Differences, Vol 6, No 2-3 (2011) - The Sense of Sound

Paul Klee, Twit-
tering Machine
(Die Zwitscher-
Maschine). 1922. Oil
transfer drawing,
watercolor, and
ink on paper with
gouache and ink
borders. ARS,
NY. The Museum
of Modern Art, New
York, NY.
rey chow and james a. steintr ager
In Pursuit of the Object of Sound:

An Introduction
I
f something is to stay in the memory, writes Friedrich
Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, it must be burned in: only that
which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory (sect. 3, 61). This remark
not only underscores the ineluctability, in the process of memory-making,
of a marking by force, it also articulates the role of the human sensorium
as a receptor that effects the materialization of memory in accordance with
the intensity of the pain that is felt. For something to endure as memory,
according to Nietzsche, it must keep hurting; for it to keep hurting, it
must be burned in. This characterization recalls Aeschyluss notion, as
expressed in The Agamemnon, that all learning is accompanied by pain. Yet
the significance of Nietzsches remark is less such apparent historical and
conceptual continuity than its current status as an anachronism. A short
while ago, we would still have been able to update Nietzsche or Aeschylus
by proclaiming that a little object, a compact disk, had taken the place of
the mind and that it was now the cd that was receiving the burning-in and
doing the hurtingand the rememberingfor us. From the perspective of
our current digital world, however, the externalization of memory may still
Volume 22, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1428816

2011 by Brown University andd i f f e r e n c e s:A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
2 In Pursuit of the Object of Sound
hold, but we increasingly talk not of burning and hurting but of flows and
streams. Compact disks and other hard storage devices have given way to
a softened materiality and, indeed, ethereality. We now store our memories
and our music in the cloud, an expression that conjures changeability,
intangibility, and an almost angelic transcendence of the bodily. How, then,
should we rethink Nietzsches metaphor and its materialist associations?
The interplay between technological mediation and percep-
tionincluding the metaphors and associations that entangle them, as in
the classic figure of memory storage and retrieval outlined aboveforms
the basis of our collective inquiry into what may, if ever so tentatively,
be called the object of sound. Our contributors call on a series of related
terms that slide between referential and figurative registers: resonance,
timbre, whisper, echo, silence, voice, rawness, rhythm, noise, antinoise,
near inaudibility, signal, and dissonance. Using these termsand often in
the form of synecdoche for something like sound in generalthey pursue
this elusive object along philosophical, scientific, technological, musi-
cal, historical, and other paths of inquiry. What they all bring to the fore
is the key challenge posed by the sense of sound: the question of (sonic)
objectivity itself.
An image appears before usor at least appears to appear
before us. As a visual phenomenon, objects are generally discrete; they
have a (sur)face and exteriority. The beam mechanism of projection cap-
tures this nicely: the images are out there, on the screen, and framed by
it. Sound, on the other hand, does not appear to stand before us but rather
to come to or at us. Yet even when we attend to a sounds source, we sense
sound as an emanation and as filling the space around us. Objects as sonic
phenomena are points of diffusion that in listening we attempt to gather.
This work of gatheringan effort to unify and make cohereimplies
that subjectivity is involved whenever we try to draw some boundary
in the sonic domain.1 This is perhaps why sound has traditionally been
conceptualizedor perhaps idealizedin terms of plenitude and as a
continuumthat is, as something not obviously divisible. In the English
language, such a conceptualization seems at play in various connotations
of the word sound: as a deep body of water; as the quality of firmness
or of purity (the ringing of coins made of precious metal as opposed to
the clunk of a base alloy); as an unbroken condition (as in being sound
asleep). 2 When we recognize that these uses are etymologically unrelated
to sound meaning sonic phenomenon, do these connotations decay? Or
do they resonate around us all the more?
d i f f e r e n c e s 3
Turning to religion, myth, and fiction, we find that the occur-

rence of sound has been narrativized in a number of fascinating ways.
Here sound is frequently treated as a source of mystery and of powerone
that arouses emotions of fear, bewilderment, anxiety, disorientation, or
madness. In the Book of Genesis, Gods voice is not only a creative force
but is also heard in Eden as an unseen source of dread by Adam and Eve
after they have eaten of the forbidden fruit. Or consider the same numi-
nous voice instructing Abraham to kill Isaac. The unverifiable location of
this aural encounterwhich we might also describe as unfathomable or
unsoundablebecomes for Erich Auerbach the definitive stylistic feature
of the Hebraic representation of truth, which in turn leads him to propose
an alternative inception for the Western literary canon to the Hellenic one
(Mimesis, ch. 1). To use a term coined by Michel Chion, God in Auerbachs
reading is the first acousmtre (a being who is nothing but a voice and
whose visual presence is obscured) (The Voice in Cinema 1729). 3
For his part, Homer tells of Odysseuss encounter with the
Sirens, whose alluring sounds have compelled many interpretations over
the centuries. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno recast the episode
into a vivid image of modern mans existential predicament. While Odys-
seus cleverly plugs his oarsmens ears with wax so they can row at full
strength, he himself is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, bound
impotently to the mast (34) like a prisoner. If Odysseus can hear the
Sirens songs, he is also immobilized, whereas the oarsmen, precisely
because they cannot hear them, are able to proceed with their task, dog-
gedly and with mechanical efficiency. Odysseus in this account prefigures
the cunning of bourgeois rationality and its attempts to control and to
instrumentalize nature. In his encounter with the Sirens, we also glimpse
how the sensuous pleasures integral to aesthetic enjoyment are segregated
from manual labor. Art in modern times, as personified by Odysseus, has
become abstract and inconsequential.
In his short tale The Silence of the Sirens, Franz Kafka, less
dour than the Frankfurt Institute theorists, responds to the alarm sounded
by the songstresses in a decidedly strategic yet playful manner by rewriting
Homers episode in two major ways. First, he has our hero plug up his own
ears with wax, as though, to stave off distraction and danger, he must arm
himself with something like iPod earbuds or the noise-canceling head-
phones preferred by voyagers today. Kakfa then delivers another surprise
by proclaiming that the Sirens had a still more fatal weapon than their
song, namely their silence, and that in their encounter with Ulysses they
actually did not sing (24849). In an inversion of the acousmatic, the

Sirens are reduced to lurid visuals: they are lovelier than ever in their
part-human, part-animal creatureliness, [clinging] with their claws to
the rocks as Ulysses makes his escape sailing past them. By doubly turn-
ing the Sirens offwe might say that he hits the mute button twiceKafka
not only honors the classic patriarchal preference for women to be seen,
not heard, but he also transforms his Ulysses into the figure of allurement
who now vies with the females in being seductively mysterious. At the end
of the tale, a codicil suggests that Ulysses, who the reader has been led
to believe did not perceive the actual silence of Sirens, was more clever
than that and had simply feigned ignorance. Naive or devious, innocent
or cunningKafka leaves us with questions that are less about the Sirens
themselves than about their resister. 4 Is the silencing or silence of these
females the effect of his plugged-up auditory capacities? Or is it something
that he knows but pretends not to? Does the condition of female silence
have a reality independent of male hearing or even of (possibly feigned)
nonhearing?
By way of contrast and perhaps complement, we might recall
how Ovid handles gendered divisions in relation to sound. By making
woman the emitter of echoes of amorous communication, however incom-
prehensible, Ovid reveals that sound, as personified by the nymph Echo,
rather than image is the unacknowledged foundation of male narcissism
and ultimately of mortiferous self-knowledge. 5
The ambiguous oscillation between sound as that which one
tries to capture and that itself is a force of capture is particularly prevalent
insofar as boundlessness remains a determinant in the thinking about
sound (or, for that matter, about silence). Sonic objectification is almost by
default organized through a Romantic paradigm, whereby sonic capture is
understood implicitly as the capture of that which is lost. More succinctly
put, sound is always capture, and capture is always loss. 6 This Romantic
legacy helps explain why the study of sound tends to follow two major
trajectories of explication. One involves the elaboration of the sonic in
an empirical network of scientific and technological inventions. In this
trajectory, technical skills, instruments, and experiments, often rendered
as measurable and quantifiable, become the means of charting the sonic
as mediated by machines and technologies. The other trajectory, typically
focused on the sonic as ineffable effect, moves us instead in the direction
of the phenomenology of audition and perception, for which the sonic is
mediated first and foremost by the human sensorium, through the ears and
the skin, and through cultivated habits of response.7 In this instance, the
human sensoriums lack of precisionits propensity toward error, decep-
tion, and subjectivismmakes for an interesting contrast with the path of
machines and technical skills. In both instances, however, the approach
to mediation rests on the assumption that sound is elusive. No matter how
meticulous and refined, sonic capture is imagined as a pyrrhic victory:
sound is forever elsewhere; it has always already escaped.
The persistence of the Romantic paradigm is perhaps one rea-
son that the discourse of loss continues to drive audiophile communities.
Audiophiles are typically obsessed with fidelity and reproduction of the live
original as the technological ideal, and they tend to love analog technolo-
gies such as turntables and vinyl since analog suggests reproduction via
isomorphism: following the real contours of the sonic sources themselves.
The discourse of loss is also evident in the terminology adopted by sound
engineers such as lossy, degradation, deterioration, and so forth. Even so,
we would like to propose that something of a rupture may be tracked in the
midst of all thisand not simply because there are now lossless formats,
which seem to promise plenitude through digitization. The larger ques-
tion is, rather: what has become of loss in the age of digitized sound, with
MP3, MP4, and other file formats that contain more and more information?
Using a lossy compression algorithm, the MP3 format, for
instance, records and stores data as strings of binary numbers, translat-
ing sound into discrete states of zeros and ones. Frequencies that are per-
fectly natural but inaudible to the human brain can be left out. Data can
also be further processed and cleaned up in a variety of ways. To pick
one example: the singers breathing that used to fill the gaps and silences
in a recording can now be eliminated. Yet what digitization as a process
suggests is that while certain elements of the supposed original (such as
the sounds that accompany the normal functioning of the human body or
frequencies beyond our range) can be made to disappear, we might think
of such disappearance less as loss than as supplement: the addition to
what is stored and recovered of a new quality of purityand one that
will not diminish with repeated use. What has in the tradition appeared
to be a negative trait is by the same process recoded as a positive outcome:
additional compactness, additional pristineness. Capture, in other words,
need no longer be imagined as simply a form of subtraction: the always
less-than-perfect remainder taken from a plenitude. It is rather a formal-
ization of an instantaneous conversionand limitless replenishingin
which actuality turns into potentiality and vice versa. The correspondence
between capture and loss, a correspondence that has for so long been
accepted, naturalized, and taken for granted in our habits of thinking,
has been interrupted.
It is tempting to compare such interruption to Walter Benja-
mins famous description of the interruption and decline of the traditional
artworks aura in the age of technical reproducibility (The Work of
Art). Benjamins thesis, which, among other things, pertains to the new
repeatability of the image in the age of celluloid (significantly, with the
use of photographic negatives or, in French, clichs), 8 prompts the parallel
observation that sound, in the age of mass recordings, is also eminently
repeatable and copyable. Indeed, the age of mass recordings has made
certain questions inevitable: Is not what we call hearing and listening
always a form of recording, an organic copying? Is there, then, any sound
as such that is not already a copy? Are not all sounds, even the most
revolutionary, sonic clichs? These parallels between the mass-produced
image and mass-produced sound notwithstanding, it is sound, on account
of its age-old association with both unbroken plenitude and loss, that we
believe more pointedly spotlightsor amplifiesthe phenomenon of a
senses separation from itself through mediation, a process that is at once
alienating and productive of reflexivity (the opening of self-awareness
and of self-critical distance). As is evidenced by chronologically earlier
recording technologies such as the phonograph, the gramophone, the vinyl
record, steel wire, reel-to-reel magnetic tape, and cassettes, sounds sepa-
ration from itself almost invariably takes the objectified form of writing,
through which a machinic-cum-perceptual boundary emerges between
sounds appearance (as recorded sound) and disappearance (whatever
remains unrecorded). Even though that boundary used to be drawn on
an analog basis of sound capture, with amplitudes of vibrations that can
always contain more variations (or impurities), it would seem fair to say
that, once sound begins being recorded or written on a material surface (as
the words graph, gram, and track remind us), the paradoxical situation of
sonic loss and gainof sonic loss as gainhas already begun. The digital
revolution, in this regard, has simply brought that paradoxical situation
up to date by giving it a high-definition rigor and clarity.
In the realm of sound, therefore, a kind of ephemerality is
structural to processes of transmission, but, as digitization has made
explicit, such ephemerality might be treated as less about decay, degrada-
tion, and depletionthe wearing out that comes with time and with copy-
ingthan about a state in flux, indeed the state of what might be called
to-be-improvedness. If and when actualized, such to-be-improvedness

would turn what has hitherto been assumed as normal sound and hearing
into a kind of inferior sound and impaired hearing. Digitization, in other
words, has brought about a basic reversal of the Romantic paradigm. If
origin was once likened to an indivisible continuum, digitization has
turned sonic origination itself into an unfinished and impure copy, one
that awaitsor potentiatesenhancement in the very process of being
recorded, transmitted, and retransmitted, ad infinitum. The object of
sound, if it can be so called, is now a series of infinitely encodable varia-
tions, a series in which what is specifically human (such as a cough or a
sigh), as it is being archived and reused in bits and pieces, has become
joyously superfluousor transformed into a mere starter. Is this joyous
superfluity a sign of the posthuman, the condition in which the human
as such is no longer either the origin or destination? Or is it the latest
version of idealismwhat might be called digital idealism and that we
glimpse in the ethereal data cloudand thus another form of humanism?
If the discourse of loss, including the technical talk of lossy and lossless
formats, should remain constitutive of the way we make sense of sound,
as we suspect it will for some time to come, the nostalgic, humanistic
tones of Romanticism should probably be among the first to be remixed
and reprocessed.
We would like to thank Denise Davis, Rachel Greenspan, Calvin Hui, and Karim Wissa for
their assistance with the preparation of this special issue. Our tasks would have been much
more daunting without the search efforts, bibliographic and editing support, and financial
resourcefulness they provided at important stages.
rey chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University and the author of
a number of books on literature, film, and cultural politics, including Sentimental Fabu-
lations, Contemporary Chinese Films (Columbia University Press, 2007). Her writings in
English have been widely reprinted and translated into multiple languages. She was the
editor of Writing in the Realm of the Senses, a special issue of differences 11.2 (Summer 1999).
More recent publications include The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman (Columbia
University Press, 2010), and Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Duke
University Press, forthcoming 2012).
james a. steintr ager is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Univer-
sity of California, Irvine. He is the author of Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the
Inhuman (Indiana University Press, 2004) and the forthcoming The First Sexual Revolu-
tion: Libertines, License, and the Autonomy of Pleasure (Columbia University Press, 2012).
He is currently working on global networks of mediaincluding music and filmand the
discursive construction of culture.
Notes 1 In a related vein, see Nancys not distract them from the mes-
suggestive remarks on the occur- sage (206). Chion adds that the
rence of music: [M]usic (or even production of an acousmatic voice
sound in general) is not exactly a through the prohibition of sight
phenomenon; that is to say, it does can be found in many rites and
not stem from a logic of manifes- religions, and in psychoanalytic
tation. It stems from a different practice, as well as in cinema.
logic, which would have to be
called evocation, but in this pre- 4 Compare Shapiros analysis of
cise sense: while manifestation sound and subjectivity in his
brings presence to light, evoca- Silence of the Sirens (3335).
tion summons (convokes, invokes)
5 See Spivaks groundbreaking
presence to itself (20).
discussion, which challenges
2 The sound of hearing is derived the elision of soundand with
from the Latin sonus. Sound it, the significance of Echothat
as a body of water seems to is characteristic of major rendi-
have come from an Old English tions of Ovids story of Narcissus
term sund (the power of swim- and Echo, including Freuds and
ming) with a Proto-Germanic Lacans.
root meaning sea. Sound as a
6 If we call this Romantic, it is not
description of pure metal or pro-
as a vague gesture. Wordsworth,
found sleep is traceable to the Old
in The Prelude, describes his
English gesund (from a Germanic
early attempts at poetry in terms
root) and means healthy.
of a sonic materialization that
3 Chion uses the term acousmtre fails to capture poetic thought:
in relation to Alfred Hitchcocks My own voice cheared me, and,
Psycho, in which Norman Batess far more, the minds / Internal
mother makes an exemplary echo of the imperfect sound (376
appearance as a voice seeking [Bk. 1, lines 6465]). If there is a
a body (we will turn to the gen- deconstructive aspect to thisthe
dered nature of sound discourse mind is not given as an origin but
shortly) (The Voice in Cinema rather as an echo or subsequent
14051). Chions analysis of the effect of sonic materializationit
film also appears in a modified only emphasizes the notion that
translation under the title The sonic capture is always imper-
Impossible Embodiment in fect; an impossible goal is here
Everything You Always Wanted paradoxically expressed.
to Know about Lacan, edited
7 For an exquisite example, see
by Slavoj iek. This version
Nancy.
includes a long note on Pierre
Schaeffers retrieval in the 1950s 8 For an argument that Benjamin
of the ancient term acousmatic, was mistaken about major aspects
which supposedly was the name of his topic and that this is the
given to a Pythagorean sect reason his essay has become so
whose adepts used to listen widely popular, see Hennion and
to their Master speaking from Latour.
behind a hanging, so that, it was
said, the sight of the sender would
Works Cited Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1946. Trans.
W. R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton up, 2003.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.
Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 21751.
Chion, Michel. The Impossible Embodiment. iek 195207.
. The Voice in Cinema. 1982. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia
up, 1999.
Hennion, Antoine, and Bruno Latour. How to Make Mistakes on So Many Things at Once
and Become Famous for It. Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Ed. Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan. Stanford: Stanford up, 2003. 9197.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Trans. John
Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1987.
Kafka, Franz. The Silence of the Sirens. 1936, 1937. The Great Wall of China: Stories and
Ref lections. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken, 1946. 24850.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. 2002. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham up, 2007.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. 1887, 1888. Ed. Walter
Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Shapiro, Michael J. Reading the Postmodern Polity: Textual Theory as Political Practice.
Minneapolis: u of Minnesota p, 1991.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Echo. New Literary History 24.1 (Winter 1993): 1743.
Wordsworth, William. The Major Works: Including the Prelude. 1805. New York: Oxford
up, 2008.
iek, Slavoj, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to
Ask Hitchcock). London: Verso, 1992.
veit erlmann
Descartess Resonant Subject
T
he reception of Ren Descartess (15961650) work has
always been notoriously selective. From the infamous Utrecht debate in
1648 to the intellectual turf battles of our time, few thinkers in the history
of Western thought have polarized opinion more than this seventeenth-
century philosopherand few now seem stranger and yet more familiar
at the same time. Descartess proclivity for abrupt, opinionated, and
sometimes contradictory statements may have a large role in the almost
mythical image posterity has constructed of him as the inventor of not
only the infamous mind-body binary but a whole string of stark dichoto-
mies: the opposition between rational thought and aesthetic judgment,
the difference between man and woman, and the contrast between vision
and hearing. Of these, the latter two oppositions are of particular inter-
est because there exists a surprising parallel between the unstable place
of Cartesian thought within the larger feminist project, on the one hand,
and the troubled relationship of the emerging field of sound studies to
Descartess views of the sense of hearing, on the other. The fundamental
issue at stake in both fields is whether the Cartesian disembodied mind

must be forever renounced as detrimental to these fields larger agendas

or whether, by contrast, certain aspects of the philosophers work may
be salvaged in an effort to develop alternative concepts of consciousness
and (gendered or auditory) personhood, demonstrating that some of Des-
cartess most entrenched views warrant fresh scrutiny. Feminist schol-
arstraditionally wary of Cartesianisms masculinization of thought
(Bordo 105)have been reluctant to reexamine the significance the fetus
has for modern concepts of identity in Descartess work. Despite a partial
revision of feminist theorys anti-Cartesian stance, liberal feminists worry
that in accepting the philosophers insistence on the subjecthood of the
fetus, they might compromise the philosophical rationale underlying Roe
v. Wade of birth as the dividing line of individuation, which would put
them in rather uncomfortable political company.
For their part, students of sound distrust modern epistemologys
Cartesian roots, citing the stereotypical view that Descartes, in yet another
act of male hegemony, fathered the modernist visualist paradigm (Jay
70). Never at a loss in asserting the prenatal and, frequently, the ontologi-
cal primacy of hearing, these scholars find little in the philosophers work
that might support concepts of subjectivity that transcend modernitys
cult of the eye. Indeed, not only did Descartes admit to being tone deaf,
he apparently did not even mind. Those most skilled at ordering their
thoughts, he was fond of saying, are always the most persuasive, even if
they speak only low Breton (Philosophical Writings 1: 114; at VI: 7).1 That
is to say nothing of Descartess musical preferences; if he took an interest
in it at all, music for him was little more than a part of the ancient qua-
drivium whose practical application, if any, was limited to such oddities
as a harpsichord with eighteen keys tuned according to ratios of small
whole numbers, or just intonation.
The argument of this essay is, first, that sound studies stands
to benefit from recuperating the Cartesian legacy in modern aurality.
Sound, music, and listening played an important role in the development
of Descartess thought from, in his words, the uncouth and immature
Compendium musicae of 1618 (Compendium musicae 52; at X: 140) to the
prolonged debate with Marin Mersenne during the 1620s to works from
his mature period such as Lhomme. Over a period of several decades,
Descartes frequently revisited and sometimes revised key propositions
of his prima philosophiasuch as the much-debated mind-body split set
out in the Meditationsby invoking sound. The philosopher conceived of
the ears relationship with rationality and epistemological certainty as the
12 Descartess Resonant Subject
foundation of modern subjecthood in far more ambiguous terms than the

eerie scene of bodily self-domestication in the Meditations might suggest.
Even more striking, there exists a previously unacknowledged
affinity between the philosophers forays into the realm of acoustics,
physiology, and music theory, on the one hand, and his reflections on the
fetus, on the other. Descartess acoustemology and epistemology of life
must be approached in tandem, as two intertwined discourses about one
of the most hotly debated issues of the time, resonance. A critical appraisal
of Descartess theory of resonance therefore not only sheds new light on
this thinkers significance for sound studies; it may also encourage (and
in turn be shaped by) new feminist readings of his work.
Resounding Reason
Resonance, as a quick glance at the Oxford English Diction-

ary shows, is an extremely multifaceted phenomenon, one that traverses
numerous semantic fields, scientific disciplines, cultural practices, and
discursive genres. Resonance can refer to the amplification of wave or
tidal motion in a body of water when this motion has the same frequency
as a natural vibration of the body of water. Physicists speak of resonance
when a particle is subjected to an oscillating influence (such as an elec-
tromagnetic field) of such a frequency that a transfer of energy occurs or
reaches a maximum. And in general language use, resonance denotes the
power or quality of evoking or suggesting images, memories, and emotions;
an allusion, connotation, or overtone. In the acoustic realm, resonance in
the most general sense describes the condition in which an oscillating or
periodic force acting on an object or system has a frequency close to that of
a natural vibration of the object. Most significantly, however, resonance
is also the concept at the heart of an influential theory of hearing accord-
ing to which the perception of pitch ensues from certain structures deep
inside the cochlea vibrating in phase with the oscillations of the outside
air. Commonly labeled the place resonance theory of hearing (because
the sensation of pitch is produced in a one-to-one correspondence between
the frequency of the outside airwaves and specific parts of the inner ear),
this concept of resonance was the dominant model for the biomechanics
of the human ear between 1683 (when Joseph-Guichard Duverney first
introduced it) and 1928 (when Georg von Bksy replaced it with a place
nonresonance theory) (Wever).
But it is in philosophy that resonance has perhaps given rise

to the most conflicting interpretations. To Cartesians, resonance simply
smacked of magic tout court, of things like astral influx and the like. As
such, it was the exact opposite of the concept of the mind as a mirror. By
contrast, Denis Diderot openly flirted with the image of the philosopher
who listens to himself in silence and darkness while his ideas make each
other quiver in the way the strings of a harpsichord make other strings
quiver (879). Meanwhile, Immanuel Kant, ever wary of any form of deter-
minism, rejected as barbaric the claim that aesthetic pleasure requires
the addition of stimuli and stirring [Rhrung] (13). It was only with the
publication of Martin Heideggers Being and Time in 1928 that resonance
was embraced as a cornerstone of the way philosophy might relate to its
other. As Jacques Derrida recognized, Heidegger may be the first philoso-
pher to reject philosophys obsession with absolute properness, or the
difference, epitomized by the tympanum, between what is proper to oneself
and what is the realm of the other (Tympan x). Heideggers otophilol-
ogy reorganized philosophy by admitting into its discourse a privileged
metonymy of ear and friend, a simultaneity of domains previously thought
of as dichotomies (Derrida, Heideggers Ear 164).
Yet it is precisely these conflicting interpretations of resonance
that invite us to revisit the Cartesian project in the hope that it might shed
new light on contemporary debates about the precarious interrelations
among aurality, cognition, subjectivity, and embodiment and their sig-
nificance within sound studies and feminist theory. Because resonance
names the other against which thought is privileged as philosophys core
operation and possibility, and because at the same time it denotes the
materiality of auditory perception, resonance is eminently suited to dis-
solve the binary of the materiality of things and the immateriality of signs
that have historically preoccupied feminist discourse (as, for instance, in
Luce Irigarays critique of Western epistemology as a logic that figures the
feminine as an essence to which thought might return) and now troubles
the field of sound studies. Resonance calls into question the notion that
the nature of things resides in their essence and that this essence can be
exhausted by a sign, a discourse, a logos. An account of something such as
resonance must therefore situate itself in a kind of echo chamber together
with other thingssigns, discourses, institutions, and practices.
It is the quest for this resonant space, for the convergence of
reason and resonance, that shaped Descartess entire work. While he
rarely tackled the issue of the union of body and mind head on (and then
only when he was assured a sympathetic reception, such as in the corre-
spondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia or his Utrecht sympathizer
Henricus Regius), Descartes did broach the subject indirectly, in fields as
diverse as physics, physiology, obstetrics, and music theory. In numerous
remarks scattered throughout his oeuvre, he rehearses the idea of a per-
son as a single substance composed of body and res cogitans by exploring
resonance and its interconnections with three terms that recur in his work
with remarkable regularity: resonare, concutere, and sympathia.
A Man Opens His Mouth
The human voice seems most pleasing to us because it most

directly conforms to our souls, Descartes writes on the first page of his
first known work, the Compendium musicae. He continues: By the same
token, it seems that the voice of a close friend is more agreeable than the
voice of an enemy because of sympathy or antipathy of feelingsjust as it is
said that a sheep-skin stretched over a drum will not give forth any sound
when struck if a wolfs hide on another drum resonates at the same time
[lupina in alio tympano resonante] (11; at X: 90). Descartes had written
the Compendium at the behest of the Dutch philosopher Isaac Beeckman,
who had taken the eighteen-year-old, freshly graduated scholar under his
wing and monitored his acoustic experiments. The short work was meant
as a dedication to Beeckman, as a token of our friendship, and as such
to be kept forever under lock by its recipient (Descartes, Compendium
musicae 53; at X: 141).
Resonance, then, occupied a firm place in Descartess work
from the outset, a place it was never to leave again until the philosophers
death. Small wonder that orthodox commentators ever since have con-
sidered Descartess reference to sympathia and resonare as bothersome
intrusions into the purity of philosophical discourse: a strange remark
harking back to Renaissance medicine (at X: 90, n.a.) and one patently
at odds with the laws of physics (Compendium of Music 11). Yet the point
for Descartes is actually not the property of sounds as such. These, he
goes on to state in the following sentence, concern the physicists [agant
Physici] (at X: 89). It is therefore not the factual basis of the remark (or
lack thereof) that ought to be of interest to us but the epistemological work
it does in Descartess text. Resonance and sympathy, Descartes seems to
suggest, are if not the essence then the condition of philosophy. Without
resonance, a voice will fail to find a sympathetic reception. Similar to the

principle operating between the skins of two drums (tympanum), the voice
requires an eardrum (tympanum) that is tuned to the same frequency to
be heard. If the voice and the eardrum of the other are, almost literally,
not on the same wavelength, the speakers words will be misunderstood,
or worse, they will not be heard at all. There will be no possibility for
discourse or even the recognition that such discourse ever took place.
Of course, all this stands in marked contrast to the philoso-
phers famous assertion that the only indubitable foundation of truth
rests in the fact that I am a thinking thing and that this res cogitans is
entirely and truly distinct from the body and can exist without it
(Descartes, Philosophical Writings 2: 54; at IX: 62). Although the word
indubitable has become commonplace in modern translations, Descartess
preferred Latin term is inconcussum (unshakable). Derived from the root
-cutere (to shake violently)which itself is based on the Indo-Germanic
-kwatthe term inconcussum is embedded in a rich semantic field. From
astrophysics and Descartess theory of tourbillons to Galileos experi-
ments with pendulums to Marin Mersennes work on the mechanics of
strings, various cognate forms of -cutere permeated scholarly discourse
during the Scientific Revolution. 2 But it is especially in two partly overlap-
ping fields of acoustic inquiry that terms such as percutere or concutere
recur with remarkable frequency: in the relationship between the fre-
quency of vibration and pitch and in the theory of musical consonance. 3
Not coincidentally, both fields also figure prominently in the fierce con-
troversies that accompanied Descartess career from start to finish, such
as the dispute that took place in Utrecht during the 1640s over the alleged
anti-Christian implications of Descartess philosophy and that pitted the
philosopher and his ally Henricus Regius against the theologian Gisbertus
Voetius and his pupil Martin Schoock (aka Martinus Schoockius). The lat-
ter had published De Natura Soni et Echus (On the Nature of Sound and of
the Echo), a work in which he distanced himself from the Peripatetics and,
on a superficial reading, even adopted a mechanist view of auditory per-
ception. Sound, according to Schoock, is not a sensible quality [qualitas
sensibilis], separate from the mechanical process of aerial transmission.
For if sound were a quality, it would differ from the movement of the bodies
themselves, and air in motion would be one thing and sound another. So
what is the purpose of this quality, as if air, when it is moved and prompted
in a certain way, does not already itself move the eardrum? What else is
there to say about sound but that it is air in motion itself [sonus sit ipse
ar motus], or rather, repercussed air [repercussus] that is perceived

