complex whole made up of physical and
technological parts that extend the self and expand into the parts of others,
with others.
147
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 60.
39 In Listening to Noise and Silence (2010) I discuss listening as the invention of
sound and describe auditory perception as a generative process that does not
recognize or receive but creates the heard from what is there and even from
what remains unheard. This inventive and generative capacity of sounding
and listening becomes, in the context of interbeing, first an inter-vention and
then an inter-invention: the action in the between-of-things, the inter-action of
generating the heard as the complexity of all there is together.
40 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, p. 85.
41 Instead, it is more akin to Nancy’s violence at the ‘cut in the un-sensed
[in-sensée]’, where we do not hear the source as a quasi visual and complete
appearance or sign, as skin making a certain shape, but hear the scars and
intersections that make a fragile form: an tentative opening towards meaning
(Nancy, Listening, p. 27).
42 In the French version Cixous’s word at this place is dé-penser, and in a
footnote the translater makes us aware that this term ‘Dé-pense’, is a neo-
logism formed on the verb penser, hence it is a de-thinking, it ‘unthinks’,
but it is also ‘depenser’: to spend (‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, translator’s
note, p. 882). I read the de- as my un-, as an affirmative unthinking not as
deconstruction but to think anew, to dispense and expense with old thought
and thought structures. Thus the spending is an investment in new thinking,
an affirmative renewal of its restrictive meaning in a Kantian frame.
43 Alex Kittle, ‘The Body Extensions of Rebecca Horn in Art, Film and Over-
Enthusiasm’, 11 February 2014, http://alexkittle.com/2014/02/11/art-the-
body-extensions-of-rebecca-horn/ (accessed 13 March 2018).
45 Rebecca Horn, Tailleur du Coeur, texts and drawings Rebecca Horn –
Notebook, Zürich, Berlin, New York: Scalo, 1996.
46 Cixous and Clémente, The Newly Born Woman, p. 87.
47 Ibid.
48 Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises, Women on Electronic Music and Sound, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 6. These ghosts are the ideologies
and sociopolitical interests of military and technoscientific projects, which
according to Rodgers still pervade and influence the current use of electronic
tools and technologies that enable the making of electronic music and
sound art. And while the sound of a current use of those interfaces within
the context of art and music might only hold a lingering radiation of the
technoscientific purposes that drove their design, it is, according to Rodgers,
enough to keep them within the belief systems that gave rise to them, and
within the political and philosophical sense that organizes their conception.
In this instance, Rodgers points to the link between audio and military
technology in the United States, a connection that can be assumed to hold
globally.
148
49 Cixous and Clémente, The Newly Born Woman, pp. 87–8.

50 The ouverture au monde, describes a practical and applied openness to the
world through the reconsideration of the relationship between knowing and
its object. It does not simply indicate a passive opening, a noun, but prompts
opening as verb, as a predicate that makes the world open (Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1968, pp. 35–6).
52 Ibid. This state- or system-sponsored violence of making into Stücke is
perpetrated by the search engines and facilitated by social media interfaces
revealed as systems of ultraobjective violence. The online exchange and social
media networks are also fora for an accelerated ultrasubjective violence,
facilitated by distance, representation and anonymity.
53 Balibar, Violence and Civility, footnote 11, p. 175. This notion of the
elimination of a superfluous population, meets Rancière’s distinction
between those that have a part but need to play a role, and those that
have no role to play, quoted at the beginning of this essay, which now
finds a clearer articulation in the relationship between online and offline
communities.
54 Online, Steyerl’s image as material, articulated in critique and rejection
of representation, discussed at the beginning of this essay, becomes again
disabled as a resisting object. The digital platforms and networks render the
image not a material but a measure of its size.
55 Balibar suggests that the withdrawal of the welfare state happens on the
rhetoric of an ethos of self-care (souci de soi) where ‘individuals must moralize
their own behaviour by submitting it to the criteria of maximum utility or
the future productivity of their individuality’. He identifies this via Manuel
Castells, as the development of negative identities, where social security and
thus social solidarity is destroyed (Balibar, Citizenship, Cambridge: Polity,
2015, pp. 111–12).
58 This subject on trial, always signifying never a sign, is Julia Kristeva’s subject
of the fourth signifying practice of the text, and is exposed to impossible
dangers:
relinquishing his identity in rhythm, dissolving the buffer of reality
in a mobile discontinuity, leaving the shelter of the family, the state,
or religion. The commotion the practice creates spares nothing: it
destroys all constancy to produce another and then destroys that one
as well.
(Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Practice, p. 104.)
59 This is a recording of the work from the concert with Joan La Barbara as part
of the 2014 ROOM Series at Royce Gallery in San Francisco.
149
References
Balibar, Étienne, Citizenship, Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
Balibar, Étienne, Violence and Civility, On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans.
G. M. Goshgarian, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Caygill, Howard, A Kant Dictionary, The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Cixous, Hélène, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer
1976): 875–93.
Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy
Wing, London: I. B. Tauris, 1996 [1975].
Forster, Michael N., ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Language’, Tijdschrif voor Filosofie,
vol. 74 (2012): 485–511.
Horn, Rebecca, Tailleur du Coeur, texts and drawings Rebecca Horn – Notebook,
Zürich, Berlin, New York: Scalo, 1996.
Ifekoya, Evan, Genuine, Original, Authentic, interview by AQNB Productions,
2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pObx57o0gmQ.
Ifekoya, Evan, interview with J. D. A. Winslow for YAC, Young Artists
in Conversation, May 2015, http://youngartistsinconversation.co.uk/
Evan-Ifekoya.
Kittle, Alex, ‘Art: The Body Extensions of Rebecca Horn’, 11 February 2014, http://
alexkittle.com/2014/02/11/art-the-body-extensions-of-rebecca-horn/.
Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981 [1980].
Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern
Moss Angel, ‘No Skin’, Untoward Magazine, vol. 2, no. 12, 22 October 2012,
https://untowardmag.com/you-are-actually-a-baby-deer-and-im-not-going-to-let-
that-get-in-the-way-of-our-potential-future-ec2874ba654.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, ed. Charlotte Mandell, New York: Fordham University
Press, 2007.
Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh, ed. Melvin McLeod, Boston and
London: Shambhala Pocket Classics, 2012.
Pamela Z, interviewed by Cathy Lane, in Playing with Words, Derbyshire,
UK: CRiSAP, RGAP, 2008, pp. 34–6.
Rancière, Jacques, On The Shores of Politics, London, New York: Verso, 2007.
Rodgers, Tara, Pink Noises, Women on Electronic Music and Sound, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Rorty, Richard, ‘Kripke versus Kant’, London Review of Books, vol. 2, no. 17
(1980): 4–5.
Steyerl, Hito, ‘A Thing Like You and Me’, in The Wretched of the Screen,
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 46–59.
150

Art, New York: Continuum, 2010.
Voegelin, Salomé, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound,
New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Work
Pamela Z, Breathing (2014, solo version), part of Carbon Song Cycle (2013),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7AZsQoD630.59
Rebecca Horn, Einhorn (Unicorn), 1970–72 (bandages, a wooden horn and
metal clasps)
Evan Ifekoya, Gender Song (2014)
and
Disco Breakdown (2014)
http://evanifekoya.com/work/.
At time of publication this work was not accessible without a password anymore.
151
Sonic materialism: A philosophy

of digging
When night comes

I stand on the stairway and listen,
the stars are swarming in the garden
and I am standing in the dark.
Listen, a star fell with a tinkle!
Do not go out on the grass with bare feet;
my garden is full of splinters.
Edith Södergran1
The poem ‘The Stars’ by Edith Södergran articulates in seven short lines the
dilemma of realist philosophy: the calculable existence of a star autonomous
of human perception, the tension between the knowledge of astronomy, the
human foundation of its discipline and the inability to reach its materiality
without a body and without a mind, whose uncertainty falsifies the
star’s calculable existence. For realist philosophy, whose aim is to grasp
the unthought, the ‘absolute outside’ reality of ‘pre-critical thinking’ this
falsifying body and mind is the weakness of phenomenology and reason,
who can only see a ‘relative outside’, an outside of our own existence that
is only our absence, the void signed by our not being there rather than its
being by its own what it is.2
For Quentin Meillassoux, this relative outside is the outside of the
correlationist, the phenomenologist for whom reality is an intersubjective
mode of being in the world, and of the idealist, for whom reality is
transcendental, a matter of reason and necessity, bound to general laws of
nature. Accusing them of religious fanaticism and ideological dogmatism,
152
Meillassoux suggests that both produce a ‘fideist obscurantism’ of a

proper truth by relating knowledge to the body as flesh and the rational
mind respectively.3 In response, he proposes that the stability [of the laws
of nature] must be established as a ‘mind-independent fact’, ‘which is to
say, from a property of time which is indifferent to our existence’, which
is not thought or experienced within our actuality but as the absolute
possibility of a mathematical reality.4 Thus his aim is to reach the unthought
via ancestrality, the exploration of the pre-human world, without referring
it to human experience or theorization, but through mathematical
calculations, not tampered by human ‘corrections’ to get to an ‘irremediable
realism’: where ‘either this statement has a realist sense, and only a realist
sense, or no sense at all’.5
I will meet the irremediable reality of Meillassoux’s ancestrality with a
material sound. I will listen to its calculations and inhabit its numerical
world to gauge what a sonic phenomenology might contribute to the
understanding of the speculative materiality of the world, and how it might
help to reach a proper truth that includes the outside of experience, while
also accounting for the asymmetries and responsibilities of the inside.
Phenomenology, at least the psychological phenomenology of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, which informs my thinking on materiality, does not deny the
desire to know the world without us, its unthought material substance and
possibility, but it understands and accounts for difference, the contingency
of our individual life-worlds, that inform our thinking of the unthought.
Discounting a higher power or mathematical dogma, we have access to the real
only from our own positions and positionings in the world. Phenomenology,
its strategy of reduction and the reciprocity of its intersubjectivity, helps
us to consider how these positions define us as embodied materialities and
how they realize our political condition: the cultural, economic, ideological
as well as physiological and educational particularity that opens the world
to us in different and not entirely symmetrical ways. Thus a materialist
phenomenology might enable a thinking of the unthought materiality of
the world while accounting for our own materiality, including a human
unthought, and baring in mind also what appears unthinkeable: those
manifestations of human and non-human existence that lack representation
to make themselves count.
Therefore, I agree with the principle of Meillassoux’s project and that
of new materialism and speculative realism at large and in its many guises,
namely the desire to think the non-human matter of this world before its
representation, or ‘correction’, in language and rational thought. And embrace
the desire to speculate on the real from its actual materiality rather than its
(Kantian) definition or concept. However, I believe with Rosi Braidotti and
Karen Barad that the human too is matter, the mind is matter and the body
is matter, and steer towards the possibility of an embodied materialism that
does not seek to simply disavow the body in favour of the calculation of the
153
SONIC MATERIALISM 153
ancestral, but re-engages the body and mind’s own materiality in order to
be with that of things, thought, unthought and unthinkable.6 Consequently
objectivity, the standard of scientific truth, is not qualified through (temporal)
distance from an ancestral real, but denotes the responsibility to be a social
and connected subject, to understand the reality of the world through, as
Barad suggests, being entangled in its processes of materialization.7
While Meillassoux’s statement makes it clear that he does not want to
compromise between a realist and a correlationist world view, I believe
that we get the clearest sense of reality if we acknowledge our human
impotence to be anything other than human, but still try to see beyond a
relative outside, even if we might never comprehend it, by considering it
from our own embodied materiality, rather than assuming a transparent
identity in a mathematical process of facticity. Thus, in this essay I want to
try my fascination with Meillassoux’s mind-independent reality, his notion
of an absolute outside, not in order to reach it necessarily but because in the
process of trying, philosophical questions on parity, materiality, agency and
autonomy can be asked and discussed that address access and objectivity
and give us some insights into whose unthought the absolutely real of the
realist actually is.
To engage this question, this essay considers realist and new materialist
ideas via sounding and listening. It finds as its starting point much
agreement and some disagreement with Christoph Cox’s 2011 essay ‘Beyond
Representation and Signification: Towards a Sonic Materialism’, from which
it returns a verdict on new realist philosophies as overstating the culture
nature dichotomy and overlooking entirely its visuocentric tendencies on
which such a dialectic depends in the first place. To elaborate the consequent
notion of sonic matter, reality and possibility I turn to Luce Irigaray, Karen
Barad and Rosi Braidotti, and profit from their ideas of the feminine, the
agential and the creative respectively to come to a different materialism that
questions representation, linguistic, mathematical or otherwise, by embracing
an embodied materialism that thinks the matter of the world through the
matter of the flesh and the mind, and reads objectivity as accountability
rather than as distance and thus does not come to an ‘irremediable realism’
of absolute ancestrality, but to the radical realism of practice, to the doing of
philosophy as ‘spacetimemattering’.8
From there the question arises whether in new materialism philosophy
has found its end. Whether, in other words, in the finitude of the ancestral
and the practice of mattering, philosophy becomes obsolete and the post-
anthropocentric has to, by necessity, be a post-philosophical. We might have
to go gardening, digging and turning the earth to understand the world
instead; to practice and perform the unthinkable in-between rather than
think about it as the unthought.
This proposal for a radical post-philosophy of practice is inspired by
Naldjorlak I. A work for solo cello, by Éliane Radique written in collaboration
154
with cellist Charles Curtis, not as a score of certain instructions, but on the
body of the performer and of the instrument, who search in the in-between
of bow, space, flesh and audience the material reality and possibility of their
relationship. It is in the performance rather than the reading of the work
that a political possibility of difference as diffraction and entanglement, in
Barad’s sense, becomes imaginable, and that Braidotti’s affirmative, mobile
locationality that can stand up against the commodified pluralism of neo-
liberal capitalism becomes thinkable, and that we are able, with Irigaray,
to write in caresses and gesture-words: to ‘appeal to language as a path
towards sharing the mystery of the other’.9
Sonic matter – sound matters

Christoph Cox’s 2011 essay on sonic materialism charts an interesting
relationship between sound and philosophy by considering the relative lack
of scholarly attention given to sound art. He states that:
The open-ended sonic forms and often site-specific location of sound

installations thwart artists musicological analysis, which remains oriented
to the formal examination of discrete sound structures and performances,
while the purely visual purview of art history allows its practitioners not
only to disregard sound art but also to gloss over the sonic strategies of
Postminimalism and Conceptualism.10
He continues by explaining that the reason for this oversight or ignoring of

sound arts and sonic strategies is the prevailing theoretical models’ failure
to grasp the sonic. He places the blame for this inability with cultural theory
that refutes meaningful existence outside the text and which thus divides the
world into two domains: the meaningful cultural sphere of the symbolic and
the domain of nature and materiality that remain unintelligible. Refusing
to accept the presuppositions of symbolic meaning and thus refusing to
critique sound art for not making itself available to discourse as a textual
form of thinking, he presents a critique of representation and attempts to
‘eliminate the dual planes of culture/nature, human/non-human, sign/world,
text/matter’ by pursuing a ‘thoroughgoing materialism that would construe
human symbolic life as a specific instance of the transformative process to
be found throughout the natural world’.11 He suggests that it is a materialist
philosophy that could take account of sonic practices and could furthermore
rethink art theory in general.
What follows is an interesting proposition towards such a sonic
materialism working against the representational preconceptions of Pierce’s
structuralism and edging via Schopenhauer’s notion of music as a direct
expression of the will, and Nietzsche’s naturalistic view on music towards
155
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers and Manuel DeLanda
to present a materialist and realist philosophy that appreciates matter’s
creative and transformative capacity and that thus can theorize sound art
on its own transforming terms.
What makes this essay valuable is its critique of the nature/culture,
text/matter, human/non-human split through a focus on sound. Through
this particular emphasis, Cox identifies the more general realist and new
materialist complaint about dualist structures of knowledge and locates
the motivation against representation, idealism, and mind-dependentness
that drives the materialist and speculative project, in the oppositionality of
dialectical thinking, which relies on distance and a visual language to define
things against each other.
Cox develops, through sound, the theoretical concerns about
representation and figuration that I recognize from Braidotti’s writing; and
addresses in the particularity of sonic production Barad’s unease about the
term critique and the reading of objectivity as (critical) distance. In this
way, and while not agreeing with him on his eventual articulation of a
sonic materialism via Deleuze’s notion of the virtual, as Dyonisian excess,
and the flux of a sonic becoming, he makes it possible for me to focus on
the dualism at the core of the materialist project and to think its causality
in reverse.
Dualism is not in the world but in theory and in philosophy. There
it appears not as the cause but as the symptom and consequence of
visuocentrism instituted through the devocalization of thought by the logos
as the right joining of words: ‘Freed from the acoustic materiality of speech,
this pure semantic – which is the privileged object of theoria – occupies the
place of origin and rules over the phonetic.’12 What Adriana Cavarero points
out here is the muteness of Western philosophy since Plato. His logos is
visual and mute and promotes a visual and mute thinking of the world. It is
a visuocentric undertaking that is not caused by but causes the dualism, as
its vision divides the world in signs and symbols, ‘this’ or ‘that’, from which
theory produces ideas ‘connected with “right” links in the totality of the
intelligible order that the soul’s eye contemplates’.13
Taking account of this origin of philosophy in muteness, the focus on
the complaint of the materialist on the dualistic nature of thought has to be
shifted from the dualism itself to its causes in visuocentrism. I propose that
it is not because of the dualist split between nature and culture, language
and thing, that we have to rethink matter to understand sound. Or rather
it is not the dualist split, which causes our inability to grasp sound within
discourse. Instead, dualism becomes apparent as a mere symptom, albeit
with consequences, of a visuocentric philosophy. Thus it is the preference
of Western philosophy for the visual, the essentializing of the world in a
visual paradigm, textual and pictorial, that creates a dualistic thinking and
promotes differentiation and thus establishes a hierarchy between things
156
that reveals an anthropocentric view: producing the duality of human and

non-human signs, creating a chain of differences and similarities.
Cox’s emphasis on the cause of sound art’s lack of articulation allows me
to think sonic materialism not against duality, but as ‘anterior’ to duality,
avoiding its dividing ideology by accessing philosophy in the invisible
simultaneity of things, before language and culture assert their superiority
and determine their organization. This is not a going back, however. It is not
a primitivism that precedes the dualistic thinking of the world, as a naïve
primordiality overcome through the truth of modernity. Rather, it is an
acknowledgement of the unthought sonic variable of the world that exists
without our thinking it. Thus reaching its truth implies a going forward into
the future of a sonic sensibility, to reddress from its ‘science fiction’ a past
philosophical turn against the invisible and indivisible sphere of sound and
retry its path in the present. This anteriority is then not a chronological and
patrimonial ancestrality but a simultaneous possibility of a different world,
a variant whose philosophy was always there but remained unthought,
inarticulate, practiced in sound only.
Therefore, while the new materialist project might help sound art to its
recognition and theorization, and I appreciate the radical nature of Cox’s
project in this regard, what appears more relevant and striking is that a sonic
thinking and sensibility as the revocalization of the logos, makes possible a
new materialism and speculative realism that exists outside a dualist world
view and reaches the truth of the world before its assertion in the sign.
Thus a sonic materialism proceeds not as continuation but as an alternative
philosophical practice without the semantic linkages of vision, and the
objectivity of its distance, and thus without dualism and anthropocentrism,
from a ‘future world’.
To access the thinking of this unthought, invisible variable of philosophy,
I read Meillassoux’s writing as a mathematical fiction about a non-human
anteriority that invites us to rethink our present understanding and
co-habitation with materiality, science, human and non-human things, from
a discontinuous future. The intention is not to relegate his project to a mere
fiction, but to appreciate that his strategy of accessing the ancestral to get
to the real and irremediable truth of the world, provides, beyond his own
particular aims, a useful imagination of an inaccessible place from which
to rethink and reaccess the theorization and valuation of the materiality
and reality of this place. In the same sense I propose that sound, a sonic
thinking, affords us the science fiction of an unthought variable, which helps
us think and agitate the present in a different way: without representation
or measurement, and without the values and validities provided for by the
historical chronology of philosophy.
The suggestion is that, inspired to find a theoretical ‘language’ capable of
integrating and addressing sound art, we do not need to work around the
visuocentric nature of Western philosophy and its requisite hierarchies and
157
values, bending its canons towards invisible and indivisible matter. Rather,
we can acknowledge the dualistic tendency of thought as a consequence
of its visuality and fostering anthropocentrism and come to practice a
different variant in the unthought of sound. Thus we can engage in the new
materialist project as a quasi-sonic project. In listening to sound we are
always already in matter: an embodied ear that sounds and hears through
its own simultaneity with ‘what sounds’ as an unseen and inter-existing
‘what is’. From there we can come to understand matter and meaning in
a different way, diffracted and simultaneous, invisible and indivisible, not
as excess and not as becoming, but as a practical interbeing in the world
not of signs and symbols, texts and culture, but of inarticulate intensities,
indeterminate and indivisible, contingent and transforming.
Therefor we do not need to build materialism on modern thought, which
will always and inevitably remain caught in the dualism at the heart of its
history, and will thus always already entail the exclusion of other stories.
Instead, we can recognize the visuocentrism that determines this historical
dualism and can appreciate how the anthropocentric is tied up with
visuality, in order to find the unthought not in philosophy but in the thought
of sound, which opens vision maybe not to truth but to its plurality. In
other words, I take Meillassoux’s ancestrality from which according to him
an ‘irremediable reality’ accessible only via science and the mathematical
can be drawn, as a cause to articulate the nonhereditary of a sonic science
fiction, from which a contingent and simultaneous reality can be performed
that does not differentiate but acknowledges difference and the in-between.
However, sonic materialism does not propose to replace one essentialism
with another only to create its own dualism. Rather, it seeks to offer
the sensibility of a dark and mobile unthought to host a multisensorial
engagement and entanglement with what there is, and to trigger also the
‘vocalized’ theorization of the unthinkable: that whose not being thought
is neither a measure of its impossibility and abjectness, nor of its separate
existence, but of our ignorance and desire not to think it.
In this way, the aim to find a theoretical register for sound art leads to
a consideration of dualism’s historical tie with visuality, and resets the new
materialist project from shifting ‘the dualist gesture of prioritizing mind
over matter, soul over body, and culture over nature that can be found in
modernist as well as post-modernist cultural theories’ to shifting the material
and conceptual hierarchies and preferences that produce the dualisms of its
historical and methodological framework.14 This in turn, and in line with
Cox’s ideas, leads to a broader rethinking not of art theory only, but also of
other aesthetic and quotidian practices and materialities that do not get a
voice within the visual regime of philosophical thought.
In this way, the project of materialism and realism gets focused on the
issue of visuality, its processes of differentiation and distancing, inclusion
and exclusion, as well as its intrinsic anthropocentrism manifest in the
158
visibility of my own body and the invisibility, to myself, of my location

of looking: my blind totality. Thus new materialism and speculative
realism come to focus on the question of hierarchy and ideology: whose
authoritative gaze determines the invisible, and what can make its processes
of differentiation and valuation visible, as in recognizable and intelligible,
within a visual regime and politics? And from there they can ask how we
can grasp this regime and its politics to see a different distance.
Sound, as a sonic sensibility and concept, pre-empts and cancels these
questions by remaining unseen and offering the real another truth: not that
of ‘the “right” links in the totality of the intelligible order’,15 what is in and
what is out of its visual regime, but of the in-between of listening not to ‘this’
or ‘that’ but to what they do together. It produces the truth of the mobile
and the inaudible simultaneity of interbeing that cannot be observed from a
distance but has to be generated in the encounter, not to hear what I think
of it, but to make room for its own voice. Sound performs this inarticulate
encounter from which the thing’s own language might be heard. In this way,
sonic materialism serves the recognition and theorization of an inarticulate
sound (art), while also presenting the possibility for a materialism that
starts not from the dualism of a visual philosophy but from the unseen
simultaneity of things. This is a materialism of sonic possible worlds that
are the simultaneous and plural slices of this world, which are not burdened
with the history of its visual definitions, categories and language, but are
free to explore the unthought and the unthinkeable on its own terms.
Masculine and feminine realities

