TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

For a Demos of the Audiosphere

What are unheard-of relations? What could the silence and noise out of our “intensive incompatibility”¹ mean? How do we modulate inequalities to amplify higher variables that distend imbalances, economic and political, for those that refuse to listen? The weight of these questions seemingly slope towards an anticipatory demos of the audiosphere: where all opinions and attestations, protests and disputes swinging left and right are equally attended so as to construct generic resolutions for the common. But if the demos here is to be understood less as a formation but a sonic relationship that could possibly deliberate planetary-scale disproportion and revamp denialism ingrained in rejecting the demands of the other, however ear-splitting these demands are, the audiosphere—treated as the space where sound or the unsound are incarnated, extracted and deployed—is one locus for fine-tuning our relationships across knowable asymmetries or differences because no exceptional discipline can be a sufficient titular model in worlds that are, in themselves, senses apart.

The array of historical asymmetries (amongst the human, animal, vegetal, mineral etc.) does more than just numb or isolate receptors from hearing the problems of the other but also find in this refusal a conflicted perception of problematics that unfastens causality as it dividuates the obstacle, and so eroding the mutual endangerment that may be gleaned by the gradual intersection of experiences when dispositives are at their most apparent. This also induces a listening pattern widely bred in neoliberal politics as the strategic sourcing of middle grounds, grey areas, and half-way points in spaces where they don’t have any necessary import. Adherence to such action comes at the expense of dismissing the value of collective procedures and epistemological convergence between the human and the non-human, replacing them with controlled perspicacity that favors the vulnerability of one thing from another according to a singular reason that all the more intensifies competition and piecemeal pursuits of survival.

Where sound has no essence but only “setups of apprehension”,² a demos of the audiosphere is neither a program nor a folk politics that emphasizes immediacy in the scale of the human;³ rather, it is a prototypical experiment that rejects prevailing monophony (singular voice) or homophony (dominant voice) when thinking about the ongoing project of common-ing. Although the desire for a common good has always been normatively treated as the apex of democratic idealization, humanity is hardly inadmissible for the large-scale nature of inequalities coming at an inexhaustible rise and the techno-capital dominion laying its heap upon worlds, human and otherwise. A demos of the audiosphere, therefore, has less to do with a regulatory administration of intra-personal, conditional abilities e.g. rights, than with the urgency of listening to the unrecorded, the tangential opposite, the muffled Other.

Listening, as Robin Mackay puts it, is “a patchwork of modular systems that evolved at different periods during the history of the species … integrated with the other senses in order to produce an integral and coherent image of the world and of the self.”⁴ In what is thus subsumed under the scheme of asynchronous, global politics, only those voices with the capacity to resound, legitimized by hegemonic systems of control and attenuation, are instituted; others quiver, get lost in the noise, subordinated to a certain inagential degree. This is where erasure of performing life, reduction to lives treated less, and subjugation to novel hierarchies and gaps become more-than-human grids of manipulation. Disarming agents and systems (recursive colonialisms, fascism, capitalist surplus-extraction) that abet disequilibrium and incongruities the power to gauge voices that matter requires that we refurbish the audiosphere where these bouts of injustice are seeding and utilize un/sonic forces to overhaul unheeding, inattentive politics.

Audition as Situated Ethics

Ours is an auditory ecology where intense noises and silencing are escorted by modern technologies from the regional to the earthly. Sonic warfares⁵ are waged in the name of colonialisms which means that apart from utilizations that serve complex power relations, techno-scientific developments bounce back as toolkits for sophisticated mass surveillance and imperial gadgetry and where co-opted inventions further delineate rather than deracinate oppression’s causes from its effects. Grouped in this collection are the multiple, polarizing stipulations of wanting to be heard across the multiple vantage points of being 21st century justifying that the demand to be listened to is a sonically-embedded political activity such and such. By this same token, both hearing and to be listened to echo the assertion to be understood and interpreted correctly. But what about those that elide the obvious distinctions or arrangements in this construct? This might hint at anthropocentrism but only because we consider underlying sonic relations with the non-human as lazy comparatives of who must perceive who, or why must anything and everything be transducted for human aisth?sis. Instead, we must take these as expanded practices for speculation in an age of inseparable networks and even dissipative structures which, for Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, are dynamic states of matter arising from “giant fluctuations maintained by flows of energy and matter” and “interaction of a system with the outside world, [and] its embedding in nonequilibrium conditions.”⁶. Indeed, listening is a labor of heightening our consciousness and wits to the very conditions that expose our own compromised positions in hyper-inflected realities where no autonomy or security is guaranteed.