by the soul (Schoockius 8)?
Schoocks critique did not dispense with qualities entirely,
though. Might there be the possibility, he wondered, that while such
qualities do not inhere in the material objects themselves, they are at least
produced by the motion of air? To Schoocks ears, this was impossible; the
perception of sound was instantaneous. Because the sound of a cannon
is heard the moment it is fired, who would say that sound, as a quality,
is produced by a motion and fraction of the air when it has already been
heard? (Schoockius 4).
Descartes found Schoocks position unacceptable. Although
he, too, accepts certain qualities, these reside entirely in the mind of the
perceiver. Furthermore, such qualities are not the result of a relationship
of unmediated resonance between air and soul and therefore bear not the
slightest resemblance to the physical force causing them. A man opens
his mouth, moves his tongue, and breathes out: I see nothing in all of these
actions which is in any way similar to the idea of the sound that they cause
us to imagine (Descartes, World 5).
Another area in which -cutere played an important role is musi-
cal pitch. Ever since Pythagoras (c. 570497 bc), pitch had been determined
by establishing the ratios of musical intervals in relation to the length of a
string on a monochord. An interval was deemed most consonant when the
number of divisions of the string necessary to obtain the consonance could
be expressed by a simple, inverted proportion. An octave, for instance,
was considered the most consonant interval for the simple reason that it
is produced by dividing the string into two halves, which gives a ratio of
2:1. A fifth, accordingly, corresponds to a ratio of 3:2 and a fourth to one of
4:3. By contrast, intervals such as the major third or second are obtained
by dividing the string according to ratios of 5:4 and 9:8, respectively, and
were therefore considered dissonances.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, the conception that
music was born of mother arithmetic, as one anonymous ninth-century
tract had put it, increasingly came to be regarded with suspicion (Musica
65). One of the first attempts to link pitch to the frequency of vibrat-
ing bodies was Girolamo Fracastoros discussion of resonance in his De
sympathia et antipathia rerum (Of the Sympathy and Antipathy between
Things) of 1546. Pitch, the Veronese physician argued, depends on the fre-
quency of impulses (impulsiones) transmitted through the air. Because air
is matter that is dense in itself, its forceful compression through a blow
(ictus) results in the condensation (addensatio) where previously there

had been rarefaction (rarefactio), the series of alternating condensations
and rarefactions producing a wavelike motion (more undarum) (qtd. in
Crombie 786).
Though it remained unconfirmed for several centuries, Fra-
castoros theory of condensation and rarefaction signaled the possibility
of a major reversal of Pythagorean dogma, paving the way for a new type
of empirical inquiry into pitch in which the physics of vibrating bodies
merged with the study of the perception of consonance and dissonance on
the basis of coinciding pulses of air. Furthermore, as Hendrik F. Cohen has
shown in his classic study Quantifying Music, the first serious attempts
at defining consonance through coincidence were made at the same time
as Descartes was elaborating his new epistemology. Over a period of less
than three decades, natural philosophers such as Johannes Kepler, Gali-
leo, and Mersenne had linked consonance to the observation that the ear
judges those intervals to be the most consonant in which the pulses of air
produced by two strings coincide most frequently. As Galileo reasoned
at the end of the First Day of his seminal Discorsi (1638), if a string of a
certain length is struck, it regularly pulsates back and forth perpendicu-
lar to its axis, thus displacingor percussing, as he and other scholars
preferred to call itthe surrounding air (1048). But since the frequency
of these pulsating movements determines pitch, it follows that strings of
varying lengths, tension, and thickness also percuss the air at different
frequencies and consequently yield different pitches. When two strings
of the same pitch (which is called unison) are sounded together, their
percussions obviously coincide at the same time, which is the beginning
and end point of each complete swing. By contrast, when strings of dif-
ferent pitches are sounded together, their percussions coincide only in an
inverse proportion to the respective length of the string. For example, if
two strings are tuned an octave apart, the higher string will vibrate twice
as fast as the lower string and therefore will have completed its first com-
plete swing while the lower string has completed only half of its swing.
Put another way, the pulses of two strings tuned an octave apart coincide
every second pulse; in a fifth, they coincide after the higher string has
completed three swings and the lower one two, and so on. Consequently,
for Galileo and other thinkers of the early modern era, the pleasure we
experience in hearing an octave is a function of the greater coincidence
of percussions, and the experience of dissonance in turn is a function of
the greater scarcity of such coincidence.
Needless to say, sympathetic resonance is key to this coin-

cidence theory, as Cohen labels these findings. The observation that a
plucked string is able to set in motion another string nearby tuned to the
same pitch or an octave or fifth higher was proof that the perception of
consonance is based in percussions.
The Physiology of the Beautiful
But how set was Descartes really on opposing mind and ear?
Why did he invoke resonance to refer to the pursuit of knowledge through
friendly discourse in the Compendium, while in the Meditations the same
referent names the perils that threaten the acquisition of certainty through
disembodied reasoning? After going to great pains to create the image of
the mind as something so withdrawn from corporeal things that it does
not even know whether any people existed before it (Philosophical Writ-
ings 2: 249; at VII: 361), why did he risk blurring this sharp distinction
by hinting at the possibility that domains he considered to be otherwise
incommensurable could only be figured within and around the semantic
space of resonance?
Several answers are possible. The first might take as its point
of departure the standard narrative about the origin of rationalist philoso-
phy in the famous dreams of 1619 in which Descartes saw the outlines of a
marvelous science based on the exclusion of the bodily realm from that
of reason. As a supplement to this narrative, one might argue that one of
Descartess first attempts at casting this moment of rupture in a scholarly
mold did not involve an epistemological argument as much as it turned on
an aesthetic problem. In a series of letters written between January and
March 1630 to his chief correspondent, Mersenne, Descartes famously
took issue with Mersennes lament that in music, experience and reason
are in conflict with one another. By this the Jesuit priest meant that the
majority of musicians were holding thirds to be more pleasurable than
fourths, even though the fourth is actually in accordance with reason on
account of its ratio of 4:3 being closer to the octave and unison (Mer-
senne, Propositions 2223). The beautiful, Descartes countered, cannot be
determined rationally because it lacks any objective content. The separa-
tion of the beautiful from the rational is in reality a physiological issue or,
more precisely, a question of auditory perception. Therefore, he writes, the
way around Mersennes problem is to distinguish between consonances
that are accordant and others that are pleasant. As for the accordant
consonances, mathematical calculations serve only for showing which

consonances are the simplest, or, if you prefer, the sweetest and the most
perfect ones (Descartes Mersenne. janvier 1630; at I, 108).
In order to determine what is most pleasing, he goes on to state,
we must consider the hearers capacity, and this, like taste, varies from
person to person. From this it follows that the beautiful and the pleasant
only signify the relationship of our judgment to the object. It makes more
sense to speak of the beautiful in relative terms, in the sense that those
things that appeal to the multitude are simply the most beautiful (Des-
cartes Mersenne. 18 mars 1630; at I, 133). In short, the beautiful and the
pleasant do not have any specific measure, and as such no truthful state-
ments can be made about them.
But there is a second part to this narrative of the birth of aes-
thetics (and, indirectly, of Cartesian epistemology) in the act of listening,
one that is often overlooked but is of special interest to us here because
in it the relationship between reason and experience is beginning to be
figured positively. According to this narrative, the early history of aesthetic
theory is one of a progression from Cartesian dualism to Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibnizs reworking of the relationship of consciousness and the senses
along more flexible lines. Descartess strategy of shifting the beautiful
from its accustomed place in rhetorics or Pythagorean-style cosmologies
to the realm of the sensesand, concurrently, of banishing sensory expe-
rience from the sphere of the mindmight be said to instantiate auditory
resonance as the arbiter of the beautiful. A persons power to override the
rule of reason in judging a third to be more pleasant than a fourth defines
the aesthetic sphere as the realm of resonance tout court. But by the same
token, this act also constitutes the rational as a resonance-proof sphere,
as that which cannot be linked to the body by way of resonance.
In contrast, Leibnizs seminal move consisted in reinstating res-
onance as a principle bridging the Cartesian divide. His theory of percep-
tions is based on the notion that monads constantly produce perceptions
as a result of what he calls an inner principle or appetitus that propels
the souls transition from one perception to the next. In contrast to Des-
cartes, however, Leibniz does not reduce this dynamic force to egos ability
to become its own nonresonant foundation through cogitation. Leibnizs
inner principle includes unconscious forces: the famous petites percep-
tions such as, for instance, the sound of each single ocean wave that we
hear without being aware of doing so. Unlike Descartes, Leibniz does not
believe that this je ne sais quoi of our unconscious perceptions can be fully
distinguished from rational thought. It overlapsor resonates, one might

saywith thought in that it enables us to grasp things such as the sound
of the ocean in their totality even while it simultaneously draws us into a
sequence of confused images. Ultimately, then, it is by recognizing the
proximity of reason and the senses within this inner principle that Leibniz
is able to introduce resonance as a legitimate object of knowledge and,
more importantly, as constitutive for the very possibility of philosophical
discourse.
Descartess invention of the aesthetic as the antithesis of the
rational and Leibnizs theory of perceptions set the parameters of the fun-
damental conflict that shapes aesthetic debate to this day. On reflection,
however, the two positions are less opposed than they appear. Descartes
himself grappled with the consequences of the antinomy he had created. By
suspending sound studies anti-ocular, anti-Cartesian stance and attend-
ing to the epistemic ambiguity of -cutere in Descartess work, it may be
possible to reassess Descartess project of reconciling the mind and the
body. To do so, however, it is necessary to go beyond the Passions of the
Soul and the philosophers well-known statements to Princess Elizabeth of
Bohemia and to focus on the finer points of Descartess otology: on those
epistemic things, in other words, that are closest to resonance, such
as the material ear and its parts. 4
As is well known, Descartes took a lively interest in anatomy. He
dissected countless animals (which he obtained from Amsterdams butcher
shops) and read widely on medical topics. It is also safe to assume that
he possessed a working knowledge of the anatomy of the human ear. His
Principles and his posthumously published anatomical excerpts included
short descriptions of the ear and several crude sketches (copied from the
lost originals by Leibniz) of the cochlea, the stapes, and the tympanum (at
XI: 58182). Descartes also liked to quote from Institutiones anatomicae
by Gaspar Bauhin (15601624), a professor of anatomy at Basel University.
Published in 1604 and enjoying wide circulation throughout the European
medical establishment, Bauhins work was less an original work than a
synthesis of state-of-the-art knowledge produced during the latter half of
the sixteenth century by what is sometimes called the Italian school of
anatomy. Its leading figures, scholars such as Gabriele Falloppio (152362),
Bartolommeo Eustachio (151074), Fabrici Acquapendente (15331619),
and Guilio Casseri (c. 15521612), had also made major discoveries in
otology, describing (and in some cases even producing some of the first,
meticulously illustrated plates of) such key components of the ear as the
aqueduct, the tensor tympani, the membranous labyrinth, and the tube
linking the middle ear to the throat.
In contrast to the anatomy of the ear, however, the physiology
of hearing during the first half of the seventeenth century rested on much
shakier foundations. It clustered around two key concepts: aer innatus or
aer implantatus, and echo. Known since the pre-Socratics, the innate air
or implanted air was said to originate in the maternal womb, from where
it found its way into the fetuss middle and inner ears. Its substance was of
an ethereal kind, different from ordinary air and more akin to the Platonic
pneuma blowing through the universe. Doubts about this special quality
of the aer innatus were first voiced by Volcher Coiter (153476), author of
the first monograph on the ear, De auditus instrumento (1573). Because
of its direct communication with the outside air via the Eustachian tube,
Coiter reasoned, the innate air had to be plain air after all, ill suited for
the Platonic qualities attributed to it. Instead, the mediating role of the
innate air had to be understood in mechanical terms, as a form of actio et
passio between the sentient thing (the ear) and the thing sensed (air). Yet
even though this mutual agreement is mediated by the interposition of
the membrane [tympanum] and of certain ossicles as well as the twist-
ing and turning windings of the cochlea, resonance does not come into
play. The role of the cochlea, in Coiters view, is to absorb surplus sound
such as echoes and to carry the sound without any disturbance to the
auditory nerve (qtd. in Crombie 386).
Descartess chief authority on the ear, Gaspar Bauhin, differed
with Coiter on the role of echo. Instead of reducing echoes, he argued,
the ear is designed to take advantage of them. Since the tympanic cavity
consists of openings of different shapes and sizes, echoes also contain an
element of selective resonance: lower tones are received in larger spaces,
higher tones in the narrow ones. Elsewhere, however, Bauhin leaned more
toward the view advanced by Coiter that the proper organ of hearing is not
the cochlea as such but the endings of the auditory nerve.
In summary, while the study of vision during Descartess life-
time (and in no small measure due to Descartess own work) progressed
more rapidly than research on the other senses, otology did witness
something of a paradigm shift during this era. After centuries during
which the tympanum held sway as a kind of corporal tertium compara-
tionis, otologists shifted the focus of attention farther inward, toward the
cochlea and the auditory nerve. Although the physiology of these parts
continued to elude scientists until well into the nineteenth century, the
shift was an important step in granting listening a modest autonomy by

unmooring the sensation of sound from a form of unconscious calculus of
divinely ordained harmonic proportions. But above all, the new anatomy
and, with certain restrictions, physiology of hearing offered to Descartes
a welcome terrain on which to pursue his lifelong project of rethinking
the mind-body relationship.
The Quill and the Nerve
One prominent place where this project appears to have reached

something of a turning point is a section in the Treatise of Man in which
Descartes offers one of his more developed discussions of the ear:
As to the filaments [filets] that serve as a sense organ of hearing

[...] it suffices instead to suppose: [a] that they are so arranged
at the back of the ear cavities that they can be easily moved,
together and in the same manner, by the little blows [secousses]
with which the outside air pushes a certain very thin membrane
[the tympanum] stretched at the entrance to these cavities; and
[ b] that they [these filaments] cannot be touched by any other
object than by the air that is under this membrane. For it will
be these little blows which, passing to the brain through the
intermediation of these nerves, will cause the soul to conceive
the idea of sound. (4546; at XI: 149)
Elsewhere Descartes had made similar propositions, albeit with minor

modifications. Thus in a short section of his Anatomica he describes the
auditory nerve as consisting of three branches (ramus) (at XI: 581). In
the Principles he also mentions the three ossicles and what he calls the
surrounding air (Philosophical Writings 1: 282; at VIII: 319). What is
striking in the passage above, however, is the complete absence of either
the middle ear or the cochlea. And so the question is why the philosopher
here seems to fall behind his considerably more advanced otological
knowledge as evinced in the Anatomica sketches. As a closer look at the
passage reveals, there is something more original and potentially more far
reaching in this passage, despite its awkward prose and weak empirical
base. The absence of the cochlea is less a sign of ignorance on the phi-
losophers part than a shrewd move bolstering Descartess larger project
of reconciling resonance with reason.
To Descartes, nerves were tubes, which he called filaments

( filets), that were filled with very thin threads that transmitted physical
motion to the brain, where small pores would open containing the esprits
animaux, or animal spirits. These, in turn, would move back to the muscle
that first experienced the sensory stimulation, inflating it and thus caus-
ing it to move. But although in this theory nerves generally were held to
be passive matter and hence just another form of res extensa, as the main
operators in the interchange of body and mind, they also occupied a lim-
inal position between physiology and psychology, a position crucial for
Descartess later work on the biology of emotions.
The auditory nerve had an even more liminal status. Thus the
first feature to be noted about the auditory nerve is that apparently there
is not one nerve, but many filets. Second, these filaments are agitated by
the secousses of air together and in the same manner. Finally, to produce
the idea of pitch, the soul selects the sensations it receives by arithmeti-
cally matching the frequency of the vibrations to the concepts of order
lodged at its core.
There are clear advantages to this theory, sparse though it may
be. What Descartes may be arguing for is a resonance theory in which a
great deal more autonomy is granted to nerve fibers than in his physiology
in general. Contrary to the concept of the nerves as passive transmitters
of animal spirits and the subsidiary idea that the entire nerve responds to
a stimulus in much the same way as the top of a quill pen moves during
writing, the philosopher seems to entertain the possibility of the auditory
nerve being subject to an altogether different form of movement. As he
argues in the Meditations, nerves produce the same sensation regardless
of the point at which they are stimulated. Since the nerves in our feet,
for example, go right up to the brain, we feel pain even when these
nerves are touched in some intermediate parts, such as the calf or lumbar
region, and the more distant part does nothing (Philosophical Writings
2: 60; at VII: 86). In modern terms, if the sciatic nerve is affected in the
lumbar region (by a herniated disc in the spinal vertebra, for instance), it
will produce pain and muscle weakness in the extremities. Analogously,
the auditory nerve will produce sound, no matter whether it is struck by
blows of air at its alleged endpoint in the tympanum or somewhere else
along its path toward the brain. In both cases, the ensuing sensation of
sound will fail to provide reliable information on the exact nature and
location of its source.
By the same token, the soul is being downgraded to an ancillary

role. In a section following the one quoted above, Descartes invokes the
coincidence theory of consonance:
[W]hen many [blows] succeed one another, as one sees in the

vibrations [tremblements] of strings and of bells when they ring,
then these little blows will compose one sound which [a] the soul
will judge [to be] smoother or rougher according as the blows
are more or less equal to one another, and which [ b] it will judge
[to be] higher or lower according as they succeed one another
more promptly or tardily, so that if they are a half or a third or
a fourth or a fifth more prompt in following one another, they
will compose a sound which the soul will judge to be higher by
an octave, a fifth, a fourth, or perhaps a major third, and so on.
And finally, several sounds mixed together will be harmonious
or discordant according as more or less orderly relations exist
[among them] and according as more or less equal intervals
occur between the little blows that compose them. ( Treatise 47;
at XI: 150)
No longer the supreme arbiter it had been in the scholastic tradition of

how several sounds mixed together match up with the absolute truth
enshrined in mathematical ratios, the souls role is reduced to that of a
mere observer, monitoring the structural equivalencethe according
aslinking the objective coincidence of physical blows to the subjective
experience of consonance and dissonance.
In many ways, all of this might be seen as clashing with the
assertion that the secousses of air pass to the brain in some form of tempo-
ral sequence. But it might also be read as an early incarnation of Johannes
Mllers concept (developed almost two centuries later) of the nervous sys-
tem as a self-referential system rooted in what he called sense energies.
Individual nerves of the senses, the nineteenth-century physiologist
maintained, have a special sensibility to certain impressions by which
they are supposed to be rendered conductors of certain qualities of bodies,
and not of others. Or, more floridly, the nervous system here illuminates
itself, there sounds itself, here feels itself, there again smells and tastes
itself (59). In fact, when we put Descartess model of noncochlear hear-
ing side by side with other propositions in which the philosopher draws
on nonacoustic forms of vibration to argue for the relative autonomy of
sensation, we begin to grasp the ambiguity of his larger quest for a more
resonant form of reason than the one grounded in the purity of cogito. One
of these propositions is a section in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii in
which Descartes sets up a contrast between reason and the senses (or,
as he puts it, ratio and phantasia) by comparing them to the movements
of a quill during writing. In the former, the tip of the quill transmits its
movement to the entire quill. The imagination, by contrast, can generate
many different images that then result in quite different and opposite
movement at the top of the quill (Philosophical Writings 1: 42; at X: 415).
As Christoph Menke has shown, this passage highlights the
ambiguous place of the imagination within Descartess epistemology (16).
Although it is capable of producing divergent images, sensory perception
remains the handmaiden of reason at best. At the same time, however, the
passage anticipates Leibnizs distinction between dark and clear percep-
tions. The soul, Descartes seems to imply, knows something even though
it cannot know exactly what it is that it knows because by definition the
beautiful has no knowable content. The souls knowledge thus is uncon-
scious knowledge that is gained from experience, from the ability to use
equivalence as a means of relating things to each other that cannot be
related on the basis of reasoning.
Sympathia, Again
Contrary to conventional belief, Descartes held that each

human being, from the first moments of life in the maternal womb, is an
individual who is endowed by some miracle or act of God with a soul and
who is thus capable of conscious thought (Descartes Regius; at III: 461).
The fetuss auditory capabilities, by contrast, possess no such temporal
antecedence; like the other sense organs, they only form in the last phase
of fetal evolution. 5 But this phased development of our cognitive and audi-
tory capabilities in utero does not necessarily imply an ontological domi-
nation of the former over the latter. Nor does the separate development of
the fetuss mental and corporeal qualities mean that in Descartess view
the separation persists for the rest of our lives and that we cannot become
something in addition to being two beings in one. In fact, the possibility
of resonant thought becoming the operative principle shaping the unity
of body and minda possibility Descartes invoked often but never fully
explicatedis part of our natural, prenatal makeup in much the same way
that the intimacy of reason and resonance forms the ground on which we
continually reaffirm our personhood after birth.
Descartes elaborates two conditions of such intimacy, one natu-

ral, the other cultural. The first is discussed at length in a collection of
fragments that were written between 1630 and 1648 and posthumously
published as Cogitationes circa generationem animalium and as Descrip-
tion du corps humain: De la formation du ftus, Descartess last work on
a medical topic. What is striking in these texts is the recurrence through-
out of sympathia, the same strange term invoked in the Compendium
musicae to denote the resonant qualities of drums and friendly voices and
that functioned as the companion term of resonare and concutere used in
several other works. Even more noticeable is the fact that, contrary to the
claim that the early reference to sympathia was a sign of the philosophers
juvenile credulity vis--vis hermetic theories of astral influx or actio in
distans (Buzon 647) (a navet that is said to have been supplanted by a
more sober outlook in his mature work), Descartes never quite settled on a
clear definition of sympathia as either the work of occult forces or a matter
of plain physics. There is nothing in magnetism, for instance, that remains
outside of the sphere of science and that cannot therefore be referred to
purely corporeal causes, i.e., those devoid of thought and mind. To think
otherwise would be tantamount to accepting the existence of a miracle
of sympathy or antipathy (Philosophical Writings 1: 279; at VIII: 31415).
This position contrasts with several fragments of the Cogita-
tiones in which Descartes invokes sympathia to elucidate the formation
of the fetus. Here the philosopher constructs a sympathetic relationship
between those body parts that are linked by dint of symmetry, such as
the correspondence between the testicles and the brain (or the eyes).
But despite the reminiscences of Bauhin and other Renaissance medical
authorities, the force driving this overall sympathy between symmetrical
parts is anything but occult. It is the mothers heart that, though indepen-
dent from that of the fetus, impacts the formation of individual body parts
via the maternal blood. In fact, this rapport between all the movements
of the mother and those of the child (Philosophical Writings 3: 76; at XI:
429) is so strong that it even comprises the mothers thoughts, such that
from damaged maternal thoughts the fetus receives monstrous members
(at XI: 518). While Descartes here simply recapitulates basic tenets of pre-
formation theory, and even though the only specification he offers about
the nature of the transformation of maternal thoughts into blood is that
these pass (at VI: 129) and radiate (Philosophical Writings 1: 341; at
XI: 354) from their center in the pineal gland, the point is that sympathia
clearly operates through physical matter.
The second, cultural, requirement for the unity of reason and

resonance is, to use Descartess preferred term, training (entrane-
ment). Descartes invokes it frequently, and often in relation to animals
and rote learning. While still in the uterus, animals are said to be exposed
to certain situations that train them how to respond to similar situa-
tions later in their lives (at XI: 520). Lutenists, for their part, often learn
a piece of music not by remembering the sound but by memorizing the
fingering they use to produce these sounds. Statements like these have led
scholars to suspect an element of determinism in the philosophers views
on those forms of learning that do not occur on a higher plane. But even
where learning does require the intervention of a high level of intellectual
comprehension, a certain degree of routine is inevitable. Contrary to the
image of the peasant expressing himself rationally in low Breton, clarity of
thought cannot dispense with sensory perception and convention entirely.
The ability to communicate ones thoughts is based on the experience of
similar situations in which the relationship between perceived objects and
ideas has previously made sense. We are able to recognize the similarity
between the two situations not because we necessarily know what a color,
sound, or other such sensory impression is but because we have faith in the
stability of the relationship between signifier and signified. Even though
the production of such knowledge through a combination of sensory per-
ception and experience does not yield the same degree of specificity and
certainty as does rational thought, it is acquired in a way that can be said
to be structurally akin to rational thought.
Permeating Boundaries
Contrary, then, to the entrenched view of Descartes as the

arch-ocularcentrist and foe of the senses, grappling with the biomechan-
ics of auditory resonance may well have enabled Descartes to rehearse
the fragile proximity of reason and sensation. As material sympathia,
resonance reminds us of our past history of intrauterine dependency; as
culture, such resonance holds the promise that we might make ourselves
anew each time we listen, realizing our prenatal potential to become, at
some point in our postnatal lives, reasoning minds who resonate with their
own bodies and those of others.
Yet there are limits to how far we canand perhaps should
take Descartess tentative recuperation of resonance in rethinking the
foundations of modern rationality. There is in fact no illustration more
compelling of the perils of using resonance to question feminisms or

sound studies anti-Cartesian stance than one of feminisms most evocative
statements, Irigarays Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. No stranger to
accusations of essentialism herself, Irigaray in this book invokes sound,
the voice, and the ear to articulate a critique of the female as the exem-
plary echo chamber (3). In fact, the book opensmuch like Descartess
Compendium musicaewith resonance:
I was your resonance.