In the total invisibility of my point of view, in the unchallenged visuality of
philosophy, there is another dualism that opens itself in the contemporary
project of new materialist and speculative thought: it is the split between
masculine and feminine theorizations of the real, the speculative and the
material. Whereby the terms feminine and masculine, following Hélène
Cixous’s notion of a feminine writing, her écriture feminine, purposefully
avoid the notion of male and female to acknowledge this difference not as an
issue of a physiological sex and category, but of the performance of a gendered
subjectivity and its position in relation to canonical discourse, power and
powerlessness, and to encourage towards a plural empowerment: ‘Woman
must write her self’, she ‘must put herself into the text – as into the world
and into history – by her own movement’.16 Here she adds, ‘when I say
“woman,” I am speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against
conventional man.’17 And thus I read her woman as the feminine, and
interprete her writing insertions as inclusive of a general marginality, ‘their
territory is black’, their language is ‘impregnable’.18 Woman in this sense is
what is not grasped in discourse and what remains untheorized, and thus
159
it is what has no part in the reality of a philosophical and a political real

without being an essentialized other.
Philosophy’s history is not only visual it is also masculine. And this
asymmetry finds expression in the self-certainty of the philosophical subject,
his location and relationship with a material reality in which he finds himself
mirrored and therefor represented in sameness and similarity. Masculine
distance is relative to his correspondence with a representational truth. It is
distance in the certainty of coincidence, which creates a dominant language.
Thus it is a ‘conquered distance’, whose reach is relative to the masculine
vision at the centre. Like a retractable and extendable lead, it is a controlled
expanse that snaps back at the owner’s command, who never loses hold of
its actuality and power in the first place.
A masculine new materialism continues this dominant vision into its
disappearance creating a hyperrealism of its historical truth. As Braidotti
remarks, a hyperrealism does not wipe out class relations, racism or sexism,
it intensifies them, increasing disparities and inequalities, through what
I would argue is their hyper-invisibility: the invisibility of normative relations
and values that represent unseen the unquestioned reality of an absolute
view.19 To move towards a materialism of ancestrality and distance means
to continue and intensify the hyper-invisibility of a masculine philosophy, its
extreme visuality and dualism that cannot see the historical ideology of its
point of view. It is power signed by absence, transparency and the certainty
of a calculable real, whose speculation is not that of actual uncertainty and
precarity, but of factuality: the notion that the thing and the world could
be other than they are, but that this ‘other than they are’ is a calculable
probability rather than a contingent, differentiated and differentiating other
of unknown matter. Therefore, the engine of a masculine speculative realism
is not doubt but mathematics, numbers and measurements. And so, for
example, Meillassoux, Manuel DeLanda, and Graham Harman pursue the
mathematical, causation and calculations to reach beyond duality into the
existence of a mind- and body-independent real in Ancestrality, Possibility
Spaces, and Object-Oriented Ontologies respectively. Each in their own
way holds that to find what things/objects really are, we need to withdraw
from them, and measure their interaction, free of human influence. They
read theorization as objectification in the sense of sublimation to a human-
representational scheme, and in response remove the body and the mind from
the encounter of materials to find ‘the reality of things’.20 This reality is that
of bones and stones, of the hard facts and facticities of the world that make a
picture of a calculable real, of a science with speculation but without doubt,
ascribing nature existence according to laws rather than contingencies, even
if the laws remain contingent. Their project does not include a conscious
consideration of whose body and whose subjectivity needs to be withdrawn
to attain this measured view. The term human is taken as a homogenous
frame, standing directly and consistently opposite the non-human, and
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lacking any appreciation of the asymmetries united therein. In this way, they
are deconstructing the power at the centre of an anthropocentric worldview
without however critiquing its origin in a masculine visuality, its authority
as a hyper-invisibility, and without therefore losing their power to articulate
the very deconstruction pursued in their own image of correspondence and
control.
By contrast, Irigaray, Barad and Braidotti are seeking caresses,
entanglement, creativity and agency, to reach a non-hierarchical, non-
dualistic world that accounts for the variability of the human and the non-
human, and that comes to breach the dualistic nature of knowledge by
performing its differences. Their materialism manifests the feminine body’s
own precarity in the negotiation of the real, and makes it apparent that
the term human is not symmetrical or same, but is itself a matter of its
performance and valuation as different and distant. And that therefore not
all humans are ready to deconstruct the position from which to gain the
voice they have not yet had: ‘How can we undo a subjectivity we have not
even historically been entitled to yet?’21
The feminine materialism, they are collectively but differently articulating,
acknowledges the materiality of the body and the mind as well as of language
and representation. ‘It is a materialism of the flesh that unifies mind and body
in a new approach that blurs all boundaries.’22 It starts from the premise of
being ‘proud to be flesh’, an affirmative attitude towards the visceral and
sexual body, from where it meets animate, inanimate, technological, digital,
and analogue others to configure the world in reciprocity and contingency.23
Thus it pursues an ‘embodied and sexually differentiated structure of the
speaking subject’, which is motivated by the desire to make human influence
on matter accountable rather than have it disappear in the hyper-invisibility
of its power.24 To this end it seeks difference not through (visual) distance
and separation, but through ‘diffraction’.
Following Donna Haraway and adding insights from quantum physics,
Barad proposes the practice of diffraction as a reading diffractively rather
than reflectively: as a careful reading of difference and detail rather than
a looking for sameness and outlines. Diffraction eschews distance and
recognizes through an entanglement with the world how patterns of
difference bring about what she calls ‘inventive provocations’ that illuminate
‘the indefinite nature of boundaries:’25 the lack of clear lines and outlines
that allows disciplines and territories to be read through one another and
whose absence invites a re-imagination of their cross-overs and interbeing.
Diffraction is a performative reading of the world from its interactions
and interferences that allow us to see ‘differences that make a difference’.26
It describes a practical engagement with the world understood as a
heterogeneous entanglement of plural patterns rather than as a singular
meeting of defined shapes. Barad describes the shift from a focus on
connecting similarities, the visual shape of things, towards ‘differences
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that matter’, the patterns of inter-activity that is matter, through the shift
in emphasis from a geometrical optics to a physical optics.27 Geometrical
optics, according to Barad, does not pay attention to the particularity of
light but only to its being light, as an approximation of a known shape,
reliant on distance and comparable sameness, whereas a physical optics,
enables us to ‘see’ the difference and knowledge that is in matter: its own
voice that transcends knowledge boundaries, its disciplinary frameworks, by
highlighting the simultaneous plurality of its origins and truth, which enables
us to appreciate ‘what gets excluded as well as what comes to matter’.28 The
first is a theoretical optics of measurements and calculations, the latter an
experiment, without grammar, based on doubt and the engagement with the
material as an inter-activity, or what she calls an intra-activity: the action
between things and subjects that ‘enact the differentiated inseparability that
is a phenomenon’.29 That is the phenomenon of their co-constitution and
entanglement that includes inseperably also the apparatus and the material
of observation: its grammar and shape.
This feminine speculation on the reality of the world, its material
knowledge and knowledge disciplines, is based on doubt about the shape
drawn around things, their grammar, as well as the doubt about the shape
drawn around one’s own location, one’s historical, material and political
position and positioning. Therefore, it entails a ‘situated politics of locations’
that takes account of our lived experience and is able to engage in different
modes of mobility and stasis.30 Acknowledging, for example, within the
premise of Nomadic Theory, Braidotti’s theorizing of material and subject in
complex motion, that there is no equality of mobility; and to consequently
articulate a nomadology that considers movement as the central premise
of critical thought, in order to ‘actualize multiple ecologies of belonging’.31
Accordingly, her situated politics of location is not the practice of an isolated
or fixed place, but its mobile and contingent configuration by the inter-activity
of human and non-human matter producing the reality of their in-between
as an entangled social and material place. It is based not on certainty but
on doubt about language as mediator and representative of one’s location,
matter and subjectivity. This doubt about language as mediator but trusted
as an agent of the in-between, working through the entanglements of matter
rather than its articulation, resonates with Irigaray’s sense that language
is not a guarantor of fact and truth, but a caress that ‘makes a gesture
which gives the other to himself, to herself, thanks to an attentive witness,
thanks to a guardian of incarnate subjectivity.’ This embodied and mattered
subjectivity is co-constituted temporarily in the ‘call to be us, between us’.32
Irigaray, Barad and Braidotti each formulate their individual critique of the
ability of language to grasp a plural truth, and question its trustworthiness to
be inclusive, open and willing to accommodate things beyond the ontological
reality of its own medium. Barad follows Nietzsche in warning against
‘allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding of
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the world’.33 She discusses the dominance of language and acknowledges its
‘always already’ meaning and reality. In an affirmative response, Braidotti
considers the nomad as polyglot, who works not on the sign but its arbitrary
nature, not to be cynical and endlessly relative and deferring about meaning,
but to keep speech in transit and work on its constant transformation.34 And
Irigaray makes a language from caresses that as gesture-words produce a
world full of neo-logisms of the feminine that do not produce a certain sense
but are the material of expression itself, which is driven into speech by my
inability to grasp the other in language.35 All three propose a performative
criticality: the practicing and doing of linguistic and cartographic matter to
challenge the representational and figurative sense of the real, to contest its
power, and to break ‘humanities’ own captivity within language’.36
In such a garden resonates the song of the birds, those who celebrate
the present moment, who assure the passage between here and there,
between earth and sky.
Messengers, they announce if the site is livable. When the universe
is not habitable, the birds, if only for a time, are mute. As soon as the
danger draws away, they again communicate the celestial: nearby, they
tell the distant.37
A feminine sonic materialism

I understand sonic materialism to be feminine materialism. Both the feminine
and sound do not speak in the dominant tongue, whose representational
schema falsifies their material reality. They are both failed by the prevailing
theoretical models and have to forge a different sensibility to promote
the inclusion of the invisible and make themselves count. The feminine,
just like Cox observes in relation to sound art, has been ‘undertheorized’,
under-appreciated in the knowledge stakes. Its voice has not been heard
or it has been marginalized as ‘goofy’, poetic, or sentimental.38 Its body
is ignored by conventional theory and thus its material speculation is not
that of the probable unthought, but of the excluded and of alterity that is
unthinkable.
Its marginality and unthinkability is one of the reasons why Braidotti
insists on the situatedness of the feminine subject even in Nomadic mobility,
and why she appreciates that the minority subject needs to go through a
phase of ‘identity politics’, claiming a fixed location, to find a voice, a
name and a body of its internal differentiation that has the control of its
own situation to articulate itself in the flow.39 It is why Barad is diffracting,
looking for differences and the indefinite nature of boundaries, rather than
finding sameness. And it is the reason also while against much criticism of
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its definition, and the talk of disbanding with its label, I still see value in
protecting the invisible practice of Sound Art by calling its name. It too
has not yet had a voice enough to deconstruct itself. So, before we disband
with its name and thus with its claim to be heard on its own terms, in
difference and through diffraction, we have to develop a language or a
performativity, as a mode of engaging in its material practice that is ‘able
to grasp the nature of sound and to enable analysis of the sonic arts’.40
Not to build a discipline and definite disciplinary boundaries, but to give
a voice to its patterns of difference on whose rhythms it can meet, inter-
act and intra-act with others without being subsumed into their shape
and grammar, so that it can articulate itself in the flow of an entangled
difference.
A sonic sensibility lets us think a different materiality that is not virtual,
distant and mathematically probable, but possible as inhabited plurality,
reached through the caresses and gesture-words of Irigaray, generated from
the nomadic creativity of Braidotti, and performing the diffractions of
Barad, to create a being in the world that articulates through the encounter,
the conflict and difference that are the engine of its material reality. To me
their projects are intrinsically sonic, in the sense of a sonic sensibility and
concept. They are in in their differing ways pursuing a philosophy of the
invisible, that does not calculate but revocalizes the object and the subject,
which, as matter, sound through their difference the complex simultaneity of
the world and assert a space and a practice for a nondualistic knowledge. As
feminine sonic materialists they might make us hear, innovate and imagine
different political possibilities and a different socio-material consciousness
of reciprocity and care.
I suggest it is in the new materialism of a feminine practice, where physical
optics that ‘make up diffraction patterns that make the entanglements
visible’ enables the thinking of a sonic visibility of indivisible vibrations,
connections, patterns and differences that are not either resonant or
dissonant but produce the experience of reality in the between-of-things.41
In turn, listening makes diffraction thinkable as a material experience. Its
invisible and intangible sphere lends a blind imagination to a physical optics
that avoids the dominant regime of representation to delve into its physics
as an entangled concept of mattering rather than a line of mathematical
calculations. Diffraction entangles the object and the subject, and makes
knowing a direct material engagement. It brings us to the notion of objectivity
not as distance and detachment but as a practice of difference to which
we are held accountable. Rather than deferring its value to a quantitative
measurement, which in any event, according to Barad, ‘disturbs what you
are measuring’, we are responsible through our entanglement with things:42
‘Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted mirror image of
the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility
to the entanglements of which we are a part.’43 Listening performs this
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responsibility, and practices accountability between sounding, listening and

hearing things.
Responsibility, then, is a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for the

response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who
is not entirely separate from what we call the self.44
In this way, knowledge is performative and non-representational. It is able

to grasp the other in its invisible difference and to articulate our mattering
in a sonic visibility that breaks our captivity with the historical determinism
of language and instead grants voice to an entangled movement of things: to
those who ‘celebrate the present moment, who assure the passage between
here and there, between earth and sky’ as the between of a sonic sensibility
that does not think in ‘this’ or ‘that’, but senses and participates in their
inter-being as an embodied and creative materialization of the world.45
Objectivity as responsibility: Ethics
of a modest collaboration
Meillassoux’s critique, referred to at the beginning of this essay, of the strong
correlationism of phenomenology and other metaphysical philosophies
that he understands to develop from the criticism of the absolutism of
transcendental idealism but which, according to him, result in equally
dogmatic fanaticism and fideist obscurantism, drives his project towards
the unthought of ancestrality: the absolute outside of a pre-human world,
whose material configuration is a mind-independent fact, whose fleshlessness
grants it the objective truth of distance.
Arguing that the world ‘is there’, rather than that the world that is there ‘is
there for me’, he does not want to compromise his realism of the (ancestral)
unthought through a correlationist subjectivity, but pursues the absolute
possibility of a mathematically conceivable world.46 To this end Meillassoux
develops facticity, the pure possibility of what there is, into the notion of
factuality understood as the speculative essence of facticity: the fact that
what there is, cannot be thought of as a fact but is a matter of non-dogmatic
speculation, a speculation of mathematical probability rather than human
doubt. Critiquing phenomenological intersubjectivity, which according
to Maurice Merleau-Ponty is based on doubt and practiced through the
sensory-motor actions of perception, Meillasoux suggests that its
consciousness and its language certainly transcend themselves towards

the world, but there is a world only insofar as a consciousness transcends
itself towards it. Consequently, this space of exteriority is merely the space
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of what faces us, of what exists only as a correlate of our existence. This
is why, in actuality, we do not transcend ourselves very much by plunging
into such a world, for all we are doing is exploring the two faces of what
remains a face to face – like a coin which only knows its own obverse.47
Contrasting this apparently expected and expectable world with Braidotti’s

sensibility for the marginal, whose body, moving towards the world, is not
faced with ‘merely the space of what faces us’ but with its own exclusion,
and whose ‘plunging into such a world’ is a plunging into the world of
the dominant other, in which she is not mirrored and thus in which she
does not recognize herself but is alien to: not situated and without words,
absent not by choice but through the partisan homogeneity of its design;
and comparing his sense of objectivity as distance with Barad’s notion of
objectivity as responsibility and accountability, it becomes apparent that
Meillassoux’s project of a calculable world anterior to human experience,
is ‘merely the space of what faces’ him as a gendered and racial subject,
culturally and historically privileged with access to definite forms of
representation: performing his own recognition of himself in a world of
calculations, represented in the possibility of a language of numbers
articulated in the face of a canonical philosophy. Thus his realism creates,
from a place at the centre of knowledge and truth a fiction about an absolute
outside, and while he appears to be deconstructing his own embodied
authority on the way there, he can only do so because his subjectivity has
been historically entitled and matters on in the obverse of his total absence
as a hyper-invisible and absolute transparent presence.
However, once we acknowledge that his realism is a realism from
the centre and turn to the margins, where according to Braidotti all the
action takes place, we can unread his ancestrality not as objective as in
truthful because disembodied and distant, but as another location to
think the possibility of the real: a remote ‘planet’ of the unthought; a
sphere configured from the speculative essence of the pure possibility of
what there is without really being what there is but providing access to
the thinking of the unthought as a fiction for thinking the unthinkeable.
Thus his notion of an ‘after finitude’, of a place without the defined finitude
of humanity, can help us think about the absolute outside as an otherwise
unthinkable possibility of the inside, inviting the creative performance of
an unthinking of the centre from the plurality of the margins. In this way,
Meillasoux’s non-human ancestrality, considered from the margins, from
‘the real-life minorities’:48 the women, blacks, youth, postcolonial subjects,
migrants, exiled, and homeless of Braidotti, and those whose ‘territory is
black: because you are Africa’, as discussed by Cixous, lines up interestingly
with Afrofuturism, which seeks to find a space without mirrors of the past
in the future to rethink the unthought and the unthinkable of the present.49
At the same time, Meillassoux’s notion of the absolute outside as the only
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place from which the real can be thought, brings to mind also the outside of
philosophy as discussed by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi: their location
outside the discipline that is opened by movement and practice rather than
representation and language, to ‘challenge philosophy to compose with
concepts already on their way in another mode, in the mode of artistic
practice, in the mode of event formation, of activism, of dance, even of
everyday perception’, to generate the impossible.50
Through this shift from the unthought to the unthinkable, I recognize
the benefit of the ancestral as a place of renewal and invention, where
practice can gain ground on theory, revocalize its representational matter
and contribute to a different knowledge. Thus I will try to reach that space
of the absolute outside not through thinking the unthought but through
moving, listening and sounding towards it. To practice rather than think
ancestrality so that the uncertainty of my body does not find comfort
in a relative outside, the outside of my simple absence and ‘correct’ its
vision, but can plunge into the truly unknown of what is generated in the
contingent configuration between my body as matter and that of other
subjects and things. In this way, I won’t come back with a calculation that
terminates all speculation about the outside in its probability, but with the
need to keep on practising, as a constant prizing open the entangled space
between the matter of my body and mind, that of other things and of the
representational scheme that pretends their objective distance and thus
absolute knowability. In this performance we do not grasp each other, but
entangle temporarily, practising the in-between, and get to understand the
world as diffractions, mobile differences, where distance enables a breach
with history, and objectivity is responsibility: ‘being accountable to marks
on bodies’.51
In this materialist agitation of thought through creativity, practical
knowledge bares the responsibility of the physical encounter. It does not
come from a pre-given place at the centre but emerges from the sides and
in another mode. According to Braidotti, ‘the center is void; all the action
is on the margins’.52 This is the void that masculine materialism takes as its
transparency and these are the margins from where a feminine materialism
is active, changing the conceptual scheme through creativity: the ‘retelling,
reconfiguring, and revisiting the concept, phenomenon, event, or location
from different angles, so as to infuse it with a nomadic spin that establishes
multiple connections and lines of interaction’.53
I get to this retelling and reconfiguring of new materialism by listening
to a performance of Naldjorlak I by Éliane Radique, composed for and
with the cellist Charles Curtis, between 2004 and 2005. The work invites
an engagement in the reality of embodied matter and the entanglement
of things, and is what prompted and informed my investigation into the
possibility of a sonic materialism as a feminist science fiction. It is a piece
produced without a score, the language of music’s disciplinary erudition, but
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in collaboration, where the grammar of composition is not representational,

a semantic code, but a matter of working together, from a tentative drawing
of the shape of the piece, to a work that performs the entanglement of
composer, cello, cellist, bow and breath.54
Listening and writing about this work I try not to represent but to
continue its entanglement. To understand what it does not by finding a
visual figuration but by finding access into how its processes of interactions
produce a creative and performative reality of the work.
Naldjorlak I (2005/2017)55
Éliane Radique, Charles Curtis
The work is a composition in real time without a traditional score,
produced from the collaboration between the composer, the performer and
the instrument of which it sounds all their parts not as separate things but
in their interbeing: their being together as the configuration of the reality of
their performance. It plays as a single gesture of different voices that sound
in one movement their creative transformation of which none seems a leader
and through which each articulates itself to become not a singular whole but
a complex sphere of inter-action.
The beginning is faint but insistent, a tuning in to the instrument and
the body, and in to the work that the tuning-in starts to create: exploring
between them the material, the scope and scale of their meeting. They are
measuring in sound the possibility of their work together before growing
in insistence to know more about what could sound. This tuning-in is
not the start of this sonic collaboration however, rather it is preceded,
materially and conceptually, by the tuning of the instrument to the ‘wolf
tone’: a tuning not to a referenced pitch, an inter-musical orientation, but
to the cello’s own resonance, its intra-activity, as it sounds the context and
condition of its play. Thus it is a material reference, which is unstable,
contingent and changes depending on the space, its humidity and
temperature: its ‘weather’ and other factors that affect the cello’s material
sound. Curtis suggests that this tuning to the outside of music is named
wolf tone to account ‘for the unpredictability, danger and acoustical
wildness that it stands as the herald of’.56 Elaborating on its practise he
goes on to explain that
This ‘tuning’ is a days-long process, which attempts to combine a very high

degree of precision in brining as many of the cello’s resonating elements
as possible into unison, with the essentially impossible task of matching
all elements to an amorphous pitch-complex which is additionally a
moving target.57
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I read this tuning to an amorphous pitch-complex of resonating elements that