To mount an ethics built from the situated fronts of multiple, auditory experience is to set in motion a solidarity bound by the one and the many’s right to resonate-with:⁷an aleatory collaboration and interaction with every vibing creature which, in the process, flattens any declaration of sonic exceptionality or self-resonance. Hence, audition is the hypothetical field of a situated ethics that seeks to challenge the univocal, unequal interpretation and privileging of one mode of sound-ing, being sound, and outsounding the other. Trial and error rationalization of what our ethics serve today does less than repair the very criteria that nets our lives with the existing processes of privatization and atomisations. On the other hand, the value placed by ethics on the things it deems as subjects does not come without naturalized prerogatives and so does sonic activities when it transforms and interprets the unsound in the crisscross of aesthetics and politics. These meshed factors unevenly distribute and further stratify according to nominal designations like identities and earth-bound demarcations like localities. The problem is no longer that differences tendentiously multiply uneven treatment and chambers but precisely that the situations mentioned contiguously reimpose distinctions to lure emergent yet frangible belongingness, doing more to the decline than the reinforcement of comprehensible lines of association and repulsion.

Updated Silence

Silence, not only the absence of sound but the inability to hear range-limited frequencies, is a feature partial to perception. Correspondingly, imperception is a criteria at the horizon of hearing, sensing, and understanding. Both a tentative inacoustics and an extra-musical category, silence deftly articulates what cannot be perceived in the vibrating world or, at least, what can be im-perceived in an existing environment. As a gap between what could be heard and what happens after when such is heard, silence enables unheard-of relations that could originate prior to any motivation for the sonic. This unheard-of relations is not only the undiscovered potential for planetary modes of being unsound and being-with unsoundly but the prospect that a sonic justice between one and the many, the minoritarian and the majoritarian, could thrive in silence. If we take silence to be appropriable to political ends such that we could devise concepts suitable to the common that takes a universalized operator of silence as its starting point, imagining enactments distinct to our current planetary dissonance have need of an audiosphere that echo every sentiment, however discrete and diverse, at the interim between sound and non-sound.

To think of silence as an objective baseline for unheard-of relations that waver from dissonant politics is to challenge not only auditory scenarios but also intelligent organization. Managing silence as a material field does not automatically mean that we could harness it as a slate without delinking from the kind of politics that conjuncts our visions of a world to come to futuristic models that attest to these visions. If what we are seeking in the long-run is a version of an egalitarian, earth-optimized politics, the prioritization we reserve for the optical as a superior model must itself be re-designed to begin with. How to construct egalitarian politics from silence is as important as the question of how to delineate from our current visualizations of politics, aesthetics, ecology with the sonic as our moderator. Consequently, if we reject a strand of correlationism that posits sound as only accessible at the limits experience and follow a sonic materialism⁸ where sound’s ontology is contingent to nature or natural fluxes, silence is to be taken as a leveled stratum where all sounds could simultaneously proceed and emanate and so could relations be.

If habit added to crises leads to the update as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun puts it, the newness that new media heralds should thus concern silence (if we are to mediate relations through it and in it) as a potential zone to “inhabit the inhabitable”.⁹An inhabitable silence premised on the idea that the crises of today accustomed us to treat diverse problems as habituated interludes against noise and therefore surrounded by urges to update. But rather than retreat to obsolescence from a constant state where normalcy evolves, these urges should teach us the reserved potentialities of innovating what is not heard, the unspoken relations between and among us, and what stays after hearing nothing and everything. This, of course, is not just a matter of perspectival parity but an account of the interrelated techniques we acquire and hone if we are to re-engineer the audiosphere to its utmost integrative quality, one world among many, as a space of inhabitable silences, and all these itself as a critical extra-sonic practice.

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Notes

1. Reed, “Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization”.
2. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, p. 331.
3. Srcinek and Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, p. 28.
4. Mackay, “Synthetic Listener”. Available from: <http://readthis.wtf/writing/synthetic-listener/>.
5. Sonic warfare is the “the use of force, both seductive and violent, abstract and physical, via a range of acoustic machines (biotechnical, social, cultural, artistic, conceptual), to modulate the physical, affective, and libidinal dynamics of populations, of bodies, of crowds.” (author’s italics). Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, p. 10.
6. Prigogine and Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, p.356.
7. Following Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis or making-with. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, p. 58.
8. “This materialist theory of sound as an anonymous sonic flux suggests a way of rethinking the arts in general. Sound is not a world apart, a unique and autonomous domain of non-signification and non-representation. Rather, sound and the sonic arts are firmly embedded in the material world and in
   the powers, forces, intensities, and becomings that compose that world.” Christoph Cox, Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics, p.37.
9. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, p.174.

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Bibliography

Bonnet, Francois. The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2016.

Cox, Christoph. Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2010.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.

Mackay, Robin. “Synthetic Listener”. Available from: <http://readthis.wtf/writing/synthetic-listener/>.

Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. London: Verso, 2017.

Reed, Patricia. “Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization.” e-flux Architecture, Sep 18, 2017. Available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/140674/xenophily-and-computational-denaturalization/>.

Srcinek, Nick and Williams, Alex. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso, 2015.