Drum [tympan]. I was merely the drum in your own ear sending
back to itself its own truth.
And, to do that, I had to be intact. I had to be supple and
stretched, to fit the texture of your words. My body aroused only
by the sound of your bell. (3)
In this and similar passages in Marine Lover, Irigaray may well be address-
ing what she considers to be Nietzsches figuration of woman as a physi-
cal setup that goes into vibration, amplifies what it receives all the more
perfectly because the stimulating vibration comes close to the systems
natural frequency (109). At the same time, the motif of resonance allows
her to turn against poststructuralisms and especially Derridas elision
of femininity under the guise of an all-out assault on essence tout court.
It is as though these lines are turning Derridas critique of phonocentric
hearing-oneself-speak back on itself. What Irigaray seems to imply is
that as long as it fails to recognize the feminization of aurality inherent in
the metaphysics of presence, Derridas critique of philosophys self-refer-
entiality will not succeed in puncturing the philosophers master organ,
the tympanum (Derrida, Tympan xii). Phonocentrism to her is more than
a mere indissociable system through which the subject affects itself
and is related to itself in the element of ideality (Derrida, Grammatology
12). And the tympanums role as the organ of absolute properness (Der-
rida, Tympan xix) requires more than its being capable of resonance and
of casting back philosophys logos on itself. Phonocentrism involves the
prior reduction of the female to a mere vocal medium, to a perpetual
relay between your mouth and your ear (Irigaray 3). The very possibility
of thought requires an essential, resonant femininity.
Clearly resonance in Irigarays view is doubly ill suited for chal-
lenging philosophys autism. It cannot be the ruse not belonging to rea-
son that would prevent philosophy from still speaking of itself (Derrida,
Tympanum xii). But by the same token, as the indispensable, feminized
condition of the philosophers truth, resonances usefulness to the feminist
critique of the Cartesian roots of modern rationality is limited. Hence to

render more permeable the boundaries between reason and resonance
remains a task as urgent today as it was for Descartes.
v eit erlm ann holds the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at
Austin. His most recent publication is Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
(Zone Books, 2010).
Notes 1 In accordance with Descartes 3 An excellent overview of seven-

scholarship, citations of modern teenth-century vibration theories
editions of Descartess works will is offered in Dostrovsky. See also
be followed by the corresponding Truesdell.
reference in the Oeuvres de Ren
Descartes edited by Charles Adam 4 The phrase epistemic things
and Paul Tannery (abbreviated as is Hans-Jrg Rheinbergers. It
at followed by volume and page denotes a biological entity or
number). function that embodies as yet
unsecured knowledge.
2 On the etymology of concutere,
see Thesaurus Linguae Latinae 5 at XI: 261/30 and 262/25263/25;
4.1: 11821. For percutere, see 10.1, Descartes, crits, Fragment [8];
fasc. 8: 123450. at XI: 513/35; Fragment [7];
atXI: 510/21.
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jonathan sterne and tar a rodgers
The Poetics of Signal Processing
A
n electronic musician sits onstage, amid a maze of small
boxes and cables, and twists knobs as the sound coming out of the speak-
ers slowly morphs and changes. A sound artist hunches over her laptop,
working intently with custom software objects. As she clicks a slider on
the interface, the sound is transformed. Elsewhere, an automated switch
system connects two wireless phone calls. A hard-of-hearing caller puts
the mobile phone to his ear and experiences distracting static as it inter-
acts with his hearing aid. At a house party, someone plugs a karaoke
machine into a home stereo; it removes the vocal track so that partiers
can sing along with backing tracks. The next day, the same system will
decode a 5.1 format dvd for listening through stereo speakers. A forensic
specialist cleans up an audio recording for a trial by removing some
background sounds and highlighting others. A radio station compresses
a song so that drivers will hear their broadcast as if it were louder than
their competitors when flipping through the dial. Some of those drivers
now have noise-cancellation systems in their cars that help eliminate the

2011 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
32 The Poetics of Signal Processing
Figure 1
The Poetics of Signal
Processing
A sound synthesis
and processing
interface in the
open-source envi-
ronment SuperCol-
lider, designed by
Tara Rodgers for
Owen Chapmans
Icebreaker project
in 2009. Ice and
water sounds are
processed with
noises and effects
that evoke associ-
ated state changes:
melting, evaporat-
ing, condensing, and
freezing. http://
icebreaker.opositive
.ca/
drone of road noise, similar to the kinds found in headphones worn on

flights across the world.
Each of these scenarios involves signal processing, perhaps
one of the most important and understudied dimensions of contempo-
rary sound culture, and electronic and digital media technologies more
generally. In electrical engineering, signal processing involves the math-
ematical modeling of signals over time and through circuits, which then
allows for their modification. Sometimes there is a person actively doing
the modifying. Sometimes the process is automated. Along with Georgina
Born and Mara Mills, we have argued for the centrality of sound technolo-
gies in the history of twentieth-century signal processing and, conversely,
the centrality of signal processing in the history of sound (Born; Mills,
Deaf and Hearing; Rodgers, Synthesizing; Sterne). Scholars in science
and technology studies and related fields have also considered signal
processingnot always by nameas central to the story of cybernetics
and to knowledge construction more generally in the twentieth century
(e.g., Edwards; Galison; Hayles; Mindell). But our goal in this essay is not
historicalit is interpretive.
Signal processing is itself a term with a complex and politi-

cally loaded history. Millss essay in this issue offers a nice account of the
relationship between signs and signals in engineering discourse. In con-
ventional professional usage, signal processing presupposes a distinction
between an electrical, electronic, or digital signal that is manipulated,
and the meaning and content of the signal (see Nebeker). Thus the signal
has a certain materiality to itit takes up space in a channel or in a stor-
age medium, and it is an object that can be manipulated in various ways.
Although cybernetically inflected thinkers have sought to subsume all
of communication and social action under the rubric of information and
signals, we would follow writers like Tiziana Terranova who resist this
impulse. For us, signal processing involves actually manipulating sound in
a transduced statewhen it exists in electrical or digital form, in a moment
before it is heard, or as part of the process of hearing. Signal processing
happens in the middle of technologized transmissions of sound. Although
signal processing can involve interpretation, it is not itself the same thing
as interpretation, nor is interpretation reducible to signal processing.
In the following pages, we consider two different metaphorical
frames commonly applied to signal processing in the everyday language of
users and makerscooking and travel. If we had more space, we could con-
sider other common metaphors of signal processing, like games and play;
as an advertisement for a new Moog iPhone and iPad app declares: Filt-
atron is not a toy, but go ahead and play with it anyway. Each metaphor
elucidates, figures, or for that matter processes a different aspect of what
is at stake in audio signal processing. Each might nudge us in productive
or problematic directions when thinking about the relationship of sound
and media, or otherwise advance various agendas in sound scholarship.
Our argument is grounded in the sonic register and its various electrical
and digital transductions, but even if it is rarely named in some registers,
signal processing is equally crucial to the experience of visual, olfactory,
tactile, and culinary technologies (e.g., Belasco; Bud; Hillis; MacKenzie;
Marks; Mudry; Parisi; Rodowick). Chapters on the cultural dimensions of
signal processing could be important additions to histories of almost any
modern media technology, including technologies like cars and thermo-
stats that have mediatic dimensions but are not themselves media in
any conventional sense. We hope those tales will be told in coming years.
Signal processing touches almost every sound or image that
reaches subjects senses through an electronic medium, whether ana-
log or digital. In the sonic register, signal processing happens in sound
recording, editing and mixing, artistic creation, wired or wireless trans-

mission, musical performance, radio broadcast, everyday conversation,
playback, and listening. It is in computers, telephones, radios, cd play-
ers, home and car stereos, portable audio players, mobile phones, baby
monitors, televisions, movie theaters, video game consoles, and childrens
toys. It is one of the most ubiquitous aspects of modern sound culture,
a veritable obsession among the people who make sound technologies,
whether hardware or software, and one of the burgeoning fields of inquiry
in academic music and speech pathology departments. It is also one of the
core metaphors through which psychologists explain the process of hear-
ing itself. Brian C.J. Moores standard textbook discusses, among other
things, impedance-matching in the middle ear (51), which metaphorizes
it as an electrical circuit. Moore in turn draws on work including Peter
Lindsay and Donald Normans Human Information Processing, which
explicitly connects cybernetic theory, computer processing, and human
consciousness (1011).
Yet with some notable exceptions that we discuss in this essay,
signal processing has garnered scant attention in sound studies in the
humanities and interpretive social sciences. The reasons for this lack of
attention appear to be a result of fairly ordinary conditions of the disci-
plines. The centrality of signal processing has thus far been oblique to
sound studies in part because of the social distance between the humani-
ties and interpretive social sciences and the fields where signal processing
is most importanteven in many music departments, where the possi-
bilities from crossover exist, but in practice composers and musicologists
can be worlds apart. Signal processing is, for instance, a major topic in
electrical engineering and computer science. Besides its presence in
core curricula in those fields, it can also be a point of pride. One of our
colleagues whose office is in a university engineering building works
across the hall from a giant Fifty Years of Signal Processing banner.
But how many people outside engineering and the sciences will ever see
that banner? Although the role of media and other technologies is widely
acknowledged in sound studies, scholars are still more likely to emphasize
the fact of mediation (in contrast to unmediated sound) over its consis-
tency, and they are likely to use models like the circuit of culture, which
separate the moments of production, circulation, and consumption and
thereby obfuscate something like signal processing that is in the middle
of all three moments. Thus when signal processing does appear in sound
studies, it tends to appear in other forms.
Signal processing happens in the middle of media. Signal pro-

cessing is not exactly the domain of musician, playback technology, or
listener but rather exists within all three and in the interstices between
them. For a vocalist in a recording session who asks the sound engineer
to add reverberation effects to her headphone monitor as she is laying
down a track, her sense of her voice reverberating in a processed space is
integral to her performance. When signal processing modulates recorded
sound or musicas in the cases of an equalization technology that subtly
boosts the bass frequencies of a single kick drum in a mix or a spatializa-
tion algorithm on a home speaker system that makes the entire playlist
on an iPod sound like it is being projected in a concert hallthe effects
tend to be heard as inseparable from the sound and music itself. It is this
very embedded aspect of signal processing in all stages of contemporary
sound production, reproduction, and reception that makes it an elusive
subject of critique.
In referring to the poetics of signal processing, we mean to
invoke three senses of the term: 1) signal processing itself as a type of
figuration, 2)the use of metaphor to represent signal processing (which
is the main focus of our essay), and 3)the places where the intersections
between these two forms intersect with some political effect. Thus, while
we follow Albin Zak in gesturing toward Aristotles broad sense of poetics
as making, we do not begin from mimesis or imitation (Aristotle and
Butcher 147a, 147b). In the first instance, signal processing deals with life
in a transduced state, a transformation of sound into somethingelectric-
ity, digits, states on a hard drivethat can be manipulated for the purposes
of expression, figuration, or representation. We begin from the proposition
that others have already specified components and meaningful dimensions
of signal processing, and by analyzing these components as themselves
carrying metaphorical and rhetorical weight, we can better understand
the kind of stories and meanings that get built into our technologies. Like
cooking food, processing signals carries with it a basic set of cultural
meanings (Zak xvxvi).
The poetics of signal processing thus refers to the figural
dimensions of the process itself as well as the modes through which
the process is represented in audio-technical discourse. In the term
audio-technical discourse, discourse references a way of knowledge, a
background of assumptions and agreements about how reality is to be
interpreted and expressed, supported by paradigmatic metaphors, tech-
niques, and technologies (Edwards 34). The modifier audio-technical
encompasses the range of social actors and institutions invested in the

technologically mediated production of knowledge about sound, distrib-
uted across such fields as music making and consumption, acoustics
research and engineering, and electronics hobbyist cultures. In the rest
of the essay, we consider two metaphoric constructs of signal processing
to get at the phenomenon on two different levels. Our consideration of
the prevalence of rawness metaphors aims at how everyday engineering
talk represents the work of signal processing and elevates it as a kind of
culturing process, a readying for the consumption of sound by others. In
the subsequent section, we turn to spatialized representations of signal
processing as a voyage, where its elements are represented as points on
a map. We can subject these spatial representations to the same kinds of
interpretive frames one finds in the critical analysis of landscapes, maps,
or travel narratives. Taken together, we hope our explorations inspire oth-
ers to ask after the status of signal processing in broader circuits of media
culture and communication and to further subject actual techniques of
signal processing to the critique of representation.
A Sonorous Cuisine:
The Raw and the Processed
The language of cooking is everywhere in audio-technical dis-

course. In audio, rawness is not a form of purity but a relative condition, a
readiness to hand, an availability for subsequent processing. Musicians and
engineers will describe the raw tracks for an album, which may be made
up of recordings of individual instruments or even parts of or perspectives
on particular instruments, as when an engineer puts ten microphones on
a drum set or two on an acoustic guitar, with each going to its own indi-
vidual track on a tape machine or comprising a separate sound file inside
a folder on a hard drive. Raw tracks are for mixing, for processing, and for
transforming. Musicians and audio engineers talk of slicing and dicing
sound samples in creative ways (Iced Audio; Kelly). Recording artists post
raw tracks on the Internet so fans can remix them in new ways: For
years, [Trent] Reznor has been releasing music via the webfirst offer-
ing his work in bonus formats (so fans could remix the raw tracks), then
in an ever-growing number of additional forms (Price). Radiohead has
announced that their new single, Nude, has been releasedwith the re-
mixable raw tracks packaged alongside the single![...] Nude comes with
bass, vocal, drum, guitar, and strings/effects tracks all separated for your
mixing pleasure (Shambro). The title Nude is not insignificant here;

like an artistic rendering of a naked figure, the parts of the songs body
are stripped bare and isolated in the studio as objects of aural pleasure.
One of our concerns in this essay is to denaturalize the subject positions
produced in audio-technical discourse. To treat raw tracks as passive
material to be done through technologized processes of composition,
indeed, reflects a particular gendered orientation to music technology,
where the process of composition is normalized as a male performance of
technological mastery. As Paul Thberge has documented, music technol-
ogy magazines and advertisements address a community of readers that
is assumed to be largely young and male, and these publications routinely
associate electronic music machines with seductive, female sexuality. They
cast music technologies as vehicles for the experience of sonic pleasure
and for the performance of technological control (12225). The tendency
identified by Thberge continues in many music magazines today, and it
has proliferated across online fora and Web sites dedicated to music pro-
duction, equipment, and software. In this cultural context, the rawness
of stripped-down tracks can get folded into tropes of sexualized objectifi-
cation, availability, and malleability; raw tracks can be cast as feminized,
passive material to be actively controlled via specialized technologies and
techniques of the masterful composer/producer.
The language of the raw and cooked also permeates discourses
of sound synthesis, where processing again figures as an expression of
creative control. An oscillator generates a sound that is called raw until it
is run through filters, amplifiers, and other sound shapers. In his history
of electronic and experimental music, Thom Holmes notes that all analog
and digital synthesizers have the same basic components, beginning with
[t]wo or more oscillators for generating raw sound material, which then
pass through filtering and amplification processes (15253). One finds
the same discussion of the raw sounds of oscillators in numerous elec-
tronic music textbooks and synthesizer manuals. A description of the rca
Electronic Music Synthesizer, a precursor of contemporary synthesizers
housed at the Columbia-Princeton studios beginning in the late 1950s,
reads: Oscillators and noise generators provide the raw materials which
the composer [...] can obtain at will with a high degree of control over
pitch, timbre, and volume (Griffiths 68).
As with the case of recorded tracks, rawness is a relative condi-
tion, a readiness for processing and not simply the presence of sound in
nature or sound in the world. This is an important distinction. As Sterne
awkwardly types this sentence in the third person, he listens out the win-
dows of his office. The whistling wind, birds chirping, and the murmur-
ing expressway in the distance outside his window are precisely not raw.
They could be meaningful in many different ways. They may, however,
become either prospectively or retrospectively raw if he launches a sound
recording program in his computer, captures them with the built-in micro-
phone, and then processes them into an ambient music composition later
on (http://sounds.sterneworks.org/rawandcooked). The car noises, wind,
birds chirping, and mouse clicking are all potentially meaningful sounds
and will offer the standard polysemic cornucopia of potential interpreta-
tions depending on who is hearing. Obviously, the sounds mean different
things to passersby, traffic engineers, deer, and birdsas well as different
things to different subjects within those groups. But in this example, their
rawness comes from their availability for signal processing, just as raw
food or raw material becomes raw by virtue of its availability for cooking
or manufacture. A lettuce planted in the ground, a mushroom hidden in
a forest, and the tree nearby are not raw in the same way.
This follows a more general point Martin Heidegger makes in
Being and Time about contemplation and availability, though he does it in
standard visualist language. No matter how sharply we just look at the
outward appearance of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot
discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things just theoretically,
we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when
we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is
not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation
is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character (98).
Raw sound is sound that is ready-to-hand, that is available to be processed.
It comes not to the sonic world as it is contemplated, but rather, rawness
emerges from a relationship to the sonic world where sounds are used
and manipulated (the latter word containing within its etymology a ref-
erence to the hands and to bundling up). Heideggers examples from this
part of Being and Time are decidedly not high tech, and our application
here may be something of a stretch given that our examples so far have
involved specialists. But although signal processing is a specialized term,
we would be wrong to relegate it to something of import only to geeks in
music departments and engineering schools. Media criticism has become
a standard practice across the humanities. We are simply arguing for the
inclusion of signal processing within that critical lexicon, for in many
cases it is just as important to the meaning of mediatic sound as the notes
in a score, the choice of violins in a movie soundtrack, the words said or

unsaid in a phone conversation. Signal processing is also increasingly
something that nonspecialists do, from children playing with Garage Band
or sound-making toys to drivers and airplane passengers switching on
noise-cancellation devices. Heidegger might have objected to the entire
proposition of signal processing, but it played a conditioning role in his
experience every time he picked up a phone, saw a film, or turned on the
radio or television.
As with rawness, one finds a language of decay and rot with
respect to sound. Over the course of the twentieth century, the decay of a
sound from its peak volume to silence became a common signal processing
effect to be manipulated electronically (Bode). Even sonic rot, an extreme
form of distortion, is now available in the form of at least two guitar effects:
pedals and boutique synthesizers (Dwarfcraft; Pro Tone). The treatment of
sounds as materials to be processed and preserved for future use emerged
in the late nineteenth century alongside techniques for canning and pre-
serving food (Sterne, Audible 29293; see also Josephson; Koehn). Tech-
niques for processing and preserving food guarded against premature rot
and decay and made fruits and vegetables available year-round rather than
in a limited season. The fading of the human voice signified the fleeting
qualities of organic life and was understood to be a distinguishing mark
of human temporality and finitude (Peters 177). Electronic processing
techniques were a means by which relatively ephemeral acoustic sounds
gained extended shelf lives, so to speak, through the possibilities of elec-
tronically mediated repeatability and aesthetic transformation. These
examples suggest that both processed foods and processed sounds have
been shaped by desires to technologically prolong and control organic
lifewhereby raw or unprocessed sounds (like their counterparts in
the realm of food) are typically articulated to the organic or natural and
contrasted to their technologically mediated or artificial instantiations.
The many references to rawness, rottenness, and cooking recall
Claude Lvi-Strausss classic The Raw and the Cooked, which directly
addresses the relations among these terms (and their semiotic relatives)
at great length and in much technical detail. Often cited and often criti-
cized, The Raw and the Cooked used the triad of raw-cooked-rotten as the
basis of an attempt to demonstrate the power of structuralism to explain
the workings of diverse cultures. Less often remembered is that The Raw
and the Cooked is full of musical and sonic metaphors. The entire book is
organized around terms derived from the Western concert traditionfor
example, theme and variations, sonata, fugue, symphony (viiviii)and

Lvi-Strauss frequently resorts to references to sound, silence, and noise
(e.g., 14750, 28689, 32729). Our interest in semantic connections
between talk about sound and talk about food mutates connections he
made long ago.
Lvi-Strauss argues that native thought conceives of culi-
nary operations as mediatory activities between heaven and earth, life and
death, nature and society (6465). In Lvi-Strausss analysis of indigenous
myths, there is a double contrast: on the one hand, between what is raw
and what is cooked, and on the other, between the fresh and the decayed.
The raw/cooked axis is characteristic of culture; the fresh/decayed one of
nature, since cooking brings about the cultural transformation of the raw,
just as putrefaction is its natural transformation (142). As with Heidegger,
we only want to sample a morsel from this text, rather than digesting the
entire argument in one sitting. His claims about the transcultural work-
ings of myth, the structuring power of language through binary operations,
and the relationship of indigenous and industrial societies are a little too
rich for us. We take Stephen Mennels point that despite the ambitions of
structuralists to disclose the deep structures that lie below all of society,
they offer no grounds for predicting the unfolding of hitherto unknown
social structures and instead offer mainly a classificatory scheme and not
an explanation (13; see also Bourdieu; Goody; Ross). Following Norbert
Elias, Mennell argues for a more sociogenetic sociological approach that
does not look behind flow and process for something which is static and
constant (13, 15). But we are precisely after the analysis of classificatory
schemes, not as a generative explanation (for which we would refer the
reader to the signal processing histories referenced above) or as the basis
of stable universals. We simply seek some reference points for thinking
about what happens to sounds as they are signal processed and how people
talk about the meaning of those processes. It is not that music bloggers
and textbook authors are working with the same deep structure as Lvi-
Strausss Bororo in Brazil. We offer the much less demanding proposition
that Lvi-Strausss language bears some morphological resemblance to
that used by our bloggers and textbook authors.
Therefore, pace Lvi-Strauss, let us consider rawness as one
not necessarily (or, more precisely, serially, situationally, and transitively)
fixed pole in a system of meanings attached to recorded or fabricated
sounds that are available for and sometimes subject to signal processing.
In a way, we have simply extended his point about musical sound to sound
as such. In discussing the arbitrary nature of scales, he points out that

although sounds exist in nature, it is only retroactively [...] that music
recognizes physical properties in sound and selects certain of these prop-
erties with which to build its hierarchical structures (22). To be sure,
Lvi-Strauss would not go there. His model of music was clearly rooted
in the Western concert tradition, and he was not comfortable with the
aesthetic or theoretical propositions of the avant-gardes of his time. He
rejected the arrangement of recordings of nonmusical sounds in musique
concrte as floundering in non-significance, even though it is in imme-
diate communion with the given phenomena of nature (2324). Similarly,
he attacked serialist composers, who exploded the Western tonal system in
attempts to construct completely new ones, as like a sailless ship, driven
out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a
pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to
the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking
nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination. [For
the serialists,] the journey alone is real, not the landfall, and sea routes
are replaced by the rules of navigation (25). The Raw and the Cooked is
worth a careful read by sound theorists because it is an effort to think
culture sonically, but we need not accept Lvi-Strausss theoretical com-
mitments to systems or his universe of sonic aesthetics to do so.1 Where
Lvi-Strauss hears meaninglessness in the tape compositions of musique
concrte and the abstract compositions of Pierre Boulez, we suspect there
is a great deal of meaning to be found in the talking navigation devices
in cars, mobile phones that reproduce only a fraction of the human voice,
hip-hop singles that top the charts with a mixture of singing and found
sounds, television shows and movies that use synthetic timbres instead of
melodic figures as leitmotifs for characters, situations, or even products,
and on and on. We live in a world of meaningful processed sound that is
significant and also represents the kind of semiotic groundedness that,
for Lvi-Strauss, was so lacking in serialist compositions.
Having established our differences, let us now return to Lvi-
Strausss founding binary. If sounds are thus rendered raw through human
actionand do not simply exist in a raw state out in the worldwhat does
it mean for audio to be cooked? And what do we make of the cooking
process itself? Here we find some guidance in Lvi-Strausss discussions
of fire. He introduces a binary opposition between two kinds of fire in
the myths he interprets: one celestial and destructive, the other ter-
restrial and creative, that is, fire for cooking purposes (188). This fire
has a mediatory dimension that is necessary for maintaining relations

between sun or sky and earth. Total conjunction is excess, a burned
world. Total disjunction is lack, a world of rottenness (298). Cooking
fire mediates between these two conditions by facilitating the conditions
for conjunction and disjunction. Mediating fire is the basis of social and
cultural order and stability.
We are used to discourses of the raw and the cooked in media
theory, in both its academic and vernacular versions. Crusty critics com-
plain of the disproportionately processed nature of our mediatic reality,
while savants of the new age celebrate the possibilities of sensory plastic-
ity (Cooley; Gitlin; Hansen; Heidegger, Question; Meyerowitz; Plant). The
available positions can be easily anticipated: we live in a world with too
much cooking; or, cooking has greatly enhanced what was once the raw
world. An essay such as ours could easily begin by paraphrasing Walter
Benjamin and announcing that the sound of immediate reality is an
orchid in the land of technology (23233). But doing so would too quickly
concede one of the most special and fascinating dimensions of contem-
porary sound culture. In everyday life, heavily processed sound coexists
with totally unprocessed sound. The hearing among us are used to hearing
human voices emanating from real people every day, yet if we were to play
a recorded song or transmit a speech that did not include the standard com-
pression and equalization of the voice to the point that it differs vastly from
a voice in a room, it would sound strange and unnatural to most listeners.
The phone processes too, reducing the dynamic range of speech such that
weak voices can sound strong and vice versa. As the sound and multime-
dia artist Christina Kubisch, who explores this distinction between what
we hear as natural and artificial in her work, points out: Please ask
yourself how many things you know by real experience and how many by
digital information. When did you smell a humid forest ground the last
time, or when did you observe a sunset or a real bird in the sky for a long
time? I use these very commonplace examples because they are not com-
mon originally as an experience, but instead by their transmitted image
or sound (Rodgers, Pink 112). James Carey has made a similar point about
mediatic experience more generally: most common culture comes to us
via the media we use and not direct personal or collective experience. If
much of culture is indeed processed through media, how do particular
metaphors provide the contours of these experiences? We now turn our
attention to the metaphor of travel and how it has informed designs and
uses of particular audio technologies and techniques.
Figure 2
Signal Processing as
Voyage
Illustration of signal
flow from oscillator
(VCO) to filter (VCF)
to amplifier (VCA).
Adapted from Kent
H. Lundberg, block
diagram of modular
analog synth. So
you want to build an
analog synthesizer?
14 Nov. 2002, http://
web.mit.edu/klund/
www/weblatex/
node2.html
Signal Processing as Voyage
The image in Figure 2 is a fairly pedestrian signal flow diagram

for an analog synthesizer. The lines represent paths; the shapes represent
electrical elements that do different things to the signal. Electricity flows
from left to right in time. In this circuit, an oscillator creates a simple or
complex pitched waveform, which more or less corresponds to an audible
waveform. That sound is then modified by a filter, which removes the
upper harmonics or partials of the signal, and then an amplifier, which
adjusts the volume. The electrical signal then goes out of the synthesizer
through the audio out and is turned into sound through a transducer
like a speaker or headphones. This is a standard design for pretty much all
popular analog synthesizers and is often imitated in the software realm.
If you ask a synthesist what the essential components of a synthesizer are,
she would likely say oscillator, filter, amplifier.
In this image, the synthesizer circuit is configured as a space,
and the metaphor is not simply visual. Circuit designers refer to circuits
as having their own topologies. In electronics, topology has come to refer
to the way constituent parts are interrelated or arranged. However, the
term has a much longer history, referring to mathematical operations,
the art of assisting memory by associating ideas with particular places or
things, and topographic anatomy (oed , topology). But one other mean-
ing is of particular interest for us from this list: the scientific study of a
particular locality, listing among its examples the proposition that one
can draw deductions about the history of a place from geographical facts.
What history of sound can we deduce from the most basic topology of an
analog synthesizer?
The fundamental building blocks of the synthesizer correspond
to Hermann von Helmholtzs ideas about the fundamental building blocks
of sound. In the 1860s, Helmholtz theorized that loudness, pitch, and
timbre corresponded to the primary properties of color: brightness, hue,
and saturation (1819; Lenoir 19899). His resolution of sound into these
basic elements, in connection with a logic of resolving complex waveforms
into simpler sine waves, laid an epistemological foundation for synthesis
techniques. Any sound could be analyzed to its fundamental parameters
and, at least in theory, synthesized from that information (Peters 183). Our
most basic characterization of sound, and one of the most basic technolo-
gies for shaping sound today, emerges from specific historical ideas about
perception and the relations of the senses.
Jessica Rylan, who designs synthesizers for herself and her
small company Flower Electronics, described in a 2006 interview how so-
called fundamental parameters of sound have played a defining role in syn-
thesizer designs and techniques. Conventional synthesis, she explained,
is characterized by this very scientific approach to sound, like, What
are the fundamental parameters of sound? Volume, pitch, and timbre.
She continued: What a joke that is! It has nothing to do with anything.
[Laughs] How do you manipulate volume and pitch? And timbre [synthe-
sizer designers] couldnt really figure it out (Rodgers, Pink 147). Rylans
suggestion that the fundamental parameters of sound may have nothing
to do with anything invites us to reconsider technical concepts that are
usually taken as self-evident and universal. Rylan sometimes analyzes
sound not according to the conventional parameters of loudness, pitch, and
timbre but in comparison to other things that she admires and is affected
by, like the size and temporal regularity of raindrops: big, fat raindrops
that dont come as often [...] really fine mist and its smooth and constant
[...] a mix between the constant chhhh with quieter, little drops that are
steady, and big drops once in awhile (149). She designs her instruments
to create a range of possibilities from which performers can synthesize
these ever-changing sonic patterns, like those of wind and rain.
Implicit in Rylans critique of Helmholtz is a debate about what
sound is. For Helmholtz, it is a thing in the world, a material with definite
qualities. The analog synthesizer circuit animates this legacy and takes it
literally. If we can analyze sound and break it down into its fundamental
components, we can also create it. Rylan offers a more experiential basis
for understanding what sound is. In her model, nature exists externally,
but sound exists in the hearers experience. Perception and temporality
are the central concerns here: her description of rain conjures its memory,
and it is meant to evoke rather than to measure. Both her synthesizer
circuits and the generic analog circuit are still mimetic in their approach
to sound-making, but at two totally different levels. The Helmholtzian
approach creates sound by breaking it into components and imitating and
manipulating them. The Rylanian approach begins from an experience
of sound and undertakes synthesis to approach and modulate it. Rylan is
critical of how the top-down approach in the Helmholtzian tradition has
been built into synthesizer designs and techniques, producing a norma-
tive logic and teleological progression of the signal (This output goes to
this input) that limits the range of possible sounds (Rodgers, Pink 147).
Some of her design techniques are informed by circuit-bending techniques
and other variations on such a weird kind of black-magic strategy thats
counterintuitivein other words, there are ways to route the signal
in nonstandard ways through the circuit to produce more chaotic and
unpredictable sounds and patterns (145).
It is not just the shape of topology that interests us but the
very idea that sound travels through a circuit (or rather that electricity
does to become sound). This most basic scheme, so central to almost all
representations of signal processing, itself has roots in ideas about travel
and voyage that inflect Western epistemologies of sound more broadly.
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts that were founda-
tional to the fields of acoustics and electroacoustics, and to ideas and
machines of sound synthesis, sound was defined as fluid disturbances
that initiate sensory pleasures and affects. It was also figured as a jour-
ney of vibrating particles that voyage back and forth, outward and home
again (Rodgers, Synthesizing 5590). Ideas for the generation and control
of electronic sound waves by synthesis techniques emerged at the turn
of the twentieth century in a Euro-American cultural context in which
wave metaphors and fascinations with the sea abounded (Helmreich 15,
3435). Sound and electricity were both understood as fluid media and
were conceptually linked to each other through water-wave metaphors
and associated terms such as current, channel, and flow. Heinrich Hertzs
research on electromagnetic waves in the 1880s contained these meta-
phoric associations, and his work informed the analogies that subsequent
generations of acoustics researchers drew between sounds and electrical
signals (Thompson 34, 61, 96). By the 1920s, it was popularly understood
that waves, and particles in wave motion, comprised all phenomena in