remain mobile and impossible to unite, as an interesting allegory, beyond the
preparation of the instrument, for the performance of Naldjorlak itself. The
work seems to continue this tuning effort outside the resonating spaces of
the instrument in those of the concert hall: tuning it to the wolf tone of its
resonance. Thus it presents a useful image of how the playing of the instrument
activates a composition between the different resonating bodies of the space,
the performer, the cello and the audience, working on an impossible and
yet aimed for unison. Tuning them in to a mobile complex, opening their
resonances not in harmony but as their unpredictable in-between; creating
the invisible volume that they sound together and in which we can sense
their existence as simultaneous vibrations, as mobile materialities that are
not ‘this’ or ‘that’, but are the resonance of their indivisible interbeing. Thus
we hear the reality of each element in practice, in their resonating together,
producing the composition as a viscous and indivisible shape of different
things that are in conflict and even contradictory, searching for a vibrating
line that never unites.
From this first low vibration, this hoarse breathing of the instrument and
the body, the space and the bow, the sound is becoming a piece that clearly
draws a shape, started possibly by the form of Radique’s initial drawing
shown to Curtis at the beginning of their collaborative composing, but soon
producing its own contingent configuration in the viscous volume of its
fraying sound. And so a space is made between bow and cello, body and
sound, forged through the continuous movement of their performance. In
this formless form they lose their definite shape as nouns, and transform
into what they are together, as actions rather than as things, producing what
Barad terms an ‘agential realism’ of their formless form.
With agential realism Barad describes her notion of agency not as a
property of persons or things, but as an enactment of difference, ‘a matter of
possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements’.58 Barad’s idea of an agential
realism as a realism of intra-action: of the action between things and
subjects that reconfigure entanglements through difference, is useful here to
elaborate on the relationship of instrument, body, bow and weather not as
an inter-action of static and similiar objects but as the action in-between of
active things that are at once the apparatus and material of their production
and that perform the reality of their meeting by opening different resonant
spaces in listening, in architecture and in music.
In relation to my articulation of sound creating the world as an indivisible
sphere of interbeing and inter-activity, made earlier in this text, Barad’s
realism of intra-activity permits me to recognize and confirm this sonic
interbeing as an interbeing not of static things but of mobile bodies, whose
resonant vibrations, the sonic sign of their molecular activity, co-produce
and co-constitute the formless complex of an indivisible world. In this sonic
world we hear the mobile and transforming interconnectivity of things,
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and have to think through their porous motility rather than through the
significance of autonomous and stable objects, to understand what matter
does together in difference rather than in the sameness and oppositionality
of separate things.
Curtis in his essay ‘Éliane Radigue and Naldjorlak’ (2010), discussing
the work and the process of its collaborative composition, talks about the
need to become Radique ‘in order to make this work, in my performance,
hers’.59 He understands the continuous motility of the sound’s vibration to
reflect on Radique’s hearing: ‘she hears sound as a spatial, and constantly
moving, entity’; and he compares the method of composition but not its
sound, to her tape pieces, which were ‘written’ in real time on the tape,
in the movement between two machines, alternating between decks to
create a continuous duration, and developing a single gesture that had to
be restarted if an unwanted sound or a sudden volume change or other
‘false’ move occurred.60 Since, although there is no traditional score,
Naldjorlak is not an improvisation but a composition produced in the
act of performance that is determined by the act of collaboration between
Radique and Curtis, the drawing of the work, the tuning of the cello to the
wolf tone, and the playing of its allegory through the elements that affect
its tuning.
According to Curtis, for Radique the instrument is the score. He
develops this interpretation and suggests that the score is the drawing on
the instrument: the physical action of creating the sound from its resonant
body, its strings, wood, bridge, and bow, articulating a composition through
the agitation of the instrument’s physical design, as well as its location,
temperature and the body that plays its sound to create the temporary
form of its score. The score then is a site of collaboration. It is a temporal
enactment of impulses and instructions given by the initial drawing, through
conversations, and ultimately of the actions that the instrument teases out of
Curtis as Curtis teases the resonances from its body.
In this reciprocal play between body and instrument every possibility for
resonance is explored, excited, brought out and made to sound: to perform
its capacity and the capacity of the cellist to perform it. The instrument is the
contingent location of a drawn score that gives instructions and parameters
to this process that the body, the bow and the breath follow and perform
while in response and as iteration they expand what this drawing out of
possibilities might be and reinstruct the process.
The sound grows ever more insistent, its diffuse vibrations catching ever
more tones to swing along. Broadening its texture and reach, it extends
beyond the limits of the instrument and excites the resonance of my listening
body. The cello’s sound transforms from rasping vibrations into deeper
tremors that expand into the unlit volume of the place, gaining in import
and ferocity, taking hold of its invisibility and transforming through the
oscillating continuity of its diffracted pitch the sense of sitting in the dark.
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The light is focused on the performer and the instrument only. We were
under strict instructions to switch off mobile phones. And now I understand
why. Their light and sound would have broken the piece, we would have had
to start again, as Radique had to start again every time a ‘fault’ or unwanted
level and sound occurred in her tape works produced in an effort not unlike
this one, but staged as a performance without audience and between decks,
on the movement of a rolling tape.
In this unbroken darkness we move together without breaking the
tone: Moving forward and backward to see through the bodies of a
packed audience sitting on wooden benches in the Moscow cold of an
old turbine hall in February, the body of Curtis, that of the cello and that
of the bow moving to produce the sounds we are moving to and towards.
His play is agile and focused, the effort clearly visible. The rapport
between cello and cellist intimate and muscular. He has to get up and
move to reach and communicate with the resonances that are available in
the instrument. In turn the tonality of his moving body finds resonance
in the motility of the sound that moves around him. But this is not an
effort of similarity or harmony but a slow and patient differentiation
and diffracting of sounds and bodies into the precision of their specific
formlessness together. The work performs the intra-activity of all the
elements involved in the composition, and unperforms their certain form
as human or as music, as bow and architecture, body and breath. Their
sounds are Irigaray’s gesture-words, the caresses that do not seek to grasp
the semantic but to make a musical speech that ‘longs for the existence
of a between-us’.61
At their agential in-between my listening too becomes diffracting: a
reconfiguring of the ‘material-discursive apparatuses’ of hearing: the nature
of the apparatus of observation and its material object, which are the
discursive and material conditions of music, of performance, of the score
and of audienceship.62 This reconfiguring listening reads them as patterns
of difference, beyond a disciplinary language, in the infinite openness
and volatile material of sound from where it allows us to engage in the
possibilities of its expression beyond what we think it is as music.
This effort of listening ignores the line of harmonic development, the
grammar of music, and the authority of performance, and grants access
to the work’s complex and simultaneous interbeing in difference: In the
difference of each other and the complexity of their in-between, as a site not
of unalterable or negative conflict but of an affirmative conflictual generation
of what is in the invisible realm between things in motion. And from this
invisible realm the definition of each thing can be resisted, rethought and
recomposed. Thus a new music arises as a temporospatial production of
wild and transforming things, enacting the differentiated inseparability that
is a heterogenous music without origin.
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This sonic diffracting moves the unheard and the inaudible into music. It
produces a rhythm of deep vibrations and probing sweeps, a concentrated
scanning for difference and particularity, growing ever more insistent and
forceful, until at one point we seem to reach a plateau, a moment of balance on
which the piece continues in a simpler voice but equally demanding. Swerving
still in the dark. Closing in, loud and intense: a mobile horizon, static in terms
of its verticality. Here the sound is extremely focused in an unplaceable pitch.
Unhalting it makes pulsating connections between places on the body and
the cello, performing an impenetrable but elastic core between the two that
does not find a certain form but tunes itself to the movements of what either
is. It is a narrow band with a plural throw, expanding how long a sound can
be and extending the infinitude of listening and the reach of our ears.
Once more the intensity rises and I can feel the tremors of bow and cello
reach my body and impact on its molecular shape, carrying it into the intra-
activity of the composition to become part of its reality, entangled in its invisible
configuration. But then the work starts to slow down, and on its ways into a
quieter register it opens up the frequencies and vibrations it held together in
the faster movement of a louder volume, to give them up to our listening in a
slower, broader drone. Frayed and open they vibrate as formless forms until
the sound collects itself, becomes slimmer, transparent almost, and the bridge,
the strings and the fingerboard become visible, clear, a form in silence.
This is a point of rest. We take a breath with Curtis, the cello and the
room, until with a low sound of uneven harmonics we start in a play of
intense to and fro along the whole bow and in the middle of the instrument
where sound becomes the rhythm of its own time. The movement starts
slowly, broad and searching: a fog light in the dark space, illuminating its
different resonances, while bringing them into play.
Le lien entre le rythme et le sujet vient de ce que j’entends par pensée

poétique une invention du rythme, au sens où le rythme n’est plus une
alternance formelle mais une organisation du sujet.63
I hear with Henri Meschonnic how the work becomes the invention of this
rhythm, not as a vacillation of tones, but the configuration of the work itself.
It is not a metric of things but a wild engine from which the work grasps
its material possibility. Thus the work becomes slowly the steady oscillating
movement of body and bow articulating between tones and overtones.
This movement reaches out and brings into the work what there is that can
sound on its undulant weave. Its muscular performance erases any sense of
an original note or common musical ground. Instead, we are in the throw of
surging textures as an alternative to the tonal line, growing ever more intense,
faster, more insistent. This is a choreography of unperforming as an affirmative
reconstitution of musical possibility. There is nothing else now, just this
172
movement, this rhythm that configures the room in the timespace of its material
sense. This is not even really sound but is time as all there is, intense plastic
and infinite. ‘La notion de rythme permet précisément d’infinitiser le sens, de
fragmenter infiniment l’unité, la totalité. De montrer l’enjeu du discours.’64 To
show the heart of discourse. De montrer l’enjeu de la materialité. To show the
heart of matter: to fragment, diffractively, the unity and totality of the work.
The sound as broad and textured rhythm is the agential reality of the
work’s reconfiguring the space, the instrument, and music, the body playing
and the body listening, in an alternative shape. This shape is visceral,
muscular, agentially real. It is a predicative shape that brings us into the
materiality of time, reminding us that we are with the work and that its
time is our joint material duration. It is thus not a chronological measure
but a viscous and voluminous expanse in all directions. It is the time of
honey grasping me when I grasp it, demanding and sweet.65 It is ahistorical
time with regard to musical conventions and writes backwards from the
instrumental performance into what music can do, what its material might
be, and how its language might articulate.
This nonmeasured time denies distance and insists on intimacy while
not revealing its form. It is a sustained but intangible formlessness that
highlights the in-between, from where it grants glimpses of what is, and
where we have to meet it to hear our joint configuration of what that is.
Thus the work produces a doubtful measure of a feminine sonic materialism
that insists we inhabit it if we mean to say anything about how it passed,
to be accountable and take responsibility for what it is we think we saw.
This time is what carries the reciprocity and collaborative nature of the
work’s production: ‘the move to composing for acoustic instruments now
means working with musicians, being with them for extended periods of
time, sharing the difficulties of creation and the hopefulness of the new piece
evolving’.66 And it sustains this reciprocity into perception as participatory
listening that creates a durational co-production, sharing the difficulties and
hopefulness of a musical possibility.
The time of this material rhythm, inhabited by me on a cold February
night, brings things into motion, and brings duration into a materialist
discussion as a pattern of difference that unfolds and intra-acts but never
runs out. That is inexhaustible, but exhausting. It is the engine of difference
and the shape of its mattering. Diffracting time does not make discrete
units, of seconds and milliseconds, but generates their expanse, which is the
material when all else has left.
And then the work stops.
To breathe again, as the sustained low vibration of a third frame that
foregrounds the duration of materiality and the nonmetric rhythms of
hearing. This third movement composes a fragile thread of time that breaks
material certainty and makes it reappear as the ephemeral co-constitution of
things, as all there is, a whistle only, a thin sound of indivisible time.
173
Philosophy as digging on your hands and

knees: A conclusion on gardening
Having heard all three movements the place of listening is different now. The
old turbine hall is opened, available to the infinity of meaning, its material
and institutional built an invisible configuration, ready to be recomposed.
Once we have experienced its resonance we know it in a different way. We
have tuned into its wolf tone, which ‘in the parlance of performers, “speaks”
differently’, it speaks to us of its invisible capacity and the indivisible volume
that we excite and produce by being with it, intra-acting its expanse.67
Listening and sounding fragment the representational preconceptions of
matter: that of architecture, music, the cello and the score. They highlight
and perform its creative and transformative capacity – the vibration of an
amorphous shape within which we recognize the inarticulate, the unthought
and the unthinkable – and reperform it through the language of a minor
practice: A feminine voice that is symbolic of a general marginality and
works through agitation, intra-activity, processes and diffractions of
inclusivity.
This intra-action is, according to Barad, not an issue of choice but of a much
less predictable necessity, a wild and dangerous causality that makes us part
of its tuning and teases out new resonances without harmonic reference or
name. It is a plunging into the world of a composition without a score, without
grammar, but with the strength of the radical contingency of a collaborative
production of music that imagines a collaborative production of the world.
This agential reality of co-production and co-constitution articulates
through the new materialist elaboration of performativity as ‘agential intra-
action’, and creates an ethics of entanglement that reconfigures interbeing
through agential forces rather than through essentialisms and a priori. It
informs an ethics of doing as an ethics of doing together, of entanglement and
participation in difference. Thus it brings correlationism, and particularly
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intersubjectivity as an interobjectivity in action,
as intra-objectivity and modest collaborator into the unthinkable doing of
matter, to ensure the situatedness of the marginal subject even in a nomadic
world.68
Sound and listening, as a sensory-motor action fuelled by phenomenological
doubt, makes the new materialism of Barad and Braidotti tangible, audible
and thinkable and asserts their feminine focus by insisting on diffraction
and creativity as an inhabited and reciprocal practice. In comparison,
Meillassoux’s mathematical fiction of an absolute exteriority found in the
ancestral purposefully bars the access to direct experience. It suspends
habits of thought and expectation to reach the unthought via an intellectual
disappearance. Thus it forces us to rethink how we might grasp and articulate
such a world. Since we have to articulate it, or perform it, if it is not simply
174
to be a mute unthought of belief and dogma: a blind faith in numbers, which

he set out to critique in the first place.
Meillassoux’s focus on calculation rather than experience implodes the
philosophical ground as the symbolic and literal baseline of knowledge
and reality. In that sense it represents an emancipatory force that equals
Braidotti’s cartographies that are ‘more like a weather map than an atlas’,
that mutate and change and do not offer a mapped out ground but a
practice to stay grounded in mobility, and is not unlike Barad’s agential
realism of diffraction that explores invisible difference instead of similarities
and outlines.69 However, without an a priori ground, without a visual
cartography and an optic structure of sameness, philosophy has to be
performed, even if in numbers. We cannot escape being human by plunging
into mathematics instead of into the world. It needs to be dug into, digging
in ‘the field of possibility’, of practice and of discourse that according to
Barad is not static or singular but plural and moving,70 and that according
to Braidotti encourages ‘a sort of intellectual landscape gardening’ of an
embodied mind.71 Digging and building on our hands and knees to sense the
amorphous shape of the work and the world’s complex possibility to grasp
them as a consequent and accountable real.
It is not the matter of the human being, her movements or thoughts that
undermine the possibility of materiality, but the mute thinking in categories
and dualisms. And these we can unperform by writing different scores, not
as legible instructions but as a dialogue with things, and by following them
differently, not to hear the correct interpretation but to participate in their
contingent configuration through a rhythm that does not alternate the sign,
but breaks into the infinite possibility of material fragmentation to realize
its political possibility in renewal.
For rhythm is a subject-form(er). The subject-form(er). That it renews

the meaning of things, that it is through rhythm that we reach the sense
that we have of our being undone [défaire], that everything around
us happens as it undoes itself [défaire], and that, approaching this
sensation of the movement of everything, we ourselves are part of this
movement.72
Meschonnic’s nonmetric rhythm presents a strategy of diffraction that

brings time into a materialist and speculative realm, and sees things in
their duration as configured timespace, rejecting a dualist visuality through
the entangled movements of sound that renew the realist frame in the
simultaneous plurality of a spatial time.
This renewed possibility of digging in an irregular beat brings
phenomenology back to materialism as a modest collaborator. It makes its
speculation inhabited, experienced and real in its consequence rather than
as probability and calculation, and takes account of the situatedness and
175
the responsibility of the subject, who while matter herself is accountable

for her actions. In turn, the materialist project opens phenomenological
intersubjectivity to the notion of intermateriality, as intra-materiality,
recognizing the independent causality of the non-human, and fostering
the notion of interaction as a process ‘that blurs all boundaries’ between
objects and subjects, as well as between disciplines and knowledge
institutions.73
Through sound realism finds a new relationship with correlationism, not
as a visuocentric intersubjectivity ‘merely the space of what faces us’, but
as the invisible in-between of what we do together, as indivisible matter
mattering an entangled interbeing of the world that takes care also of its
exclusions. This invisible in-between creates a performative rather than a
dogmatic doubt that finds in the concept of the ancestral a possible space
from which to suspend habits of thought and rethink, reperform and reinvent
the present beyond a dualist view. This sonico-feminine materialism, in
collaboration with a phenomenology as a modest partner, creates Barad’s
agential realism in Meschonnic’s political rhythm, where agency is not an
attribute but a verb and where reality is not ‘this’ or ‘that’ but the dynamic
irregularity of their mobile in-between.
The collaborative composing of Radique and Curtis, their tuning of the
instrument to the wolf tone and the tuning of the performance in to its
environment creates this intra-activity where music and performance attain
an ethics of entanglement, where they are part of the production of the
place and take responsibility for the phenomenon of body and instrument,
subject and object, generated in their irregular rhythm, not as dialectical
opposites but through an entangled co-production of their differences and
possibilities.
Naldjorlak I produces not a score to re-interpret correctly, but the
unrepresentable movement of the performance as an architectural score of
contingent resonances, their differences and inter-dependencies. As such a
contingent and fluid map it does not present a cartographic scheme or firm
instructions that exclude what else we might do, but creates the mapping of
fleeting things in the movement of sound. It enables participation and the
recording of simultaneous and overlapping trajectories through movements
that are deliberate and rigorous but are not limited to what we think the
instrument, the bow, the body or the breath of the space are capable of, but
what their unthought capacity makes possible.
While a masculine new materialism insists on the absence of the human to
get to the unthought, and thus ultimately proposes the end of philosophy in
its own mathematical probability, a sonico-feminine new materialism brings
us to the creative performance of matter and language not in words but on
the body and on things: doing, digging, gardening as a revocalization and
rephysicalization of theory through its intra-activitiy with things. Through
this practical philosophy and the performance of matter I can reach the
176
outside of the discipline not as its disavowal and end, but as the place of its
renewal: working on the outside of its conventions, at the nonchronological
and noncanonical place of thought, at the margins, to produce a different
path for thinking as doing. At the same time, I can, from the edges of its
possibility, through the practical act of a sonic thinking as movement and
performance of irregular rhythms, reconfigure the notion of historical sonic
and musical production and its discourse.
This is a working from the margins to an entirely different centre of
philosophy and of music that is shared and sharable, made from differences
in an entangled and embodied materiality. The ethics of this music is an
ethics of entanglement and embodiment rather than that of categories,
good practice virtuosity, and a certain form. It is not the ethics of rules
and commandments, but of process, of performing and unperforming place,
instrument, body, score, musical materiality and expectations. It is an ethics
of digging, plowing into the framework and apparatus that give rules and
see a singular actuality, in order to respond with a contingent practise from
the voids in its history and the plurality of its time, creating a ‘subject-
unformer’, an ‘object-unformer’.
And maybe that is what new materialism has to do, it has to start
digging into its own material to perform it, to write a different score on
the body of the philosopher and on the body of theory, and to let them be
diffracted, plural, different and nomadic, not located but creating a place
as an extension, as the elastic and expanded space of its agential reality.
Philosophy has to become a digging, a digging down, into language, into
canons and authority, to unperform them, to undo them in an affirmative
action of recomposition. This is a new materialism of doing and undoing,
of uncreating and of unperforming what there is: subjectivity, materiality,
relationships, procedures and processes, not to deconstruct but to be
affirmative in the non-dialectical practice of making a fresh planet of the
unthought through the futurism of ancestrality, creating a place of pure
possibility that is not mathematical but inhabited and agentially real.
They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and
they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less
imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it
at all. It is possible that is does not exist.74
Notes
1 Edith Södergran, ‘The Stars’, in Complete Poems, trans. David McDuff,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1992, p. 63. Reprinted with permission.
2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, New York: Continuum, 2009, p. 7.
177
3 In After Finitude, Meillassoux states that: ‘the de-absolutization of thought

boils down to the mobilisation of a fideist argument.’ An argument in other
words that defends a quasi and generalized religious thought and thus,
according to Meillassoux, leads to the obscurantism of correlationism,
at the very point where it wants to escape the dogmatism of rationalism
(Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 46).
4 Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 126–7.
5 Ibid., p. 17.
6 The unthinkable is not what is too horrific to be thought but what escapes
thought’s normative boundaries, what remains outside our imagination of
what can be thought conventionally.
7 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, vol. 28, no. 3 (2003): 810.
8 Karen Barad, interviewed in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies,
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press,
2012, p. 68.
9 Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 20.
10 Christoph Cox, ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Towards a Sonic
Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 10, no. 2 (2011): 145–6.
11 Ibid., p. 148.
12 Adriana Cavarero, For More than one Voice, Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 57.
13 Ibid., p. 61.
14 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews &
Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012, p. 119.
15 Cavarero, For More than one Voice, Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, 2005, p. 61.
16 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., pp. 886 and 877.
19 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, the Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 70 and 72.
20 Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, Essays and Lectures,
Winchester, UK and Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2010, p. 113.
21 Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, New York: Routledge, 1991, quoted
in Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd edn, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011, p. 9.
22 Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, p. 2.
178
23 Ibid., p. 60.
24 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 128.
25 Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p. 803.
26 Barad, interviewed in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, p. 49.
27 Ibid., p 50.
28 Ibid., pp. 52–3. Diffraction places an emphasis on open, ‘indefinite
boundaries’ between disciplines, which echoes also Braidotti’s sense on the
need for a ‘transdisciplinary approach that cuts across established methods
and conventions of many disciplines’, to produce an articulation and being
in the globalized labour market (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 7). The
challenge to ‘separate academic division’ through the creative diffraction
of their knowledge base appears an important and central target of
feminine new materialist thought: promoting an interdisciplinary mattering,
which effectively reimagines ‘the entanglements that already exist’ (Barad
interviewed in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, pp. 50–1).
29 Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of
Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come’,
Derrida Today, vol. 3, no. 2 (2010): 253.
31 Ibid., p. 41.
32 Irigaray, To Be Two, p. 27.
33 Barad ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p. 802.
34 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, pp. 29–43.
36 Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p. 812. While Barad suggests a
performative turn to avoid the pitfuls of semantic language, Braidotti suggests
the reimagining of figuration as a cartography that resembles weather maps
(Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 13), and Irigaray infuses her critical writing
with poetry.
38 ‘Goofy’ is the term used by Manuel DeLanda when describing Irigaray’s
work in a conversation with Christoph Cox. In answer to a question about
Gilles Deleuze and his circle of friends, that is, like-minded philosophers, De
Landa suggests that: ‘Deleuze was close to Foucault and Lyotard, but not to
Derrida, and certainly not to Irigaray and her goofy notion of a “masculinist
epistemology”’ (‘Possibility Spaces: Manuel DeLanda in Conversation with
Christoph Cox’, in Realism Materialism Art, Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and
Suhail Malik [eds], Berlin: Sternberg, 2015, p. 87). This statement is not only
embarrassing but also paradoxically demonstrative of the masculinist view
point, deliciously unaware of the dominance of its logic and the suppression of
the other, what is unfamiliar and unknown, while searching for the unthought.
This apparent unawareness of the dominance of a masculine position
within new materialism finds a further example in the English translation
of Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2006). In the French original version by
179
Meillassoux, the correlationist, who stands accused of fanaticism, is identified

as masculine: ‘Le corrélationiste intervient alors pour disqualifier ces deux
positions: Il défend, quant a lui, un strict agnosticisme théorique. Toutes les
croyance lui paraissent également licites’ (Meillassoux, Après la Finitude,
Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006, p. 75).
In the English translation of these passages, by contrast, the correlationist is
identified as failing in ‘her’ ability to see and think an absolute outside, for
being caught, in other words, in the relativity of her own position and prone to
the fanaticism of fideist perception, ‘all beliefs strike her as equally legitimate’
(After Finitude, p. 55). In all other passages of the book the impersonal plural
of the pronoun ‘they’ is used, avoiding gender specificity. Thus the sudden
choice of the female pronoun produces the sense of a deliberate assignation
of fideism and fanaticism to the feminine. Given that phenomenological
philosophers and correlationists, on the whole, and those addressed by
Meillassoux in the particular are male, this seems a very strange choice of
pronoun, even if made in an attempt at gender inclusivity.
It is hard to say whether this decision on the part of Ray Brassier, a
fellow new materialist who translated the book, is entirely deliberate or
just unthinking of its context. Nevertheless, as I will argue later, there is a
most striking difference between what I call a masculine and a feminine
interpretation and application of new materialist aims and ideas: the first
looks for the bones and stones of this world, the other for our responsibility.
I am not mentioning these incidences to prejudice this enquiry into the
possibility of realism and its access to an unthought world, but because it
brings the absolute outside into a potentially totalitarian position that is not
as neutral in its motivation, starting position and design as claimed, and that
needs to be considered since speculative realism has built into its method a
guaranteed defence against any form of critique, given that we cannot reach
the reality or even discuss it without undoing its claim of absolute outsideness.
40 Christoph Cox, ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Towards a Sonic
Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 10, no. 2 (2011): 145.
41 Barad, interviewed in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, p. 51.
42 Ibid., p. 63.
43 Ibid., p. 53.
44 Ibid., p. 70.
46 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 126.
47 Ibid., p. 7.
50 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the
Ecology of Experience, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014, pp. vii and 134.
51 Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, p. 824.
180

53 Ibid., p. 230.
54 In his text on the experience of working on Naldjorlak, Curtis explains
how upon his arrival at Radique’s apartment in Paris to start the process
of co-creation, he was presented with a single white sheet ‘with some faint
and tentative pencil marks on it’ (Charles Curtis, ‘Éliane Radigue and
Naldjorlak’, in Attention Patterns, Black Pollen Press/Important Records,
2010, p. 3).
55 Since 2007 there are two further parts to the work, forming a trilogy:
Naldjorlak I, II and III, the second of which is for two basset horns composed
for and with Carole Robinson and Bruno Martinez, and the third for cello
and two basset horns. My writing here will focus on the first part only, not
to show a preference or distinction but to create an engagement with one
particular material entanglement.
The original solo cello piece was premiered at the Tenri Cultural Institute
in New York on 5 December 2005. The performance that I experienced was
at the Geometry of Now exhibition/concert program at GES-2 in Moscow, on
25 February 2017.
56 Curtis, ‘Éliane Radigue and Naldjorlak’, p. 6.
57 Ibid., p. 6.
58 Barad interviewed in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, p. 55.
59 Curtis, ‘Éliane Radigue and Naldjorlak’, p. 5.
60 Ibid.
62 Barad discusses this co-reading of the apparatus or practice of observation
and the material observed in her interview with Rick Dolphijn and Iris van
der Tuin in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, p. 55.
63 ‘The linkage between the rhythm and the poetic matter/subject, comes from
what I understand through poetic thinking as an invention of the rhythm,
in the sense that the rhythm is not anymore a formal, metric alternation,
but an organisation of the poetic matter’ (Henri Meschonnic, Politique
du Rythme, Politique du sujet, Paris: Editions Verdier, 1995, p. 9, my
translation).
64 The idea of the rhythm permits precisely the rendering infinite of sense; to
infinitively fragment its unity, the notion of totality; to show the heart of
discourse.
(Henri Meschonnic, Critique du Rythme, Anthropologie historique
du langage, Paris: Verdier Poche, 1982, p. 19, my translation.)
65 In The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis, London and New York:

Routledge, 2008, pp. 46–7, Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that
honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain
consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the
fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it
181
has been given a particular shape, and what is more, it reverses the roles,
by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it.
Being honeyed expresses the reciprocity of phenomenological
intersubjectivity. The honey can only be felt through my stickiness. It cannot
be grasped as a remote object but comes to being in my honeyed-hands
as the complex phenomenon of the subject and the object. It articulates a
phenomenological intra-activity; a correlationist material speculation on the
being of being honey as being a mobile and sticky configuration of matter, a
phenomenon of honey and hands.
66 Charles Curtis remarking on Radique’s move from composing with
synthesized sounds and reel to reel tape, as a performance without audience
or instrumentalists, to working with an interpreter in a collaborative effort
of composition as a sharing of time in ‘Éliane Radigue and Naldjorlak’, pp. 8–9.
67 Ibid., p. 6.
68 Phenomenology is a modest collaborator in this context since the aim is not
to find a phenomenological truth about the work, as a work for me, but to
understand its entangled performance and materiality: to get to its ‘intra-
actions’, Barad’s nondeterministic causality, which is not appreciated via the
interactions of entities in an additive fashion, this caused this caused this,
but as itself existing as the between of entity and the action that impacts
on it, as an invisible force, whose ‘diffractive’ thinking is motivated by
phenomenological doubt, and is afforded a method in its reciprocity and
intersubjectivity understood as an intra-objectivity: the action between objects
and subjects that enact their being a phenomenon together.
69 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 13. Braidotti’s weather maps elaborate
embodiement as the grounding for a nomadic subject. Producing not maps
of positions and locations but maps of positionings. I remain sceptical of
the term map, but appreciate that her maps represent, in many ways, an
unmapping, a cartography of unrepresentable movement, highlighting its
unrepresentability by insisting on the authority of the map.
70 Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of
Inheritance’, p. 819.
71 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 46.
72 Henri Meschonnic, The Rhythm Party Manifesto, trans. David Nowell Smith,
Thinking Verse, vol. 1 (2011), p. 165.
74 Ursula K. Le Guin, The UNREAL & The REAL, Selected Stories Volume 2
Outer Space, Inner Lands, London: Orion, 2015, p. 7.
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Cox, Christoph, ‘Possibility Spaces: Manuel DeLanda in Conversation with
Christoph Cox’, in Realism Materialism Art, Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey and
Suhail Malik (eds), Berlin: Sternberg, 2015, pp. 87–94.
Curtis, Charles, ‘Éliane Radigue and Naldjorlak’, Attention Patterns, as part of a
48-page booklet that accompanied a double LP, Che Chen (ed.), Black Pollen
Press/Important Records, 2010.
Landa, Manuel De, ‘Emergence, Causality and Realism’, in The Speculative Turn,
Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham
Harman (eds), Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2011, pp. 381–92.
Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews &
Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012.
Harman, Graham, Towards Speculative Realism, Essays and Lectures, Winchester,
UK and Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2010.
Irigaray, Luce, To Be Two, New York: Routledge, 2001 [1994].
Le Guin, Ursula K., The UNREAL & The REAL, Selected Stories Volume 2 Outer
Space, Inner Lands, London: Orion, 2015.
Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of
Experience, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude, An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,
New York: Continuum, 2009.
Meillassoux, Quentin, Après la Finitude, Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence,
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis, London
and New York: Routledge, 2008 [First published in French as Causeries 1948,
Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2002, from a radio series commissioned by the French
national radio and broadcast on its National Program at the end of 1948].
Meschonnic, Henri, Critique du Rythme, Anthropologie historique du langage,
Paris: Verdier Poche, 1982.
Meschonnic, Henri, Politique du Rythme, Politique du sujet, Paris: Editions Verdier,
1995.
183
Meschonnic, Henri, The Rhythm Party Manifesto, trans. David Nowell Smith,
Thinking Verse, vol. 1 (2011): 161–73.
Södergran, Edith, ‘The Stars’, in Complete Poems, trans. David McDuff, Newcastle
upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1992, p. 63.
Work
Radique, Éliane and Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak I (2005) three movements for Cello
performed at the Geometry of Now exhibition/concert program at GES-2 in
Moscow, on 25 February 2017.
184
185
Reading fragments of listening,

hearing vertical lines of words
This magnificent trumpet is going to change your life.1
In Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974), Marian Leatherby, an

old lady, 92 years of age, receives the gift of an ornate hearing trumpet from
her friend Carmella. Using this rudimentary amplification device enables her
to hear more clearly what is being said and what goes on around her.
The first thing Marian overhears thanks to its amplification is her
family plotting to send her to a nursing home out in the suburbs, run by
The Well of Light Brotherhood, a Christian organization that houses old
ladies in bungalows shaped like toadstools, igloos, a boot or an Egyptian
mummy, and makes them endure strange rituals of fortification and
self-betterment.
Seemingly unable or unwilling to resist this move to the institute,
Marian arrives at the home where she is immediately accommodated in
a tower whose walls are painted with furniture, a bookcase, a wardrobe
and even a window that are not there but simply present themselves as
two-dimensional depictions of what is supposed to be there. Meanwhile,
a large oil painting of a winking abbess dominates the dining hall of the
institution and comes to preoccupy Marian’s imagination in a very three-
dimensional and fleshly way. The hearing trumpet and the fantastical story
of the abbess’s live soon tie her into this peculiar community of ten elderly
women, whose past and current secrets are not heard to summarize and
conclude their existence but to generate a future that is fantastical and
prophetic. Emboldened by the unity of rhythmic dancing and chanting
they recognize their singularity and common strength and abandon their
186
obligation to male authority expressed in the domineering language of

dead husband’s, chivvying sons and now Dr Gambit, who governs the
place through strict institutional rules and the Original Teaching of the
Master. Instead, they come to articulate their own voice through riddles
and the inarticulate calling of wild bees.
The hearing trumpet is at once a metaphor and a portal to see beyond
the conventional, the expected and what is presented as complete and
coherent in a mute contemplation. Through its concept and sensibility,
we come to appreciate invisible connections and mobile complexities
that insist on proximity and reciprocity and produce unseen fictions that
make the unfamiliar part of actuality and reveal the possibility of a sonic
reality. Thus it opens Marian’s deaf ears to the acoustic reality of her
surroundings and grants her access to the possible slices of a sonic world.
Initiating her into the hidden dimension of this community of elderly
ladies, the hearing trumpet at once demands and enables her participation
and admits her into that which eludes a visual perception but nevertheless
determines its consequences. Soon Marian’s world opens to the depth
of sound and becomes forever more fantastical, illusionary or maybe
visionary.
The narrative quickly leaves the path of chronology and spatial
coherence. The story of the abbess and the pneuma of Mary Magdalene,
a vapour that induces levitation and a different state of mind and body –
‘and it hath changed my darkness into light, and it hath rent the chaos
which surrounded me’2 – the death of Maude Somers, who had been
Arthur Somers all along; as well as séances, fasting and chanting, tilt the
story world’s reality and earthquakes start the rotation of the Poles to the
Equator. Snow starts to fall and covers the land, which is now roamed by
werewolf cubs and honey bees, and Marian enters the sonorous possibility
of her own life.
Listening, Marian delves into the depth of the real and comes to see the
strange that is a part of the unremarkable, and to accept the inexplicable not
as an aberration but as the real fabric of truth. Standing at the top of steep
stairs, she is drawn by the warm wind of the earth and descends down its
vertical steps, deep into the tower in which she meets herself.
At the farthest end of the gallery a final flight of steps led down into the
large round chamber. As I reached the bottom of the steps I could smell
sulphur and brimstone. The cavern was as warm as a kitchen.
Beside the flames sat a woman stirring a great iron cauldron. She
seemed familiar to me, although I could not see her face. Something in
the cloth and the bent head made me think I had often seen her before.
As I drew near the fire the woman stopped stirring the pot and rose to
greet me. When we faced each other I felt my heart give a convulsive leap
and stop. The woman who stood before me was myself.3
187
READING FRAGMENTS OF LISTENING 187
The descent is dark. She cannot even see her own hands. She is afraid of
falling into the unknown below, to lose ground and a verifiable sense of
reality. And yet she follows the pull into the complexity of her life where a
sense of smell, warmth and sound enables her to inhabit its depth from which
we are barred by a visual perception. The gaze disavows the view upon the
self, whose hidden sphere we reach in sound: listening to the reciprocity of
our voice as a sort of ‘echo location’ that affirms our being simultaneous
with the environment, with what we see and hear. This same sonic sense of
an unseen simultaneity enables the reader to inhabit the complex possibility
of the text without denying responsibility for its invisible dimension, which
is the location of the reading-self that grasps the semantic line but cannot
see behind it, into its depth, into the back of language, where meaning is
produced between letters and words, rather than from them, and where
the reading self hears herself and her environment as a reverberation of
participation, chanting and singing.
Listening thus becomes a mode of diving into a literary reality verified
not by the horizontal line of semantics, history and spatial relations, but
practised in conversation, chanting, singing and re-citations; moving
vertically into the sonorous material of words that crosses time and space
and ignores the necessity of reason, the ground of culture and the pull of
forward motion by moving into the dark depth of things, whose articulation
comes from the future.
Belzi Ra Ha-Ha Hecate Come!

Descend upon us to the sound of my drum
Inkalá Iktum my bird is a mole
Up goes the Equator and down the North Pole.
Eptàlum, Zam Pollum, the power to increase
Here come the North Lights and a flight of wild Bees.
Inkalá Belzi Zam Pollum the Drum
High Queen of Tartarus Hasten to Come.4
These lines are spoken by Christabel Burns, one of the inhabitants of

the home. They are intoned to the rhythm of her drums, chanted again
and again, they rouse the group of elderly women to exclaim in unison,
to agitate and move the world through the force of their voices: ‘Then it
seemed that the cloud formed itself into an enormous bumble bee as big as
a sheep. She wore a tall iron crown studded with rock crystals, the stars of
the Underworld.’5
The shared chant generates a sonic fiction that is not a fiction in the
sense of a falsehood or a story world parallel to the world we refer to
as our actual reality. Instead it presents the radical reality of sound that
breaches referential language and generates as ‘world-creating predicate’6
the environment of its own truth that articulates in excess of representation
188
and semantic sense, and that has the capacity to restage chronological order
and expectations and work from the body into the invocation of letters that
call another real.
As a visual text, words write a literary fiction, a mute thought of images
and significations. Listened to and performed however, they attain their
sonic reality, which is an actual possibility of this world, since, unlike
literary fictions, sonic fictions are only separate from the actual world when
considered visually: when their material is negotiated as a ‘shadow’ of a
visual source, dependent for its meaning on their correspondence and a
textual referent; a signifier that rehabilitates its lack of definition on the
horizontal line of semantic relations. When listened to in the ‘dark’, free
from a lexical source, and the authority of a (masculine) language, however,
its letters and words sound in the actual world its possibilities and invite the
invocation of alternative articulations in-between the letters as sound.
Zam Pollum, Ave Ave Queen of all Bees!7
Reading with a hearing trumpet

This book of essays is written in fragments that can be read out of order for
a contingent in-between rather than for a chronological completeness, which
might provide a seemingly more comprehensive and intelligible meaning but
lacks the inexplicable, where the text loses its solid ground and attains a
hidden dimension. It is a collection of texts that are fragments of writing,
written from fragments of listening to the world and to works as a cosmos
of interactuality, where things are possible in their mobile interbeing, made
visible and graspable by sound. Writing fragments of listening I try to write
the unseen in-between: ephemeral connections and moments of coincidence
that invite Christabel’s chanting and my participation rather than a
comprehensive sense of things. In response I hope to trigger a reading that
‘listens’ to words rather than ‘sees’ them and that approaches the textual
image with a sonic attitude: an attitude of doubt towards signification and
its structures of communication, and an acceptance of the ephemeral, the
inarticulate and the meaningless, as well as an appreciation for reciprocity
and the reader’s own fragile position in the text, which is constrained in a
semantic reading. Thus I try to write with a sonic sensibility, with an awareness
to what remains invisible in the world and in language; what remains
unseen, outside discourse: the mute logos, its semantic harmony, ‘spoken by
the silent voice of the soul, and constituted by the pure signifieds that can be
contemplated by the mind’s eye’.8 Moreover, I try to entice a reading of the
text as a reading with a hearing trumpet to access the possibilities behind
and at the back of language where, in our coincidence with its letters and
189
words, meaning attains a visceral and corporeal dimension that questions

the silence of the textual frame and opens it towards different noises.
Adriana Cavarero, referring to a platonic conception of language, which
according to her establishes the basis of contemporary theoretical writing,
states that the sound of semantic speech, the vocal utterances that fulfil
the purpose of intelligibility and meaning, is not sonorous. Instead it is
determined and limited by the orders and rules of a visual signified. She
writes about the devocalization of the logos and of language that stands as a
universal, univocal and perfectly transparent expression to serve the Platonic
ideal of theory and identifies the logos as the mute seat of language: the
horizontal joining of letters and words with ‘right’ links form the intelligible
of a universal (symbolic) order within which the phonetic signifier signifies
rather than sounds.9 ‘Freed from the acoustic materiality of speech, this pure
semantic – which is the privileged object of theoria – occupies the place of
origin and rules over the phonetic.’10 Within the preoccupation with total
intelligibility and semantic meaning, language that does not connect words
in the right way, and does not follow the universal rules of signification; that
does not fulfil the criteria of definitions and a priori references, fails to have
a signifier, and thus fails to count and be counted. It sounds unintelligible, a
sound only, and becomes marginalized, ignored as inaudible noise.
For these essays about sound to be able to hold the sonority of their
own observations within language, the notion of a mute theory needs to be
challenged and different interactions need to be practised that do not read
to find meaning and the right connection, but practice the sonic texture
of its image to generate sense from coincidental overlaps and the failure
to connect but the capacity to sound between: between letters, words and
sentences, as well as between essays as rhythms and a score for chanting.
The sound of written words constructs Cauleen Smith’s ‘awkward
objects’ and ‘speculative artefacts’ mentioned in the introduction to this
book:11 they ‘loosen our assumptions of what we know and encourage us
to embrace the instability of knowledge rather than the certainty it broadly
offers’.12 Smith’s work is discussed in the introduction to frame my intention
of writing as a re-engagement with what we thought we knew through the
playful misappropriation of things and a sensibility towards the invisible
in order to reach its political possibility. Her sculptural works are made
from technology, objects, images and sounds that have their own purpose
but whose aim she ignores in an improvised reassembly that restages their
function towards unexpected tasks. Through this reconfiguration the
assembled objects come to include their own fragility and possibility for
failure, and remind us that things could be different, that they could have
different names and purposes and that they could be put together differently
to construct a different meaning and reality.
In this final essay, I reflect on whether critical writing can carry this
speculation and awkwardness: to be as fragments of meaning not a building
190
block of semantic language but a possibility for a different thought.

Therefore I ask whether a rigorous criticality can be established that does
not use the meaning of language, but plays with its invisible elements, to
build new connections, fabulations, fantastical things that appear impossible
but which can materialize between fragments of text as unthinkable thought
that eventually will generate a new language that expands the possibility of
thinking and thus the possibility and heterogeneity of the critical voice.
The writing in fragments of listening, which these essays pursue, aspires
such fragmentation. They need an equivalent reading as a hearing of
fragments that does not translate the sonic into a visual sign but allows
for things to remain invisible: not to make sense according to language
but according to listening; to make sonic non-sense, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s sensate sense opened in listening;13 and to remain fragile, ephemeral
and maybe even inarticulate, providing it is sounded in dialogue and in
conversation, read aloud, alone or together, to hear the in-between of essays,
letters and words give a contingent meaning to the logos of the semantic
text.
In this essay, I pursue, through the concept and metaphor of the hearing
trumpet, the idea of a sonorous textuality that is able to challenge the
devocalization of the logos and of theory, as articulated by Cavarero via
Plato, and come to suggest a revocalization of the textual field through
the invocations of Leonora Carrington’s writing, a performance of real,
technological and ventriloquized voices by Andrea Pensado live at the
Back Alley Theatre in Washington, and The Wanderer, a field recording
composition by Jana Winderen.
Winderen’s recordings of Zooplankton and Pythoplankton under the
surface of the ocean and of lakes juxtapose the horizontal connections
of the semantic field with a vertical depth. I invest this underwater world
with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s depth: his notion of ‘depth and “back” (and
“behind”) – It is pre-eminently the dimension of the hidden’,14 which is
paradoxically the place of my looking, my simultaneity with the thing,
which my gaze obstructs and I cannot see, and where I am too close to
read signs and signifiers but exist in simultaneity with letters as sound. Here
I have to read the text as a phonography, which I hear along vertical lines
as the possible slices of writing. This reading as a textual phonography on
vertical lines of words meets the rhizomatic networks of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari in their critique of a taxonomical and phallocentric language.
The invisible verticality of reading sonic textures joins in the challenge to the
arboretic, the image of the tree that starts from one point and fixes an order,
which Deleuze and Guattari stage via the rhizome ‘that connects any point to
any other point’.15 The rhizome critiques the transcendental and the a priori
of writing and thinking on mobile and interconnected plateaus. However,
listening into these mobile dimensions, we come to appreciate, via Alexander
Kluge, Silicon Valley’s takeover of their networks and come to understand
191
that the rhizome has lost the ability to critique the infrastructure of power,
which now progresses along horizontal lines. Therefore, a different plane
of agency and interaction needs to be found that can counter-poeticize the
platforms of a virtual authority beyond the reach of the market, in the depth
of an inarticulate sound.16 Thus at the end of this essay we fall, with Hito
Steyerl, ‘towards objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces
and matters’ that needs to be heard to sense its critique of what got us there
in the first place.17
These suggestions and contextualizations try to entice a sonic
engagement with all the essays in this book so that the fragments of
writing can entice a reading of fragments, that does not seek completion,
comprehension or meaning; that does not pursue the idea that motivated it
but finds the one that is proposed in its own material, between rather than
through the connection of things. In this sense, this final essay responds to
the introduction to these texts and follows its fragments of writing into
the deep to try and promote reading according to the hidden image of a
material sound.
The fact that this reading attitude is proposed in the last essay is deliberate
and should not frustrate or confuse. The text rereads with its own sound
after the event. This is when we perform it, in discourse, in dialogue and in
our exchanges with others from where it obtains its present sonority and
truth, and we our reciprocity in the world. Speaking as Cavarero tells us
is speaking to someone, it is a reciprocal exchange of sound making and
listening. This listening voice of reading brings the text into a shared sphere
that is not the common ground of theory and its a priori understandings
and values. Rather, it is the shared practice of reading together, as chanting
together, in an unrepeatable performance that generates rather than receives
the truth of the text. It is Marian Leatherby and her fellow women from
the home for ‘senile females’, dancing and chanting together that invokes
through riddles a future that is not destined but articulated, brought into
motion beyond the intelligibility and history of language. Its truth is plural
and possible. It does not obey a chronological order or a semantic form; it
does not follow the logic of time or the constraints of place, but practices
sonic fictions written not through the harmonious linking of syntactical
joints but through listening to the in-between, the depths of inarticulation,
at the excess and the overflow of language and the narrative where they
do not serve theory but the movement of breath. This sonic between is the
depth also of memory and the ‘dis-illusions’ of remembering out of which
in dialogue we make the untruths of a present interpretation that are not
irrealities, falsehoods or lies but the contingent truths and understandings of
a present speaking of it.18 The rigour of these interpretations and exchanges
does not come from the text. It is not what Cavarero via Hannah Arendt calls
‘the oral dead [rigor mortis] which is writing’, but the vitality of speaking,
as a putting into action, breathing and moving.19 And its legitimacy comes
192
not from established genealogies and taxonomies of the known, but from
the need for the unknown to be heard.
As a concluding essay, this text does not conclude, it does not summarize
or complete, but suggests how the previous texts, and any writing, could be
engaged with by reading as listening with a hearing trumpet and voicing the
phonographic field of the text aloud to get to the sonorous of theory. ‘The
point is not to simply revocalize logos. Rather, the aim is to free logos from
its visual substance, and to finally mean it as sonorous speech.’20
Andrea Pensado live at the Back