the universe (Beer 298).
Themes of sound as fluid disturbance and maritime journey
were imagined in the exterior world, often represented as an ocean of
air (Hunt 1). They were also transposed onto the interior structures of
the inner ear, itself a kind of seascape of canals, sinus curves, and other
fluid passageways to be traversed by scientific exploration. The ear was a
destination of sound waves, one that accepts [...] all the strife and struggle
and confusion of vibratory motion in the surrounding environment (Tyn-
dall 82). Structures within the ear (solids, fluids, and membranes) were
depicted as a terrain of interconnected parts through which vibrations
travel (Barton 33543). The term ear canal itself evoked a channel of
water for navigation, an arm of the sea. Francis Bacons Sylva Sylvarum
(1626) contained one of the first applications of the term canal (derived
from channel, a waterway for boats) to a pipe for amplifying sound, as
well as to tubular structures within the body, such as the ear canal (oed ,
canal). Like twentieth-century biotechnology discourses that transposed
tropes of outer-space travel to inner space representations of immune
systems (Haraway 22125), Bacon and followers imagined formal struc-
tures of the ear in relation to symbols of maritime voyage drawn from con-
current scientific and colonialist exploration projects. Themes of maritime
voyage symbolized the promise of scientific exploration to conquer the
unknowable, fluid landscapes of sound waves in the furthest reaches of
the world and the innermost spaces of the ear, and these metaphors have
persisted in audio-technical discourse.
Even the technological possibility of synthesizing and process-
ing electronic sound has roots in scientific observations of water waves and
desires to navigate waters by predicting wave shapes and patterns. One
of the first documented technologies to be called a synthesizer was Lord
Kelvin (William Thomson)s mechanical device to predict the tides, devel-
oped in the 1870s. Kelvins harmonic synthesizer performed calculations
to integrate simpler curves into a more complex waveform (Miller 11011).
The machine was an important technological bridge between Joseph Fou-
riers mathematical concepts of waveform synthesis, established in the
1820s, and the implementation of these concepts in musical instruments
that generated sound electronically, such as Thaddeus Cahills Telharmo-
nium in the 1890s. Wave metaphors and maritime themes also infiltrate
the ways that analog circuits have been imagined and designed. A press
release on the design of the Random Probability System, a composition
aid and prototypical music sequencer developed at rca in the late 1940s,
described the signal path through the system just as floating sticks might
follow different channels in drifting through a river delta with many
branching streams (rca 3). Synthesizer historians Trevor Pinch and
Frank Trocco refer to analog filters as analogous to technologies for the
control of flowing water, like a gate in a stream (65).
In a similar spirit to Rylans critique that the fundamental
parameters of sound are historically contingent and have structured syn-
thesizer designs in limiting ways, we suggest that these wave metaphors
and themes of maritime travel typically privilege a particular subject
position that stands in as universal. In the tropes of audio-technical dis-
course, white, Western, male subjects were initially figured as the proper
navigators of synthetic sound waves, for whom the generation and control
of electronic sound entails the pleasure and danger of taming unruly
waves. This is evident in numerous accounts of the physical properties
and affective experiences of sound, which are characterized by the voyage
of displaced particles outward and back, and the analogous and corollary
transportation of this archetypal male subject to a pleasurable, sensory
experience and back to a state of rest (Helmholtz 251; Tyndall 8182, 254).
We can interpret the narrative logics of wave motion and sig-
nal flow as we would a piece of music or other cultural text. As Susan
McClary has demonstrated, the tonal organization and compositional
structures of Western music represent narratives of heterosexual male
desire and sexual fulfillment. These narratives are often resolved by a
tonal journey through, and figurative conquest of, other musical areas;
colonialist paradigms are thus encoded in familiar musical structures
(McClary 719, 15556). There are similar stakes in the ways that themes
of maritime travel are mobilized in audio-technical discourse. The physi-
cal properties of sound, its affective qualities, and its mapping onto the
forms of electronic circuits and musical instruments are often rendered
through a masculinist and colonial rhetoric that promotes the bold tra-
versal and technological mastery of turbulent waves and maritime fron-
tiers. We do not wish to promote a simplistic or essentialist relationship of
these normative subject positions produced in discourse and their various
negotiations in audio-technical practice. In our conversations with audio
engineers and musicians, we have found a plurality of perspectives and
experiences. But we take technologies to be crystallizations and ongo-
ing productions of social worlds, and thus the language and metaphors
used to represent technical processes merit sustained consideration and
critique, especially as paths into their historical development and default

assumptions.
Conclusion: For a Political Topology
In this essay, we have considered the metaphors applied to

signal processing itself and the language used to describe and figure the
work of signal processing and the people who do it, or who are supposed
to be doing it. Cooking and travel as metaphors for signal processing mark
cultural locations much as they do in broader social contexts. Cooking
with sound can be figured as a creative, expressive act or as a labor or
service. Signal flow as a travel narrative emerges from presumptions of
freedom of mobility rather than from experiences of disability or of being
surveilled and stopped (Ahmed 139). As such, metaphors that circulate
in audio-technical discourse as neutral and instrumental (its just how
we talk about it) are inflected with particular subject positions that are
gendered, raced, classed, and otherwise culturally situated. As Tom Por-
cello and Louise Meintjes have written of talk in the studio, the figurative
language can be challenged, overcome, or negotiated, but it sets the initial
tone of the conversation.
Our focus on the metaphors of cooking and travel in signal
processing also illustrates that, for as much as technical cultures may be
constituted by expert language (Marvin; Porcello), this language is also
metaphoric and full of tacit understandings (Horning; Thberge). Audio-
technical discourse is infused with common signifiers of things people do
and therefore is not purely technical at allunless our understanding of
technical expertise is expanded and demystified to account for its reliance
on broad and familiar terms.
One of the classic questions of communication theory can
thus be recast as a question of signal labor: who treats what for whom,
with what process, and to what end? In their study of disabled mobile
phone users, Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell explain how it was
discovered in the 1990s that then-new second-generation mobile phones
interacted poorly with hearing aids. The phones generated a great deal of
electromagnetic interference, which could cause a loud buzzing sound in
hearing aids. What was intriguing here, they write, was that for quite
some time hearing aids rather than mobiles were conceptualized as the
principal problem by providers of mobile telephony. Attention was directed
to the need for hearing aids to cope with higher levels of electromagnetic
emission, something that was seen as important given the wide range of
technologies emitting such signalsnot just mobile phones. A European
standard was introduced in 1990 requiring hearing aids to be immune to
emission from mobile phones (158). At its most basic, this story seems to
be about the politics of standards and use of the electromagnetic spec-
trum. But as Goggin and Newell so nicely point out, this really was about
the politics of which assistive technologies were more fundamental. The
implied normalism in the proposition that it was the hearing aids that
were the problem spoke volumes. Despite the fact that the telephone is
itself a technology to hear for people, phones were conceived as being for
the normally hearing first and for the disabled second.
We should ask the same questions of the language of signal
processing technologies. If we find that audio-technical discourse ren-
ders signal processing in terms of masculinist languages of mastery and
domination of nature, can we help but wonder after its broader social
implications? Does it not also suggest a gendered set of relations to these
technologies (McCartney)? Is it any wonder that we still find the design,
implementation, marketing, and use of audio signal processing tech-
nologies to be male-dominated fields? Overcoming this state of affairs is
not simply a matter of inviting more women into various clubsthough
certainly some invitations have been made and more are needed. It will
require fundamentally rethinking how we model, describe, interact, and
sound with signal processing technologies.
The authors thank each other, Rey Chow, Denise Davis, James Steintrager, and Mara Mills
for helpful comments on and discussions of this piece. Jonathan Sterne also thanks the Center
for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he worked on this essay.
jonath an sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies
and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003)
and numerous articles on media, technologies, and the politics of culture. His next book,
mp3: The Meaning of a Format, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2012, and he
is editing The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). He also makes sound. Visit his Web
site at http://sterneworks.org.
tar a rodgers teaches in the Womens Studies Department at the University of Maryland,
where she also works with the Program in Digital Cultures and Creativity and the Mary-
land Institute for Technology in the Humanities (mith). Her book Pink Noises: Women on
Electronic Music and Sound was published by Duke University Press in 2010. Her current
project is a history of synthesized sound that traces metaphors in audio-technical discourse
as representations of identity and difference. She also produces music and sound art in
various forms and contexts: http://www.pinknoises.com.
Note 1 For all the complaints about the of thinking problems sonically,
visualism (or denigration thereof ) of which Lvi-Strauss is but one
in social and cultural theory, representative.
there is clearly a long tradition
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nick seaver
This Is Not a Copy: Mechanical Fidelity

and the Re-enacting Piano
I
n 1927, a piano played in the window of the American Piano
Companys New York showroom. As the clangorous opening chords of
Rachmaninoffs famous Prelude in C sharp minor rang out, a paper roll
advanced above the keys. Printed on it in large type was this text:
I am the ampico . I re-enact the playing of the worlds greatest

pianists and bring their musical magic into your home. This
recording is Rachmaninoffs own interpretation of his famous
Prelude in C Sharp Minor. It is the actual playing of Rach-
maninoff just as if he were personally at the keyboard. When the
Ampico plays, it is just as if the hands of the artist were actually
touching the keys. The same strings are vibrating identically as
they vibrated when Rachmaninoff himself controlled them. This
is not a copy or an imitation or a reproduction, but the actual
playing of Rachmaninoff himself. (qtd. in Givens 77; emphasis
added)

The Ampico was a re-enacting piano, a descendant of the turn-of-the-

century Pianola and earlier musical automata that sought to replace or
replicate human musical performance. Rachmaninoff was not playing at
this piano but rather had performed his piece on a special recording piano
in the American Piano Company (also known as Ampico) studio eight
years earlier. The recording the text referred to was on the roll itselfa
series of punched holes that corresponded to musical notes and timings.
Along the edge of the roll, a separate set of holes controlled an elaborate
pneumatic system that could change the force with which the notes were
played. The roll advanced over a metal bar lined with holes; when a hole in
the paper lined up with a hole in the bar, vacuum pressure was released,
flinging one or another part of the piano into action.
The Ampico had been the subject of extensive research and
development, undergoing substantial revisions as laboratory scientists
worked to make its playing truer to the playing of virtuoso pianists like
Rachmaninoff. The bold and counterintuitive claim printed on the roll
that this was a recording but not a copy or an imitation or a reproduc-
tionwas a declaration of victory: the Ampico, its manufacturer claimed,
produced such a precise reproduction that it was not really a reproduction
at all. While phonograph manufacturers worked to convince the public that
cones and discs could sound like singers and bands, Ampico proclaimed
something more: a paper roll could be the actual playing of a famous
pianist. In spite of this accomplishment, the American Piano Company
would, two years later and insolvent, go into receivership, shut down
its research laboratory, and effectively stop manufacturing re-enacting
pianos altogether.
In this essay, I explore how it came to be that a piano in a shop
window could claim to play as Rachmaninoff or how the Ampico scien-
tists produced recordings that they saw not as copies but as originals.
This production relied on what I call mechanical fidelity: a rhetoric of
faithful repetition that was built in laboratories, treating the predictable
materiality of the reenacting apparatus and the pianos action, or inter-
nal machinery, as both symbols and guarantors of objective reproduction.
Guided by a mechanistic scientific ethic that had emerged in the nine-
teenth century, the Ampico scientists tied together fidelity, materiality,
objectivity, and identity, producing a framework in which they came to
understand the relationships between humans and machines, originals
and copies. This framework, I suggest, differs significantly from the pho-
nographic regime that would come to define our common sense about the
56 Mechanical Fidelity and the Re-enacting Piano
nature of fidelity and the relationship between sonic reproductions and

originals.
Although fidelity at first appears to be a simple measure of
similarity between originals and copies, on closer inspection it can be seen
as the pivot on which the whole enterprise of reproduction turns. Fidel-
ity is simultaneously a technological ideal, an evaluative criterion, and
the means by which reproduction can be said to occur in the first place;
without fidelity, we lack the ability to describe something as a reproduc-
tion. Jonathan Sterne argues in The Audible Past that fidelity is socially
produced: it is much more about faith in the social function and organi-
zation of machines than it is about the relation of a sound to its source
(219). The faithfulness that fidelity indexes is not between sources and
copies but rather between us and our copying machines. No longer merely
a measure of similitude, fidelity becomes an arbiter of human-machine
relations. Rhetorics of fidelity are not just technical or commercial details
but meaningful interpretations of the relationships between human and
technological identities.
Through a commingling of traits that had formerly been consid-
ered either human or mechanical, the re-enacting piano offered a way to
imagine human and machine performances as materially interchangeable
and potentially identical. As Hannah Arendt writes in The Human Condi-
tion, [T]he things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life;
it is by relating to man-made objects that humans, their ever-changing
nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity
(137). Arendts faith in objectsin their stability and objectivitycomes to
bear on the more mundane fidelity of mechanical reproduction. Mediating
between things and people, fidelity is a negotiation of objectivity, material-
ity, and identity. If, as Arendt suggests, we understand ourselves through
our technologies, the obsolete re-enacting piano offers an alternative
framework that reveals the contingent ways in which fidelity helps us
make sense of identity, reproduction, and hearing itself.
Phonographic Fidelity
Before turning back to the re-enacting piano, it is crucial to

place it in the context of the phonographits rough contemporary and
competitor. A decade before the Ampico in the showroom window claimed
to be Rachmaninoff, a phonograph was onstage at Carnegie Hall, imitating
the soprano Marie Rappold. Aural historian Emily Thompson quotes the
New York Tribune:
Startlingly novel even in this age of mechanical marvels was

the concert that drew 2,500 persons to Carnegie Hall yesterday
afternoon.
Alone on the vast stage there stood a mahogany pho-
nograph, apparently exactly like the tamed and domesticated
variety that has become to be [sic] as much a part of the furniture
of the ordinary drawing room as was the wheezy melodeon a
generation ago. In the midst of the hushed silence a white-gloved
man emerged from the mysterious region behind the draperies,
solemnly placed a record in the gaping mouth of the machine,
wound it up and vanished. (131)
The phonograph began to sing an aria from Puccinis Tosca at the top of
its mechanical lungs, as the soprano entered the stage and sang along,
stopping occasionally to let the phonograph sing alone (131). The fascina-
tion for the audience, wrote the Tribune, lay in guessing whether Mme
Rappold or the phonograph was at work, or whether they were singing
together (131). The climax of most of these tone test concerts, organized
as publicity events for the Edison Company, was the dark scene (152),
when the lights would be dimmed and the audience, imagining they were
listening to a live performance, would suddenly find that they had in fact
been hearing an Edison recording.
Whether or not audiences were indeed fooled, Thompson argues
that the tone tests provided listeners with a tool, a resource, that enabled
them to transform their conception of what constituted real music to
include phonographic reproductions (160). The dark scene helped by
hiding the mechanism behind the sounds production. Thompson writes,
[B]y effacing the mechanism of the machine [. . .] the tone test cam-
paign enabled people to equate listening to records with listening to live
music (160). Fidelity, for the phonograph, hinged on the fantasy that its
physical mechanism was irrelevant. In the dark on stage or packed into
decorative cabinets at home, phonographic reproductions made live and
recorded performance commensurable by hiding the material details of
their difference. Of course, this dematerialization happened discursively,
not physically: although the phonograph still scratched its sounds out of
shallow plastic grooves, audiences could imagine their listening as if it
depended solely on vibrations in the air. The source of these vibrations

was considered, literally, immaterial.1
Obsolescence
The descendants of the phonograph have been terrifically suc-

cessful: speakers that work on the same basic principle of vibration are
nearly omnipresent in contemporary American life. Automatic pianos like
the Ampico have fared more poorly. Historian David Suisman writes: The
player-piano has not aged well. Today, it seems like a curious mechanical
stopover on the route from manual music making to digital storage and
playback. To the extent that it is remembered at all, it is usually cast as a
historical also-ran, a postscript to the age of the piano, a foil to the more
dramatic advent of the phonograph (13). This history poses an important
problem for accounts of the automatic piano. As Lisa Gitelman writes,
successful media are often understood through tenacious, valoriz-
ing narratives of dematerialization (Media 199): they start to seem
inevitable and then transparent, or transparent and then inevitable (200).
From our contemporary perspective, populated by the descendants of the
phonograph, the player piano seems a self-evident failure, intrinsically
inadequate. While Gitelman describes how the material specificity of a
technology appears to dissipate as it comes to be taken for granted, we
might take perceived materiality as an index of technological success: the
supposed immateriality of the phonograph and its eventual dominance
went hand in hand, while the unavoidable physicality of the player piano
seems to have doomed it from the start.
As a failed or obsolete technology, the automatic piano
lacks the inevitability and transparency we grant retroactively to the
phonograph. However, as Suisman notes, the culture of the mechanical
reproduction of music does not belong to the phonograph alone; at the turn
of the century, many more people saw the player-piano as a revolution-
ary cultural force and the phonograph as a mere trifle than the other way
around (1314). To talk about automatic pianos, we must be sensitive to the
historicity of what Gitelman calls their material meaning: that nexus
of cultural practices, economic structures, and perceptual and semiotic
habits that make tangible things meaningful (Media 203). 2 A history
of a failed technology should recover its historical sense of viability: the
Ampico was not always already obsolete.
The automatic pianos current position on the margins makes it

a promising object to think with. While phonographic fidelity has become
ubiquitous, dematerialized, and naturalized, the mechanical fidelity of
the Ampico appears as something of an historical anomaly. In its obsoles-
cence, the re-enacting piano provides a case study with which to observe
the negotiation of material meaning, a chance to catch the production of
fidelity at a moment of technological change when it was particularly
contingent and far from inevitable or natural (Gitelman, Media 200).
By exploring the production of a fidelity quite unlike the phonographic
fidelity that would come to define the word, we can catch a glimpse of an
alternative way to understand reproducing technologies and the human
identities that are shaped in collaboration with them. Media technologies
are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning
(Gitelman, Always 6), and by examining their production we can come to
appreciate the contingencies of meaning that have been imagined as uni-
versal technological facts. For the Ampico, this production took place in
the lab, as scientists sought to understand and measure the fundamental
traits of pianism.
Coarse Mechanisms
In 1924, the American Piano Company, then one of the largest

and most successful manufacturers of both automatic player pianos and
straight pianos in the United States, announced that it was forming a
new department dedicated to scientific research. The journal The Music
Trades quoted the goals of the new department, as outlined by its head,
Charles Stoddard: Among other things, said Mr. Stoddard in discussing
the plans of the new department, we shall make a careful research into
tone analysis. [...] We doubt if there has been enough absolutely accurate
knowledge in this whole subject of tone production. We cannot, of course,
predict what we will find out, but we propose to go into the matter as thor-
oughly as is humanly possible. The manner in which we are approaching
this subject is revolutionary (qtd. in Givens 21). 3 The Ampico laboratory,
wrote The Music Trades, would be dedicated to the thorough scientific
investigation of the piano (21). Historian Larry Givens effusively describes
the duration of the laboratory as the only period in the history of the
player piano industry in which real scientific methodology was applied to
the development of the player piano (25). As a strange result, a complex,
man-made machine was brought into laboratory conditions so that its

natural qualities might be ascertained. The piano, with a lengthy his-
tory and social life, was reconceived as a clean, scientific object: the tacit
knowledge of pianists and piano builders would be supplanted by the
explicit and accurate knowledge produced in the lab. However, Stoddards
lab was by no means the first scientific endeavor to examine the details
of pianism.
For researchers interested in characterizing or reproducing
pianistic performance, it was first necessary to identify an object to
reproduce. This object came to be what pianists had long referred to as
touch. Touch had been ambiguously defined in its specifics, but it gener-
ally referred to the manner in which the pianist operated the keys of the
piano. Earlier technologies took care of recording the what and when
of played notes, but the how remained elusivethis how was touch.
Although variously described as a kind of expertise, a mechanical fact, or
a transcendent artistic moment, touch was, if anything, a locationwhere
the finger met the key. The point of physical contact between performer
and instrument was understandably a site of anxiety: it was here where
the pianists organic body ceased and the mechanical configuration of
the piano action began. Touch was potently symbolic territory, and argu-
ments about the nature of pianism fought for it, claiming it in the name of
mechanical expertise or organic artistry. 4
These two competing ideas about pianismthat it was inef-
fable and organic or mechanical and reducibledrew from a much older
philosophical discourse, populated by ideas descended from Cartesian
dualism, the experimental automata of Jacques de Vaucanson, and Johann
Goethes vitalist biology. Historian of technology Myles Jackson outlines
two competing views of piano performance as they manifested in a more
mundane setting: nineteenth-century German piano pedagogy. In one
view, the technique of proper piano playing was purely mechanical and
thus possible to teach through mechanical means (375). As a result of this
mechanistic perspective, physicists seemed to be able to offer quantifiable
answers to a seemingly non-quantifiable aesthetic phenomenon (384).
The competing view maintained that [t]he emphasis on mechanical skill
was [...] anathema to the true idea of art, and the true purpose of music
was transcendent, greater than the sum of mechanical techniques (387).
Arguments in support of both sides were made and contested
through mathematical and experimental methodologies. Hermann von
Helmholtzs famous 1863 acoustics textbook, On the Sensations of Tone
as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, treated the vibrations of

piano strings mathematically, as if they were caused by an instantaneous
percussive impact, their subsequent tone the result of the material they
were made of and where they were struck. This idealized view, which
disregarded variations in force, the materiality of the hammer, and the
duration of contact between the hammer and string, had little use for the
details of the key and thus touch. 5 Helmholtz rejected the concerns of his
metaphysico-esthetical opponents, who claimed that his theories were
too coarsely mechanical (vii). His work was, he wrote, a mere system-
atisation of observed facts (vii); the behavior of the piano was plainly
mechanical, and there was no interpretation to be argued with.
Helmholtzs rejoinder glosses over the production of scientific
facts, their operation within particular experimental settings and paradig-
matic contexts. Other approaches were indeed possible. Jackson describes
the various wrist guides and posture devices that piano teachers used
to experiment practically with the mechanical possibilities of touch. He
recounts a more unusual experiment in which a French researcher took
fingerprints of various students left and right hands while they played a
Beethoven sonata in an attempt to measure touch through a kind of foren-
sic physiology (407). The fundamentally hybrid nature of touch seemed to
invite a wide variety of investigative strategies: piano teachers concerned
themselves with the posture and finger position of their students, physi-
ologists observed the minute motions of the body, and physicists modeled
the levers and strings that the fingers impelled. Residing at the interface
of physiology and physics, human and machine, artist and instrument,
touch was a potently hybrid concept, a hiding place for ineffable aesthetic
nuance or simply the momentary transfer of force.
Although Ampico lab head Stoddard claimed revolutionary
status for his research into tone production, he built on this long history of
inquiry in acoustics and piano pedagogy, endorsing certain claims while
discounting others and organizing a theoretical space, the contours of
which would come to define what fidelity could mean for the reproducing
piano. The idea of what counted as science would guide the production
of fidelity in the Ampico lab. The central object of the labs research was
the piano action, the mechanism that translated a finger pressing a key
into a hammer hitting a string. By focusing their attention on the action
rather than, say, the physiology of performers or the acoustics of perfor-
mance spaces, the scientists of the Ampico lab endorsed a particular argu-
ment about what mattered in pianistic reproduction and, by extension,
pianism. The terms by which fidelity would be constructed in the Ampico

lab were, in many respects, settled at the start by choices in methodology
and object of study. 6
Stoddards view was well summarized in 1925 by Otto Ortmann,
a pianist and researcher at the Peabody Conservatory of Music:
No matter how we hold our hands, how gently or harshly we

stroke or strike the key, no matter how relaxed or rigid our arms
are, how curved or flat our fingers, we can do nothing else to
the key than move it three-eighths of an inch or less vertically
downwards. [...] Any variation in touch which does not influ-
ence or in some way change key-speed is useless when evaluated
in terms of the result on the action. (1516)
Constructing the piano action as a material assemblage of simple machines

meant that it could be treated as a mechanical translator, reliably convey-
ing force from the key to the string. As mechanism, the piano resisted
interpretive interventions, producing sound in necessarily delimited and
regular ways. Gentleness, harshness, relaxation, and rigidity meant noth-
ing to the machine that could only take an impulse on one end and convert
it into a hammer strike on the other. For researchers invested in objective
knowledge about the pianos mechanical traits, the piano came to repre-
sent and be a collection of mechanical traits. The mechanical nature of the
piano action acted as a filter: nothing extra-mechanical that the pianist did
had any effect on the ultimate sound because it could not have any effect
on the ultimate sound. The status of the piano action as the physical last
thing before the striking of the string ensured it. All the pianist could do
was input a series of impulses. Ortmann concludes, What we actually
do, then, when playing the piano, is to produce sounds of various pitch,
intensity, and duration. Nothing more (171).
Mechanical Fidelity
The mechanistic reductionism endorsed by Ortmann fit neatly

with the scientific approach of the Ampico lab and with a scientific ethic
that had emerged in the nineteenth century. Historians of science Lor-
raine Daston and Peter Galison, in their history of scientific objectivity,
describe the rise of what they call mechanical objectivity. Contrasted
with the method of the interpretive, intervening author-artist of the
eighteenth century (121), mechanical objectivity stressed the detachment
of the scientist through a morality of self-restraint (185). By relying on

instruments, scientists attempted to remove their own subjectivity, deriv-
ing scientific knowledge through a strict protocol, if not automatically
(121). Since they had no subjectivities themselves, objects and measuring
instruments were free of that distortion characteristic of the observers
personal tastes, commitments, or ambitions (121). As Arendt writes,
[A]gainst the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the man-made
world (137). In this scientific context, pianoswhich well predated the
ethic of mechanical objectivitycame to be seen in a new light.7
Mechanical objectivity allowed the scientists to envision the
piano as a machine in a very literal sense: a fundamentally material collec-
tion of levers and pivots that operated in predictable and fixed ways. This
predictability had serious implications for the enterprise of reproduction.
Musicologist Kent Holliday writes of the Ampico lab: Commencing an era
of unprecedented achievement in numerous technological fields, it was
logical to assume that even the subtlest nuances of a pianists mysterious
art could somehow be captured and explained in scientific terms, much
like an immobile butterfly fixed on a pin. If Helmholtz could discover the
laws of acoustics by an inductive method, so could the whole musical pro-
cess be replicated by machine, given another decade or so (53). In the sci-
entific milieu of the piano lab, the fundamental nature of materiality was
granted a priori. From this perspective, touch was simply a mystification
of mechanical facts that could be readily explained and measured.
The a priori reduction of pianism to mechanical components
provided the foundation on which to build a quantitative and mechani-
cally objective pianistic reproduction. This reduction was not simply a
reflection of the true nature of pianism but rather a definitional move:
by understanding piano performance in terms of the actions motion, the
Ampico scientists set the limits of what could be counted as pianism and
thus what needed to be faithfully reproduced. Touch could be measured
through its effect on the piano action, since anything that exceeded the
action was, from the outset, not pianism.
Through the piano action, what had formerly been known as
touch became intensity, a quantitative category that only lacked a clear
way to be measured. Dr.Clarence Hickman, one of the founding members
of the new Ampico lab, was tasked with solving this problem. Hickman
had received his doctorate in physics and acoustics under a student of
Helmholtz and put his training in physical modeling to use in the develop-
ment of the spark chronograph, a precision timing device to measure the
velocity of the hammer at the time it struck the string (138). Inside the
piano, the spark chronograph worked by means of a lightweight electri-
cal contact attached to the hammer; as the hammer swung upward, this
contact would brush past two other fixed contacts that were a known dis-
tance apart, completing an electrical circuit. Nearby, the completed circuit
would cause sparks to burn a rapidly spinning roll of paper. By measuring
the distance between burn marks, Hickman could calculate the speed at
which the hammer had traveled. Hickmans method had the advantage of
being lightweight (therefore precise) and simple (therefore more reliable),
but it also endorsed a kind of directness: if the hammer hitting the string
was the essence of playing the piano, the moment in which the relevant
sound was produced, then measuring the hammer speed was the most
direct way to quantify the dynamic level of a note. 8
For Hickman and Ampico, hammer speed came to mean
touch. This equivalency was mechanically and experimentally produced:
the piano action mechanically guaranteed that hammer speed was an
objective representation of the pianists playing. By correlating these
speeds with pressure levels in the re-enacting pianos bellows, Hickman
outlined a procedure by which hammer speed and dynamic level could be
made functionally equivalent. A chain of reliable machines and translat-
ing formulae connected the eventual striking of strings by the re-enacting
piano back to the pianists original performance through a flung ham-
mer, electrical contacts, vacuum pumps, a pneumatic calibration chart,
and depressed ivory keys. The material meaning of the piano action was
inflected by the ethic of mechanical objectivity, rendering the pianists
work thoroughly (though still expertly) mechanical and guaranteeing
that hammer speed would constitute a reliable representation of that
mechanical work.
This substitutionhammer speed for intensitywas by no
means the obvious or only solution to the problem of quantifying touch. 9
However, it provided the terms with which a rhetoric of fidelity might be
established. The chain of scientifically vetted operatorsboth mechanical
parts and mathematical modelsthat connected the performers hands to
the sounds they would eventually make both bound the two together and
made interventions between them possible. Once the constituent parts of
pianism had been identified and characterized, they might be replaced,
automated, or rearranged. Ortmann wrote this explanation: If A plays
poetically and B does not, then, as far as the single tone is concerned,
A plays sounds of different intensity than those of B; and if B could play
sounds of the same intensity as A, B would play just as poetically as A