Alley Theatre (2014)
Andrea Pensado performs electronics, voice and a ventriloquist dummy
live at the Back Alley Theatre in Washington, DC (2014). Seated on a chair
facing the audience, to her left is a table of electronic equipment, to her
right another chair with a bright red lump of fabric that later turns out to
be her ventriloquist dummy that does not speak another’s voice but agitates
the voice of technology and the distortion of language. The visual scene is
rudimentary, technological rather than theatrical, cables around Pensado’s
shoeless feet and across the floor, a microphone inelegantly attached to
her head obscures her face but grants her hands the freedom to perform
between the technology and the dummy as a body that does not speak as a
function in relation to meaning and sense, neither musical nor linguistic, but
that expels meaning as interaction: the forward movements of expression
that sound an exchange rather than what it says.
Her voice is amplified as well as erased by technology that increases
its volume but severs its relationship to semantic language.21 The shrieks,
screams and on occasion even whispers are entirely unintelligible as words
but mobilize as sound the scene staged by the visual. This sonic does not
complete the scene however, but puts it in motion and agitates its elements
towards the erasure of its composition and semantic function. In this way, it
adds the complexities of invisible connections to the disorganization of leads,
plugs, chairs and tables, and mobilizes things through their in-between.
According to the programme notes ‘the combination of the performance
situation, the often abrasive sounds, the irrational use of the voice and the
inherent uncertainty of improvization contributes to discoveries of unknown
places in her mind’.22 It contributes also to discoveries of unknown places in
electronic music and in semantic language by improvising their possibility
without the need to communicate. In this way, her work opens the historical
norms of articulation and empties them from their own expectations and
values: producing a raw material that reinvests articulation from the between
of things rather than from a lexicon or symbolic order, de-historicizing music
193
and challenging the semantic code of language through contingent physical

interactions that emphasis the improvisation of expression and of the heard.
The performance of the unknown places in her mind, in music and
in language, challenges comprehension and urges an exploration of
the condition of intelligibility: the cultural frames and limits that ensure
understanding but control what can be heard. In this way Pensado counter-
poeticizes meaning, as a phallocentric assertion of sense, historical reference
and the ‘right’ connections of sounds as tones and phone, through impossible
utterances. Thus she reinvests both music and language with the exigency of
performance, as a temporal and vocal act of exchange from which meaning
gleans its currency and the confidence of a contingent sense.
At one moment, a rhythmic Tango interrupts the flow of abrasive
inarticulation and tries to reassert the sense of a melodic line, but it gets
destroyed, shot at, chased away and utterly demolished through electronic
signals and distortions that severe the harmonic sequence. The lungs and
cavities of the body and of technology, the dummy and the performance
space produce shrieks and screaming, the expulsion of words and sounds
that are equivalent rather than hierarchized - ordered in a grammatical or
harmonic sense – and sound the disjointed simultaneity of inarticulation.
While they might be unable to produce meaning within conventional terms,
they engage the basis of sense making and reinvest it with the temporality of
a trans-objective sound: a sound that cannot be sourced from one subject or
one thing as locus and signifier of its meaning but exists in-between things
and from their inter-agitation. Listening to her voice we hear the vibration
between technological manipulation, amplification and the utterance of the
body, which at times still resembles words, but which have left signification
in favour of materiality, breath and expanse. Her inarticulation creates not
a solipsistic monologue however, but produces a complex communication
between herself, the technology, the audience and the ventriloquist dummy,
seated on her lap in a red dress, long blond hair and staring at us with a
demonic smile and bright red lips.
Subverting the convention of ventriloquism as the body that speaks for
somebody else, her dummy amplifies and extends rather than acts as a funnel
for a disembodied voice. Pensado makes no effort to hide the relationship
between her actions, the input of technology and her voice and the sounds
attributed to the movements of the dummy. This ventriloquism is not about
the pretence of an autonomous voice sounding in an inanimate body, which
is the curiosity and pull of the ventriloquist stagecraft. Instead, it highlights
the manipulation and ventriloquism of Pensado’s own voice, and potentially
of every voice, and recaptures from this control of speech the speechless
by destroying the intelligible with abrasive shrieks, shouts and murmurs
to sound the unknown. This recapturing of the unique voice from the
organization of language does not destroy comprehension but questions its
parameters and authority, and generates other possibilities that do not lack
194
in competence but have no common grammatical or harmonic ground, and

have to generate it contingently in order to be heard in their own voice.
Pensado’s inarticulate articulations are extremely fluent, displaying
a competence of language and music without grammar and harmony,
measured instead in its contingent performance, whose rigour lies in its
putting into action and into movements the unknown and the unheard to
make language lose its rigid frame. Thus it produces a communication that
is not measured by what is said but what says, what sounds, what is there. In
this sense her work produces a pragmatic object of sound that is awkward
and speculative in relation to semantic and musical language but articulate
and intelligible in relation to the contingent moment of its performance, and
that invites the participation of a listening self that hears the unexpected and
the inexplicable not as aberrations but as the fabric of the real.
For Cavarero ‘the privileging of theoria over speech is . . . first of
all the erasure of the voice.’23 The aim is to lose the disruptive power
of its sonorous force which endangers the pure semantic that ensures
the universal ‘I’ and ignores the singular existence that is unique and
unrepeatable and therefore puts the possibility of communication in
doubt. Pensado’s work performs this disruptive power of the voice and
lends the force of the body, expanded and amplified by technology, to
language, so it might step out of linguistic constraints and come to sound
the political possibility of speech.
Her performance stages the erasure of an intelligible voice, and disrupts
its form and structure, which is its organization as the location of its politics.
The inarticulation of the voice intervenes at this location of politics and
challenges the management of its structure, which is the infrastructure of
its political ideology. This inarticulation requires we hear its excess, its
overflow, the voices that remain unheard, and make them count within the
political practice and institution of norms and expectations.
In this sense, Pensado’s use of technology is comparable to Marian
Leatherby’s hearing trumpet. It is its sounding counterpart, a ‘speaking
trumpet’ that does not overhear but overflows the limitations of language
to sound its excess and generate unknown articulations from the mundane
possibility of the voice. However, her devices sound not language but the
larynx, the lungs and the breath, and utter their technology through the
technology of amplification and electronic manipulation, and with the help
of a staring dummy they disrupt what was meant to be said and speak in
their own tongue the unfamiliar.
This is where the work counter-poeticizes the horizontal drive of meaning
and the semantic plane. Where it dives inwards, into language and into the
voice to get a different register: the register of Pensado’s unique articulation
and the introspection of its tone. What Alexander Kluge speaking to Hans-
Ulrich Obrist on What Art Can Do calls ‘the individual capacities, the eyes,
the ears, the soles of their feet’ which are the capacities from which we
195
come to work together to form a ‘counterworld’ that ‘permeates the pores of

reality, and then counters reality’s systemic terror by forming connections of
its own’.24 Kluge’s notion of a counter-poetic world is articulated in relation
to the language of the digital: the Silicon Valley generated algorithms that
increasingly determine our movements, actions, walks and articulations,
and that have to be countered by turning inwards to counteract, in alliance
with others, the terror of its seemingly inevitable flow and meaning. His
suggestion is we collaborate, dig canals and build gardens together to
counter act the desert of the microchip in order to counter what we are
everyday subjected to: The digital pathways of online networks, and the
semantic pathways of authoritative language.
Kluge’s counter-poeticizing performs, in relation to digital networks
and algorithms, the revocalization that is sought in relation to theoretical
language by Cavarero, and that I would promote for the reading of these
essays and any writing: to listen into the text to hear the excess and the
overflow of the semantic so the sonorous might become part of thinking and
reading words and ultimately the world. In this way we could perform with
language to determine how we move and dig through the pervasiveness of
its code rather than following it.
The safeguarding of mute thought in writing is the refusal to let the
unspeakable take part in knowledge. It is a linguistic curbing of the politics
of language, of what its practices could be, and its preference demonstrates
the logocentricity of politics as an administration of mute thought.25 In this
sense, it recalls Jacques Rancière’s distinction between the possible and the
impossible and the need on the part of a political authority for a belief in
‘the only thing possible’, which ascertains the universal but necessitates that
‘scholarly authority is required to fill in all the holes in the possible/reality’
that might belie its horizon.26 Therefore knowledge, in order to fulfil this
need to represent the only thing possible, has to write comprehensively and
completely. It cannot leave gaps and doubts into which the sonorous might
flow to disrupt its totality by naming what it sees contingently and out of
the bounds of definition; and it has to entice reading as an acceptance and
recognition of the totality of words on the page.
By contrast, to produce a knowledge that includes the impossible,
reading has to become a chanting and singing of letters and words. It has to
become a performance of our capacities to break the seal of mute thought,
to let sound agitate the in-between of things that is at once the relationship
and the difference that produces not ‘this’ or ‘that’ but things together as
interbeings.
Belzi Ra Ha-Ha Hecate Come!

Descend upon us to the sound of my drum
Inkalá Iktum my bird is a mole
Up goes the Equator and down the North Pole.27
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Such chanted words as interbeings do not connect along the ‘right’

semantic lines, but sound as invocations, as a generative naming, rather than
as a reference according to a lexicon. In this chanting the voice meets the
other since while the voice is itself ‘it is at the same time the invocation of the
other’.28 Speaking is reciprocal and generates listening. It is a collaboration
between mouth and ear, between sounding and hearing. Chanting is digging
into the mute authority of language. It meets the other not in the paternal
voice of platonic meaning and authority, but in the fleshly singing of the
body which breaks into a maternal tune: where the voice is as breath and
as ‘languelait’, as an expulsion of first air and as mother tongue and mother
milk, nourishing and relational, ‘given to the ear and the mouth’.29
Thought in my lungs
Referring to R. B. Onians, Cavarero suggests that thought in ancient Greek
is linked to the voice and to breath. It is an embodied action, ‘whose seat
is in the corporal organs that extend from the area of the breast to the
mouth’.30 It is the expulsion of audible air formed into words. It is invisible
and centrifugal, presenting as the movement from the lungs into speech
and ultimately to the listener’s ear. In this scenario, speech does not simply
convey thought but produces it. Thought is therefore performative and
sonic. It is produced in the expulsion of sound as air and generates what
it is contingently. Language does not translate and communicate thought
that exists before articulation but is simultaneous with its conception an
embodied process of articulated thinking. It is the techno-fleshly body
of Pensado that expels thought as shrieks and shouts that generate the
unknown places of the real.
In contrast to this noisy breath of non-sense, in Plato’s metaphysics, which
serves as predecessor to a contemporary scientific point of view, the logos, as
seat of knowledge and understanding is visual and mute. It is positioned in
the head, in the location of the brain, the encephalon, and eschews the body
and corporeality. In this way, thought becomes autonomous, separate from
the body, it becomes ideal.31
Thus, after Plato, a pure semantic, freed from the vagaries of the acoustic
materiality of speech and the viscerality of a corporeal body, directed
instead ‘by the silent discourse of the soul with itself’, dominates the
phone, the sonic gesture of language, that does not sound as noisy breath
but articulates meaning according to the right joining of signs towards
the harmonious idea of totality and intelligibility.32 This platonic idea of
language precedes and enables Immanuel Kant’s rationality, his analytical
philosophy of language, which according to Richard Rorty builds ‘a world
inside our minds by tying concepts together so as to package sensations more
conveniently’.33 In his review ‘Kripke versus Kant’ (1980), Rorty suggests
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that just as metaphysics had come to be considered as first philosophy of

its time, establishing a new appreciation of knowledge and thought, so
Kant’s analytical philosophy of language too had come to be seen as a
first philosophy that defines our thinking still today. Kant’s philosophy of
language develops a sense of reference and truth relations dependent and
enforcing semantic lines of correspondence and attribution that produce
taxonomical definitions and enable a categorical organization of thought
whose pervasiveness is demonstrated by how ‘everything from politics, to
literature to religion is, after all, shot through with Kantian assumptions’.34
Rorty critiques this inescapable influence of the Kantian philosophy
of language for focusing on the structure of representation rather than
on what is being represented and thus missing, according to Rorty, the
pragmatic turn towards ‘what is really there’. He complains that we take
‘Kant’s notion that we structure the world by representing it’ for granted,
and that we treat the privileging of semantics, the study of the structure
of representation, without circumspection as universally applicable and
transparent. In this way, he suggests we forego a consideration of content, of
what is being represented and how it might be affected by the mechanisms
and ideologies of its representation.35
While Plato shifts thought from the lungs into the head and reorganizes
the relationship between thinking and speaking, thus making speech, its
bodily performance, a vehicle rather than a generator of thought and its
possibility, Kant makes language the semantic structure of knowledge that
presents the universality of its articulation and application, while preventing
it from being able to say anything else. In that sense, language’s privilege is
a poisoned chalice. To attain its status as transparent authority, it has had to
cut its throat at the location of the larynx and block the conduit to its lungs.
It had to become a form that does not produce or discover but only says
what is already there; and it had to make the appearance of intelligibility
universal by silencing the plural rasps of breath, the coughs, splutters and
other noises that try to speak with another tongue.
Rorty presents Saul Kripke’s theory of naming as articulated in Naming
and Necessity (1980) as the key of how to unlock the closed off frame of
analytical language and to confer the status of the philosophical object back
to the thing under scrutiny away from the frame of its reference and the
structure of its articulation. He explains that by rediscovering Artistotle’s
‘metaphysical necessity’ as opposed to the ‘epistemic necessity’ of a Kantian
world view, Kripke challenges the linguistic frame of truth and introduces
the possibility of calling things what they are contingently in their encounter
rather than what they are per definition.36
Kripke’s philosophy of language suggests that language does not describe
or structure the world but names, as in baptizes, the objects and subjects
in the world. His philosophy is based on the rejection of description
theory: the idea that a thing is denoted in a particular way according to the
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criteria that it fulfils as an account of meaning, and it relativizes prioricity

as a possibility rather than a necessity, and thus it reconsiders the process
of referencing things and moves away from essentialism and certainties, to
the act of naming. Therefore, things are not just there, fulfilling the criteria
that defined them, without needing to be mentioned or called, but rather
‘everything needs to be decided to make a total description of the world’.37
Such a designative theory of language does not reference, instead it is a tool
to speculate around the existence of the thing, which might well become
an awkward object refusing a priori definition and demanding the agency
of calling a contingent name. On this point, Kripke’s realist philosophy of
language stands opposed to and critiques Kant’s analytic philosophy, and
demands a reconsideration of the relationship between words as names and
the object, subject named.
In a Kantian consciousness language precedes experience, the definition
is an a priori set against criteria that demonstrate correspondence and
justify the name as description. In this categorical thinking we can find
the reliable definition of things and establish a sense of certainty from
which taxonomies and a taxonomical thinking are achieved. However, it
also means some things will remain unnamed, and thus without authority
and agency, and other things will have their signifiers revoked, if they no
longer hold and the signified breaks down: if the chair loses a leg, or the
table collapses, if a human changes gender or revokes her identity. Thus
as soon as the thing does not fulfil the criteria it falls out of definition and
becomes unspeakable. A language of designation by contrast holds in all
counterfactual situations because it does not rely on givens but creates,
from an anti-foundationalist position, the contingent possibility of the
thing. I keep my name as I am what there is, even if I change what it is I am.
Similarly, a sonic sensibility of the text brings the action of naming, with
letters and words as sound rather than visual signifiers into consciousness
and makes us appreciate the instrumentality of semantic language and hear
alternative combinations sound a different sense. This empowers the thing
and the subject as thing, and reconnects language to its lungs and ears to
articulate its own contingency.38
Silent Running
In the half hour before she rises
a submariner cannot drop a comb
for fear of echo. Down there
it all depends on silent running.

In the pitching dark,
nothing but the crying of fish,
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throat-murmurs of boats.
They’re as deep as can be,
holding a steady trim.
seeing only the blood

in their brains. Air is short,
the darkness wide,
and they cannot blink too fast

for the sound of their eyelids
shudders the North Sea charts.
Miles and miles of night,

pegging for jabber or clack
of passing trawlers.
They might be moles

but the silence gives them back
their eyes, the twitch of their hearts,
and when they sky has bled

all scratch of light,
a man surfaces, opens the hatch,
Enters the lean-to of black

and listens to the ocean
filling up.
Sarah Jackson39
As the image of a quantified utterance of sense, visual/textual language is

a lexical resource. As such it is the cornerstone of Western thought and
decisively influences the organization and possibility of our thinking,
speaking and writing in quantifiable epistemologies of meaning and
reference. This mute text has taken from the body its ephemeral and fluid
expression and reduced its unique sounds and noises into a system carved
in the head rather than intoned and chanted. Its phone is ‘reduced to an
auxiliary role that is basically superfluous or in any case inadequate with
respect to the realm of truth’.40 It cannot contribute its unique and vertical
sonority to the production of meaning and truth and is forced to receive
‘from the visible order of signifieds the very rules of its sonorous labor’.41
The horizontal joining of letters, words and sentences, as signifiers and
signifieds, dictates the sense of sound to articulate an apparently reliable,
harmonious definition of the real. However, this definition does not produce
but reflects the idea that precedes it, and it reduces the plural uniqueness
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of utterance into a universal articulation, whose universality by necessity is

limited and exclusive: excluding the sonorous, its body and vibration, and
thus the potentially revolutionary action of speaking the unknown and the
voice that is not heard.
In this way written language, as a visible language, enables intelligible
articulation whilst its own limits, what it can’t say or won’t hear, disable
and exclude what cannot be thought. The visual text defines and delimits the
scope and articulation to the thinkable, as the limit of the real, boundaried by
its own taxanomical norms that create a consciousness and a sense of truth
about what things are and how the world is. In this way written language
grants legitimacy. It enables consensus and permanence. But at the same time
it carries with it the asymmetries and biases of those taxonomies in terms of
gender, race and class, preference and solidarity, that enable and legitimize
it. Thus it excludes without acknowledging this exclusion, that which falls
outside the remit of its ideological framework; that which appears opaque to
the set of its articulation: the sensate materiality of the voice when it speaks
between words and letters the invisible and the inaudible, and when it creates
formless utterances, whose appearance has no letters to follow a definition
and whose shape cannot be recognized in relation to an idea: it all depends
on silent running. In the pitching dark, nothing but the crying of fish.42
The semantic line is the political reality of language. Through
definitions and exclusions it acts as a borderline between the speakable
and the unspeakable and delineates the linguistic institution of politics: the
administration of what can and cannot be articulated, and what can and
cannot take part in the definition of the world. The sonorous counter-
poeticizes this borderline through the invisible overflow of a noisy breath. It
represents the political possibility of language, where from the possibility of
sound it questions the actuality of its structures and norms, and where from
the potency of the invisible it creates the unknown and articulates its name
contingently. In this way, sound revocalizes the logos understood not simply
as the locus of a mute knowledge and understanding but also as the location
of its political investment, ideology and norms.
To transgress the borderline of semantic articulation and its political
institution, this essay promotes reading with a hearing trumpet and proposes
we consider text as a phonographic field, engaged with through the sounds
of letters and words organized as a contingent notation. It proposes that
if we do not read them as an encoding of signs, according to the rules of
a semantic order, but as the invisible textures and rhythms of sound, the
access to language’s impossibilities, its unthinkables, might become possible,
and the partiality of the visible text might become apparent. The suggestion
is to do a ‘textual phonography’: to step into the field of words, the textural
marks on a page understood not as the description of another world, but
as inviting a performance of the variants of this-world; to inhabit their
inaudible sound and to take on their rhythms and place ourselves among
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them in order to, in our simultaneity with each other and the world, hear
the invisible of language and sense, and perform its possibility through the
thought in our lungs.
Vertiginous sound
This stepping into the field of words performs the verticality of introspection
mentioned earlier in relation to Kluge’s counter-poeticizing of the language
of algorithms and the authority of Silicon Valley and mentioned also in a
footnote in relation to Morton Feldman’s ‘Vertical Thoughts’ on composition.
It is a diving in, digging in effort that prevents the horizontal line from
sublating the individual capacity for articulation through the persuasiveness
of its networked rules. The vertical resists the pull of connecting interfaces.
It counteracts in alliance with the other in speech the rules of its semantic
logic, and revocalizes its horizontal weave. It puts to use the vertiginous: the
sense of falling without a ground, to resist the a priori and the necessity of an
established reading in favour of what comes towards it from the dark. It is
Marian Leatherby walking down the steep steps of the tower to meet herself
cooking herself and becoming her invisible other, and it is ‘the downfall of
linear perspective’ and the acceleration towards a vertical view that can
see in slices the possibility of interactions: stacked up on top of each other,
rather than laid out on the ground; not a certain territory, but enabling an
experience of the simultaneity of the unseen.43
Hito Steyerl’s text In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical
Perspecitve (2012) celebrates, via Theodor Adorno, this new verticality, as
a new representational freedom: ‘A fall toward objects without reservation,
embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability
and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly
deterritorializing, and always already unknown.’44 This interpretation of
verticality expresses the excitement of a groundless world, often feared and
criticized in philosophy, for its ability to give us a new perspective and new
insights into social and political dynamics and realities, determined not along
horizontal lines, and its a priori meanings and hierarchies, but in the depth of
the world’s volume, where it is too dark to see but we can make sense through
participation. In this sense, this new representational freedom of the vertical
recalls also Rancière, when he suggests that ‘the collapse of representation
of another life does not nullify that life but instead lends it a vertiginous
reality.’ A reality of falling, without a ground, towards ‘the desire to partake
of equality’, to be defined not on a horizontal plane, whose ground is its
prejudice and creates difference, but to partake in the simultaneity of things
and subjects as things interbeing along vertical lines.45
The vertiginous in this context is a critical verticality that eschews
the horizontal line to critique its transcendental hierarchy and exclusive
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connections. In this sense, it picks up on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s

critique of hierarchical language and arboretic values of knowledge that
support and are supported by taxonomies, lexica, the a priori and analytical
givens. Their articulation of the rhizome as a weave of flat multiplicities, as
connecting plateaus that negate genealogies and build infinite connections
made by ‘the abstract line, the line of flight of deterritorialization according
to which they change in nature and connect with other mutliplicities’,46
counters the arboretic: the system of knowledge rooted in a particular
location and rising phallocentrically towards an ideal. Instead, the rhizome
proposes a heterogenous and organic connecting in n dimensions, creating
a network ‘where any point in the rhizome can be connected to anything
other, and must be’.47
However, since the first publication of their seminal text Mille Plateaux
in 1980, their weave of n dimensions has been colonized by neo-liberal
capitalism that transports its ideology along digital networks that have
taken the rhizome hostage for their own ends. Thus the critical possibility
of a network of multiplicities, able to connect ‘any point to any other
point’ has been blocked as a route to radical thinking.48 Instead, the way
is down, into the text, into the world and into the self. ‘Introspection is
the only authority from which you can obtain advice. You can’t ask the
internet what you love, You can either notice this yourself or not.’49 I take
Kluge’s introspection to hold beyond the interests of the individual as a
broader gesture, as an ‘introspection of the world’, a diving into the depth
of things into an in-between and interbeing that is not endless alliance, ‘the
conjunction, “and … and … and” ’,50 of a digital attention deficit, but is the
responsibility to the moment that is not observable but needs to be felt at
the back of myself and of things.51
The idea that ‘the rhizome is an acentred, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying
system without a General and without an organizing memory or central
automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states’52 in a contemporary
digital context describes the deterritorialization of the self by a virtual
power that pretends acentricity and promotes endless circulation as
a means to force boundarieless and timeless consumption as the only
territory left. In the digital age, the rhizome’s short-term memory is not
antigeneological but is the ten-second fame of Snapchat, which, erases my
memory but not that of my search history that produces the arboretic text
for my exploitation.
Deleuze and Guattari’s critique was based on the idea that the arboretic
preexists the individual who is allotted only a given place, preventing
multiplicity and transformation. While I agree with this critique as a critique
of a Kantian thinking and its taxonomical consciousness, the infrastructure
and metaphor of the rhizome has been taken over by Silicon Valley: ‘Silicon
Valley-imposed algorithms, the rules of which are now embedded in our
neurosystems directed by connecting interfaces’.53 They control the direction
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of power along the plateaus on which a radical becoming was meant to

happen.
Instead then of a rhizomatic becoming of the text as a writing in endless
conjunctions along n dimensions, writing has to fall into the depth of its
own infrastructure to find a critical voice, and reading has to follow these
lines as a falling into the groundless depth of language, where semantics do
not reinstate and rehabilitate the formless into the hierarchy of meaning, but
where the formless finds sonorous words in the dark.54
To follow the vertical, to fall vertiginously into the text, is to discover its
invisible textures not to a ground but to the cosmos, the volume, in which
they agitate meaning contingently and in which we inter-are with things in
our individual capacities together.55 Thus the vertiginous is the sensibility of
the sonic. It is sounding and reading, as digging and falling into the depth of
the text, as the point where I coincide with its articulation, where I cannot
see it but have to perform it in proximity and reciprocity behind and at the
back of semantic language.
This back of semantic language is Merleau-Ponty depth. It is the place
within which things remain distinct without having to be different and
producing a sign, and without existing in relation to a ‘synthesis’ of (different)
‘views’, producing a totality. It is the ‘dimension of the hidden’: within
this dimension, according to Merleau-Ponty, things coexist in degrees of
proximity and in simultaneity, and ‘remain things, while not being what
I look at at present’. Thus they are not tethered to my interpretation and
look, but have a flesh that is their resistance to my visual inspection, ‘a
resistance which is precisely their reality, their “openness” ’.56
For Merleau-Ponty the depth is the point from which I see and in which
I remain invisible to myself looking. It is the impossible of vision, the
obstacle to its total view. The look cannot overcome its invisibility. It cannot
break through its resistance to being seen. Instead, seeing goes around it,
tries to make up for it from different points of view synthesized into one
total vision, which however lacks this depth. I suggest that it is listening that
can take account of this invisible dimension and that can engage in its depth
without having to compensate for its ungraspability, or go around it to
avoid what it cannot see. In listening I inhabit this depth: I am in the world,
which surrounds me. I am simultaneous with it and in its proximity we are
our interbeing as the reality of our ‘openness’. Such a sonic sense expands
the seen from the flesh of this depth. Through its being with my flesh, sound
challenges and augments its limits to add sensation to visual interpretation.
The Wanderer (2015)

Jana Winderen’s field recording composition The Wanderer plays us this
impossible of vision from the depth of the sea. The work is a 30-minute
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composition of underwater recordings made of Zooplankton and

Phytoplanktons, two organisms that drift in the sea and in lakes and
produce half of the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis. Thus what we
hear as crackles, hisses, pops and bubbles is the base-rhythm of the world as
a liveable volume of air, moving and standing still, retracting and expanding
between 0 and 90 metres below the water’s surface.
The composition is produced from hydrophone recordings made by
Winderen on her travels between the Equator and the North Pole, following
the movement of the plankton on their drift north.57 Listening we follow
the long cables of the hydrophones into the deep of the sea, into its textures
that remain unseen but that make appreciable the physical and scientific
interbeing of the Equator and the North Pole, whose reciprocity performs
the environmental condition of the world.
The far reach of the recordings reminds of the ubiquity of the unseen
while its depth invites us into the enormity of a shared volume down below,
where the simultaneity of sound allows us to understand the correlations
of actions and agencies: where ‘events, peoples, climates, economic systems
and cultural life-worlds in one part of the world have bearing, meaning, and
impact on places and people in other parts of the world’.58 Where, in other
words, the world is a cosmos, and where sound shows its connections on a
four-dimensional map.
This vertical depth does not enable a synthesis of different viewpoints
and opinions, it resists visual inspection, but generates a participatory sense.
Through the simultaneity of my audition and its sounding, back to back,
it shows us the necessity and consequence of what we are together; and it
gives us the imagination of depth as a geographical dimension that can be
explored without having to chart and map it on a two-dimensional plane,
but through the designation of a blind experience.
The microphone cables plot vertical lines for hearing the text of murmurs,
blurbs, shrieks and hisses that do not mean as semantic signs and do not
connect on the horizontal line of meaning, but provide the unspeakable
complexity of their relationship in invisible slices stacked up under the
surface of the sea. The recordings illuminate an ecology of verticality
in the same sense that we can grasp a ‘politics of verticality’59 from the
consciousness of a sonic in-between: when things are not ‘this’ or ‘that’,
organized along a series of horizontal events and connections, but when
they are understood as simultaneous, on the back of and behind, on top and
underneath, and potentially invisible to each other, but nevertheless creating
the cosmos of their interaction.
This sonic in-between of a four-dimensional cosmos does not work as
a simple montage: the juxtaposition of two sound images that is resolved
through an imaginary third that compensates for the gap in representation.
Rather, sound creates an ephemeral in-between of opaque intensities that are
not hauled to the surface but remain in the deep, that resist visual inspection,
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and instead need to be grasped through the proximity of listening to hear

the reciprocity of their sound.
The recordings of hissing and crackling Zooplankton invoke the other of
ecology: the voices and breaths we are dependent on for our own. They set us
into vertical reciprocity where just because something is lower down does not
mean they cannot impact on how we live and what we are, up here. In this
way, they put into question and invite a rethinking of the power lines built
invisibly but persuasively on the horizontal lines of a semantic navigation of
the world, and reconfigure reciprocity in a multidimensional volume.
The extended microphones and a sonic sensibility allow us to grasp
this invisible volume and enable us to comprehend its interconnectedness
physically: to understand global warming, pollution, fishing, food and
breathing, not as a scientific fact removed from our being, but as the lived
experience of interbeing. Where we do not add up different viewpoints or
resolve what we thought we saw in a synthesis of different points of view,
but where we dive, with Winderen, into the depth, to hear what the air is
made of, to hear the rhythms and textures of its formation, and come to
appreciate our bond with its processes not through the scientific lexica and
history of ecology but through the simultaneity of an unseen sound.
This sonic sense challenges the notion of semantic meaning, the infrastructure
of its production and categorization, as well as its value and validity. However,
it does not represent its opposite but augments and contributes to its possibility
by going into the depth of its articulation: its signs and symbols, to uncover
the possibilities of its performance and to attempt the unperformance of its
limits and exclusions. Freeing language from the code of the logos, which
develops through horizontal connections, and finding connections as slices of
possibility in a reading of vertical lines in free fall.
The long cables of Winderen’s hydrophone recorder meet the hearing
trumpet of Marian Leatherby. The sonic fiction of her composition, that
show us the real complexity of an invisible world, meets the fabulations
of Leonora Carrington, created 55 years earlier, in the foretelling of
the rotation of the poles and the equator, and the coming of an endless
winter. Both the Zooplankton and the chanting of elderly women produce
co-cantanations of the world that give us insights into its condition that
remain otherwise unseen, speculative and ungraspable. These insights are
gained from the deep of the sea and the deep of the text. This is not a
frivolous or silly comparison but a point to be pondered when texts are
taken apart and put together again without the logic of a semantic sense
or the ‘representation of another life’, and a vertiginous reality becomes
apparent that connects them both in the dark. Winderen’s work invites us
to listen to this inter-connectedness, and allows us to hear it in our need
to breathe. Through our unique and shared necessity we are brought into
the processes of the ecosystem and are faced with the consequences of the
possibility of its and our disappearance.
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Conclusion: chanting vertiginous songs

To the Peoples of Earth
Proper evaluation of words and letters

In their phonetic and associated sense
Can bring the peoples of earth
Into the clear light of pure Cosmic Wisdom
Sun Ra60
To promote the reading of sonic sense, I follow Sun Ra, and propose we
hear ‘words and letters in their phonetic and [vertically] associated sense’
understood as a sonic sense achieved via a sonic literacy that does not read
but hears written signs and symbols as textures and rhythms of an invisible
language below the surface of the semantic but creating its eco system.
Written words are the inscription of sounds, thus they are the possibility
of its performance and hold below their mute surface the opportunity to
unperform conventional meanings and reperfom their form as a formless
sound that undoes the horizontal logic of analytical language and its
political ideology, in favour of the experience of its material and the opacity
of a vertical drive.
This call to listen to writing is not a deception or a perverted language
game. Rather, it is a sincere and critical endeavour to reach a different place
vis-à-vis words as signs and their cultural significance and signification
from their sound, where the infrastructure and politics of nominal meaning
making itself can be discussed and challenged, and that which so far
appeared as opaque, awkward and outside of language, and thus outside
of political possibility, can be reconsidered, and can start to gain influence
and an ear.
The watchers who slept will now be awake

And over their land I will fly once again
Who is my mother? What is my name?61
The riddle given by Christabel Burns to Marian Leatherby presents a

participatory form of text. It is a question, a score, an invitation and
invocation to participate in its writing and reading: to dig into language and
sound it together as the dissolution of a mute theory that presents rather
than performs knowledge. The riddle is an invitation so speak, to utter and
to make a voice; to participate in a sonic writing in the depth of letters and
words that reverse the hearing trumpet and write the rhythms of the heard
as a visual texture that carries with it the depth of sound and shows us the
forensics of language reached by digging into its infrastructure.
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The hearing trumpet serves as a conceptual device to reach this practice

in writing and reading. It allows us to appreciate the textuality of the text
and to perform its contingent inarticulation: to listen into its depth and
hear what lies behind and beneath its semantic meaning; to appreciate the
invisible textures of its words that construct another possibility, which is
equally true but that does not express a normative reality and instead reveals
the possibility of the impossible.
Sound is a political concept and sensibility. It is a conduit, a portal
into the appreciation of the invisible and the mobile dimension of the
world. It does not produce this invisible language but enables its voice,
since to provide a voice for that which cannot make itself count in the
normative formation of actuality would in any event only amount to a
ventriloquism or a subsumption. Therefore, language cannot be given,
but space for an unknown and unheard voice can be made, which might
not articulate in a recognizable register, but vibrates with what we do
not have words for.
As such vibrations of the unknown, sonic words are not even signifying.
They cannot perform Julia Kristeva’s fourth signifying practice of the
sign that does not stop, that does not rest in meaning but moves on and
on in ‘endless mobility’.62 The verticality of sound does not move on but
resonates, vibrates behind and at the back of language as a language that
as yet seems impossible, awkward, time consuming, and not up to it; that
fails the register, fails to communicate and yet it sounds, has a depth and
an agency. This agency is activated in the move from incomprehension into
song: if the text seems to make no sense sing it, riff it, participate in its
sound and see what happens, what volume, what subjectivity and what
possibilities it might perform. Sing a little louder, let the body sway while
you form movements from signs on a piece of paper. Go into public spaces,
stand on a step and chant it louder and louder until the context starts to
resonate with your voice and meaning starts to emerge from the mobile
depth of the words as song.
Now in the precincts of Hampstead Heath there is a certain cavern

used by a coven of witches who hold their ceremonies there in secret
in order not to be molested by the law. From ancient times the witches
had danced in the cavern through wars and persecutions; many a time
when I was pursued I would hide with the witches, and was always
received with courtesy and kindness. As you are no doubt aware, my
mission through the ages has been to carry uncensored news to the
people, without consideration of either rank or status. This has made
me unpopular with the authorities all over this planet. My object is to
help human beings to realize their state of slavery and exploitation by
power-seeking beings.63
208
Notes
1 Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, London: Penguin Books, 2005,
p. 5.
2 Ibid., p. 100.
3 Ibid., p. 136.
4 Ibid., p. 117.
5 Ibid.
6 Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative
Theory, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 22.
7 Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet, p. 117.
8 Adriana Cavarero, For More than Once Voice, Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005,
p. 57.
9 This evaluation on the non-sonority of a theoretical voice is echoed
by Morton Feldman writing about music composed with the aim of
differentiation on a horizontal line: ‘When sound is conceived as a
horizontal series of events all its properties must be extracted in order
to make it pliable to horizontal thinking . . . the work resulting from this
approach can be said not to have a ‘sound’. What we hear is rather a replica
of sound, and when successfully done, startling as any of the figures in
Mme. Tussaud’s celebrated museum.’ This articulates a close connection
between the horizontal muteness of semantic language and that of music
when it is in the service of theory and intelligibility, and attests to the fact
that even music can be non-sonorous when it strives towards the theoretical.
Feldman counteracts this mute horizontality with ‘Vertical Thoughts’
(Morton Feldman, ‘Vertical Thoughts’ in Give my Regards to Eighth Street,
Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, p. 12).
10 Cavarero, For More than One Voice, p. 57.
11 In the introduction to this collection of essays, I discuss Cauleen Smith’s
lecture at Pacific Northwestern College of Art, PNCA, on 2 November
2016, to introduce the notion of things and subjects, that do not fulfil their
purpose, remain irresponsive to expectations and the demand of definition,
but make aware of themselves as transgressive and fragile things, that inspire
re-engagement to think what they might be.
12 Cauleen Smith, Visiting Lecture at Pacific Northwestern College of
Art, PNCA, 2 November 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
1mwULFTXRk (accessed 12 December 2017).
13 In a collection of his essays brought together in the book Sense and Non-Sense
(1964), Merleau-Ponty articulates ‘non-sense’ not in reference to rational
sense, as its nonsensical opposite, but as a sense that comes out of ‘sensation’.
Here this non-sense of sensation is adapted to the notion of a sonic sense.
209
14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso

Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968,
p. 219.
15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press, 1996, p. 21.
16 Ibid., p. 15.
17 Hito Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, in
The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, p. 28.
18 These ‘dis-illusions of remembering’ are Merleau-Ponty’s illusions of a first
impression set in the past. His dis-illusions name what we think we see,
which, as we step closer reveals itself as to what it really is. In relation to a
remembered dis-illusion it is the generative nature of dialogue that gets us
closer to what there was. However, as with the dis-illusions of distance, the
initial/remembered perceptions are not unreal or wrong, and play a part
in what it is we finally articulate to have been there or remember to have
been there, which equally remains subject to the vagaries of the world and
of perception, a possible truth only (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 41).
19 Hannah Arendt in Cavarero, For More than Once Voice, Toward a Philosophy
of Vocal Expression, p. 180.
20 Ibid., pp. 178–9.
21 This erasure of the voice is and at the same time is not Jacques Derrida’s
erasure, his sous rature, his writing under erasure: ‘This is to write a word,
cross it out, and then print both word and deletion. (Since the word is
inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible.)’ (Of
Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, translator’s
preface, p. xiv).
The distorted voice does not erase the visual word, the sign that marks the
difference between the originary, familiar and lexical definition of the signified
and a present experience of it. Performing outside the semantic the voice does
not articulate within this play of inadequacy and necessity, but is its own
object in sound. Every shriek and scream, amplified here by technology, is
its own sound rather than a signifier for something else. Therefore the sound
of the voice does not exist within the contortion of its own inadequacy and
difference to what it is supposed to be. Sound is not genealogical but present
and thus no past can be confirmed and erased. And so while the vocalization
is not an erasure but a performance of the contingent in sound, the voice
as a signifier of a semantic body, and the notion of technology as a signifier
of electronic music, as a genre and category, are under erasure. Woman,
electronic music, the originary and historical referents express the inadequacy
of their definition and need to be ‘re-called’, as in re-baptized, in order to be
able to account for the contingency of their performance without recalling the
necessity of their history.
22 Program notes, Back Alley Theatre, http://backalleytheater.tumblr.com/search/
pensado#100603204961 (accessed 5 December 2017).
210
23 Cavarero, For More than Once Voice, Toward a Philosophy of Vocal

Expression, p. 169.
24 Alexander Kluge and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ‘Alexander Kluge and Hans-Ulrich
Obrist -What Art Can Do’, e-flux journal, no.81 (April 2017).
of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 133.
26 Ibid., p. 132.
27 Ibid., p. 117.
Expression, p. 169.
29 Ibid. In her articulation of the maternal voice, Cavarero refers to Hélène
Cixous and Julia Kristeva, who find a non- or pre-semantic place for the
voice in infancy and the link to the mother: ‘The mother I speak has never
been subjected to the gramma-r wolf’ (Cixous, Coming to Writing and other
Essays, Deborah Jensen [ed.], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991, p. 22).
While I do not want to read this notion of the maternal through the
emphasis on an actual biological mother, understanding the term as exclusive
and unable to encompass all of the feminine, and thus implicit in reducing
women to mothers and marginalizing their voice, the concept and metaphor
of the mother tongue, nevertheless serves to articulate the fleshly of a feminine
writing that insists on the breath and on a reciprocal voice, on hearing and
sounding. As such a concept then the mother tongue presents a critique and
revocalization of a disembodied and autarchic expression of paternal authority
and its mute voice.
It is in relation to this emphasis on a maternal voice interesting that despite
her ripe old age, Marian Leatherby has a mother who, at 110, lives in England
and regularly sends her postcards. Her maternal voice remains and sustains her
throughout her life and seems to find particular emphasis during her uprising
against the patriarchal order of things.
Expression, p. 63.
31 At this point Cavarero makes a distinction, which will become important later
on in relation to the contemporary renewal of metaphysics by Saul Kripke,
between Plato’s metaphysics and that of Aristotle, to whom Kripke’s notion of
naming relates. While Plato’s metaphysics is based on the notion of a universal
and ideal, perfect world from which to derive knowledge, Aristotle believed
that the natural world was real and imminently available for contemplation,
and should be the context from which to derive understanding.
Expression, p. 60.
33 Richard Rorty, ‘Kripke versus Kant’, London Review of Books, vol. 2, no. 17
(September 1980): 4.
211
34 Ibid., p. 5.
35 Rorty considers Kripke’s critique of Kant’s ‘marvelous internal coherence’,
articulated in Naming and Necessity, which his essay reviews, as a necessary
and exciting break with the Kantian project. He suggests the book implodes
a Kantian premise of definition through a ‘naïve’ realism that calls something
X rather than by suggesting we call something X if it meets all the following
criteria (Rorty, ‘Kripke versus Kant’, p. 4).
36 Rorty, ‘Kripke versus Kant’, p. 5.
37 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, p. 44.
38 In this way, agreeing with Rorty, and leaning back on Aristotle, rather than
Plato via Kant, a new relationship between thought and its object can be
established. Kripke’s idea of naming things with ‘rigid designators’ give a new
attention to the ‘what is there’ and shift the focus away from the mechanism
of representation and its epistemology towards the encounter between the
thing and its articulation.
39 Sarah Jackson, ‘Silent Running’, in Pelt, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe,
2012, p. 39. Reprinted with permission.
Expression, pp. 65–6.
41 Ibid., p. 61.
42 Jackson, ‘Silent Running’, p. 39.
43 Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, p. 20.
44 Ibid., p. 28.
45 Jacques Rancière, On The Shores of Politics, London, New York: Verso, 2007,
p. 64.
46 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 9.
47 Ibid., p. 7.
48 Ibid., p. 21.
49 Kluge and Obrist, ‘Alexander Kluge and Hans-Ulrich Obrist -What Art
Can Do’.
50 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25.
51 This depth is the ‘ “back” (and “behind”) – ’ that Maurice Merleau-Ponty
discusses in the working notes of his book The Visible and the Invisible
(1968). It is the place where I coincide with my looking and therefore cannot
see myself. It is ‘the dimension of the hidden’ at my simultaneity with the
thing, which I am too close to see (The Visible and the Invisible, p. 219).
52 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21.
53 David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin, ‘Overlapping Environments,
Made by Moving through Buildings and Paragraphs’, in Aurality and
Environment, Madrid, Spain: Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport,
2017, p. 93.
212
54 This vertiginous depth that I propose can re-radicalize the multiplicities

plateaus/networks, could be seen in parallel with internet communication of
blockchain: a growing list of records/blocks that avoids the centralized power
of the net by peer-to-peer networking. These alternative systems of one-to-one
networking online are created due to a loss of faith in established institutions
(Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani, ‘The Truth about Blockchain’, Harvard
Business Review, January–February 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-
truth-about-blockchain). However, just like the rhizomatic pathways of the
network, those peer-to-peer systems will no doubt soon be high-jacked by a
centralized power, and so I am aware of the inevitable failure of the vertical
and how it has to reroute and rethink constantly. The vertiginous is, then,
in the longer term not a direction as much as an attitude of groundlessness
and vertical slicing that demands of us as users to be participants, to be
covert, to play against the trend through constant critical reassessments of
the status of reality, actuality, possibility and impossibility through a sonic
sensibility: reading the internet with a hearing trumpet.
At the same time, or in return, the plateaus of Deleuze and Guattari can
still retain radicality if we can find a way out of the neo-liberal weave and
read them backwards through their back and depth.
55 Here the notion of volume is clarified not as a measure in decibels but as an
invisible and viscous expanse of the world in sound.
57 In an email exchange, Winderen explains that she had visited many places
to realize this work: rivers in Thailand, Russia, Norway, Sweden, the United
States, and from the Barents Sea by the North Pole to Greenland, Iceland
and the Carr. She spent some time on research boats and also on the vessel
Dardanella for TBA21 Academy.
More about some of her fieldtrips can be found here: http://www.
janawinderen.com/fieldtrips/.
58 Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held in the introduction to The
Cosmopolitan Reader, Wallace Brown and Held (eds), Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2010, p. 1.
59 The notion of a ‘politics of verticality’ is informed by and resonates with
Eyal Weizman’s definition of the phrase articulated in relation to the Israeli
occupation of the Palestine (Weizman, Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of
Occupation, London: Verso, 2012). I develop his ideas in relation to sound in
the essay ‘Geographies of Sound: Performing Impossible Territories’, included
in this book, where I propose that sound could be a tool and device to explore
the vertical necessity of an occupational politics, to unearth its causes and
consequences, and attempt to offer an alternative interpretation and course of
action.
60 Sun Ra, Pathways to Unknown Worlds El Saturn and Chicago Afro-Futurist
Underground 1954–1968, Anthony Elms, John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis
(eds), Chicago: WhiteWalls, 2006, p. 115.
213
62 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller,

New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 102.
References
Brown, Garrett Wallace and David Held (eds), The Cosmopolitan Reader,
Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010.
Carrington, Leonora, The Hearing Trumpet, London: Penguin Books, 2005,
[orig. 1974].
Cavarero, Adriana, For More than Once Voice, Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Cixous, Hélène, Coming to Writing and other Essays, ed. Deborah Jensen,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Cixous, Hélène, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Feldman, Morton, ‘Vertical Thoughts’, in Give my Regards to Eighth Street,
ed. B. H. Friedman, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.
Guattari, Félix and Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press, 1996.
Iansiti, Marco and Karim R. Lakhani, ‘The Truth about Blockchain’, Harvard
Business Review, January–February 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/01/
the-truth-about-blockchain.
Jackson, Sarah, Pelt, Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ‘Alexander Kluge and Hans-Ulrich
Obrist – What Art Can Do’, e-flux journal, no.81, April 2017, http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/81/126634/what-art-can-do/.
Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981 [1980].
Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1964.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed.
Claude Lefort, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Mollin, David and Salomé Voegelin, ‘Overlapping Environments, Made by Moving
through Buildings and Paragraphs’, in Aurality and Environment, Alex Arteaga
and Raquel Rivera (eds), Madrid, Spain: Ministry of Education, Culture and
Sport, 2017, pp. 84–97.
Rancière, Jacques, On The Shores of Politics, London, New York: Verso, 2007.
214
Rorty, Richard, ‘Kripke versus Kant’, London Review of Books, vol. 2, no. 17
(1980): 4–5.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Smith, Cauleen, Visiting Lecture at Pacific Northwestern College of Art, PNCA, 2
Steyerl, Hito, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, in The
Wretched of the Screen, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 12–30.
Sun Ra, Pathways to Unknown Worlds El Saturn and Chicago Afro-Futurist
Underground 1954–1968, ed. Anthony Elms, John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis,
Chicago: WhiteWalls, 2006.
Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso,
2012.
Work
Pensado, Andrea, Performance at Back Alley Theatre in Washington, DC, 24
September 2014.
Winderen, Jana, The Wanderer, Album of field recording composition, Ash
International, ASH 11.8, 24 September 2015, 40 min.
215
PUTTING ON LIPSTICK
get a lipstick (any colour)

stand in front of a mirror or another reflective surface
start to paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song.
5 March 2017, 11:03 pm, www.soundwords.tumblr.com.