(171). This reproductive syllogism was enabled by mechanical objectivity:
the piano keys, if operated with identical intensity, could not do anything
but respond identically. So making a performance happen again was, it
seemed, as simple as providing the piano action with the proper series of
notes at the proper duration and intensity, as measured by the spark chro-
nograph. The objectivity of the piano, which allowed two players to play
alike, could also be used to repeat a performance. Since the performers
action was, in the first place, fundamentally mechanical, the perforated
paper rolls of the re-enacting piano might be ableif the machinery was
reliableto do exactly what a performer did, to be, as the Rachmaninoff
roll said, not a copy or an imitation or a reproduction, but the actual
playing of a performer him- or herself.
Machinery does not just work; it also means, operating in semi-
otic terrain, even as it pumps, hammers, ratchets, and lifts. Through this
process of meaning making, Daston and Galison write, [T]he machines
constitutive and symbolic functions blur, for the machine seem[s] at once
a means to and a symbol of mechanical objectivity (139). That the piano
scientists object of study was already a machine allowed for a totalizing
rhetoric of mechanicity: the piano action was both the means through which
performance was translated into mechanical action and a symbol of the
underlying mechanical nature of the entire act of performance. Like their
instruments in the lab, the piano, as an instrument on stage, was thought
by the scientists to be nothing more than a reliable mechanical conduit.
Piano researchers, invested in mechanical objectivity as a methodological
obligation, found it, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the object they studied.
By bringing the man-made piano back from the mysterious
world of art into the certain laboratory of science, Ampico hoped to under-
stand it completely, and this complete understanding offered the promise
of replicationthe expansion of the machinic ideal outside the bounds
of the piano and into the body of the performer, as performance became
a repeatable configuration of mechanical actions. It was as though, in
the words of collector and enthusiast Nelson Barden, in piano playing
the performers body is literally a machine operating another machine
(Barden, Morgan, and Howe 171).10 If phonographic fidelity was achieved
through the discursive elision of its material support, the fidelity of the
re-enacting piano relied on an understanding of pianism and its reproduc-
ibility as fundamentally mechanical. Once pianists were understood as
machines, machines might be understood as pianists.
Mechanical Identities
The simple equivalence drawn between pianists and machines

was complicated by the fact that, in spite of its scientific status, machinery
could be quite unruly. Mechanical objectivity, write Daston and Galison,
was not a natural fact but rather a regulative ideal, a shaping ambition that
conditioned whether and when practitioners sought to improve what they
did on the page, in the field, and at the laboratory bench (321). Objectivity
was not something found in machines so much as projected onto them, and
it acquired regulative power as a new model for the perfection toward
which working objects of science might strive (138). The positive inflec-
tion of the mechanicalreliable, precise, tireless, and rigorouswas an
identity that both humans and machines struggled to live up to.
If pianos could be relied on to behave always the same way,
then Ampicos reproductive project, it was thought, could go off without
a hitch. However, difficulties emerged almost immediately. Reenacting
mechanisms came installed in different makes and models of piano, and
they could be installed into older straight pianos as well. As it turned
out, the various pianos responded differently to the same inputs, com-
plicating the reproduction of a performance that had been recorded on
a different piano, in a potentially different climate. Worse still, within a
single piano, different hammers had different weights, meaning that the
same pneumatic pressure might result in different note intensities. The
complex and unstable machinery of the piano had to be disciplined into
the objective and reliable role it was expected to play.
Givens writes that in the Ampico lab, a touch analyzing device
was developed [and] it was discovered that frictions in the piano action
varied from note to note [...]. A special Note Compensation Test Roll was
issued by Ampico to calibrate the pneumatics, and by tailoring the open-
ing of each pneumatic to the frictional value of the piano action assembly
which it operated, an extremely light and even pianissimo was obtained
(5859). The reliability of machines was itself a sociotechnical construc-
tion, and Ampicos Note Compensation Test Roll was a device for disci-
plining machines into compliance with it. The equivalence that Hickman
had produced between hammer speed and pneumatic pressure was, in
practice, imperfect. But by running the Note Compensation Test Roll, users
could calibrate their pianos, relying on their own auditory perception of
equal loudness and adjusting the valves of the machine to fit. By match-
ing the pianos responsiveness to their own perception, users facilitated
mechanical fidelityironically through their own, often untrained, judg-

ment. In the home, as in the lab, the reliable sameness of machines had to
be produced, and its metric was ultimately the subjective human.
The irony of machines failing to act mechanically was a
testament to the shifting semantic field in which machinery signified.
Daston and Galison write: Mechanical had long referred to an inferior
brand of labor executed with the hands, not the head (Shakespeares rude
mechanicals). As the Industrial Revolution transformed work in the
nineteenth century, mechanical retained its pejorative, manual associa-
tions, but now referred dismissively to actual machines and the workers
who tended them, suggesting they were repetitive, mindless, automatic
(137). In the context of pianism, mechanical had the disparaging sense
it retains today: lacking spirit, inexpressive, or overly rigid. These ideas
about what it meant to be mechanical had been at play in the debates about
touch described above and featured frequently in criticisms of automatic
pianos.11 Advertisements for automatic pianos denied that they sounded
mechanical, while simultaneously relying on a mechanically reductive
understanding of piano performance. The Edison Company had responded
to accusations of crude mechanicity by downplaying the body of the pho-
nograph, hiding it away in cabinets. Ampico instead attempted to shift this
negative attention onto its rivals.
The Course in Ampico Salesmanship, an internal Ampico publi-
cation that provided sales tips to store owners, included a set of diagrams
that purported to illustrate the difference between human playing (and,
implicitly, the playing of the Ampico) and the playing of competitors repro-
ducing pianos. Ampico tried to align its own pneumatic system with expert
human playing, leaving the negative inflections of the word mechanical
for its rivals. The defining characteristic of expert human playing, accord-
ing to these diagrams, was control: a virtuosic player could play any note
at any time with any degree of force (15). The pneumatic system of the
German Welte reproducing piano was supposedly unable to play instanta-
neous, sharp accents without affecting consecutive notes. The expression
of the American Duo-Art piano, which used an accordion pneumatic
systema set of small bellows that controlled volume in a series of discrete
stepswas characterized by Ampico as much like that which would be
produced by a beginner vainly trying to control his unruly muscles and
unable to attain smoothness of expression (118). In Ampicos representa-
tion, the poor reproducing machine was, in fact, like an inexpert human
performer, lacking control, and the expert performer was like a well-oiled
machine, able to play conceivably anything. The mechanical identities I

describe in this section were roles ascribed to people and machines as well
as identities in a more mathematical sense: equivalencies constructed
between re-enacting pianos and pianists, imagined through the shifting
semantics of the mechanical.
In their sales rhetoric, Ampico took advantage of the construc-
tion of the virtuosic pianist as a kind of human re-enacting piano and
vice versa; both were able to re-enact every element of great piano-play-
ing (16). Salesmen were encouraged to forgo descriptions of the pianos
mechanics, focusing instead on the expressive breadth the re-enacting
piano was capable of reenacting:
The colorful pedalling of Copeland

The feathery lightness of Godowskys flying fingers
The satisfying straight-forwardness of Mirovitch
The spectacular brilliancy of Nyiregyazhi
The incredible clarity of Rosenthal. (16)
After attempting to discard the negative connotations of the mechanical,

Ampico filled the gap with descriptions that had once been limited to
humans. Would you like to have such artists play your piano for you at
command? went the ad copy (Givens 77). If we could think of humans in
mechanical terms, we could also now think of machines in human terms.
The blankness of a well-disciplined and properly mechanical piano action
that played all that could be played provided a backdrop against which
one could appreciate the reenacted individuality of performers technical
styles. Daston and Galison write that one of the outcomes of mechanical
objectivity was a reconception of scientific objects: In the precision of
their depiction, objects became specific, individual, no longer represen-
tative of a type but instead the end product of a series of certifiably auto-
matic copies (148). The Ampico sales rhetoric highlighted the specificity
of performance styles in support of the re-enacting pianos fidelity, taking
the recognizable styles of individual virtuosi as both the object and evi-
dence of a perfect and reliable reproduction. The evaluative criteria for
humans and machines were linked. Mechanical fidelity provided discur-
sive and material resources that opened up a fluid, if delimited, connection
between the human and the mechanical.
Pianos in Our Ears
In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell worked on two hearing

machines. The firstthe ear phonautographconsisted of a human
middle ear screwed to a board. Using the eardrum as a transducer, the
phonautograph drew vibrations from the air into lines on a smoked glass
plate. The second was based on Helmholtzs so-called piano model of the
ear, which suggested that hearing occurred in a set of nerves past the
eardrum that resonated in sympathetic vibration with external sounds,
like the strings of an open piano. Bell constructed a piano-sized device
with thousands of metal tines, resonant at different frequencies, intended
to duplicate the physical work of audition.
These two devices brought ideas about how and where hear-
ing occurred (at the transductive eardrum or the resonant organ of Corti)
into instrumentalized, technological existence. The ear phonautograph
marked a pivotal moment in the history of what Sterne calls the tympanic
mechanism: with the cutting of the ear and its function from the head,
Audition became a mechanism that could be anatomically, processurally,
and experimentally abstracted from the human body and the rest of the
senses (62). In the history of sound reproduction that spun out from Bells
invention and others like it, ears and speakers would come to be imagined
as examples of the same basic sonic function. The phonograph that took
the stage with Marie Rappold for Edisons tone tests shared its history with
Bells phonautograph. Transductive membranes were found in both our
heads and the studios of the nascent recording industry. With the eventual
success of the phonograph and its descendants, our ears would become
fleshy stereo microphones rated from 20 to 20,000 hertz.
As John Durham Peters writes, [H]uman-machine mimesis is
mutual (189). Thomas Edison claimed I am a phonograph because, like
his device, he was deaf to high frequency sound (Peters 191). We might
imagine an alternative history in which the ear piano and not the ear
phonautograph took holdin which we had not microphones but pianos
in our ears. Bell did not just envision the ear as a piano, Peters writes,
but buil[t] a piano as an ear. Metaphors leap off of pagesand out of
earsinto machines (187). One might add that the metaphors then leap
back: although our ideas about our senses bleed out into the machinery
we use to stimulate them, technologies and technological understandings
make their way back into our bodies.12
Sterne wrote in 2003: It is still impossible to think of a con-

figuration of technologies that makes sense as sound reproduction without
either microphones or speakers (3435). Tympanic technologies have
come to occupy the entire field of sonic reproduction, their identification
with the ear collapsing the distinction between sound production and its
reception. If tympanic reproduction seems irrevocably intertwined with
hearing itselfubiquitous, immaterial, and naturalizednontympanic
technologies of sound production like the re-enacting piano offer the pos-
sibility of localizing, materializing, and making strange the act of sonic
reproduction. The claustrophobic definition of sound that isolated it to
the eardrum and enabled hearing to be literally cut from the head might
be expanded. Discussions of sound and sound reproduction need not be
confined to the tympanum alone.
If we step back from the moment of vibration, we find reproduc-
ing technologies like the re-enacting piano engaged with larger questions
of performance, repetition, and identity. Fidelity, the troubled arbiter of
sameness, works differently here, tracing the motion of keys and fingers
rather than the compressions and rarefactions of the air. Where tym-
panic fidelity reduces sound to a momentary stimulation of the eardrum,
mechanical fidelity engages with the production of sound writ large, in
its mechanical and performative contexts. The naturalized regime of
tympanic reproduction might be supplanted or augmented by a renewed
attention to the rhetorics of objectivity, materiality, and identity that char-
acterized the re-enacting pianos mechanical fidelity. If, as Arendt sug-
gests, we retrieve our identity from our technologies, then we must attend
to those technologies. Obsolete sonic machinery like the re-enacting piano
might well offer an alternative to normative tympanic discourse: aware-
ness of the contingency of our technological metaphors and new ways to
imagine the entanglement of hearing and sounding, originals and copies,
humans and machines.
Thanks are due to William Uricchio and Stefan Helmreich for their guidance and to Rey Chow
and James Steintrager for their thoughtful comments and invitation to this special issue.
nick seaver is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of California,

Irvine. He received a masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
comparative media studies in 2010. He is currently working on an ethnographic study of
software engineers, studying the production of automaticity in music information retrieval
software.
Notes 1 Thanks to Myles Jackson for reductionism. Although piano

drawing my attention to the rel- performance undoubtedly
evance of Thompsons work on exceeded its representation on
the phonograph to the present piano rolls in mechanical and
discussion. potentially nonmechanical ways,
the question was whether that
2 This careful appreciation of con- excess mattered. The answers to
text is especially important for that question, though argued for
the automatic piano, which has and against in terms of objective
been enrolled into the prehis- reductionism, were unavoidably
tory of computing, ostensibly subjective.
as a result of its failure in the
history of music reproduction. 7 Daston and Galisons Objectivity
However, as Gitelman writes, takes the visual representations
[D]igitized data could hardly of scientific atlases as its object,
have mattered to the material raising the question of whether
meanings of perforated rolls their observations can be applied
in the automatic pianos heyday in the acoustic domain. How-
(Media 204). This essay seeks to ever, mechanical objectivity, in
understand the re-enacting piano their treatment, centers on the
as a sonic technology, refusing to perceived reliability of physical
cede the category entirely to the mechanisms, independent of any
phonograph and its descendants. particular human sense; as such,
it is readily applicable to the ques-
3 Givens reprints the article Entire tions of objectivity raised in the
Piano Industry to Profit by Work Ampico lab. Though outside the
of Newly Organized Research scope of the present essay, there
Department of American Piano are certainly more connections to
Company, originally published in be drawn between their discus-
The Music Trades 21 (Apr. 1924), sion of expertise and truth-to-
in his book. nature and the practice of roll
editors who altered automatic
4 Other components of perfor- recordings so as to make them
mancepedaling, for example play more musically.
would eventually come to be
studied, but touch maintained a 8 This ballistic approachmodel-
special metaphorical significance ing the hammer as a freely flying
as the central moment of pianistic bodycame to define Hickmans
action. scientific career: he would even-
tually co-invent the bazooka
5 Although an exact analysis of the shoulder-launched missile
motion of a string excited by the weapon and adapt the spark chro-
hammer of a pianoforte would be nograph to make measurements
rather complicated, Helmholtz in archery.
offers in an appendix some pre-
liminary equations that might be 9 The German Welte Company
used to further investigate piano reportedly used a system in which
hammers as they were: covered electrified graphite rods, attached
in elastic felt that would result to the bottoms of the keys, dipped
in longer contact with the string into a trough of mercury below
and thus more complex vibrations the keyboard, producing vari-
(380). able voltages that could be mea-
sured for intensity. A 1929 patent
6 This is not to pass judgment on by Henry Price Ball suggested
the Ampico labs mechanical that linking intensity directly to
hammer speed was fallacious, November, 1969 issue and again

as the amplitude of movement in the March, 1976 issue. This
of the string and the intensity version (MayJune 1993) has been
of tone produced thereby [...] is extensively edited and updated
not a straight line function of the by Jeffrey Morgan and Richard
velocity of the hammer. Balls Howe, with permission from
invention purported to quan- Barden, to reflect new informa-
tify dynamics by measuring the tion which has become available
vibration of the string itself. See during the past 20 years (Barden,
Ball, Music-recording instru- Morgan, and Howe 171).
ment, u.s. Patent 1,716,811. The
few contemporary descendants 11 A pianola (the earliest of the
of these piano recording systems mass-produced automatic piano
often record speeds at both ends players) was featured in H.G.
of the piano action to ensure reli- Wellss Tono-Bungay where it was
able measurement, calling into ridiculed as a musical gorilla
question the idea that the machin- with fingers all of one length. And
ery simply transmits impulses a sort of soul (438), playing on
without changing them. the stiffness of its levers and its
pneumatic, though not ensouled,
10 1993 Publishers Note: This operation.
excellent article on the Ampico
was originally written by Nelson 12 This return happens not only
Barden approximately 24 years metaphorically but materially: the
ago. It has appeared twice in cochlear implants that are used to
the amica Bulletin, once in the help the deaf hear operate on a
similar resonant principle.
Works Cited Ampico Corporation. The Course in Ampico Salesmanship. New York: Business Training
Corporation, 1925.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: u of Chicago p, 1998.
Barden, Nelson, Jeffrey Morgan, and Richard Howe. Fidelity and the Ampico. amica
Bulletin. 1993. 171180. http://www.amica.org/Live/Publications/Past-Bulletin-Articles/
FidelityAndTheAmpico.pdf.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone, 2007.
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge,
m a: mit p, 2006.
. Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or the Case of Sheet
Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls. Rabinovitz and Geil 199217.
Givens, Larry. Re-enacting the Artist: A Story of the Ampico Reproducing Piano. New York:
Vestal, 1970.
Helmholtz, Hermann von. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory
of Music. 4th ed. Trans. Alexander J. Ellis. London: Longmans and Green, 1912.
Hickman, Clarence N. A Spark Chronograph Developed for Measuring Intensity of

Percussion Instrument Tones. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1.1 (1929): 13846.
Holliday, Kent A. Reproducing Pianos Past and Present. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1989.
Jackson, Myles W. Physics, Machines, and Musical Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century

Germany. History of Science 42 (2004): 371418.
Ortmann, Otto. The Physical Basis of Piano Touch and Tone. New York: Dutton, 1925.
Peters, John Durham. Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History. Rabinovitz and Geil 17798.
Rabinovitz, Lauren, and Abraham Geil, eds. Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital
Culture. Durham: Duke up, 2004.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham:
Duke up, 2003.
Suisman, David. Sound, Knowledge, and the Immanence of Human Failure: Rethinking
Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano. Social
Text 28.1 (2010): 1334.
Thompson, Emily. Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison
Phonograph in America, 18771925. Musical Quarterly 79.1 (1995): 13171.
Wells, H. G. Tono-Bungay. New York: Random House, 1908.

mar a mills
On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller,

Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove
The electrical engineers of today, he Teacher gave me an instrument covered

said, are only talking baby talk. They with soft polished leather and contain-
know how to handle resistances and ing coils of wire varying in thickness
even capacitances and inductances, and sensitivity. Observe this carefully,
but these speak much too childish a Helen, she said, and it will help you
language. If you put two messages side keep your speech at its present level of
by side in such a piece of apparatus, excellence. It will also bring you differ-
they stay side by side and merely add to ent sounds from a distance just as we
each other. Now a steam engine or an get them through the ear. I placed my
electric generator or an electric motor hands on the instrument. To my aston-
speaks a much more complicated lan- ishment each wire coil vibrated with a
guage, with a really difficult syntax to sound easily distinguishable from the
it. [...] Of course we know a little bit of restcars and teams going by, passing
their language, but we havent learned footsteps, birds singing, running water.
its grammar as yet and it is on that that [...] I have yet to find out whether
I am working. the instrument she showed me is an
Wiener, The Tempter encouragement or a prophecy of new
victories over limitations.
Keller, Journal
The Industrial Conception of Language
I
n the acoustic dead room at Bell Telephone Laboratories
during the summer of 1949, Helen Keller experienced a new kind of
silence: Language has no equivalent for the absolute physical silence
that burst upon me in that fantastic, baffling chamber. [...] I have known
many kinds of silencethe silence of early morning, the silence of remote
mountain summits, the silence of gently falling snow. [...] Shut in by floor,
ceiling, and walls of fiberglass, I throbbed with the silence of the dead
and the silence that covers buried peoples and ages without a history.1
The anechoic chamber shielded occupants from outside noises and stilled
Figure 1
Helen Keller and
her assistant Polly
Thomson examin-
ing a telephone at
Bell Laboratories in
1949.
Photograph courtesy
of at & t Archives
and History Center.
internal reverberations. In a typical room, walls and furniture would have

variously reflected and absorbed sound waves, and the floor carried the
aftereffects of movement. As John Cage would discover in the Harvard
anechoic chamber two years later, a silenced environment opened up
the sense of sound, whether tactile or auditory, to the throbbing of ones
own body.
Although deafness was popularly associated with the dead
world of soundlessness, telephone engineers were interested in the ways
deaf and deaf-blind people took in information from environmental vibra-
tionsin particular, the ways speech could be converted from one
medium or sensory domain to another. The telephone itself relied upon the
ability of sound waves to be transferred from a mechanical medium (the
air) to an electrical one. Similarly, Keller described herself as a vibro-
scope: like the telephone and other electro-acoustic technologies, she
was a partial translator of sensuous phenomena, themselves connected
through the universal language of physical oscillation.
Bell Telephone Company, the corporate predecessor of Ameri-
can Telephone and Telegraph (at&t), was founded in Boston in 1877,
76 On Disability and Cybernetics
Figure 2
Harvey Fletcher
addresses Helen
Keller before the
statue of Bell at the
labs.
Photograph courtesy
of at & t Archives
and History Center.
financed by Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, two men

whose deaf children were tutored by A.G. Bell. 2 Bell Labs, the research
and development arm of at&t, was the largest industrial laboratory in
the world at the time of Kellers commemorative visit. In addition to her
encounter with the dead room, Keller inspected a bust of Bell in the foyer
of the labs, held the earliest telephones and compared them to mid-century
models, and attended lectures on miniaturization and the new transistor,
for which she had been briefed with Braille translations. 3
Communication engineering had long since exceeded the con-
struction of telephone sets and wires; speech and hearing themselves were
submitted to the procedures of mechanization. Like the motor functions
and the other senses, speech had been analyzed, subdivided, reproduced,
rationalized, and streamlined through the joint forces of psychophysics
and industrialization, which fused in the medium of the telephone. 4 What
Walter Benjamin described as the bourgeois conception of languagein
which the means of communication is the word, its object factual, and
its addressee a human beingemerged in tandem with an industrial
conception of language, in which speech is a material good and a saleable
commodity (65). According to Karl Marxs formulation, commodities are
something twofold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, deposi-
tories of value (55). Likewise, a particular message from a unique voice,
sent as a signal through the telephone system, could at once be treated in
abstract mathematical and economic terms: quantified in terms of relative
volume and information or priced in terms of time. 5
Telephone signals were electrical representations, at first anal-
ogous to the airborne speech wave (analogs), but soon more loosely corre-
lated as telephone engineers devised new ways to securely and efficiently
transmit their commodityand still reproduce intelligible speech at the
receiver. 6 In the interest of efficiency, electromechanical media began to
process communicationsimagined as deliveriesbetween human send-
ers and receivers. The verb form of the word process, meaning to oper-
ate on mechanically, according to a set procedure, came into use in the
late nineteenth century in the context of food processing. Following the
industrialization of agriculture and diet, speech, data, and other signals
also came to be processed. Indeed, Claude Shannon worked out his com-
munication theory at Bell Labs the year prior to Kellers visit, partly as a
way to quantify the information content of a given telecommunications
signal and thus code it economically (generally by removing irrelevant
information and redundancy).
One of the interventions of this essay, then, is to place tech-

nologies for speech transmissionthe telephone and kindred phonetic
technologiesat the center of new media history. Written text and
other visual recordings are assumed by the majority of scholars to be
the underpinnings of digital technology.7 Yet oral communication was
an obvious foundation for early communication theories, which emerged
in the context of telephone engineering. at&t was, of course, also con-
cerned with telegraphy, the electrical transmission technology that set
many standards in terms of coding, compression, and error correction. 8
However, the extensiveness and density of the telephone network, and its
automatic conversion of a continuous phenomenon (speech) into electri-
cal signals, created the demand for the first digital sampling technology
(pulse code modulation [pcm]) and for Shannons information theory. 9 This
history does not ultimately recuperate natural orality; to the contrary,
telephony expanded the technification of speech from its precedents in
phonetics and deaf education, often supporting orality with recording
and reproduction technologies, and finally defining speech as essentially
mechanical.10
As a second intervention, this essay examines one of the speech
machines developed within the telephone system: a device for converting
sound into tactile vibrations. Building on the material or object-voice long
familiar in deaf oral education, this hearing glove was used for vocal
regulation as well as speech transmission. It played a secondary role in
the field of haptics and the optimization of tactile communication. It was
part of the milieu of early information theory, and it also became a feature
of early cybernetics, where it raised interest in information compression
and the automation of communication. The glove was eventually tested
by Helen Keller during a visit to another laboratoryNorbert Wieners at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit).
In media and science studies, the hearing glove has often
served to illustrate claims about the dematerialization and/or disembodi-
ment of information in the cybernetic paradigm. From the first telephonic
voices to the current proliferation of digital media, a series of commenta-
tors has worried over the physical and temporal separation of signals from
embodied sources, material channels, and architectural spaces. Although
a growing scholarly corpus has now demonstrated the materiality of elec-
tronic/digital/computerized media, most authors continue to attribute a
fantasy of disembodied communication to early cyberneticians and electri-
cal engineers.11 In How We Became Posthuman, for instance, N.Katherine
Hayles insists that information theory disembodied information from

its carrier media, conceiving of it as a pattern rather than a presence
and thus creating the illusion of erasure of the material world (28).
Her argument encompasses posthuman threats to the body, to media
materiality, and to embodiment. The fixation on message transmis-
sion in communication engineering did often lead to a disregard for the
uniqueness of individual embodiment and interpretation; nevertheless,
the industrial conception of communication treated the voice as a material
good, and it remained committed to conventional bodies.
From metaphysics to deconstruction, as shown by Adriana
Cavarero, the voice has been widely regarded as immaterial and semantic,
with acoustic materiality ignored in favor of mental signifieds (57).
In the context of communication engineering, however, it was precisely
acoustic materialityand the materiality of electrical signalsthat under-
pinned the reproduction and simulation of the voice. In the first decade
of the twentieth century, as telephone engineers began to theorize the
speech signal and its economy, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure worked
out his own theory of semiology, based on a speaking-circuit seem-
ingly modeled upon a telephone call. The speaking circuit isolated the
communication between two individuals, which was sent via impulses
along imaginary wires from mind through mouth, to the ear of the other,
and so on (11). Saussure divided speech according to the physical (sound
waves), physiological (phonation and audition), and psychological parts
(word-images and concepts) (12). Only the psychological parts truly
mattered for Saussures semiology, which took as its focus the study of the
sign: The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept
and a sound-image [signified and signifier]. The latter is not the mate-
rial sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the
sound, the impression it makes on our senses (66). The rest of the speech
circuit, as far as Saussure was concerned, could be left to phonetics and
psychophysics (18).
Indeed, drawing on those two disciplines, telephone engi-
neers obsessively examined phonesthe elemental possible sounds of
human speechmoving them from the air into electrical media, as well
as building ideas about human physiology into transmission apparatus.12
In contrast to scholars of the signand even to phonologists who studied
meaningful sound differencesengineers of the phone were not inter-
ested in signification or meaning.13 The physical properties of sound waves
formed the basis for telephone signals, at first quite directly (indexically)
as the vibration of the diaphragm in the transmitter generated an analo-

gous electrical current. In the digital coding that preceded information
theory (i.e., pcm), the signals and their material channels were still treated
as physical things. After Shannon, the segregation of information from
redundancy and irrelevancy in a signal was linked to the parameters
of the source and the receiverin the case of speech, statistical norms of
articulation and human hearing.
In Hayless account of the postWorld WarII emergence of the
posthuman, early cyberneticians and information theorists dematerial-
ized signals and privileged information in a manner comparable to
Saussures semiotics and the strong constructionism that followed.14 Sci-
ence fiction authors and techno-futurists, she explains, have extrapolated
from the seeming disembodiment of information in signal transmission
to virtual bodies: at worst, a future of posthumans who regard their
bodies as fashion accessories to be jettisoned as needed through the
downloading of patterns from minds to machines (5). The counterargu-
ment of How We Became Posthumana venture that Hayles compares to the
rememory work of Toni Morrisons Belovedis her own insistence that
for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium (192).
In an article dismissing the significance of cyborgs to early
cybernetics, Ronald Kline has contested Hayless move from informa-
tion abstraction to radical bodily mutability and human-machine fusion.
With present-mindedness, he contends, Hayles has read later concerns
about cyborgs as the next step in evolution back into the early history of
cybernetics. He continues: The role of the founders of cybernetics is to
set the cybernetic wave in motion, to disembody information so that it can
travel across boundaries between the organic and mechanical, to create
the material and metaphorical figure of the cyborg. The cyborg can then
disrupt old notions about human autonomy, especially in the science fic-
tion analyzed so well in Hayless book (335).15 Kline argues that early
cybernetic research mostly developed human and machine analogies
concerning the principles of feedback control, homeostasis, and informa-
tion processing, leading to a focus on automata, neural nets, biological
systems, and social systems rather than bodily transformations (351).
The few cyborgs that Kline discovers in the history of cybernetics derive
from the minor research area of medical cybernetics, one of his prime
examples being the hearing glove presumably invented by Wiener as a
sound-to-tactile prosthesis for deaf people (331).16
Curiously, Kline states that the hearing glove is a good exam-

ple of what Hayles calls technical cyborgs, although she does not mention
the device, nor did Wiener use the word cyborg to describe the glove (338).
In fact, Hayles depicts the glove as paradigmatic of Wieners analogical
reasoning and the ways analogy enabled human-machine fusions: As
data move across various kinds of interfaces, analogical relationships
are the links that allow pattern to be preserved from one modality to
another. Analogy is thus constituted as a universal exchange system that
allows data to move across boundaries. It is the lingua franca of a world
(re)constructed through relation rather than grasped in essence (98). For
Hayles, analogical reasoning extracts patterns, coordinates, or equations
from material thingsit is another means by which information loses
its body (98).17
Like Hayles, Kline reads the glove as a disembodying device:
Information is extracted from sound waves in a disembodied form
(338). Because speech waves inherently escape the human bodymost
often carried by the medium of the air, understood to be a form of mat-
ter in this periodwe might instead interpret the glove to be part of the
unremitting modern materialization of speech. The hearing glove was a
strong analogy, a concrete analog that replicated the speech processing
performed by the inner ear. Although the glove was not a digital device (it
did not quantize speech waves), it did parse the information from the
noninformation or redundancy in speech. This abstraction of informa-
tion from speech waves was not abstract in the sense of being immate-
rial: the frequencies subtracted from the human-generated speech wave
were transferred directly to other material media. Moreover, the infor-
mation transmitted by the glove was defined with reference to certain
physiological parameters.
To read the hearing glove, and its history, is to unavoidably
encounter the material interfaces of communication, the ways media
systems incorporate the bodies of users. Signals themselves, I argue, are
best understood as concretized abstractions, material-semiotic objects. In
1944, Ernst Cassirer would include signals within the typology of signs
in An Essay on Man, which contrasted signals and symbols as operators
versus designators, the one physical and the other meaningful (37). (As
operators, signals triggered responses from machine or human receivers.)
By the latter half of the century, signals began to be described within com-
munication engineering and semiotics alike as material mise en abyme:
electrical carriers of other signs, encoded transmitters of messages

(these codes often obtaining from the quantified information content of the
message). With signal processing, and in the wake of information theory,
signals were complexly designedin this sense they are representations.
The pattern of the signalthe physical variations of electrical current or
voltageembodies ideas about faithful, efficient, or robust transmission
or synthesis. As Wendy Chun summarizes, signals have a double nature,
both as a physical event and as a symbolic value (156).
Although signals have been catalogued within semiotics since
the first half of the twentieth century, they remain understudied compared
with other types of signs. At the same time, they are ideal objects for the
material-semiotic analyses favored within science and technology stud-
ies. In their A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of
Human and Nonhuman Assemblies, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour
explain that semiotics is the study of order building or path building and
may be applied to settings, machines, bodies, and programming languages
as well as texts; [...] the key aspect of the semiotics of machines is its ability
to move from signs to things and back (22). Timothy Lenoir has expanded
this approach to include material considerations of language, the notion
missing in the work of earlier structuralist semiotics: language itself is
not pure sign, it is also a thing. Language is tied to voice, to bitmaps on a
screen, to materiality. The word is thus partly object, partly sign (122).
Working within this line of reasoning, Hayles credits only
Warren McCulloch, among Shannon and Wieners contemporaries, for
recognizing the entanglement of signal and materiality, the fact that
information moves only through signals and that signals have existence
only if they are embodied (62). The history of the hearing glove, however,
suggests that signal materiality was a basic element of cybernetics. (Out-
side the realm of science fiction and the virtuality craze of the 1990s, I
would argue that the majority of communication engineers have under-
stood information to always be instantiated in a medium.) Information
theory and cybernetics emerged in a milieu committed to the materializa-
tion and control of communication, rather than the erasure of materiality
and bodies. As a consequence, these fields prioritized certain kinds and
arrangements of bodies above and beyond the sheer isolation or transfer
of information.
In the remainder of this essay, I take up the hearing glove in
order to clarify my arguments about the central importance of speech
research to the history of communication engineering as well as the
continued relevance of bodies and materiality (if not singular embodi-

ment) to the early cyberneticians and information theorists. By focusing
on disability rather than science fiction, and by taking the glove to belong
to a familiar genre of communications technology rather than being a new
example of medical cyborgs, I show that the early cyberneticians paid
an obsessive attention to embodimentthrough a policing of human dif-
ference that required as much physical labor as information exchangeas
well as to physical media, which were evaluated in terms of their efficiency
for carrying signals and their compatibility with human norms.
Keller/Wiener:
Prodigies of Communication
At the time of her visit to Bell Labs, Keller had recently returned
from a peace mission to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. at&t greatly underwrote
World War II, contributing to radar, weaponry, and field communications.
With a combination of discouragement and optimism, Keller thanked the
engineers for inviting her to take part in their celebration of telephone
progress: Everything I saw at the Bell Laboratories bespoke the civiliza-
tion to which Dr.Bell looked forward that would unite mankind in one
great family by the spoken word. It is true, we are still far from peace
despite wider, more swift communications [...]. If we only use the advan-
tages worthily that cybernetics is placing within our reach, science will,
I am confident, elucidate to us relationships more marvelous than any we
have yet comprehended.18 Cyberneticsthe science of control and com-
munication in the animal and the machinepromised more widespread
communications, along with intelligent machines. These new machines
would themselves have sensory organs, they would converse with one
another or fuse with humans, and they would self-regulate or self-correct
through internal messaging systems.
The following February, Keller met the father of cybernetics
himself. While traveling to New Jersey to see family, Wiener and his wife
stopped at Arcan Ridge, Kellers home in Connecticut. Keller had taken an
interest in Wieners new project, a glove that converted sounds into tac-
tile vibrations (Journal 24). Wiener had followed Kellers career since his
childhood. His tutor Helen Robertson, who knew Keller at Radcliffe, used
to captivate him with stories of the blind and deaf womans phenomenal
learning (Wiener, Ex-Prodigy 74). Half a century later, when the two ex-
prodigies met in person, Wiener told Keller that the hearing glove was his
first constructive application of cybernetics to human beings.19 He invited

her to his laboratory at mit to try the apparatus in person.
Although media theorists have taken the glove to be exemplary
of early cyborg engineering or the disembodying (and even disabling)
effects of information technology, other historians have dismissed the
device as a postwar compensating gesture, an addendum to the theory of
messages and feedback that Wiener tested in the domain of anti-aircraft
weaponry. Steve Heims, for one, relegates Wieners glove to a belated
attempt to turn swords into ploughshares. It reveals a gentleness that
was often hidden by his awkwardness, a wish to heal, to repair the kinds
of damage done by the weapons of war on which he had worked (214).
Heimss sentimental rhetoric conjures a helpless deaf audience, with
the notion of rehabilitation doubling Wieners technical heroism. 20 This
account disregards the long history of the hearing glove concept, not to
mention the significance of this technology to the very emergence of mod-
ern definitions of information, compression, and feedback. To explain the
glove as an afterthought obscures the debts cybernetics itself owed to the
study of speech communication and deaf education.
The scientific study of speech and hearing, intensified by tele-
phone engineering, provided a significant growth medium for cybernet-
ics. 21 Speech served as a metaphor, and speech processing as a model, for
later forms of signal transmission and communication engineering. 22 Wie-
ner recognized telephony as the best studied and most familiar technique
of communication (Human Use 167). One ambition of cybernetics was to
draw computers and other machines into the category of communications
technology. The theory of the telephone is, of course, communication
engineering, but the theory of the computing machine belongs equally to
that domain. Likewise, the theory of the control mechanism involves com-
munication to an effector machine and often from it (Wiener, Time 202).
Wiener extrapolated certain elements of machine communication from
literal speech and hearing. He compared the pruning or compression of
sounds that takes place in the auditory system to the coding required for
machine languages. 23 The hearing glovea speech technology modeled
on the cochlea but constrained by the limited sensitivity of human skin
tested the limits of signal extraction and information compression. Far
from being incidental, the glove epitomized many principles of Wieners
science of control and communication.
Despite Wieners theoretical interest in the glove, he was in
fact neither the inventor nor even a technical contributor to the device.
at&t had sponsored electrical-glove research as early as the 1920s that

strikingly prefigured the cybernetic paradigm. One model attempted to
extract the essential information from a speech wave and convert it into
mechanical vibrations. Understanding feedback to be an essential property
of human speech, other at&t engineers hoped deaf people might modulate
their voices by comparing their own spoken vibrations to those of normal
orators. This technology was transferred to mit by Jerome Wiesner and
then developed by Edward David and Leon Levine, only later to be publi-
cized by Wiener. The cybernetic glove combined the same two functions
of speech translation and voice regulation; in other words, it was designed
at once with a concern for information and its medium.
The at&t-sponsored project, in turn, reworked nearly a century
of talking glove and touch alphabet development by deaf and deaf-blind
inventors. These alphabetic gloves were not designed for articulation
rehearsal, although they often embodied their own theories of efficient
communication. The fascination that Wieners hearing glove holds for so
many media theorists and historians of technology thus calls into question
the role that disability is forced to play in narratives about cybernetics.
Wiener became interested in auditory prosthesis as he finished
writing Cybernetics in 1948. Wiesner, associate director of mits Research
Laboratory of Electronics (rle), returned from a visit to Bell Labs early
that year with a proposal to construct a tactile vocoder. In the 1920s,
Homer Dudley of at &t had designed the vocoder (Voice-coder) as a
tool for sampling and reconstructing speech, hoping to squeeze as many
telephone calls as possible through a transatlantic cable. The vocoder
mimicked the inner ears own analysis by filtering a complex wave into a
series of narrower frequency bands. Unlike the ear, it sampled each band,
extracting the parameters (amplitudes) of each and discarding the rest
as redundancy. 24
At Bell Labs, Wiesner had examined the sound spectrograph,
a vocoder by-product that inscribed speech waves and was designed as a
means of visual telephony for deaf people. 25 Wiesner faulted the spec-
trograph for not being portable and for preoccupying the sense of vision.
His proposed devicea project soon assigned to graduate student Leon
Levinewould use the vocoders analyzer to deliver speech extracts to the
sense of touch. This sensory substitution was hardly a plan for radical
reconfigurations of the body; it was premised, rather, on the indispens-
ability of the conventional senses. The decision to occupy a hand during
conversation followed from the longstanding hierarchy of the senses,
Figure 3
Norbert Wiener with
an early prototype of
the translator, which
he hoped would ulti-
mately be worn as a
glove. 1949.
Photograph courtesy
of Getty Images.
with touch subservient to vision and hearing (Jutte 61). The fact that hands
might communicate more rapidly through other tactile and visual means
sign language, hand spelling, the touching of lips, reading Braillesug-
gested that mainstreaming outweighed even efficiency.
Subsequently Wiener theorized that the vocoders analyzer
could be adapted for great feats of compression: a stream of speech might
be diverted into five channels, one for each finger, and the envelopes of
each channel used to modulate five sources of vibration. The glove need
not assist with music or ambient sound; Wiener considered deafness to be
disabling only as it affected speech. He defined deafness not as the absence
of hearing but as exclusion from mainstream communication: A person
who can follow speech on the basis of sound carried by the air, and can
do this with a reasonable proficiency, can scarcely be considered socially
deaf (Hearing Fingers 3). Defined in terms of communication, hearing
switched from an immersive sense to a directional one.
Beyond tactile hearing, Wiener conceived of the glove as a feed-
back device to correct what he called the grotesque and harsh intonation
of deaf speakers. 26 As carriers of speech information, certain voices oper-
ated like noisy channels, jittery signals, or otherwise distorting media: A
highly inefficient form of sending a message (Sound Communication
260). Throughout the 1940s, hard of hearing activists themselves had
urged their peers to acknowledge how uncommon pronunciation might
distort communication: We underhearing people are apt to forget what
a strong influence sound has on the emotions [...]. And the effects our
voices have on our normal hearing friends are too frequently boredom
(from lack of color and inflection), fatigue (from straining to hear a low
mumble-mumble), annoyance (from the nervous shock of being shouted
at) (Hazzard). Learning to use the glove would require effort on the part
of deaf individuals, but the hearing world would be spared both transla-
tion and discomfort. At the outset of cybernetics, then, was an etiquette
for acceptable and dysfunctional discourse. The ideal, which affected both
human and machine communication, was universal, frictionless, instan-
taneous, and economical. 27 Sign language was unquestionably too minor
to be efficient; oral deaf speakers impeded communication through the
quality of their voices.
Wiener framed the hearing glove within his broader project to
admit machines to the field of language. He accounted for his interest in
communication as an autobiographical effect: he had been brought up the
son of a philologist (Human Use 77, 85). As a child, Wiener was immersed
in debates about the techniques and mechanisms of language. His
father Leo had been interested in universal languages; he was acquainted
with the inventor of Esperanto and was one of the first to study the new
artificial language (13). Wiener became convinced that speech is the
greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man (78). In this
frame, deafness seemed profoundly disabling. 28
Wieners contemporaries did not appreciate the links between
the hearing glove and his mathematical scholarship. At the 1949 Gibbs
Lecture of the American Mathematical Society, called Problems of Sen-
sory Prosthesis, audience members heckled him for discussing human
values rather than harmonic analysisalthough the glove explicitly
joined these two categories (Davis 2). Wiener had chosen to work on
harmonic analysis (breaking complex oscillations into their component
sine waves) in the 1920s at mit, believing it to be the proper founda-
tion of communication theory (Mathematician 77). Deaf scientist Oliver
Heaviside had popularized this topic, the Fourier transform, at the end of
the prior century; Wiener set out to prove his calculus and expand it with
probability theory. 29
Wiener also reworked Heavisides life story, making it the sub-
ject of his 1959 novel, The Tempter. Heaviside lost much of his hearing as a
result of childhood scarlet fever; he later worked in the field of telegraphy,
following his uncle, Charles Wheatstone. Although his publications helped
establish circuit theory, he was poor and unemployed most of his life. The
injustices of his career were compounded when George Campbell and
Michael Pupin, backed by at&t, patented one of his obscure inventions that
proved crucial for reducing distortion in long-distance telegraph signals.
Cedric Woodbury, the protagonist of Wieners novel, keeps
one hand cupped behind his ear yet is the only person who can discover
the hidden language of machines (Tempter 93). Woodbury was interested
in control devicestranslators between the human and machine worlds
such as the steering engines of ships. 30 While studying the conversations
between humans and machines, the intelligence of the latter became
evident to him: The man doesnt merely give orders to the machine
while the machine blindly obeys. There must be a dialogue in which the
machine acquaints the machine-tender with the difficulties of the task
to be accomplished and reinterprets the machine-tenders orders so as to
perform these tasks in the best possible way (93). Who better than a deaf
scientist to search for automatic translators and alternate languages? Still,
Woodburys insight came at the cost of human companionship; moreover,
his findings were easily stolen from him. Although machine languages
need not be oral, Wiener believed that deaf people required translators to
join them to the world of speech communication.
Despite transformations in the technology of communication
during the twentieth century, rigid bodily and speech standards largely
persisted for human beings. For this reason, relations between disability
theorists and technology theorists have been vexed regarding the position
of cybernetics vis--vis normalization and enhancement. Tobin Siebers,
for instance, takes issue with Donna Haraway, who uses disability as an
archetype in A Cyborg Manifesto. He finds her to be so preoccupied
with power and ability that she forgets what disability is. Prostheses
always increase the cyborgs abilities [...] the cyborg is always more than
human. To put it simply, the cyborg is not disabled (63). In When Species
Meet, Haraway describes the wheelchair and crutches used by her father,
due to childhood bone tuberculosis, as companion species or cyborg
technologies, with which he had ambivalent relations (173). Nevertheless,
her interest in the extended capacities produced by human-object rela-
tions seems bound to what Siebers calls the ideology of ability.31 Along
a restrictive continuum of ability, normalizing technologies are read as
augmentations, while the imperfections of these technologies and the
qualitative differences between bodies are overlooked. Wiener explicitly
designed the hearing glove for rehabilitation, as opposed to enhancement;
moreover, he soon recognized the limitations of auditory prostheses. In
the 1960s, shortly before his death, he began to complain of hearing loss
himself and purchased an electronic hearing aid (Conway and Siegelman
325). It was noisy, and it distorted sounds; he often left it turned off.
Disability theorists have also criticized the cyborg concept in
futurist literature and media studies for exploiting disability as a metaphor
or plot device. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that disability
underwrites the cultural studies of technology writ large, from Paul
Virilios anxiety about the disabling effects of future machines to Hayless
portrayals of disabled people as the quintessential cyborgsall without
any serious effort to specify the nature of this usage [of technology] within
disabled communities themselves (8).
These ideological conflicts are exacerbated by the fact that
the history of cybernetics so often depended upon disability. Siebers has
elsewhere suggested that the disabled body changes the process of rep-
resentation itself [...] blind hands envision the faces of old acquaintances.
Deaf eyes listen to public television [...] different bodies require and create
new modes of representation (54). Along these lines, D/deaf (referring
to both the linguistic minority and disability constructions of deafness),
late-deafened, and deaf-blind inventors and research subjects generated
new media and methods for speech communicationincluding an array of
glovesin the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Later, deafness
prompted hearing engineers such as Wiener to identify the essential
information in speech and to theorize the role of feedback in communi-
cation.) These new modes of representation occasionally exceeded oral
speech, being intended for other means of communication or for minor
listening rather than for normalization. At the same time, they provided
analogies and inspiration for machine communication. Nonetheless, the
rhetorics of charity, rehabilitation, and cybernetic enhancement have mar-

ginalized and even erased the specificity of disability in most historical
accounts.
Touch Alphabets and Feelies
Despite Wieners thinly veiled attack on the patent practices

at at&t, the mit hearing glove duplicated a tactile vocoder that had been
proposed by Homer Dudley in a 1937 patent. 32 Dudleys vibrotactile sig-
naling systemhis own adaptation of the vocoderwas intended to assist
deaf people with lipreading. He theorized that the information transmit-
ted by speech could be described by eight or ten bands, edited down
from the original speech wave and corresponding to the muscular parts
making up the speech signal. Information was here defined according
to the source: the motions of the lips, tongue and other vocal organs
(n.p.). 33 A prior materialization of speech thus enabled its concretized
abstraction in the form of an electrical signal.
In fact, Bell engineers had been interested in tactile commu-
nication as early as the 1920s, when Northwestern psychology professor
Robert Gault requested their assistance with his research. Gault had
designed a range of tactile tools to aid deaf people with lipreading as well
as voice control. He conceived of speech as something of a blunt object:
If the human voice can be made to break into them through their skins,
well and good (Touch 121). Tactile speech had been a preoccupation of
deaf education since the field was formalized in the eighteenth century.
Prior to Gault, this kind of research was conducted by Hermann Gutzmann
and David Katz in Germany as well as Max Goldstein in the United States.
At first Gault believed that vibrationone component of touch
would allow the skin to access sound waves directly. The ear seemed to
have evolved from the tactile sense; moreover, if every sensory phe-
nomenon existed as a waveform, it should be easy to translate from one
sense to another. Helen Keller, for instance, had been famously expert at
detecting sound and motion in her environment as they vibrated through
solid media. With a foot, she and her companions tapped Morse code
across the floor to each other. When her friend Samuel Clemens spoke,
the vibrations of his mouth and throat modulated the information on
his lips and hands:
His voice was truly wonderful. To my touch, it was deep, reso-

nant. He had the power of modulating it so as to suggest the
Figure 4
H. W. Dudley, Sig-
naling System. u.s.
Patent 2,150,364.
most delicate shades of meaning and he spoke so deliberately

that I could get almost every word with my fingers on his lips.
Ah, how sweet and poignant the memory of his soft slow speech
playing over my listening fingers. His words seemed to take
strange lovely shapes on my hands. His own hands were won-
derfully mobile and changeable under the influence of emotion.
( Midstream 6667)
However, Keller was well aware that interpreting speech through vibra-
tion alone was impossible. Alexander Graham Bell once held her palm
to a telephone pole and asked her what its quivering meant. She was not
certain, so he explained, [T]he humming which I felt in my fingers never
stopped, that the copper wires up above us were carrying the news of birth
and death, war and finance, failure and success from station to station
around the world.34 If oscillations were the language of optics, acoustics,
and tactile vibration, they might be transferred from medium to medium
or carried along the same electrical wire, but they were nevertheless
processed quite differently by each sense organ.
Gault had begun his experiments in 1922 with a simple metal
tube. He spoke through one end, and his subjects pressed their hands
against the other opening, describing the bursts of air they felt (see
Tactual). In 1925, he asked Harvey Fletcher, the director of speech and
hearing research at at&t, to equip several telephone sets with receivers

that had exposed diaphragms. 35 These teletactors conveyed speech to the
thumbs. Over the course of two years and hundreds of hours of practice,
his subjectsvolunteers from Gallaudet, as well as younger schoolchildren
who were likely forced to participateused the teletactor to rehearse the
emphasis and tempo of their own voices (Gault, Hearing 1). Feedback
theory was clearly in the air. 36
By 1928, as Dudley was beginning his experiments with the
vocoder, Gault conceived of grafting a mechanical ear upon the skin.
To make the individual words buried within vibrations distinguishable,
Gault realized that it was necessary to reproduce the filtering actions of
the inner ear (Gault and Crane 353). Speech was thus identified with the
processing of sound waves by the cochlea rather than with sound waves
as such. 37 Bell Telephone Laboratories soon offered him a multiple unit
teletactor that split speech into frequency bands, one for each of the five
fingers. The sense organs were no longer presumed to be exchangeable, as
they had been in Kellers youth. Instead, machinic analogs were required
to mediate between sensory domains. That year, Vern Knudsen, professor
of physics at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles, reviewed Gaults
project by assessing the communication capacities of the tactile sense.
Touch, he concluded, was not as discriminating as hearing: it was fairly
sensitive to changes in intensity, but a change as great as 30 percent was
required for a difference in frequency to be noticeable (Knudsen). The
teletactor might reinforce lipreading or vocal rhythm, but even this new
version could never fully convey complex speech to the hand.
Gault retired in 1940. In 1967, J. M. Pickett of Gallaudet wrote to
him with an update about new, vocoder-based hearing gloves that not only
analyzed but compressed speech. The philosophy behind this work is that
it is possible to abstract the information bearing elements in speech from
the acoustic signals. These elements can then be changed, recoded, to new
acoustic, tactual, or visual signals and after training it might be possible
for the deaf or hard of hearing subject to perceive the recoded speech or to
use the recoded information as a complement to the visual signals from the
speakers lips.38 Compression of the speech signal might accommodate the
parameters of the tactile sense, but use of the technology required training;
communication was still understood to be a bodily act.
The team at mit reinvented skin hearing, based on the
vocoder, in 1948. The hearing glove challenged them to determine the
minimum amount of information contained within speech. Awareness and
Figure 5
Single-unit teletac-
tor (Phonotactor).
The student feels
his teachers speech
and then compares
it with his own.
Robert H. Gault,
Research Program
in the Interest of
Deaf, Hard of Hear-
ing and Deaf-Blind
Children [c. 1939].
Photograph courtesy
of Northwestern pain formed the absolute boundaries of tactile communication; in between
University Archives. there were a limited number of intensity and frequency changes the skin
could detect. In his 1950 overview of cybernetics for the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, Wiener discussed the glove as a prime example of
both feedback and information compression. He also pared down the pho-
netic aspect of speechbased on the source of the human vocal tractto
a fraction of the total information in a sound wave: Not much more than
from one-tenth to one-hundredth of the information contained in a sound,
as sound, appears in the phonetics which we interpret (Cybernetics 2).
Graduate student Leon Levine took over the details of the hear-
ing glove project for his 1949 Masters thesis in electrical engineering. 39 He
called the machine feelies after the sensory cinema in Aldous Huxleys
Brave New World, with reference to multimodal communication rather
than immersive spectatorship. 40 The mit glove would later be claimed as
an antecedent to the dataglove, a virtual reality accessory to which Ken
Hillis attributes the genesis of a belief in the body itself as only informa-
tional (15). 41 Beyond virtual reality, other datagloves would abandon the
linguistic project in favor of force-feedback for teleoperations, as well as
the haptic enrichment of communication between humans and machines.
Today gloves are portrayed as devices that more naturally convey input
to computers than do mice or keyboards, the goal of electronic glove
research being to apply the skills, dexterity, and naturalness of the hand
directly to the human-computer interface (Sturman and Zeltzer 35).
Like the teletactor, Levines glove filtered microphone speech
into five bands; it then converted only the envelopes of these bands into
five streams of lower-frequency vibrations to account for the range of fin-
gertip sensitivity. 42 Wiesner and Levine quickly concluded that feelies
was inadequate for transmitting the speech information it pulled from a
sound wave to the tactile sense (Levine 39). Levine insisted, however, that
the gloves most imperative application was speech correction, through the
feedback it provided about the tone and tempo of oral speech. As indicated
by this early cybernetic device, the materiality of a signal (its frequency,
its tactile rhythm) and its human destination might be prioritized over
its often intractable information patterns. Left behind in this rigorous
management of pronunciation, however, was an openness to the unique
embodiment of voices. As argued by Adriana Cavarero in her critique of
both metaphysics and poststructuralism for neglecting the material voice
in the course of their deliberations over speech, It is no longer a ques-
tion of intercepting a sound and decoding or interpreting it, but rather of
responding to a unique voice that signifies nothing but itself (7).
A local deaf-blind man, Leo Sablosky, visited the rle to practice
speaking with the glove for a day in 1949. Sablosky already communicated
with his brother by touch, holding his fingers to the latters throat. He had
also learned to say a few words, although his articulation was very breathy
and bad. With the hearing glove, Wiesner, Wiener, and Levine announced
in Science, the patient immediately begins to improve the quality of his
speech by comparison and his voice begins to lose its deaf-mute dead-
ness. We suggest these principles [i.e., feedback] as a basis for further
work in sensory replacement (512). Working with psychologist Alexander
Bavelas, Levine continued with the project (renamed Felix) until 1951.
During those years, the Quarterly Progress Reports of the rle reported
on their ongoing troubles with the transmission of speech information to
the tactile sense.
Nevertheless, the New York Times and Life published optimistic
news briefs in 1950 about the glove and the future of tactile hearing. Let-
ters arrived from all corners: Barcelona, Copenhagen, El Paso, Jerusalem,
and Little Current, Ontario. Many correspondents were deaf scientists and
engineers. Others had acquired an uncommon scientific literacy through
their oral education or their participation in experimental studies.
David Mudgett of Florida, a former teacher at the Illinois School
for the Deaf, wrote on February 1, 1950, regarding his own theory of tactile
hearing, which he was preparing for publication in the American Annals
of the Deaf:
I was delighted to read about your studies of methods of using

the deaf persons tactile senses to detect the vibrations of speech
and other sounds. It is exactly what I have been saying should
be done. I am deaf (totally, from meningitis at 7 years) and have
Figure 6
Norbert Wiener,
feeling words. Ear-
phones supply noise
to mask sounds from
the vibrations of the
device.
Photograph courtesy
of Getty Images.
often used bone conduction hearing aids held in the hands to

catch the breaks and accents in speech, to hear music and
sometimes just to enjoy the medley of sounds around me [...].
In this paper I am working on, I state that I believe the use of a
hearing aid held in the hand would help to lessen this type of
maladjustment but that the bone conduction type of hearing aid
would have to have a larger vibrating surface to achieve greater
tactile stimuli, and the instrument will have to rule out certain
extraneous sounds that interfere with recognition of speech.
Some years ago I had occasion to use Dr. Gaults Teletactor
(Northwestern Univ.) and found it to be a wonderful tactile aid.43
For Mudgett, tactile sound translators were not inevitably new media
within an old system of communication. They could allow new forms of
sensory stimulation, as when they were used just to enjoy the medley of
sounds around. And these media, rather than the ear, could become the
primary sites for understanding sound.
P. G. McGowan, a lab manager for Gerbers Baby Foods in Michi-
gan, had also served as a research subject for Robert Gault. He offered
Wiener his evaluation of the teletactor laboratory:
A sound proof room was constructed and the apparatus and the
subject would be sealed inyou could not see out of the room and
I recall it as being very very hot. Dr. Gault or one of his assistants
would read off a prepared manuscript into the microphone and
I, on the inside, would write down what I picked up (or thought
I did) off the aluminum button. [...] I could pick up music quite
well, at least I could identify the tunes.
At any rate, this was all very encouraging at the
time, but the apparatus was too cumbersome and expensive to
be practical. [...]
I would like to mention that when I used Dr. Gaults
telatractor my lip-reading efficiency was greatly increased. The
same is true now if I place my fingers on the throat or chest of the
individual I am conversing with. I have tried holding hearing
aids in my hand, but they were not powerful enough, however,
they did aid lip-reading if held in my teeth.44
The use of this glove that was never a glove, that was not invented by
Norbert Wiener, that did not erase the hand, the ear, or deafness, was
remembered as a physical experience: in a small hot room, touching an
aluminum button, picking up music. At the same time, technification
entered routine conversations, with efficiency even present as McGowan
touched anothers chest.
Helen Keller was among Wieners correspondents in those
months. As a girl, Keller had learned to use hearing gloves of a different
sortwhite cotton ones on which the alphabet was printed. These models
required two-way intimacy, effort on the parts of both conversants. The
first hearing glove in the United States was designed in the 1870s by James
Morrison Heady of Kentucky. Heady had lost his vision in a series of child-
hood accidents, then gradually became deaf as he aged. To communicate
Figure 7
James Morrison
Headys Talking
Glove.
Photography cour-
tesy of Ken D.
Thompson.
with his sister, he attached metal letters along the palm of a glove. This
Talking Glove, as Heady named it, allowed others to converse with him
by pressing words into his hand, while he responded orally. As with all
wearable media, the interface was essential; Heady soon switched to a
printed alphabet when the metal injured his skin.
Twenty years later, a similar glove was patterned by William
Terry, a surgeon who had been deafened in the Civil War and then lost
his sight at age seventy. Terry painted his touch alphabet on a cotton
glove, at the sensitive fingertips, joints, and creases of the palm. Through
trial and error, he placed the vowels and other frequently used letters
where they seemed to be most readily found by an interlocutor (Clark
and Clark 10). Harold Clark suggested a further improvement to Terrys
glove, in which not only the frequency of letter use would be considered
but the combinations in which they are most likely to occur, as is done
in the universal keyboard of a typewriter or linotype machine (17). This
type of talking glove would be easy to use for people who knew how to
type (and it would help its other users learn to type more quickly). Effi-
cient encoding, tied to the parameters of the source and the destination,
Figure 8
Harold T. Clark and
Mary T. Clark, The
William Terry Touch
Alphabet (1917, 2nd
ed.).
Courtesy of Gal-
laudet University
Library.
was thus a long-standing principle of hearing glove designalthough the

scale of this efficiency would increase dramatically and would be applied
to the voice itself in the case of automated devices.
Thomas Edison, himself hard of hearing, felt that even this
rationalized glove would still be too slow for conversation. If efficiency
were truly the goal, perhaps both speech and writing should be aban-
doned. He wrote to Terrys grandson in 1916 after the latter mailed a
Touch Alphabet pamphlet to him: It is quite an ingenious system, but I
find the Morse Alphabet would be practicable also. I can read Morse at the
rate of thirty-five words per minute, by touch only, and if the Associated
Press abbreviations are used I can read one hundred words per minute
(Clark and Clark 17). Between two people, the code of the Morse alphabet
afforded secrecy and speed. Edisons wife regularly translated speeches
and plays against his knee. Edison tapped his marriage proposal upon
her hand, delighting in the merger of efficiency with intimacy: The
word Yes is an easy one to send by telegraphic signals, and she sent it.
If she had been obliged to speak it she might have found it harder (qtd.
in Runes 5455). 45
In other instances, invisibility took precedence over efficiency.