216
217
INDEX
Abu Hamdan, Lawrence 10, 22–3, 28, 38 soft 58–9

Adorno, Theodor W. static 83
and essay 5–6 visual 94
and verticality 201 as volume 47, 53
affect; affects 18, 31, 125 Arendt, Hannah, 39–40 n.4, 191
as experiential force 25 Aristotle 128, 210 n.31, 211 n.38
and truth 23 asymmetrical 82
affective 37 production 58, 69 n.15
energy 47 reciprocity 90
possibility 28 world 56
volume 66 asymmetry 61, 63, 159
Afrofuturism 85, 98 n.30, 165 of the world 55
Afro-Futurist science fiction 14 n.4 Auden, W. H.
Agamben, Giorgio Secondary Worlds 26, 41 n.24
and imagination 31 auditory imagination 17, 24, 37, 94
agential 104, 153 (see also Barad) autonomous 6, 18, 151, 196
ethics 105–6 agency 12, 111
forces 173 and fiction 26, 28
in-between 106, 170 identity 57
intra-action 173 imagination 36
realism 12, 15 n.15, 168, 174, 175 objects (things) and subjects 104, 127–8, 169
reality 105, 172, 173, 176 voice 21, 193
subjects 110 and writing 6, 13
agentially real 172, 176 autonomy 63, 135, 153 (see also
agents 26, 48, 88 nautonomy)
agonistic and agency 142
game 38 of fictional worlds 26
and playful 21, 80 and identity; subjectivity 126–7, 129, 134,
Al-Samman, Ghada 35 135–6
Angel, Moss 119 of the invisible subject (unknown woman)
antagonism 18 129–30
anthropocentric 47, 156–7 (see also non- and political participation 55–6, 69 n.15
and post-anthropocentric) of things 132
hierarchy 47 avatar; avatar-I 124, 131–2, 137–8, 142
intentionality 52
worldview 12, 160 Baldry, H. C. 71 n.41
anthropocentrism 131, 156–7 Balibar, Étienne 86, 103, 135
anti-violence 17–18, 21, 29, 35, 116 n.9 (see ethic of self care 110–12, 148 n.55
also violence) equaliberty 110–11
Anywhen (Parreno) 10, 48–9, 52, 57, and the political 10, 17–18, 39 n.1, 135
64, 73 and violence 12, 17–18, 29, 39 n.2, 122–3,
architecture 10, 45, 50, 52, 168, 170, 173 141–2, 116 n.9
218
218 Index
Barad, Karen 12, 15 n.15, 160, 180 n.62 capitalism 142

agential realism 104, 168, 174–5 global 112, 141
diffraction 160–3, 174, 178 n.28 neo-liberal 35, 107, 138, 154, 202
entanglement 152–4 Carrington, Leonora 12, 185, 190, 205
intra-action/-activity 168, 173, 181 n.68 cartography 75–6, 89
language 161–2, 178 n.36 as unmapping 99 n.38, 181 n.69
(new) materialism 153–5, 160, 173 visual 174
objectivity as responsibility and and weather maps 178 n.36
accountability 165 Castells, Manuel 148 n.55
Bergson, Henri Cavarero, Adriana 13
quantitative divisibility 81 and Kripke 210 n.31
between-of-things, the 12, 48, 56, 67, and mute philosophy (Plato) 155, 189–91
121 and voice (revocalization) 194–5, 196,
listening to 58–9, 147 n.39 210 n.29
and reality 163 Caygill, Howard 126, 145 n.19
and score 107 Cixous, Hélène 134, 143
between-subjects-as-things, the 47 and Afrofuturism 165
bionic and Clément 129, 138, 140,
appendix 133 146 n.34
femininity 134 dé-penser 147 n.42
man 134 feminine writing 129–30, 158
blindspots 23–4, 41 n.21 maternal voice 210 n.29
and echoes 28–9 rupture, 12, 122–3, 129–30
and maps; cartography 87–90, 93, 95, 99 and trans-subjectivity 130
n.38 Claudel, Paul 30
and sonic sensibility 38 Clément, Catherine
Boland, Philip 78 and Cixous 129, 138, 140,
Blockchain 212 n.54 146 n.34
Bök, Christian, 115 collaboration 13, 15 n.16, 196
border(s) 22–5, 62 composition (work) as 12, 87, 153–4,
and body 133 167
fluid 110–11 contingent 122–3
and lines 60, 63, 65, 88 and DIY 13, 15 n.16
and listening 124 modest 164–7, 175
and maps 60, 79 score as site of 153, 169
Mediterranean as 30 collaborative
and politics of territory 93, 96 composing; composition 168–9, 172, 173,
borderline 82, 200 175, 181 n.66
Braidotti, Rosi 12 cross-time 1
cartographies 174, 178 n. 36, frame 69
181 n.69 sphere 54
creativity 14 n.5, 163 world 7, 107, 173
gardening 174 colonial 56, 122
hyperrealism 159 and language 141
locationality 154, 162, 174 rule 92
margins 165–6 colonialization; colonialized 66 (see also
materialism 152–5, 160, 163, 173 decolonialized)
Nomadic Theory 161–2 and the digital-lexicon 141
transdisciplinarity 178 n.28 of ‘her’ 130
Brassier, Ray 178–9 n.38 and subjectivity 133, 138
Breathing (Pamela Z) 132, 136–7, composition 4, 25, 50, 76, 79, 110, 192,
143, 150 201
Bumsteinas, Arturas 76 audiovisual 31
219
Index 219
collaborative; and collaboration 87, depth (see also depth barrier)

167–9, 181 n.66 and the digital 202–3
contingent 173 and geography 76, 83, 86, 89, 96, 201–2,
as echography 21 204
feminist 3 invisible 28, 88, 140
field recording 12, 190, 203–4 Merleau-Ponty 13, 89–91, 93–4, 190, 203,
as intra-activity 170–1 211 n.51
and sonic fiction 205 mobile 29, 87
and space 47, 86, 87 as political location 93–5
conflict 104 and rhizome 191, 202–3
affirmative 170 of sound; sonic; listening 37, 121, 124,
deny (reduce) 69 n.19, 80 186–7, 191
dialectical 68–9 n.13 vertical 12, 91, 190, 204, 212 n.54
and difference 80–1, 88, 112, 131, 163, 168 watery 30–2, 34, 203–5
invisible 50 and writing 206–7
and participation 110 depth barrier 93–4 (see also depth)
political 25 Derrida, Jacques 178–9 n.38
and responsibility 131 erasure 209 n.21
and territory 55, 87 Descartes, René 31
Connolly, William E. 33–6 Description d’un combat (Description of a
Conti, Nina 50, 63 Struggle) (Marker) 8
cosmopolitanism 10, 48, 56, 69–70 n.19 deterritorialization 202 (see also
contemporary 54 territorialization)
and education 59–60 dialectic; dialectical 17, 55, 155, 155
historical 54–5, 66 and conflict 68–9 n.13
and Kant 65–6, 71 n.40 and cosmopolitanism 66
local 56, 57 and ethics 105
and morality 55, 66, 68 n. 6 and rhythm 175
and phenomenology 63–6 and violence 17–18, 35, 39 n.2,
sonic 53, 58, 63, 66–7, 68 n.6 135–6
cosmos 52, 54, 55, 61, 65, 67, 138, 203, 204 world view 78
indivisible 106 difference; différence 27–8, 86, 80, 111,
non-anthropocentric 52 (see 201, 209 n.21
also anthropocentric and contingent 131, 152
post-anthropocentric) and cosmopolitanism 65, 69–70 n.19,
and possibility 121 70–1 n.35
shared 58, 65, 68–9 n.13, 14 and the digital 142
of the work 57, 60, 188 and diffraction 154, 160–4, 166, 170–2
world as 54, 86, 188, 204 and entanglements 15 n.15, 168–9, 173–4,
Cox, Christoph 12, 153–7, 162 175, 176
and DeLanda 178–9 n.38 irreducible 69–70 n.19
curating 67 (see also volume) masculine and feminine 158, 178–9 n.38
Curtis, Charles and Meillassoux 157
and Radique, Naldjorlak I 12, 154, 166– negotiation of 112, 114
71, 175, 180 n.54, 181 n.66 performing 92, 160, 175, 195
and possibility 175–6
decolonialized; decolonialization 86 and self 131, 134, 136, 141
and geography 95 and similarities 56, 120, 156
DeLanda, Manuel 155 total 82, 92
goofy 178–9 n.38 diffraction 12, 15 n.15, 163
Deleuze, Gilles 155, 178–9 n.38 difference and 154, 160, 163, 166
and Guattari; rhizomatic networks 13, and inclusivity 173
190, 202, 212 n.54 and transdisciplinarity 178 n.28
220
220 Index
and rhythm 174 and performance 86

dimension; dimensionality 11, 49, 79, 81, 83, and space 81
98 n.30, 87, 189 of volume 89
of the actual 49, 75 Dyson, Frances 10 (see also echography)
and capacity 46, 82, 94 echo 20–1, 29
and depth 203, 93, 96 The Tone of Our Times 20
ethical 11, 18, 22, 106
geographical 90, 91–2, 204 Eades, Caroline 6–7, 14 n.9, 107
of the hidden (the unseen) 2–3, 87, 89, echo; echoing 32, 58, 198
185–8, 190, 211 n.51 and acclamation 20–1
indivisible 4, 50, 53, 82, 96 anti-nomic 17, 37
of interbeing 131, 135 and breath 20–1, 35
of possibility 75 location 187
and rhizome 202–3 plural 20, 29
sound’s 91, 124–5, 207 and political imagination 28
and volume 89, 96, 205 and responsibility 12, 37
discipline; disciplinarity 19, 90, 105, 131 singular 33
between 175, 178 n.28 of the unheard 64
boundaries 105, 160, 163, 170, 175–6 echography 21 (see also Dyson)
of geography 77–9, 90–1, 95–6 and blindspots 28
interference into 11, 79, 160 of the inaudible (unheard) 21, 35, 38
knowledge 4, 77–9, 151, 161, 175 and knowledge 37
outside of 166, 176 political 38
Disco Breakdown (Ifekoya) 123, 125, 127, Eco, Umberto
145, 150 small worlds 26, 41 n.24
dis-illusions 33, 42 n.37 ecological; ecology 7, 20–1, 33
of remembering 191, 209 n.18 of belonging 161
DIY 3, 4, 7, 13, 15 n.16, 106–7 and echo 20–1
Doty, Roxanne 10, 19–20, 29 in global context 54–6
doubt 12, 31, 33, 37, 38, 131–2 of sound 205
and cosmopolitanism; cosmopolitan vertical 204–5
project 11, 48, 57, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69–7 economic; economical; economy 4, 10, 30,
n.19 37, 54, 143
dogmatic 175 asymmetries 152
and education (listening-) 59–60, 64 and echo 20–1
and language 161, 188, 194, 195 erotic (libidinal) 137, 144
and listening (sound) 57, 61, 64, 120–1 and geography 77, 82
materialism and 159, 161, 164 and identity 125
Merleau-Ponty 61–3, 164, 173 neo-liberal 110, 142
phenomenological 61–3, 64, 66, 164, 181 in a relational (connected) world 54, 55–6,
n.68 82, 204
unity of 64, 65 of the visual 33
dualism; dualistic (see also nondualistic) education
knowledge 160 access to 55
and new materialism 155–6, 158 asymmetries of 55, 69 n.15, 152
thinking 155–6, 174 civic 59
and visuocentrism (visuality) 155, 157–9, listening (sonic) 59–60, 64
174 Einhorn (Unicorn) (Horn) 137–8, 142, 150
Dulac, Germaine 7 Elster, Jon 22
duration; durational 8, 62, 76 limbo of politics 23
composition 12, 169, 172 Logic and Society, Contradictions and
as geological timespace 41 n.29 Possible Worlds 23, 41 n.20
and new materialism 172, 174 political possibility 22, 24, 28
221
Index 221
entanglement 180 n.55 realities 158

and diffraction 154, 178 n.28 song 139
and difference 15 n.15 sonic materialism 162–3, 172
ethics of 104–5, 107, 173, 175–6, and sound 139
176 subjectivity 130, 138–9
and materialism 160–1, 163, 166–7, 168 voice 173, 210 n.29
and morality 103 writing (écriture feminine) 130, 158
multisensorial 157 feminist 123
essay 4–6 and Afrofuturism 85
audio 22 identities 11
audiovisual 24 science fiction 166
and crisis 7, 107 sound 3, 7
film 6–7, 8 fiction; fictional 23, 26, 54
as fragment 10, 13, 188, 190, 191 of the body 126
performative 106 and essay 6
and possibility 7–8, 17 future 85–6
as rhythm 189 literary 188
score 11, 103, 106, 107, 189 mathematical 156, 157, 165, 173
and sound 9, 189, 200 and non-fiction 6, 8
vertical 106, 191 parallel 5, 19, 27, 31
video 10, 22, 28 as possibility 26, 27, 186
ethical; ethics 4 (see also post-ethical and sonic 27, 29, 37, 85–6, 187, 188, 191, 205
unethical) textual 29
agential 104–6 and untruths 78, 187, 188
and collaboration 164 flesh; fleshly 154
and cosmopolitanism 54–5, 61, 66 and body 144 n.2, 152, 160, 196
of cultivation 36 (see also Connolly) and cartography 89
the dark face of 111–12 (see also Balibar) Cixous 130
of engagement 86, 127 and feminine writing 210 n.29
of entanglement 104, 107, 173, Merleau-Ponty 61, 91, 94, 203
175–6 and new materialism 12, 153, 160
of the inaudible 11, 103, 114 painting 185
of listening (sonic) 104–6, 113 singing 130, 196
and morality 68 n.6 sonic 94, 119
of participation 36, 48, 58, 61, 66 techno- 196
and possibility 21–2 and the unicorn 128, 137
of (self-)care 18, 35, 110 as resistance 203
exclusion 139, 157, 175 Foucault, Michel 178–9 n.38
and inclusion 94, 157 creativity 14 n.5
and language 200, 205 geographical knowledge 77
and modern thought 156 geography 80, 87, 99 n.36
precarity and 111 and military logic 80, 87, 92, 99 n.36
and woman 126, 165 pouvoir and savoir (power and
knowledge) 97 n.8, 99 n.41
Feldman, Morton space 76, 97 n.3
Vertical Thoughts 201, 209 n.9 future science 85, 87
Fell, Mark 82–3
feminine Gallagher, Michael 78
and precarity 160 gaze 9, 62, 64, 134
neo-logisms 162 authoritative 158
new materialism (speculation) 12, 160–1, and depth 187, 190
162–3, 166, 173, 175, 178 n.28, 178–9 and geography 90
n.38 and mirror 124, 131–2
222
222 Index
and sound 124 control of space 93–4

gender; gendered 124, 129 curbing of politics 80, 137
asymmetries 200 regulator 85
biological 138–9 rules 66
hierarchy 4 Graeber, David
identification 12, 122, 125, 141 imagination 31
inclusivity 178–9 n. 38 possibility 22
subjectivity; subject 159, 165 Guattari, Félix 155
trans- 122, 141 and Deleuze; rhizomatic networks 13,
Gender Song (Ifekoya) 123, 125, 129, 150 190, 202, 212 n.54
geographical 23, 59, 62, 76, 82 (see also Guyer, Jane I. 10, 18, 39
geography) possibility as ethical stance 21
depth 204
imagination; imaginary 77–8, 79, 90, 94, Hajjar, Lisa 22–3
204 Hanh, Thich Nhat
knowledge 77 (see also Michel Foucault) interbeing 48, 68 n.5, 120, 135, 144 n.4
mapping 59 Haraway, Donna
rhythm 77 diffraction 160
science 11, 79, 85 Harman, Graham
and sonic possible worlds 77, 81, 96 object-oriented ontology 159
subjectivity; identity 34, 76, 88 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich
truth 80 history 68–9 n.13
volume 82, 87 Held, David
geography 11, 32, 33, 59, 83, 92 (see also asymmetry of the world 55–6
geographical) autonomy; nautonomy 69 n.15
anxious 79, 89 cosmopolitanism 10, 48
and imagination 86, 92 non-state actors 55
and knowledge 60–1, 78, 94, 95–6 hierarchy; hierarchical 4, 34, 103, 113
of migration 80 angelic; of angels 20–1, 27, 35
military logic of 76, 80, 91–2, 99 n.36 anthropocentric 47, 155
and (political) possibility 78, 81–2, 94 of humans 27
of (sonic) possible worlds 11, 78, 84–5, 95 and language 202, 203
pouvoir and savoir (power and and new materialism 156–8
knowledge) 77, 97 n.8 (see also of things 103, 193
Foucault) of thought 6
as science 81, 96 vertical critique of 201
and science fiction 85–6, 96 without 25, 31, 140
social- 78, 88 Holland, Jack 40 n.8
socio-material 89, 92, 96 International Relations 10, 19
of sound 75–6, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81–2, 88, honeyed (see also Merleau-Ponty)
90, 92, 96 being 10, 68 n.3, 46, 181 n.65
vertical 88, 90, 91, 93 existence 51
visual 21, 94–5 -hands 181 n.65
geopolitics of sound 88 water 52, 60
globalized; globalization horizon; 39, 89–90
anti- 18 future 39
and cosmopolitanism 54 of knowledge 195
forces of 60 mobile 171
labour market 178 n.28 of politics 17, 39 n.1
teaching 59–60 sociopolitical 114
world 11, 48, 60 horizontal 50
government; governmental compulsion of 10
choices 19 connection(s) 189–90, 199, 201, 204
223
Index 223
drive (narrative) 6, 194 ethics of 11, 103, 114

line(s) 106, 187–8, 191, 201, 204–5 as impossible 38, 114
logic 206, 208 n.9 and the in-between 64, 158
thinking 208 n.9 inclusion of 23, 114
weave 201 and the invisible 128, 200
Horn, Rebecca 137–8 and listening education 64
humanism; humanist and music 171
brotherhood 55, 65 as noise 189
as monotheism 65 and silence 58, 63
philosophy 33, 35 subjectivities 132
secular 27 and violence 132, 136
humanity 54 in-between, the 12, 51, 49, 62, 64, 66, 192,
common 55 202
and cosmopolitanism 54–5, 69–70 n.19 agential; agent of 106, 161, 168, 170, 193,
and finitude 165 195
formless 34–5 as blindspot 58, 99 n.38
shared 25 and cosmopolitanism 56
suffering 69–70 n.19 depth of 89, 94, 191, 202
humanitarian 112, 137 geographies of 79, 82, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95
hyper-invisibility 89, 95 inhabiting 10, 172
of conventional reality 11, 78 invisible 58, 59, 83, 84, 123, 175, 192
of masculinity 159–60 listening to (sound of) 58, 130, 132, 158,
of unseen norms 97 n.7, 159 161, 190, 191, 204
of the visual 77, 89 mobile 58, 86, 168, 175
morality and ethics of 104, 106
Ifekoya, Evan 12, 123–6, 127–30, 131–2 perceptual focus of 48, 120
online 142 performing 154, 157, 195
unperforming 139, 143 political possibility of 93, 135
immigrant 82 practice of 48, 50, 64, 106, 153, 160
impossible worlds 28 (see also possible and subjectivity 123, 130, 132, 143, 144
worlds) n.4
impossibility 1, 5, 23, 139 of the text(s); of writing 10, 130, 188, 190
and abjectness 157 as undefined spaces 130, 132
blindspots as 87, 93 vertical 204
of the body 137 inclusion
cartographic 91, 93 and echographic practice of 37
of a continent 32 and ethics 103–4
erotics of 144 and exclusion 94, 157
of the impossible 80, 136 of the invisible 23, 162
and reality 21, 142 pluralized 110
as threat 25 indeterminate 9, 85
of the unsound 58 semantics 14–15 n.11
and utopia 107 and sound 24, 157
and vertical 212 n.54 index; indexical
improvization; improvised 189, 192–3 actuality 26
and composition 169 inhabiting 27
construction 1 invisible 57
of doing things 3 possibility 26
resources 7 sonic 122, 143
world 6 weave 32, 36, 38
inaudible; inaudibility 5, 58, 131 indivisible; indivisibility 81, 87, 89, 120
and echo 35 cosmos 106
echography of 21 dimension 4, 50, 94
224
224 Index
and geography 88, 95 and volume 82, 203

and new materialism 157, 163, 175 interbeing 10, 95, 126, 135, 142, 144, 195–
sphere 59, 60, 63, 156 6, 201–2 (see also Nhat Hanh)
territory 11, 79, 91–3, 95 agential 104
and time 172 cosmopolitan 60, 64, 66, 92
volume 50, 53, 57, 60, 64, 67, 75, 82, 86, and doubt 61, 63
88, 94, 96, 99 n.38, 104, 173 and ethics 105
world 55, 105, 168 forced 90
infinite; infinity 6, 10, 81 indivisible 95–6, 168
device 1 invisible 61, 88, 123, 135, 136
material 2 in new materialism 157, 158, 160, 168,
of meaning 173 170, 173, 175
and plurality 133 phenomenological 57, 64, 66–7
reality 36 and possibility 62, 93, 120, 139
and rhizome 202 scientific 204–5
and rhythm 174, 180 n.64 and sound 48, 50, 53, 57, 121, 144 n.4,
and sound 27, 140–1, 170, 172, 173 147 n.39, 167, 170, 188, 203
and violence 17, 116 n.9 and trans-subjectivity 137–9
and women 130, 140 and volume 53, 61, 67, 83, 88, 92, 104,
Inside You is Me, July/Surface Substance 188
(Kiyomi Gordon) 11, 78, 82, 83, 101 interdisciplinary 1, 178 n.28
instrument; instrumentality 12, 170–2, 176 inter-invent; inter-invention; inter-inventing
and consensus 81 and cosmopolitanism 57, 60
idealized 139 identity; subjectivity 136, 138
performing and listening; sound making 46–7, 66, 83,
as score 160 135, 147 n.39
of semantic language 198 place 52
and technology 143, 146 n.34 volume 60, 82, 84
tuning 167–8, 175 International Relations 10, 18–19, 40 n.8
instrumentalized 133 and realism 37
and digital 142 interobjectivity 120, 173
subjectivity 139 intra-objectivity 173, 181 n.68
intensity; intensities 12, 17, 49, 171 inter-vention
inarticulate 157 as inter-invention 47, 147 n.39
mobile 5 as perceptual agency 46–7
sound; sonic 47, 53, 64, 204 intra-activities; intra-activity 12 (see also
inter-activity 81 Barad)
and interbeing 168 of the feminine voice 173
matter as 161 and new materialism 15 n.15, 161, 175
interactuality 50 and sonic interbeing 168 (see also
and anthropocentrism 52 interbeing)
cosmopolitan 61 and tuning 167, 170, 175
and interbeing 48 of being honeyed 181 n.65
invisible 10 Irigaray, Luce 12, 153
and participation 57 and caresses and gesture words 154, 160,
and political possibility 58 163, 170
and sonic sensibility (sound) 58, 188 goofy 178 n.38
and volume 10, 51–2 and language 161–2, 178 n.36
of the world 57
inter-agency 57, 82 Kanngieser, Anja 78
inter-are; inter-be 12, 55, 48, 68 n.5, 82, 92, Kant, Immanuel
144 n.4, 164 cosmopolitanism 53, 64–5, 70–1 n.35, 71
and sound 119, 132 n.38, 71 n.40
225
Index 225
in digital acceleration 141–2 and Rorty 146 n.23, 196–7, 211 n.35, 211
and Kripke 128, 211 n.38 n.38
morality 70–1 n.35, 71 n.38 Kristeva, Julia
philosophy of language 126–8, 145 n.20, fourth signifying practice 148 n.58, 207
196–8 maternal language 210 n.29
and Rorty 146 n.23, 197,
211 n.35 La Barbara, Joan 148 n.59
taxonomy and lexical thinking 12, 145 Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (Abu
n.19, 147 n.42, 152, 202 Hamdan) 10, 22, 38, 44
Kiyomi Gordon, Jacqueline 11, 78, 82–4, Lebovici, Elisabeth 126
86–7 Le Guin, Ursula K. 84–5, 86
socio-material volume 88, 92 Levin, Sonya 82
Kluge, Alexander Lewis, David K.
counter-poetizing the digital 195, 201–2 possible world theory 26–7, 41 n.31
and Obrist 194 life-world(s)
and Silicon Valley 190, 195 cultural 54, 204
knowledge 1, 3, 4, 20, 59, 85, 162, 189, 210 individual 152
n.31 negotiation of 57
abstract 11, 78, 125, 196 private 62–3, 64, 66, 98 n.21
disciplinary 91, 151, 161, 175, 178 n.28 literacy
and dualism 160, 163 of the in-between 59, 60
geographical 75, 77–9, 94, 95, 96 sonic 206
and humanism 34–5 logos 155, 190, 205
and language 126–7, 128, 140–1, 155, devocalization of 189, 190
195, 196, 197, 200, 202, 206 re-vocalization of 156, 192, 200
material; matter 161, 166, 178 n.28 visual and mute 155, 188, 189, 196
to perform; performative 124, 164, 206 Lu, Catherine
phenomenological 61–3 cosmopolitanism 11, 48, 69 n.19
plural 38, 80 doubt 57, 61
and political change (transformation) 37
and power (pouvoir and savoir) 78, 88, Manning, Erin
91, 97 n.8 generative environment 81
and representation 164, 166, 174 interference 11, 79
sonic 37, 88 and Massumi 11, 79, 81, 166
and subjectivity 139, 146 n.23 map; mapping 11, 33–4, 52, 60, 78, 79,
and truth 89, 142, 152, 146 n.23 85, 87, 91, 98 n.21, 204 (see also
knowing 19 (see also unknowing) unmapping)
collective; social 61 aerial 90
and diffraction 163 and blindspots 95, 99 n.38
as doing 11, 106 echography as 21
and its object 62, 148 n.50 fluid 175
phenomenological 62, 97 n.8 and geography 59, 80
sensorial 59, 141 and scores 75
Kodwo, Eshun and sound 75, 95, 175
Afrofuturism 85 totalizing 89
subjectivity engine 105 variants 80–1
Kripke, Saul 12 visual 80–9
and Kant 211 n.38 weather 174, 178 n.36, 181 n.69
and metaphysics 210 n.31 Marker, Chris 8–9
mini-worlds 98n.21 masculine; masculinist
Naming and Necessity 128–9 history 159
realist philosophy of language 122–3, idealism 68–9 n.13
128–9, 198 language 188
226
226 Index
logic 130 dis-illusions 33, 42 n.37, 209 n.18