Alexander Graham Bell created his own finger-spelling glove in 1883 for
George Sanders, one of his benefactors children. 46 Bells glove required
his pupil to give up the use of signs and adopt the slow spelling-out of
sentences in English. The purpose of this type of manual communica-
tion, as opposed to sign language, was visual normalization: I could talk
to him very freely in a crowd without attracting the attention of others.
I took him to Barnums museum and talked to him all the time the lions
were being fed, and I am sure that no one among the spectators had the
slightest suspicion that the boy was deaf (Bell 136).
Keller evidently learned of these glove experiments when she
was eight years old. Alonzo Garcelon, recently the governor of Maine,
offered to bring her a doll, and she asked him instead for some beautiful
gloves to talk with (Keller, Story 184). Keller became quite proficient with
her new talking glove, but she abandoned it after the first year, preferring
to read in Braille or converse through hand spelling and lipreading.
Intelligent Machinery
On March 1, 1950, Keller and her assistant Polly Thomson

traveled to Cambridge eager to present [them]selves for the tests at the
Research Laboratory of Electronics the following day. 47 Keller had been
an experimental subject in some of the most prominent labs of the era.
For psychologists, blindness and deafness served as independent variables
for extracting data about the mind: the relationship of language to con-
sciousness, for instance, or the specific influences of vision and hearing
on knowledge. Engineers, on the other hand, were fascinated with Keller
as an engineering achievement in her own right. Elmer Sperry, for
instancewhose gyroscope company helped create the science of control
systems that made cybernetics possibleinvited Keller to his Brooklyn lab
in 1930 to examine feedback apparatuses: the gyroscope compass, turn
indicator, the flight instruments that Lindbergh used in crossing, and the
ship stabilizer which prevents all rolling of ships.48
Twenty years later, Wiener, Wiesner, and Levine greeted Keller
at the rle and helped her practice with their hearing glove for an hour or
so. Unlike the cotton models with which she was familiar, this glove was
automatic, demanding no attention on the parts of nondisabled speakers.
Keller was not able to interpret the words on the finger pads, but she was
able to recognize the tone and tempo of certain vibrations: It is good to
recall the hearty laughs ringing out in the machine at my blunders.49 By

three oclock, she and Polly were on the train back to Connecticut.
Keller had dreamed in 1936 that Annie Sullivan, recently dead,
returned to her with a strange leather and wire instrument. Each wire
vibrated with a separate sound from the environment, which Keller could
hear simply by touching the machine. She wrote in her diary that this
dream was perhaps a prophecy of new victories over limitations (Journal
78). The mit glove, like its electrical precursors, was not destined to suc-
ceed. The project ended in 1951 with a falling out between Wiener, Wiesner,
and several other members of the rle (Conway and Siegelman 217). Alpha-
bet gloves continued to be used, and when subsequent researchers took up
the hearing glove project, they mostly abandoned the aim of direct speech
translation in favor of haptics, or skin-specific communication. 50
The October following Kellers visit to mit, she appeared
symbolicallyat another epicenter of computing. Alan Turing published
an article in Mind that month on the coming of intelligent machinery.
He used Keller as an analogy, to argue that the phenomenon of learning
transcended specific body parts or physical forms. 51 In Turings anec-
dote, however, even these future machines would be stigmatized for their
physical deficiencies:
It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process

to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be
provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill
the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well
these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one
could not send the creature to school without the other children
making excessive fun of it. It must be given home tuition. We need
not be too concerned about the legs, eyes, etc. The example of
Miss Helen Keller shows that education can take place provided
that communication in both directions between teacher and
pupil can take place by some means or other. (Computing 457)
Keller had haunted the pages of Mind since her childhood, often on this
same theme of the endless varieties of input and output. In 1893, when
she was eleven, the journal reported on her use of typewriters, Morse code,
and hearing gloves: Her eagerness to use any means of intercourse with
others is marvelous (Helen Keller 282). 52
In a portrayal of the assistive and domestic technologies at
Arcan Ridge, Diana Fuss connects Keller to the modern media revolution:
Kellers fascination with machines, and her own allegedly mechanical

nature, made her something of a national symbol for modern sciences
artificial reproduction of human sensation. Helen Keller, a woman both
blind and deaf, became the chief cultural cipher for the new sight and
sound technologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(135). Fuss bases her argument on the scores of photographs that framed
Keller with the latest electrical technologies. According to popular under-
standing, mechanical nature was automatic or unthinking. Similarly,
Fuss reads an image of Keller touching a radio as a comparison between
two entities that passively received vibrations. 53
Keller was also described in the popular press as a second
Galatea, an automaton, a statue that had been taught to speak. 54 Con-
temporary engineers did not see Keller as an automaton; moreover, they
believed that machine intelligence could be achieved, recasting such
platitudes as acting like a machine and purely mechanical behavior
(Turing, Intelligent 107). This, then, was the media revolution in which
Keller took part. The old question Can deaf people think? resounded in
the new question Can machines think?
Turing argued that mechanical intelligence was foreseeable
because it was already possible to make machinery to imitate any small
part of man (Intelligent 11617). The translation of sound, text, and
image into electrical signals had begun to provide, in Wieners words, a
language which the machine can understand. J.C.R. Licklider suggested
that the leap from sensory extension to artificial intelligence would
be facilitated by the time-and-motion analysis of technical thinking
(Man-Computer 76).
In Turings account, it would be uneconomical to remake the
body in its entirety if the objective were simply thinking machinery.
For human beings, however, atypical embodiment was not so lightly
sanctioned. The hearing gloves allure had been the possibility of sensory
substitution in the interest of maintaining communication norms. Wiener
intended the glove to regulate deaf speech, beyond translating the speech
of others. He hoped that it would ultimately disguise both impairment and
mediationhe only intended to lose certain kinds of bodies.
Along with the human-technology hybrids and self-regulating
machines of cybernetics, information theory emerged from the milieu of
signal transmission. Communication theory, John Pierce of at&t insisted,
has its origins in the study of electrical communication (24). Starting
with Ralph Hartleys 1928 Transmission of Information, information was
defined by communication engineers as quantitative and physical. Signals

transported messages, which themselves contained a limited amount of
information. If this information were identified, signals could be better
coded for economy and for reliable transmission through noise. We should
ignore the question of interpretation, Hartley wrote. Instead, the mea-
sure of information in a telegraph, telephone, or television signal should
be based on physical as contrasted with psychological considerations
(Hartley 535, 538).
Inspired in part by the vocoder, Claude Shannon would subse-
quently prove that a signal could be encoded efficiently and compressed
due to the statistical structure of the original message and due to the
nature of the final destination of the information (1). It had long been evi-
dent in the history of hearing gloves that speech information comprised a
small fraction of the sound wave and that human sense organs constrained
the design of signals. While digital signal processing, plus computation,
would eventually enable countless media simulations, reproduction was
Shannons primary concern in A Mathematical Theory of Communica-
tion. For the analog messages of television, radio, and telephony, Shannon
maintained that perfect reproduction was impractical: We are not inter-
ested in exact transmission when we have a continuous source, but only
in transmission to within a certain tolerance (48). Continuous messages
should be efficiently coded based on a fidelity criterion set by engineers.
Shannon offered a hypothetical example for the efficient transmission of
speech and music, which would later be realized in the development of
perceptual coding (exemplified by the mp3):
The structure of the ear and brain determine implicitly an evalu-

ation, or rather a number of evaluations, appropriate in the
case of speech or music transmission. There is, for example, an
intelligibility criterion in which (x;y) is equal to the relative
frequency of incorrectly interpreted words when message x(t) is
received as y(t). Although we cannot give an explicit representa-
tion of (x;y) in these cases it could, in principle, be determined
by sufficient experimentation. Some of its properties follow
from well-known experimental results in hearing, e.g., the ear
is relatively insensitive to phase and the sensitivity to amplitude
and frequency is roughly logarithmic. (49)
Media that deploy economizing fidelity criteria to reproduce audio/visual

messages have led Friedrich Kittler to assert that our sense perceptions
are the dependent variable in a compromise between engineers and

salespeople (2). Yet perceptual norms, derived from population surveys
or experimental trials, are in many cases the independent variables that
determine coding procedureswhich only later interact with the senses
of individual listeners and observers.
For the case of discrete sources like telegraphy or computing,
where the message is inherently digital, Shannon based the quantification
of informationand the determination of the minimal bits per second
required to specify the particular signalon the statistical properties of
the source. As an example, he noted that this is already done to a lim-
ited extent in telegraphy by using the shortest channel symbol, a dot, for
the most common English letter E; while the infrequent letters, Q, X, Z
are represented by longer sequences of dots and dashes. The statistical
approach to phenomena is inherently departicularizing, smoothing indi-
vidual variety into the regularity of mass patterns. As a guide to coding
and compression, and as a material-semiotic phenomenon, it results in
the cutting up or shaping of particular signals based on probability (i.e.,
a short symbol for e).
At stake in thinking about signals, then, beyond the issue of
fidelity, are questions about optimization: the range of possible human
destinations afforded by a given transmission system, the ergonomic
design of human-machine interfaces, the types of messages that can be
handled, the elements of those messages deemed relevant for transmission.
Paying attention to the material commitments of cybernetics and infor-
mation theory, and to the machinic filtering that intercedes in so much
communication, reveals more about bodies than disembodimentspecifi-
cally, the phenomenal and interactional consequences of the industrial
conception of language.
With thanks to George Kupczak of the at & t Archives and History Center, Helen Selsdon of
the American Foundation for the Blind, and Deborah Douglas of the mit Museum for their
meticulous research assistance.
m ar a mills is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York

University. Working in the fields of disability studies and media studies, she is currently
completing a book on the historical associations between deafness and signal processing
in the telephone system. Articles from this project can be found in Social Text, Grey Room,
and The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies.
Notes 1 Helen Keller to Dr. Buckley, 17 10 Technification (or technicization)

June 1949, Series 1, Box 35, Folder refers to machine building as
6, Helen Keller Archives, a fb. well as the production of efficient
techniques, the extension of tech-
2 Hubbard was also the father of nical methods to all domains of
Bells wife-to-be, Mabel. life. On this term, see Husserl.
3 Program for Visit of Miss Helen 11 As one example of recent scholar-

Keller: Murray Hill, Tuesday, ship on the materiality of elec-
June 14, 1949, Series 1, Box 35, tronic media, see Kirschenbaum.
Folder 6, Keller Archives, a fb.
12 Phonemes, in contrast to phones,
4 For accounts of other bodily are the smallest meaning ful units
mechanizations, see Crary; in a given language.
Giedion; and Rabinbach.
13 Claude Shannon explicitly dis-
5 Wendy Chun has recently com- missed signification in the open-
pared electronic signals and ing paragraphs of A Mathemati-
information to the commod- cal Theory of Communication:
ity form: [C]ommodities, like The fundamental problem
information, depend on ghostly of communication is that of
abstraction that transforms reproducing at one point either
material things and their embed- exactly or approximately a mes-
ded use-values, into things that sage selected at another point.
can be exchanged (135). Frequently the messages have
meaning; that is they refer to or
6 The rate and shape of signals are correlated according to some
are material representations. On system with certain physical or
electrical analogies in the early conceptual entities. These seman-
twentieth century, see Care. For tic aspects of communication
a telephone engineers account are irrelevant to the engineering
of reproduced speech as a com- problem (379).
modity, see Fletcher.
14 She specifically compares Wie-
7 For influential examples, see Liu; ner and Saussure in terms of
Manovich; and Rodowick. For a their approaches to significa-
counterargument on the signifi- tion (98). See also 192. Hayles
cance of the telephone to the long herself adheres to constrained
history of sound recording and constructivism, which involves
audio engineering, see Sterne. the copenetration of information
and materiality, inscription, and
8 For more on this topic, see
incorporation. The engineering
Bellovin.
approach to construction, I argue,
9 According to K. W. Cattermole, was similarly constrained.
telegraphy led to the beginning
15 Kline notes that Manfred Clynes,
of information theory, which
who coined the word cyborg, did
ultimately resulted from combin-
not think that joining humans
ing the insights of telegraphy and
to machines in this manner
telephony (19). The work of Alec
would change the nature of being
Reeves on pcm and the subse-
human (340).
quent contributions of Shannon
and Wiener were attempts to 16 Kline distinguishes between
apply the precedent of telegraphy human-machine analogies and
to the coding and transmission of human-machine fusion in the
continuous signals.
history of cybernetics; the hear- 25 On the sound spectrograph, see

ing glove, contrary to his analy- Mills, Deaf Jam; on the vocoder,
sis, at once fused human and see The Dead Room.
machine and was constructed
based upon a series of analo- 26 Wiener defined feedback as the
gies to the human ear and vocal method of controlling a system
organs (331). by reinserting into it the results of
its past performance (Human 61).
17 The transfer of patterns between
media was understood to be a fea- 27 According to Pickering, British
ture of communication in the cen- cyberneticians in the 1960s moved
tury before Wiener. Nineteenth- away from this style of control
century physicists, for instance, and instead favored open-ended,
described waves as traveling two-way experiments with
patterns that moved across physi- feedback.
cal media. Analogical theories of 28 Wiener specifically argued, The
human sense perception, more- whole of human social life in its
over, were often premised upon normal manifestations centers
touching rather than the separa- about speech, and [...] if speech
tion of senses and world. is not learned at the proper
time, the whole social aspect of
18 Helen Keller to Dr. Buckley, 17
the individual will be aborted
June 1949, Helen Keller Papers,
(Human 85).
afb , New York.
29 In addition to acoustics, har-
19 Helen Keller to Norbert Wiener, 12
monic analysis has been central
Feb. 1950, Series 1, Box 89, folder
to optics, astronomy, and other
2, Keller Archive, afb. For Wie-
fields tied to periodic or wave
ners later work on the Boston
phenomena. Wiener traced har-
Arm, a limb prosthesis that ulti-
monic analysis from the musical
mately found [its] way to a very
theories of Pythagorus, through
different end-user: the industrial
the tradition of musical notation
robot, see Serlin 49.
based on time and frequency. See
20 Kline depicts the popular response Wiener, Historical Background.
to the mit glove in similarly
30 Wiener defines control devices as
condescending terms (338).
those which take our orders and
21 Andrew Pickering recently pass them on to a machine in a
advised that there are other ori- language which the machine can
gin stor[ies] of cybernetics than understand (Tempter 128).
military research (55).
31 In her rebuttal to the myth of the
22 On speech processing in the tele- natural human, Haraway tends
phone system as an early leader to universalize the figure of the
in the field of dsp, see Milman cyborg.
11011. 32 Wieners rationale: Matters as
23 Wiener argued that the same important as this are of such
sort of pruning not only comes great public interest that they
up in speech; it also occurs with transcend patent boundaries, and
language in machines (qtd. in for this reason we are continuing
Licklider, Manner 92). to work on the improvement and
use of this apparatus (Sound
24 Dudley correlated this highly 260). at & t eventually granted
compressed information to the him permission to work on the
phonemes of speech. project.
33 Dudleys vocoder itself had in 1971 Michael Noll credited

been inspired by the practice of Huxley with foreseeing human-
lipreading. machine tactile communication:
Perhaps [...] todays science
34 Helen Keller Addresses Pio- and technology are only acting
neers, Western Electric News, out a script written decades ago
12, at & t Archives, Warren, New by members of the other culture.
Jersey. Thomas Edison, who But perhaps the best visionaries
was hard of hearing, once asked in science fiction are really cre-
Keller to describe the vibrations ative scientists and technologists
from a Victrola. When she asked who are simply far in advance
him, in return, to invent a hear- of new developments in science
ing aid, he retorted, People say and technology. Most certainly
so little that is worth listening to it would seem that the topics of
(Keller, Midstream 290). computer-generated speech, real-
time interactive stereoscopy, and
35 Memorandum, E. B. Craft to F. B.
man-machine tactile communica-
Jewett, 16 Mar. 1926, 720203
tion were all predicted forty years
14, Frank B. Jewett Collection,
ago by Huxley in his Feelies.
at & t Archives. Gault did not seem
(Noll 7172)
to be aware of douard-Lon
Scotts earlier suggestion that 41 For mention of Wieners legacy
the phonautograph membrane be for the dataglove, see Tan and
used to have the deaf-mute who Pentland.
knows how to read follow the per-
formance of a dictation printed 42 Levine claims that Wiener in fact
on a table behind the operator, had very little involvement in the
at once on the lips of this last construction and testing of the
by sight and on the tympanum hearing glove.
which vibrates by means of tactile
feeling. 43 David Mudgett to Norbert Wiener,
1 Feb. 1950, Series 1, Box 7, Folder
36 The history of feedback in the 111, Wiener Papers, mit Archives.
engineering context is usually
attributed to the negative-feed- 44 Patrick G. McGowan to Norbert
back amplifier built by Harold Wiener, Feb. 1950, Series 1, Box
Black, for the telephone company, 7, Folder 111, Wiener Papers, mit
in 1927. Archives.
37 This insight dates at least to 45 Edison felt that his deafness

Hermann von Helmholtz. afforded him a greater physical
closeness to his wife, whether he
38 J. M. Pickett to Robert Gault, was tapping out Morse code or
7Sept. 1967, Enclosure: Speech straining to hear her speak.
Transmission Laboratory, Stock-
holm, Quarterly Progress Report 46 Bell was inspired by the seven-
January 1965, p. 15, Box 1, Folder teenth-century glove of George
5, Gault Papers, Northwestern Dalgarno.
University.
47 Helen Keller to Norbert Wiener, 12
39 Edward E. David built an early Feb. 1950, Series 1, Box 89, Folder
prototype of the vibrating 2, Keller Archive, a fb.
apparatus.
48 Elmer Sperry to Helen Keller, 21
40 Leon Levine, in conversation with Dec. 1929, Series 1, Box 84, Folder
the author, 8 Sept. 2009. Similarly, 6, Keller Archive, a fb. For more
on Sperry and cybernetics, see 52 Granville Stanley Hall, with the

Mindell ch. 3. cooperation of otologist Clar-
ence Blake (Bells assistant in
49 Helen Keller to Norbert Wiener, 12 the development of the phonauto-
Feb. 1950, Series 1, Box 89, Folder graph), painstakingly examined
2, Keller Archive, afb. Laura Bridgman at the Perkins
Institute in 1879. According to
50 In 1960, psychologist Frank his commentary, also published
Geldard insisted that a unique in Mind, Hall was fascinated by
cutaneous language (vibra- Bridgmans ability to interpret the
tese, a form of Morse code) intensity and frequency of musi-
would be more successful than cal vibrations. If oscillations as
forced hearing through the skin such can be directly felt, then the
(1584). For a fascinating discus- most generic fact of the physi-
sion of Geldard and the ways cal world enters consciousness
haptic media now embody the immediately without passing any
long history of the mechanization inconceivable chasm (156).
of touch, see Parisi.
53 See Fuss 128, 13738.
51 For this reason, Richard Powers
54 For instance, Brooks 71.
chose the name Helen for the
computer in his novel, Galatea 2.2.
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mladen dolar
The Burrow of Sound
L
et me take as my starting point one of the most striking of
all Franz Kafkas stories, The Burrow. It was written in the winter of
19231924, shortly before his death. Not quite the last piece he wrote, but
apparently the penultimate (the last one being notoriously Josephine the
Singer), it was first published in 1931 by Max Brod and Hans Joachim
Schoeps in the first collection of Kafkas unpublished stories. Looking at
these two stories together, as a strange diptych, we see the astounding
and inscrutable fact that Kafka, on the brink of death, took the problem
of sound and voice as the last most tenuous and tenacious red thread of
his pursuit, something that goes, perhaps, straight to the core of his work,
and something that has the value of a testament.
The story has a special status among Kafkas stories, albeit all of
them most remarkable, which can be illustrated by two anecdotal indica-
tions. Kafka was not Jacques Lacans authorhe practically never referred
to him in all of his published workyet we find a serious engagement in
one of the unpublished seminars, Identification (19611962), where in
the session of March 21, 1962, Lacan addresses at some length precisely

The Burrow and turns it into a strange parable (to use Kafkas word) of
the relation between the subject and the Other in psychoanalysis. Kafka
was not Martin Heideggers author either, and I am not aware of a single
mention in all of his published work. A very young Giorgio Agamben con-
fronted him with this absence in a conversation in the late sixties, where-
upon Heidegger responded by a longish improvised monologue on a single
story, The Burrow.1 No recorder was turned onone desperately wishes
it had beenso this is mere hearsay evidence. With two great thinkers
pointing to this particular story, one might surmise that the stakes of this
story may be highthat the story might lead us to something like a secret
underground thread or hidden burrow in the edifices of theory.
The story describes an animal, usually taken to be a badger,
although it is never named in the story itself. It goes around in its elaborate
and convoluted underground burrow, its subterranean castle, the under-
ground counterpart of the other Castle and its labyrinths; this citadel is
meticulously designed in such a way as to keep all possible enemies at bay.
This takes a superb effort of craftsmanship underpinned by a magnificent
streak of paranoia. In order to make this underground bastion safe and
unassailable, the animal has to carefully scrutinize all possible strategies
of all imaginable enemies and devise ways to counteract them. All even-
tualities have to be considered and seen to, but no matter how scrupulous
the efforts, no measures seem to be thorough enough. The more the
badger exerts itself, the more there remains to be done. Paranoia has the
structure of a self-fulfilling prophecy; it is self-propelling, engendering
ever more paranoia. The more enemies one imagines, the more they lurk
around the corner.
The burrow is a retreat, the secret hideaway most carefully
protected against all outer threats. It is the inside that should be clearly
separated from the outside. Indeed, there is a topological problem at the
heart of this story that Lacan will take as the red thread of his reading: the
problem of a division of space, a line of demarcation. Obviously, the biggest
and the most immediate problem is that of the entry/exit, the neuralgic
spot of transition between the inside and the outside of the burrow that
presents the most vulnerable point. 2 The first part of the story deals with
this at some length. No matter how much the entry is hidden and overlaid
by moss, whenever the badger has to emerge from his burrow or go back
inside, it involves the moment of greatest danger and requires a series of
anguished strategic maneuvers. The moment of transition is always the
moment of exposure to risk that cannot be avoided. The first peep outside
114 The Burrow of Sound
has to be accomplished by trusting to luck, and when re-entering one has

to examine the surroundings at length to make sure that one is unobserved
by the enemy eye. There has to be the point of transition and communica-
tion between the inside and the outside, but this is the point of incalculable
risk, the moment of the unforeseeable and the uncontrollable.
This vulnerable point of entry/exit/transition is only a conden-
sation to one point of something massively present overall. The burrow as
a whole is far from being a safe haven. It is at all points the space of total
exposure to the Other. The complex architecture of meandering laby-
rinths has been entirely dictated by the invisible enemy and its possible
stratagems, by its omnipresent invisible threat. Quite literally, the inner
safe space of the badger is the space shaped by the Other, by the suppo-
sition of the external menacing Other. It is like this supposition turned
into space, the inner abode coinciding with the spatialized, supposed
Other. The safer it is, the more it is imbued with the Other. The burrow
is spatialized paranoia, entirely shaped by the scenario of the Other. It is
the literal embodiment of the oppositionand the coincidence in the very
oppositionof which Freud was so fond: heimlich/unheimlich or homely/
uncanny, where the home is at all points haunted by the uncanny and
coincides with it. There is no inside that could escape the outside, and
the badger occupies the space of the constantly shifting lag between the
two: the very principle of spatialization in which it tries to find its abode
at the interstice of the inner and the outer. The inside and the outside
communicate and there is an overlap, yet the lag is essential. It prevents
the smooth transition or simple passage of the one into the other/Other.
The outside is the constant crack of the inside that cannot be filled in,
healed, and recuperated.
At almost the precise middle of the story (the story is not fin-
ished, but probably close enough), there is a shift that brings the problem
to a pinnacle and that provides a good entry into our problem of sound:
I must have slept for a long time. I was only wakened when I had
reached the last light sleep which dissolves of itself, and it must
have been very light, for it was an almost inaudible whistling
noise [ein an sich kaum hrbares Zischen] that wakened me. I
recognized what it was immediately; the small fry, whom I had
allowed far too much latitude, had burrowed a new channel
somewhere during my absence. This channel must have chanced
to intersect an older one, the air was caught there, and that
produced the whistling noise [das zischende Gerusch]. What an

indefatigably busy lot these small fry are, and what a nuisance
their diligence can be! First I shall have to listen at the walls of
my passages and locate the place of disturbance by experimental
excavations, and only then will I be able to get rid of the noise.
(The Burrow 343)
So there is a sound, a noise, that appears at the edge, most significantly

at the edge of sleep and wakefulness (we will come back to this) and on
the edge of the inside and the outsidethe intrusion of the outside into
the inside. Its first interpretation seems to be easy enough: this must have
been caused by some tiny animals (the small fry, das Kleinzeug) that
must have dug some channel intersecting with other channels; there was
some tiny passage of air that must have caused the whistling noise. It is a
nuisance, but it shouldnt be too difficult to locate it and fill it in. I must
have silence in my passages (343). To be the master is to be the master
over sound and its emission. Curiously, it never occurs to the badger that
the sound may be a phenomenon of inorganic origin, caused by a draught,
a change of pressure, and so on. The assumption is that the sound is always
alive, that it comes from an animate being: a rustling movement of life.
But this attempt at simple explanation comes to nothing:
I dont seem to be getting any nearer to the place where the noise
is, it goes on always on the same thin note, with regular pauses,
now a sort of whistling, but again like a kind of piping. [...] But
whether trifling or important, I can find nothing, no matter how
hard I search, or it may be that I find too much. [...] Sometimes
I think that nobody but myself would hear it; it is true, I hear
it now more and more distinctly, for my ear has grown keener
through practice; though in reality it is exactly the same noise
wherever I may hear it, as I have convinced myself by comparing
my impressions. (34445)
The mysterious noise immediately poses the question of its cause and
location, as any sound does. The sound is an enigma. It is structurally
mysterious: one hears itthat is, one perceives it by its having made its
passage inside, and the moment one hears it, it places one in the position
of having to figure out its cause. There is thus an enigma pertaining to
causality. The sound, at a minimum, is always a rupture of causality that
one has to reestablish and straighten out. And the first step to determine
its cause is to try to pin down its spatial location, and hence its source
that is, to pin it to a point outside and thus solve its riddle. And if hearing
a sound pertains to time, it is time that demands its translation into space.
The conundrum of sound has a temporality that can only find its solution
in spatiality. It requires a partition of space, which is here indicated by
the opposition far/close and elsewhere by inside/outside. More than that,
it requires a singularization: the singling out of a separate and discrete
location within indeterminate and continuous space. But for the poor
badger this spot recedes. There are no clues or too many clues, which
amount to the same, and the even distribution of clues makes them useless:
[W]herever I listen, high or low, at the roof or the floor, at the entrance
or in the corners, everywhere, everywhere, I hear the same noise (347).
The temporal fluidity of the sound calls for the spatial fixation, and there
is a movement of subjectivity that is placed in this loop, between time and
space, between fluidity and fixation, between the free-floating nonfixity of
the sound and its attachment. There is a hermeneutics of cause and space
that precedes the hermeneutics of meaning, of making sense of sounds.
Furthermore, there is an eerie quality to sound, this sound, and
in a minimal form to all sounds. Can it be that only I can hear it? Does
it have an objective status at all? Is it in my head or does it come from
outside? Its spatial location poses the problem of whether there is a spa-
tial location at all; there is a moment of phantasmagoria when the sound
wavers, if ever so minimally, between its reality and unreality. One has
to make sound tests to ascertain that this is indeed a sound to be located
outside and not a sound imagined or dreamed up. Remember, the badger
was just awakening from light slumber, and this may be a strange con-
tinuation of a dream that refuses to be dissipated. The sound is a testof
being awake, alert, and conscious, of being in possession of ones senses;
but is one ever? The ability to locate the sound is like the test of sanity,
for if one cannot do so, one stands on the brink of delusion, of hearing
voices, of an incapacity to make sense of the world at large. One stands
on the verge of an abyss, where the temporal is suspended and refuses to
converge into space. The tiny sound that wouldnt go away and that resists
being assigned a place and a cause is like an interminable prolongation of
the vacillation inherent in every sound. It is the extension of the enigma
that it poses from the outset. As unplaceable, it infests all parts of space.
The interstice of time and space in sound also produces a
slippage between the sound and the gaze. The one has the propensity to
translate into the other: I go once more the long road to the Castle Keep,
all my surroundings seem filled with agitation, seem to be looking at

me, and then look away again so as not to disturb me, yet cannot refrain
the very next moment from trying to read the saving solution from my
expression (357). The sound has the aptitude to return the gaze. It doesnt
merely originate from anywhere and everywhere, but also imbues space
with exposure to visibility. The impossibility of escape from hearing the
sound is transposed into the impossibility of evading the gaze. One is
being looked at, with no hiding place, without a hideout in this huge and
meticulously designed hideout of the burrow. One cannot close ones ears
as one can close ones eyesalways open and available to the soundbut
the impossibility of cutting short the influx of sounds comes to equal the
impossibility for the omnipresent gaze of closing its eyes. This gaze is
always reading me, and yet I cannot read it.
Further, how many sounds are there? What is the number of the
sound? Can it be submitted to count? There still remains the possibility
that there are two noises, that up to now I have been listening at a good
distance from the two centers, and that while its noise increases, when
I draw nearer to one of them, the total result remains approximately the
same for the ear in consequence of the lessening volume of sound from
the other center (345). Again there is a structural problem, for even the
sound at its minimal presencea thin whistling noise remaining persis-
tently the sameposes the constant question of one dividing into two
and hence into an ineradicable multiplicity. There is an implicit thesis in
this that one could spell out as follows: the sound is never one, it resists
oneness by its very nature, it poses a problem of inherent multiplicity by its
merely being a sound. And the enigma it presents is not only the enigma
of its cause, location, and source, but through all this the attempt to ren-
der it one, to submit its multiplicity to oneness. Again, can one ever? And
can one ever decompose it into discrete countable traits? There is again a
movement of subjectivity caught in the turmoil between the multiple and
the one, the imposition of one on something that seems to be by its nature
uncountable. 3
Then there is the question of its intermittencyof the tricks
played upon its duration:
Simply as a rest and a means to regain my composure I often