new materialism 159, 166, 175, 178–9 doubt 48, 61–2, 164
n.38 and materialism 152, 164, 173
realities 158 non-sense 70 n.21, 190, 2–8 n.13
theorization 158 openness to the world (ouverture au
visuality 160, 178–9 n.38 monde) 70 n.28, 140, 148 n.50
Massey, Doreen Meschonnic, Henri
geographical narratives 11, 81, 87 rhythm 171, 174, 175, 180 n.63, 180
spaces of possibility 78–81 n.64
spatial imaginaries 76, 78 migrant 112, 165
Massumi, Brian migration 54
generative environment 81 and flux 79
interference 11, 79 forced 56
and Manning 11, 79, 81, 166 geography of 80
material sound 8–9, 152, 167 mass 37
image of 13, 191 politics of 31
materialism; materialist 153, 157, 166 (see military 11, 19, 32, 90, 91
also new materialism) court system 22
and cosmopolitanism 56 and geography 80, 85–6, 87, 90, 99 n.36
and dualism 155–8, 174 intervention 33
and duration (time) 172, 174 logic 80
embodied 152, 153 and phenomenological depth 93
feminine 160, 166 power 92
feminine sonic (sonico-feminine) 162–3, and sound technology 139, 143, 147 n.48
172, 175 as technicians of space 91
phenomenology 152, 174 thinking 76
masculine 166 Mollin, David 41 n.21
and realist; realism 155, 157 moral; morality 11, 68–9 n.13, 113 (see also
and rhythm 166 post-moral)
sonic (sound) 12, 151, 154–8, 162–3, 166 agent 55
of sonic possible worlds 158 and cosmopolitanism 54–6, 65–6, 68 n.6,
of transformation 12 70–1 n.35, 71 n.38, 71 n.40
Matles, David 78 duty 54, 68 n.6
Mediterraneo (Raimondo) 10, 30, 34, 38, 44 and ethics 36, 66, 68 n.6, 104, 107, 110
Meillassoux, Quentin 12, 165 of the invisible 103, 108
After Finitude 177 n. 3, 178–9 n.38 and participation 104, 105
ancestrality 152–3, 159 practical 104, 107
critique of correlationism 151–2, 164, 177 principle 68–9 n.13, 112
n.3, 178–9 n.38 and utility 112, 148 n.55
factuality 164 multisensory 29, 47
irremediable reality 157 multivocality 20, 31, 36
mathematical fiction 156–7, 173–4 mute; muted 33, 62, 83, 122, 162, 186
memory language 189, 195, 196, 200, 206,
and architecture 58 208 n.9
and dis-illusions 191 logos 155, 188, 198–200
of Nakba 25 objects and subjects 33, 141
and rhizome 202 reality 122
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12 text 188, 199
being honeyed 10, 46, 68 n.3, 181 n.65 theorization; theory 106, 189, 206
and cosmopolitanism 48 thinking; thought 155, 174, 188, 195
depth 13, 89–90, 91, 93–4, 190, 203, 211 unthought 174
n.51 voices 35, 50, 58, 210 n.29
227
Index 227
Najibullah, Akrami 112 cosmopolitanism 48, 54, 65

Naldjorlak I (Radique and Curtis) 12, 153, and Kant 64–5, 70–1 n.35, 71 n.38, 71
166–9, 175, 180 n.54, 180 n.55, 183 n.40
Nancy, Jean-Luc
listening 46, 120 Obama, Barack 90
the un-sensed 144 n.3, 147 n.41 objectivity
nautonomy 56, 63 (see also Graeber) as accountability (and responsibility) 12,
network 109, 126 153, 163, 164, 165, 166
and blockchains (peer-to-peer) 212 n.54 as (critical) distance 153, 155–6, 165
digital (online) 141, 142, 148 n. 54, 195, ideal 68–9 n.13
202 of natural laws 37
global 91 and technology 133
invisible 59 Obrist, Hans-Ulrich
rhizomatic 13, 190, 202, 212 n.54 and Kluge 194
rules 201 Onians, R. B. 196
and social media 148 n.52
technological 133, 141 Papzian, Elizabeth A. 6–7, 14 n.9, 107
new materialism; new materialist 35, 166, Parreno, Philippe 10, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57,
176 (see also materialism; materialist) 60, 64, 73
and agential realism 173, 176 participation 2, 5, 65, 78, 119, 135, 188
and dualism 155, 157 in anthropology 18
feminine 163, 178 n.28, 178–9 n.38 in difference 173
feminine sonic (sonico-feminine) 12, 172, equal 56, 69 n.15
175 ethical; ethics of 36, 48, 58, 61, 104
masculine 159, 175, 178–9 n.38 and geography 84
and phenomenology 174 and the image 121, 124
and post-philosophy 153 meaning through 35, 107, 201
and realism 153, 155 political 55–6, 58, 69 n.15, 110, 136
sonic (sound) 12, 153, 155–7, 166 in possibility 67, 112, 114, 120
and speculative realism 152, 156, 158 and (essay) score 11, 103, 105, 107
neo-liberalism 111, 128 and sound (sonic sensibility) 31, 38, 67,
Night on the Sailship (Bumsteinas) 76, 101 103, 124, 126, 129, 186–7, 194
non-anthropocentric 48 (see participatory
also anthropocentric and capacity 104
post-anthropocentric) drive 65
cosmos 52 ethics 58, 66, 68 n.6, 103, 204
non-dualistic 160 (see also dualism) practice 105
knowledge 163 listening 172
non-hierarchical text 206
real 6 performance 4, 90, 98 n.22, 181 n.66, 170,
and rhizome 202 172
world 160 contingent 194, 209 n.21
non-human 36, 86, 154–6, 165 of cosmopolitanism 65
actors 27 and diffraction 154, 166, 170
agents 88 ethical 105–6
narratives 80 and geography 11, 76, 78, 86, 87, 88
and new materialism 152, 159–61, 175 identities; subjectivities 12, 124, 127, 130,
slices (variants) of this world 35, 80 132, 134, 136, 158, 160
non-sense 58, 64, 70 n.21, 190, 196, 208 of the in-between 130, 166
n.13 of the invisible 134, 136
Nussbaum, Martha 10 of the unknown 89, 192–3
cosmopolitan education 59 and Naldjorlak I 167–2, 175, 180 n.55
228
228 Index
and (new) materialism 154, 160, 165–6, populism 13

175–6 possible world(s) 3, 25, 27, 39 n.4, 112
of political possibility 54, 106, 205–6 (see also sonic possible worlds and
score 103–7, 170, 175 impossible worlds)
and speech; voice 12–13, 129, 136, 190, actual 28, 90
194, 197 geography of 77, 84, 85, 88, 95
of text; writing 190, 191, 195, 200, 205–6, and life-worlds 98 n.21
209 n.21 literary 41 n.24
virtuosity of 133, 143 science fiction 84
performative 11, 12, 90, 103, 126, 160, 162 theory 26–7
and diffraction 160 post-anthropocentric 153 (see
doubt 175 also anthropocentric and
essay 106 non-anthropocentric)
knowledge 164 postcolonial
and language 178 n.36, 196 subjects 165
morality 105 post-ethical 112 (see also ethical and
place 89–90 unethical)
reality 167 post-human 52
subjectivity 126, 139 post-moral 112 (see also moral)
phenomenology 65, 143, 151 post-philosophical 153
correlationism 164 precarity 23, 159
and materialism 152, 174, 175, 181 n.68 and exclusion 111
sonic 152 and feminine 160
phenomenological possibilism 26 and flux 79
phonography pre-human world 152, 164
textual (text as) 5, 190, 200 Prior, Jonathan 78
pitch 167 Pundak, Ron 91
-complex 167–8
diffracted 169 racial; race 200
unplaceable 171 discrimination 9
Plato 190 hierarchy 4
language 189, 196, 211 n.38 identity 122, 125, 127, 134
metaphysics 196–7, 210 n.31 subject 165
mute philosophy 155 Radique, Éliane
plurality 10, 66, 163, 165 and Curtis, Naldjorlak I 12, 153–4, 166,
of the actual 13 167, 168–9, 175, 180 n.54, 183
of the audible 34 tape work 170, 181 n.66
complex 30, 35, 109 Raimondo, Anna 10, 22, 30–3, 38
invisible; unseen 133, 134 Rancière, Jacques
‘of men’ (Hannah Arendt) community 136, 148 n.53
39–40 n.4 consensus 80, 97 n.13, 121
political 81 governmental curbing 137
of possibility 38, 98 n.21 possibility 195
of reality 30, 108 ‘sans-part’ 103, 123, 142, 148 n.53
simultaneous 95, 136, 161, 174 rationality 31–2, 34, 141
of its time 174, 176 of the digital network 142
vision and 157 and Kant (unity of reason) 64–5, 71 n.38,
without opposites 17–18 71 n.40, 196
of (possible) worlds 27 limitation of 38
political possibility of sound 5, 9, 10, 17, 19, of the nation-state 55
22, 29, 31, 39, 58 and natural law 66, 70–1 n.35, 71 n.38
popularism 20 realism 15 n.15, 40 n.9, 143, 211 n.35
229
Index 229
agential 12, 15 n.15, 168, 174, 175 material 172, 174

and consensus 80, 121 political 175
irremediable 152, 153 and subjectivity 126, 148 n.58
modal 26, 39 n.4 and transformation (difference) 123–4,
and possibility of 40 n.9, 178–9 n.38 163, 171, 172
radical 153 and volume 50, 88
sonic (and sound) 26, 175 Riot Grrrl 14 n.7
speculative 12, 152, 156–7, 158, 159, Robertson, Lisa 70 n.22
178–9 n.38 Rodgers, Tara 139, 147 n.48
of the unthought 164–5 Roggenbuck, Steve 75, 76
re-performance Ronen, Ruth 26
of cartography 99 n.38 Rorty, Richard 146 n.23, 196–7, 211 n.35,
representation 8, 50, 64, 121, 122, 125, 132, 211 n.38
136, 148 n.52, 152, 187, 201, 204–5 Ryan, Marie-Laure 26, 39 n.4
cartographic 83, 87, 89
crisis of 7, 106 Schmith, Cauleen 1–5, 14 n.96, 189, 208
cultural 3 n.11
of geography 11, 76, 78–9, 81, 88 Schulze, Holger 105
of identity; subjectivity 123–4, 125, 126, Schuppli, Susan 11, 79, 89, 90, 101
135, 139, 165 science fiction
of the inaudible 131 Afro-Futurist 14 n.4
language and 4, 104, 146 n.23, 160, 166, feminist 166
187, 197, 211 n.38 of geography 84–5
and new materialism 152–3, 154, 155, sonic 86, 156–7
156, 159, 160, 163, 165 score 75, 87, 104, 170, 173–7
and sound 28, 134, 138–9, 156 architectural 175
subject (body) 133, 134, 139, 143, 165 and body 154, 176
visual (and image) 87, 89, 121, 141, 142, collaborative 166–7, 169
148 n.54, 163 as echography 21
Retham, Petra 10, 18 as emancipatory force 104
revocalization (see also vocalization and essay 11, 103–4, 106–7, 189, 206
devocalization) as performance; performative 105, 106,
and the body 175 107, 169, 170, 175, 176
and the digital 195 soundwalk 67 n.2
of the logos 156 text 13, 45
by the mother tongue (maternal language) sexual body 160
210 n.29 sexuality 143
of the textual field 13, 190 singing 126, 142, 215 (see also unsinging
rhizome; rhizomatic 13, 190, 191, 202 and re-singing)
and digital networks 202 and breathing 132, 143, 196
and text 203 flesh 130, 196
and vertical 212 n.54 about gender 124–5
rhythm(s) 12, 30, 33–4, 85, 119, 123, 180 geography 96
n.64, 187, 193, 205 text (writing) 187, 195
architectural (sculptural) 83–4, 172 transformation 129–30
and breath 136, 138 socio-material
of doing 103, 107 consciousness 163
and geography 75, 77, 79, 81 geography 89, 92, 94, 96
irregular (nonmetric) 174, 175–6, 180 simultaneity 94
n.63 volume 88–9, 95
of language (reading) 189, 200, 206 Södergran, Edith 151
and light 49, 53, 126, 189, 193 song 162, 215
230
230 Index
and body 122, 129 vertical 94–5, 191, 201

breath and 133, 135 subjectivity 4, 11, 52, 82, 128, 139, 146
Carbon Song Cycle 133 n.23, 161, 176
feminine 123, 130, 139 and agency 131
Gender Song 123, 125, 129 contingent 125
speech song 123 engine (Eshun) 105
vertiginous 206, 207 feminine 130, 138, 139
sonico-feminine (new) materialism 12, 175 gendered 158
sonico-phenomenological cosmopolitanism geographical 76, 79, 88
60 historical 130, 165
sonic possible world(s) 6, 11, 25, 26, 27, 28, idealized 139
112 inaudible 132
geography of 77–8, 81, 84, 85–6, 95, 96 performative (performing) 132, 136, 139,
materialism of 158 207
and possible subjects 122 sonic (hearing) 119, 121, 122, 123, 130,
and science fiction 84–5 136, 138–9, 143–4, 144 n.4
and Sun Ra 98 n.30 trans- 122, 130, 131, 135, 137, 138, 142
and world creating 39 trans-technological 133, 134
sonic sensibility 5, 9, 11, 12, 48, 111 unperforming 143
and cosmopolitanism 56 Sun Ra 1–3, 13, 14 n.4, 15 n.14, 85, 98
for the digital 212 n.54 n.30, 206
and geography 77, 95
and image 121 technology; technological 1–2, 3, 5, 27, 140,
in language and text 188, 198 146 n.34, 147 n.48
and new materialism 158, 163, 164 and body 132–3, 134, 137, 138–9, 141,
and participation 38 143, 160, 192–3, 194
and science fiction 156 DIY 7, 106
and trans-subjectivity 122 and fascism 141–2
and volumes 104, 205 networked 140
soundwalk 45, 60, 67 of representation 76–7
score 67 n.2 trans- 122, 133, 134–5, 143
sovereignty and voice 190, 192, 193, 194, 209 n.21
and autonomy 130, 134, 142 territory 79, 86, 90, 97 n.3, 201
false 135 black 158, 165
and globalization 54 conquered (colonialized) 68–9 n.13, 99
language and 127 n.36, 130
and subject; subjectivity 126–7, 130, 142 digital 202
speculative 194, 205 and geography 76, 82, 95
artefact 1, 2, 13, 106, 189 impossible 88, 90
and facticity 164 indivisible 11, 79, 91
thought 158 invisible 76
materiality 152 Israeli 23
possibility 165, 194, 205 mapped (cartography) 52, 76, 79, 80
project 155 and nation-state 55
world 6 Palestinian 91, 93
speculative realism 12, 152, 156, 158, 178–9 politics of 96
n.38 performed 86, 95, 107
masculine 159 sociopolitical 4
and time 174 textual phonography 5, 190, 200
Steyerl, Hito Thrift, Nigel 11, 78, 86, 87, 95, 98 n.24
image 12, 121, 123–4, 126, 130, 134, 148 timespace
n.54 geological 28, 41 n.29
231
Index 231
and geography 75, 80, 82, 94, 86, 96 unmapping 181 n.69
place 39, 86, 80, 90 and cartography 99 n.38
and rhythm 172, 174 of territory 80
slices 28, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 95 unperform; unperformance
sonic 109 geography 11, 78, 82, 87, 94–5
as volume 32, 88 identity; subjectivity 139, 143, 170
world 108 knowledge 139
Tlalim, Tom 11, 79, 89, 90 language (lexical) 12, 176, 205–6
tonality 21, 35, 170 music 171, 176
transitive 129, 138 and new materialism 174, 176
‘I’ 135 representation 87, 104, 139, 142
truth 7, 14 n.19, 23, 36, 37, 52, 62, 137, and (essay) score 104, 107
159, 186, 209 n.18 (see also untruth) through the breath 136
affective 23, 31 violence 143–4
contingent 31, 191 unthought
and the digital 141–2 fiction 165
and dis-illusions 209 n.18 masculinist 175, 178–9 n.38
geographical 80, 81, 88 and new materialism; speculative realism
of the incommensurable 36 151–3, 156, 157, 158, 162, 164, 165,
and knowledge 77, 88, 89, 142, 146 n.23, 173–4, 175, 176, 178–9 n.38
165 phenomenological 152–3
and language 127, 146 n.23, 161, 187, sonic (sound) 156–7, 166
197 and unthinkable 152, 153, 158, 162, 165,
and new materialism; speculative realism 166, 173
152–3, 156–8, 159, 161, 164 and writing 13
phenomenological 62, 181 n.68 unsinging 143
plural 36, 37, 161, 191 utopia; utopian 6, 85
rational 36, 141 cosmopolitanism as 67
and reality 97 n.13, 121, 127, 137 and the essay form 107
singular 40 n.9, 62, 80, 89, 97 n.13 and geography
of the text 191, 199–200 world 8
Uneasy Listening (Tlalim and Schuppli) 11, ventriloquism; ventriloquist 50, 63–4, 192–3,
79, 89, 91, 101 207
untruth 36, 37, 52, 78 (see also truth) vertical; verticality 6
and dis-illusions 191 composition 201, 208 n.9
unactualised 26, 27, 29, 41 n.31 depth 12, 91, 94, 95, 190, 204
unethical 105 (see also ethical and geography 11, 88, 90, 91, 93
post-ethical) invisible 13, 190, 212 n.54
unknowable 89 lines of words (writing, text) 9, 12, 13,
unknowing 7 (see also knowing) 106, 185, 190, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206
unknown 7, 57, 63, 96, 166, 179, 187, 192, politics of 79, 91, 204, 212 n.59
193, 201 and representational freedom 201
geography 11, 78, 96 separation; partitioning 91, 92, 94, 95
lands 11, 84, 85, 86, 98 n.24 sonic (sound) 89, 90, 92, 95, 171, 187,
matter 159 190, 199, 207
performance of the 89 visual 91–2, 95, 201
places 7, 192–3, 196 vertiginous
subjectivity 132 depth 212 n.54
and (unheard) voices 194, 200, 207 reality 201, 205
worlds 13, 15 n.16 song 206
women 130 sonic (sound) 201, 203
232
232 Index
violence 12, 24, 31, 147 n.41 (see also sonic 10, 45, 47–8, 50, 53, 57, 88, 94, 96
anti-violence) shared 90, 203, 204
and anti-violence 18, 21, 29, 35, 39 n.2 of space and place 50–1, 83, 88
circular 18, 21, 29, 32, 68–8 n.13, 107, viscous 51, 168, 212 n.55
116 n.9 world as 61, 67, 85–6, 119, 201, 204, 205
emancipatory 136
of identity 123, 134–5 The Wanderer (Winderen) 12, 190, 203, 214
of the lexicon 12, 144 Weizman, Eyal 11, 79, 91, 92–4, 212 n.59
political imagination and 17, 116 n.9 Winderen, Jana 12, 190, 203–4, 205, 212
and reality 36 n.57, 214
ultraobjective 12, 122, 135, 141, 142–3, wolf tone 167, 168, 169, 173, 175
148 n.52 woman 34, 126, 127, 129, 137, 138, 186,
ultrasubjective 12, 122, 135, 141, 142–3, 209 n.21
148 n.52 depropriated (Cixous) 138, 140,
virtuosity 7, 124, 139, 176 146 n.34
and DIY 4 false 132
of listening 58 whole 132, 133
in performance 133 write 130, 158
visuocentrism; visuocentric writing 8, 189
anthropocentric 157 feminine (écriture feminine) 130, 158, 210
and new materialism 175 n.29
philosophy 153, 155, 156 fragments 1, 9, 106, 188, 190, 191
vocalization; vocalized (see also and listening 5, 167, 206
revocalization and devocalization) the margins 158
and erasure 209 n.21 mute 191, 199
theorization 157 phallocentric 143
volume 24, 32, 45, 46, 75 and possibility 7, 106, 190
affective 66 and the rhizome 190, 203
of Anywhen 49, 51–2, 64 as science of the world 81
architectural 10, 46, 47, 49, 60 under erasure 209 n.21
as crucible 47 vertical 6, 207, 208 n.9
discontinuous 92 and woman 140
gallery as 46–7, 60, 67
geographical 82, 87, 84–5, 99 Z, Pamela 12, 123, 135–6, 142, 143
indivisible; indivisibility of 50, 53, 60, 64, Breathing 132, 137
82, 86, 94, 99 n.38, 104, 173 and Horn 138, 139
invisible 11, 48, 49, 50, 66, 78, 96, 168, (trans-)technological 133–4, 138, 139,
203, 205 146 n.34
socio-material 88–9, 95 Zakim, Eric 8, 14–15 n.11
233
234

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i

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

First published in the United States of America 2019

Copyright © Salomé Voegelin, 2019

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. vi–vii constitute an extension of

Cover illustration © Claire Scully / www.clairescully.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

The political possibility of sound 17

Hearing volumes: Architecture, light and words 45

Geographies of sound: Performing impossible territories 75

Morality of the invisible, ethics of the inaudible 103

Hearing subjectivities: Bodies, forms and formlessness 119

Sonic materialism: A philosophy of digging 151

Reading fragments of listening, hearing vertical lines of

We write in communities, in networks of support and exchange, in a

Alberta University, Edmonton, and the Westernfront in Vancouver. Thank

stand underneath a light source

1 March 2017, 8:42 am, www.soundwords.tumblr.com.

In a lecture at the Pacific Northwestern College of Art (PNCA) on 2

2 The Political Possibility of Sound

4 The Political Possibility of Sound

DIY is a practice of self-reliance that rejects the idea of a right way

6 The Political Possibility of Sound

The desire to write a series of texts on the possibility of a groundless,

The essay film

the impossible endpoint, the fragments of an impossible totality.’9 Continuing

8 The Political Possibility of Sound

Description d’un combat (1960)

The threats that surround her, to which she gave no cause.

10 The Political Possibility of Sound

to contemplate human frailty and doubt within the cosmopolitan project

12 The Political Possibility of Sound

consider current debates on materiality and reality, specifically in relation to

14 The Political Possibility of Sound

11 Chris Marker withdrew Description d’un combat (Description of a Struggle)

16 The Political Possibility of Sound

Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects, Embodiment and Sexual Difference in

The political possibility of sound

18 The Political Possibility of Sound

THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITY OF SOUND 19

unexpected futures’,6 and urge the discipline towards an innovative analysis

20 The Political Possibility of Sound

or naturalized order of things, resonates with Frances Dyson’s focus on the

THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITY OF SOUND 21

ecology and economy. However, she acknowledges that ‘these possibilities

22 The Political Possibility of Sound

unlimit the possibilities of actuality to include and make count, in perception

Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley (2013)

THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITY OF SOUND 23

Abu Hamdan’s work shows ‘fragments of an impossible totality’ but also

24 The Political Possibility of Sound

a situation where revolution is unthinkable and thus impossible, into one

THE POLITICAL POSSIBILITY OF SOUND 25