make this experiment, listen intently and am overjoyed when
I hear nothing. But the question still remains, what can have
happened? [...] Sometimes I fancy that the noise has stopped, for
it makes long pauses; sometimes such a faint whistling escapes

one, ones own blood is pounding all too loudly in ones ears;
then two pauses come one after another, and for a while one
thinks that the whistling has stopped forever. I listen no longer,
I jump up, all life is transfigured; it is as if the fountains from
which flows the silence of the burrow were unsealed. (34750)
The sound is essentially temporal, but its temporality is punctuated. In

order for there to be a sound, it has to be intermittent. There has to be the
possibility of there being a nonsound, a silence against the backdrop of
which the sound can emerge at all. But the demarcation line between the
two is uncertain. Can one ever be sure of hearing nothing? Of perceiving
pure silence, the absence of any sound? For silence itself is always popu-
lated by infinitesimal sounds: there is the heart and the pounding of blood,
there is the sounding presence of ones own body whose limits stretch into
the ambiance, if ever so little, and this produces the incapacity to be fully
assured and confident. Silence is not the absence of sounds, but quite the
opposite, the state of the greatest alertness in which subsounds emerge:
the minimal thumps of both ones body and the ambient surroundings,
slightly overlapping on the verge. Silence is the condition of sound, the
punctuation of its flow, its frame, but also an elusive line of division that
has to be drawn by an uncertain decision. Just as the sudden emergence
of the sound had the power to transform the already nightmarish life
of the badger into a far worse nightmare, so silence has the capacity to
transfigure it instantly into bliss, albeit short-lived. 4 I listen, but the most
perfunctory listening shows at once that I was shamefully deceived: away
there in the distance the whistling still remains unshaken (351). The
intermittency of the duration of sound, shaping its rhythm, overlapping
with the elusive boundary between sound and silence, translates into the
oscillation between nightmare and bliss. The excitation on the elusive line
pushes into two extremes, the movement of subjectivity being caught in
the exchange between the two. Ones damnation and salvation depend on
figuring out the sound and its treacherous absence.
The opposition between the threatening outside and the safe
inside can be reversed: I push my way up and listen. Deep stillness; how
lovely it is here, outside there nobody troubles about my burrow, everybody
has his own affairs, which have no connection with me; how have I man-
aged to achieve this? [...] A complete reversal of things in the burrow;
what was once the place of danger has become a place of tranquility (352).
The home, this tentative safe haven achieved by so much effort, has been
de-homed (if I can venture this expression) by the mere presence of the
sound, embodying all threats, condensing them under a single heading.
The external space of constant threats can now turn into the refuge from
the refuge: the asylum from the contaminated asylum, the outer threat
offering a relief from the unfathomable inner peril. Thus the oscillation
introduced by the sound can further translate into a reversal of inside/
outside and of refuge/danger. Under these circumstances, where can one
find a proper place of safety?
There is also the question of volume.
The noise seems to have become louder, not much louder, of

coursehere it is always a matter of the subtlest shadesbut all
the same sufficiently louder for the ear to recognize it clearly.
And this growing-louder is like a coming-nearer; still more dis-
tinctly than you hear the increasing loudness of the noise, you
can literally see the step that brings it closer to you. You leap
back from the wall, you try to grasp at once all the possible
consequences that this discovery will bring with it. (351)
What makes the sound different? Is it ever the same? Its volume is con-
stantly subject to fluctuation once one concentrates on it. The volume is the
subtle difference of volume: it increases/decreases, if ever so slightly; it can
only remain the same if one doesnt pay attention to it. The moment one
isolates the single sound and fully concentrates on it, its mode can only be
crescendo. And in the strange loop that binds together time and space in
sound, it comes ever nearer. The sound is getting you, it is gaining ground
on you, it is winning. You feel your defenses crumbling; all your weapons
are of no avail. The sound, by remaining the same, seems to be getting
louder and nearer, closer to the bone. And one never hears merely with
the ears: the bones are involved, starting with the tiny ones in the ear.
The attempt to squeeze the inherent multiplicity of the sound
into the mold of One leads to a further expansion that might be called a
crescendo of oneness:
But what avail all exhortations to be calm; my imagination

will not rest, and I have actually come to believeit is useless to
deny it to myselfthat the whistling is made by some beast [ein
Tier], and moreover not by a great many small ones, but by a
single big one. [...] it has a plan in view whose purpose I cannot
decipher; I merely assume that the beastand I make no claim
whatever that it knows of my existenceis encircling me; it has

probably made several circles around my burrow already since
I began to observe it. (35354)
If there is to be a common denominator to this intriguing and vacillating

multiple sound, then it must have a single cause, one should be able to
account for it by a single big creature as its unitary origin. The sound is the
sound of a beast. It is a beastly sound. There is something in its nature, or
its counternature, its supernature and unnature, that implies a beast. The
beast not as a part of the natural animal kingdom, but its excrescence, an
excess of animality, animality turned monstrous, the specter of Animal as
such. If there is a search for cause and spatial location necessarily called
for by every sound, then this is the next stage, seemingly impossible to
avoid: imputing the cause to a ghost. The assumption of a beast as a single
cause and meaning behind the mysterious sound has a spectral existence.
The impossibility of pinning down the cause to a locus and of unraveling
its source, of discerning the indiscernible, offers a crack where fantasy
comes in. If the sound cannot be quite counted for one, then fantasy can
take the relay of oneness and give it a spectral existence. There is a beast
in the machine. And the beast is encircling medespite its being One, the
unitary agent pulling the multiple strings of sound, it is also all around,
everywhere, unplaceable, encompassing. Being is a beast. It is a creature
of assumption and imaginationthese are Kafkas wordsyet overwhelm-
ing. Its purpose cannot be deciphered, and this is what makes it intractable
and inscrutable. It is the supposed One that is all over, ubiquitous, the
monstrous underside of the Parmenidean assertion of ontological unity
hen kai pan, one and all.
If the hermeneutics of cause and location necessarily precedes
the hermeneutics of meaning, there is a gap between the two where fantasy
sneaks in. Isolating the source of the sound is like a deflation of meaning:
So this is where it has been coming from. This is what has been producing
it. There is nothing to worry about and nothing further to interpret. The
sound would thus be put in place, neatly allocated. And the possibility of
doing this at least roughly and for practical purposes is no doubt what keeps
us from the paranoia lurking implicitly in every sound. It is only when
the sound quavers and lingers in suspense for some moments, or minutes
or agonizing hours, unplaceable and unfathomable, that one is suddenly
aware of the tiny gap that divorces the sound from its source, the lag that
prevents it from ever being simply collapsed on its source, the fissure that
thwarts the proper placement of its time into a spatial slot and makes it
irreducible to it. This gap is the entry point of fantasy that necessarily gets
hold of meaning once this gap is kept open for any length of time. 5 The
meaning of a sound, the assumption one necessarily makes, is placed in
the very impossibility of its univocal placement, deracinating, if slightly,
its firm roots. The spatial anchorage would make it univocal or una voce:
with a single voice. If there is a meaning to be sought and figured out, this
stems from a dislocation of natural causality, the failed allotment of sound
to a spatial point. Fantasy equally intervenes in the gap between multiplic-
ity and oneness, in the irreducibility of sound to one, and it proposes an
assumed specter of One as the solution of this predicament. One as the
One of the beast. There is something ghostly and beastly in making sense
of sound, that is, in making sense tout court. In the pursuit of sense there
is always a beastly moment; the elusive beast that intervenes doesnt quite
vanish in sense but rather conditions it. Making sense requires bringing
multiplicity to unity and pinning the elusive to a namebut can this be
done without relying on fantasy at a certain point, a point usually reduced
and exorcized? Kafkas story gives this point a latitude to the point of
invading the whole space of meaning.
The beast behind the sound is all powerful, but its omnipotence
only gives shape and substance to what is overpowering and invasive
in the sound itself. It gathers in its bosom the eeriness, the mystery, the
intrusive force of the sound. It draws its strength from sound and pro-
vides it with strength in return. It unifies the absent cause of sounds into
a single beastly creature. Once the beast is given life by the assumption
one makes in this predicament, then all sounds become manifestations
of the hidden beast. And if the beast seems to have suddenly appeared as
lurking behind them, then it can only follow that it had been there all the
time without our noticing: Now I could not have foreseen such an oppo-
nent. But apart altogether from the beasts peculiar characteristics, what
is happening now is only something which I should really have feared all
the time, something against which I should have been constantly prepared:
the fact that someone would come (354). The sound implies the beast that
can jeopardize the whole of life, and retrospectively the whole of life has
been a long wait for this jeopardy. It is not that it has suddenly emerged
from nowhere. Rather, one was foolish and naive not to have anticipated its
coming. One has been deluding oneself. The peaceful life without the beast
was based on blindness, or rather deafnessactually both. The whistling
sound was a surprise, totally unexpected, but it was bound to come, it had
a destination to fulfill by its coming out, it was secretly lurking behind

all sounds and waiting for its moment. Its sudden emergence was just a
materialization of its virtuality in every sound, in the crack involved in
the world of sounds.
Can one come to terms with the beast? Can one reach an
understanding with it?
If it should really break through to the burrow I shall give it

some of my stores and it will go on its way again. It will go its
way again, a fine story! Lying in my heap of earth I can natu-
rally dream of all sorts of things, even of an understanding with
the beast, though I know well enough that no such thing can
happen, and that at the instant when we see each other, more,
at the moment when we merely guess at each others presence,
we shall both blindly bare our claws and teeth, neither of us a
second before or after the other. (358)
The world is not big enough for the badger and the beast. There is no room
for a friendly coexistence, for a division of space and goods. Its an either-or,
a life and death struggle. The beast grew out of the tiniest of sounds, a mere
whistling, and it grew to spectacular proportions, out of all proportion,
taking over Being at large. It has imbued being with an excessive presence,
a presence too much, the too-muchness of presenceto use an excellent
expression proposed by Eric Santner (Psychotheology 8)yet pinned to a
mere sound. The beast of being has come too close by merely emitting a
sound, but this pertains to the very nature of the sound: the hazard of its
coming too close, the impossibility of keeping it at bay. What would be the
proper distance of the sound, between its closeness and remoteness? Can it
ever be at an appropriate distance? Not too far, not too close? Can one ever
keep being at a proper distance? The beast of being, a mere creature of
sound, the slightest and the most immaterial of substances, is nevertheless
endowed with claws and teeth. It can rip one apart should it appear in flesh.
Yet despite its unbearable closenessthe unbearable closeness of beingit
pertains to its nature that it keeps in retreat, a retreat within the retreat,
never stepping into the full brightness of noon, in line with the nature of
the sound that immediately imposes itself, piercing all protection, but at
the same time never quite discloses its source and location. It dwells in the
dislocation. The sound is an advent of presence, compellingly inflicting
itself, but simultaneously a truncated presence, resisting its revelation,
posing an enigma, a retreat in its very disclosure.
Lacan, in his reading of this story in Seminar 9, curiously never

mentions the sound that antagonizes the badger. His interest is limited
to the topology of the burrow, which is spectacular enough. This is at an
early stage of his interest in topology, which would eventually become
overbearing and more often than not inaccessible and off-putting. It
presents a number of problems and paradoxes that I cannot discuss here.
I can just briefly hint at the following: topology, with its progressively
more and more mind-boggling objects, from the Mbius strip, the Klein
bottle, and the torus to cross-cap, the Borromean knot, and the whole
theory of knots, takes off from Lacans early and ample use of schemata
and graphs. It would seem that the topological objects were meant to serve
the purpose of giving an illustration or a spatial demonstration of his
theoretical propositions. This purpose immediately entailed a reversal, I
suppose not unintended, for what was designed to facilitate understand-
ing (or was it ever?) was far more difficult to grasp than the thing it was
supposed to render intelligible and, rather, served as an impediment, itself
in need of explanation. Gradually the topological objects and paradoxes,
and particularly the knots, lost their status of illustrating something and
became the thing itself, the focus of interest and elaboration in itself, the
very way that theory should proceed, embodying something that cannot
be rendered in any other way. 6 For better or for worse.
Nonetheless, it is easy enough to see why and how Lacan was
trying to use topology in reading this particular story. The burrow is a
division of space into an inside and an outside, but as we have seen, this
division is impossible; the outside not only communicates with the inside
but contaminates it and shapes it. Lacan tries to transpose this spatial
constellation into the problem of the relation between the subject and the
Other, converting this relation into topological terms: a relation between
two toruses, the torus of the subject, its construction of an inner space,
and the torus of the Other pertaining to the exterior. The early Lacan
never tired of repeating that the desire of the subject is the desire of
the Other, the dictum that places the subjects desire into an immediate
engagement with the Others desire, so that the former cannot emerge
without a dependence on the latter and, even more, without a point of
overlapping and coincidence of the two. Now he proposes an irreducible
analogy, which cannot be excluded from what [for the subject] is called
the inside and the outside, so that the one passes into the other and the
one regulates the other (Le sminaire, livre IX).7 The subjects desire is
always caught in an internal-external connection with the Other: they are
both drastically separate and linked (as the infant and the mother, usually
the first representative of the Other), so the two topological spaces, two
toruses, communicate by a passage or a short circuit that both links them
and keeps them apart. He uses the surgical term anastomosis, the inter-
communication of two vessels in the body, 8 a bypass, so to speak, a shortcut
cutting across two detached spaces. This doesnt simply create a single
space, but a torsion of the space, its curvature not merely the externality
of the outside world and the burrow, but the placement of subjectivity in
this spatial torsion in the noncoincidence and anastomosis.
Now it is true that there is an equation in the story between the
badger and its burrow: But simply by virtue of being owner of this great
vulnerable edifice I am obviously defenseless against any serious attack.
The joy of possessing it has spoiled me, the vulnerability of the burrow
has made me vulnerable; any wound to it hurts me as if I myself were hit
(355). It is as if the burrow would immediately present an extension of the
animals being; it is inseparable from it. The badger inhabits the burrow;
the burrow inhabits the badger. It is not just a question of a complicated
architecture of labyrinths and passages; it may well concern something
in the most intimate interior of organisms, an intimate tie between the
organism and its milieu, its life environment. And the life environment of
the subject is the Otherso this would ultimately be a parable of a topo-
logical model linking the organism and the Other, the one passing into
the otherthat is, the Other that reaches into organic intimacy, inhabit-
ing it as its external kernel. In the last instance, this could serve as the
parable of a topological link between nature and culture, the paradox
of their link in terms of spatial torsion, the one stretching into the other.
Ultimately the human being is the animal of the torus, the animal of the
burrow (lanimal du terrier), its animal organic nature linked by a tor-
sion to the symbolic. In this passage of the one into the other/Other, one
can neither set them apart in a simple opposition nor collapse them into
a common and unitary space.
But the crucial point is oddly missing in this account of Lacans.
This is the point where the sound comes in: the very presentation of the
topological torsion being pinned to a singular occurrence, the object epito-
mizing the topological paradox, the torsion turned into objectthe object
that is by its nature precisely unplaceable, since the whole problem is that
it cannot be attached to a spatial location, and hence presents a constant
topological conundrum. Kafkas story is neatly divided into two parts of
equal length: first, the topological convolution of the burrow; second, the
emergence of the object sound. There is something of a link of logical

implication between the two: topology requires a consequence to follow,
the consequence utterly dismantling the shaky attempts of security in the
first part by presenting an object that brings the initial setting to a climax.
The agony of the first part was bad enough, but nothing compares to the
agony of the second part. Lacan curiously dwells only on the first part and
draws his topological parable from there, disregarding what offers itself as
a royal way to the theory of the object in psychoanalysis. If there is indeed
the Other at stake, then this Other can function only if it manifests itself
as this trivial and irrepressible object, a sheer nothingness of the sound,
the topology made sound. The implication also works in reverse: the topo-
logical paradox, the spatial torsion, is conditioned by the emergence of this
singular object; it is pinned to this trivial occurrence that causesin
the peculiar Lacanian sense of causeits curvature. The sound is both
unpredictable in its nature and at the same time relentlessly persistent,
both vacillating and adamantly constant, erratic and inflexible, fickle and
obduratejust like the Other. There is no Other without a quirk, and it is
the quirk that makes the Other other.
The sound is an entity of the edge. Before coming to some tenta-

tive conclusions, let me briefly dwell on the particular edge that is crucial
for Kafka: the blurred line between sleep and wakefulness, the edge of
awakening. The Trial begins with an awakening. Josef K. wakes up in
his room, with two strangers at his bedside, in the space of his homely
intimacy. The two intruders will proceed to eat his breakfast, seize his
undergarments, and present him with the indictment. In the first scene,
at the edge of waking up, the home is de-homed, the concept of unheim-
lich is quite literally staged. Awakening is a threshold between sleep and
wakefulness, like coming back from a foreign country, but the threshold is
a risk, for does one ever come simply back home from some distant oneiric
place? There is a crack in between, and the uncanny moment is precisely
the moment of not being able to find the homely again, if only for a moment.
In a passage that he eventually crossed out, Kafka put it brilliantly:
[I]t is really remarkable that when you wake up in the morning

you nearly always find everything in exactly the same place
as the evening before. For when asleep and dreaming you are,
apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of
wakefulness; and therefore [...] it requires enormous presence
of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to

seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the
same place where you had let it go on the previous evening.
( The Trial 279) 9
There is a thin line: on the one hand, the dislocation of dreams; on the
other hand, the elusively escaping familiar, the impossibility of placing
it. One needs vigilance to catch it, to prevent it from sliding away, for its
dislocation coincides with everything being seemingly in the same place.
The dislocated world has to be relocated, that is, moved in order to be in the
same place. If awakening is a threshold, then it is a threshold where for a
moment the relation between subject and the world wavers. [T]he moment
of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over
without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for
the rest of the day (The Trial 27980). Josef K. faltered on this brink, and
he would never be able to take heart again. He will be stuck in between,
no longer asleep but not yet awake, and the whole novel will unfold on this
edge. His protracted wakefulness, with which he will struggle throughout
the novel, to the point of utmost exhaustion, coincides with a protracted
dream, or rather with what emerged at the edge of awakening.
Kafkas guideline could be stated in these terms: [D]ont give
up on the edge, on the impossible in between where the dreamlike real
infringes upon the familiar reality. It all seems like a slip, a tiny lack of
vigilance. K. says to his landlady:
I was taken by surprise, that was all. If immediately on wak-

ening I had got up without troubling my head about Annas
absence and had come to you without regarding anyone who
tried to bar my way, I could have breakfasted in the kitchen for
a change and could have got you to bring me my clothes from
my room; in short, if I had behaved sensibly, nothing further
would have happened, all this would have been nipped in the
bud. Everything that wanted to come into being [was werden
wollte] would have been stifled. ( The Trial 2122, trans. mod.)
He was caught off guard in a reckless moment. He should have reason-

ably ignored the crack into which the two guards had slipped. Something
wanted to come into being, and it could have been stifled if he reacted in
good time, but he didnt. It was a momentary deficiency that enabled the
impossible edge to invade everything else. But one is so unprepared, he
says, in an echo to Hamlet. In the Bank, for instance, I am always pre-

pared, nothing of the kind could possibly happen to me there (The Trial
22). When he is awake and occupying his social post, he is well equipped
and can fend off any such intrusion. The tiny lack of vigilance, on Josef
K.s part, is the tiny opening of Kafkas relentless vigilance, on which he
will not give way, persevering on the edge to the terrible end. Awaken-
ing is the riskiest moment [der riskanteste Augenblick], says Kafka, and if
one lets ones vigilance slip, even stranger things can happen. One might
wake up as an insect. Gregor Samsa missed for a moment the quickness
of wit to catch everything in the same place. He didnt find his own body.
He mislaid it for a moment. Awakening is metamorphosis. Similarly, on
the first page of The Castle the land surveyor K. arrives at the village at
the foot of the castle in the late evening. He calls at the inn to spend the
night, and since there is no room they put him up in a bank, whereupon
he instantly falls asleep. He is soon awoken by a young man claiming that
one needs permission from the castle authorities if one wants to spend the
night there. And everything else follows: everything starts by an awaken-
ing, after two paragraphs, and K. wakes up caught in the middle between
wakefulness and sleep.
It is worth briefly noting that at the time when Kafka was writ-
ing The Trial, Marcel Proust, in another part of Europe, was preparing the
publication of the first novel of the grand edifice In Search of Lost Time. The
first volume, Swanns Way (1913), famously starts on the same threshold
between wakefulness and sleep. But Proust, on this first page, is crossing
the threshold in the opposite direction: from wakefulness into gradually
falling asleep, sinking into a slumber, losing consciousness, but not quite.
What he tries to hold on to is precisely a region at the boundary, neither the
one nor the other, and it is on this edge, when the conscious controls have
given way but before sleep has taken over, between the familiar and the
dream world, that memories start flooding in: a vast tapestry of memories
that one hasnt invited nor tried to recall. These memories are intruders
at the interstice, or what he will call la mmoire involontaire, involuntary
memory, beyond the reach of conscious intentions and precisely for that
reason the harbingers of another kind of truth. Everything else will follow
from that threshold, and it will take seven bulky volumes to spin out what
comes sneaking in on the first page: the whole immense edifice is made
of this stuff. A neat opposition can be made: Josef K. awakes early in the
morning, but not quite; Prousts narrator is sinking into sleep late at night,
but not quite. If there is a common denominator they share, then it is the
injunction not to give up on the threshold.10 One might even speak of the
birth of the modern novel from the spirit of the thresholdfrom the spirit
of the crack between two worlds.
Lacan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
dwells for a moment on this strange temporality of awakening. He takes
up the most Kafkaesque of all the dreams Freud ever interpreted, where
a father, falling asleep during the wake for his dead child,11 is woken up in
terror by his child appearing in the dream, grabbing his hand and saying:
Father, dont you see that I am burning? And indeed the burning candles
have produced a fire in reality, redoubled in the dream fire (Freud 509).
Throughout his book on dreams, Freud maintains that one crucial func-
tion of the dream is to be the guardian of sleep. Any external disturbance
that might wake us is integrated into the dream in order to keep us asleep.
The dream protects the sleeper from the intrusion of reality. One eventu-
ally wakes up when the external disturbance becomes too intrusive for
the dream to tackle. On the other hand, the dream itself has the capacity
of producing a real that is more overpowering than any external distur-
bance from which one tries to escape by taking refuge in waking reality.
The dreams own logic of wish fulfillment tends to run amok, producing
something more traumatic than reality can be, so one is forced to wake
up in order to escape it. Simplifying to the utmost, Lacans point would
be: we wake up in order to be able to continue to sleep, in order to escape
the excess produced by the dream in its endeavor to protect our sleep. So
there is a threshold in the awakening, an edge between the real of the
dream and the reality into which one wakes, an interface where, for a
moment, the one infringes upon the other:
Thus the encounter, forever missed, has occurred between dream

and awakening, between the person who is still asleep and whose
dream we will not know and the person who has dreamt merely
in order not to wake up. [...] If Freud, amazed, sees in this the
confirmation of his theory of desire, it is certainly a sign that the
dream is not a fantasy fulfilling a wish. ( Four Fundamental 59)
The missed encounter occurs in the gap between two fantasies: the one
that sustains the dream and the one that sustains waking life.12 The
encounter of the two is impossible, and it emerges for only a fleeting
moment when everything vacillates. Josef K. wakes up in this temporal
modality. This is also what happens to Gregor Samsa, and this is what hap-
pens to the badger waking up to hear the soundthe sound of this edge
that will turn everything into a nightmare. There is something like an

ontological opening at this edge where the usual assumptions are shaken
for just a moment, and this openingor so I proposeis something that
largely conditioned the advent both of a vast strand of modern literature
and of psychoanalysis. There was a historical turn that one could describe
as the moment of awakening, though not to reality, but to something that
gets lost in the reality once constituted and made ontologically consistent.
There is a real that emerges on the very verge, and holding on to it has
largely been a red thread for both theory and artistic practices pertaining
to modernity.
Michel Chion opens his magisterial book on sound exactly
on this edge, but uses a topos of classical literature.13 Iphignie, a clas-
sical tragedy by Jean Racine (1674), opens with these words: Oui, cest
Agamemnon, cest ton roi qui tveille;/ Viens, reconnais la voix qui frappe
ton oreille [Yes, this is Agamemnon, your king who is waking you up;/
Recognize the voice that is pounding into your ear] (1.1.12). As the curtain
goes up, it is dawn and Agamemnon is waking his servant Arcas. Chion
comments: The sound of this voice seems to be coming from Arcass
dream, while at the same time it is pulling him out of it (Le son 5). The
curtain rises in the middle of waking up, the audience is awoken along
with the sleeper, the kings voice is already a sequel to the voice in the
dreams. The beginning is missed and only recuperated from the other
side of the edge: So it is in the nature of the sound to be frequently asso-
ciated with something lost, missed and at the same time captured, still
being there (Le son 5). This openingof the book on sound, of Racines
play, of Kafkas novelswith the tiny brink between sleep and wakeful-
ness is something that has a tenacious and internal link to the question of
the nature of the sound. Why does one wake up? Quite trivially and com-
monly, one is awoken by a sound, by a noise, by a voice, something that has
become too loud and disturbing. The sound intrusion was first integrated
into the dream, this guardian of sleep, but once it got too noisy, one had
to wake up. It could no longer be contained. Thus there is something that
inherently brings together, in most common experience, the line separat-
ing sleep and wakefulness and the very nature of the sound. The sound
has been going on for some length of time during the sleep. It provokes the
break and then continues after waking. It is the first thing one is aware of
when coming to ones senses and the first thing one has to figure out. The
sound displays its nature, in a particularly telling way, precisely on this
line of demarcation, and this paradoxically blurred line is epitomized, in
a most telling way, by the nature of the sound. It belongs to two worlds; it
embodies the break between the two, and in that break something comes
up for a moment that doesnt belong to either and that flickers for only a
moment. It takes a supreme alertness and mastery to hold on to it, to pro-
long it, to make literature out of it, to turn it into an object of theoretical
pursuit. The historical advent of modernism is profoundly linked to it.14
The sound is an entity of the edge. The edge between the self-
present consciousness and the inscrutable realm of sleep is just one of the
edges on which the sound has to be scrutinized, and I have given it more
attention because of the far-reaching strategic value it holds for Kafka. I
have attempted to read Kafkas story as a sound laboratory, and the burrow
indeed mimics the soundproof laboratory situation. It isolates a single
sound and systematically examines all that is at stake in it. It exhaustively
lists the attitudes of the subject in relation to the sound, and it closely
investigates its ontological stature. What kind of object is it, if it is one
at all? By isolating a single sound and focusing entirely on it, the story
shows that the sound cannot be isolated for a moment, for everything is
at stake in hearing a sound. It cannot help raising a vast array of crucial
philosophical questions, the vital ones for modern theory.
There are numerous edges at stake, and let me now attempt
to list them systematically. I will not insist any further on the first one:
the edge between wakefulness/consciousness and sleep, the very edge of
self-presence and awareness. The second one is the massive edge between
the inside and the outside, in two senses: First, in the sense that the sound
is the intrusion of an outside into the inside; it presupposes a division of
space into a part that is supposed to be isolated, close, and intimate, a
home, and a part that is external and hence threatening. The sound is
premised on this spatial partitionthe burrow presents a colossal effort to
establish and maintain it, a bastion to fend off soundand it testifies to its
permeability, its crack. The sound is the sound of this crack. And second,
in the sense of inside/outside ones head: the sound presents a moment
of vacillation of this divide, the most dramatic of all divides, a moment of
uncertainty about whether there is an outside source at all. What, where,
and how does one hear? The sound pierces inside, immediately and
unstoppably, and directly poses the question of an outside and its status,
entailing a structural moment of indecision. This structural moment of
indecision stands at the very edge of the physical and the psychical as the
paramount inside/outside divide. The assumption of a reality of an outside
discriminates between sanity and insanity, and it places the sound into a
zone of a possible delusion.
Third, the sound presents an edge in causality. It poses the
immediate question of its cause, a search for its source, and a moment of
wavering as to whether the experience of the sound can be reduced to its
source, covered by it and explained away by it. There is something in sound
that, if ever so slightly, disrupts the idea of a straightforward causality, of a
one-to-one relationship of a cause and its sound effect. There is something
in sound that evokes Lacans adage on causality: [T]here is a cause only
in something that doesnt work [il ny a de cause que de ce qui cloche],
literally in something that limps (Four Fundamental 22). Only a glitch in
causality brings forth the problem of cause, and the sound is persistently
the sound of a limping cause.
Fourth, the uncertainty as to its cause entails the edge of loca-
tion/dislocation of the sound, of its attachment and detachment. For find-
ing its cause means tracking down and circumscribing the singular spot
in space from where it presumably emanates, thus unraveling the nature
of its source. There is always a disparity between the floating nature of
the sound and its fixation. This is where the whole discussion about the
acousmatic voice comes in. Acousmatic is the term that Pierre Schaef-
fer, in his seminal book on sound,15 has borrowed from the name given
to Pythagorass pupils, who were for many years of their apprenticeship
limited to hearing the masters voice behind a curtain delivering his doc-
trine, without being able to see him (184). There is something acousmatic
in every sound, not merely in the sense that more often than not one
doesnt see its spatial source and merely makes assumptions about it (to
say nothing about acousmatic media, that is, all modern media, which are
premised on impossibility of seeing the sound source). But every sound
is also acousmatic in a more emphatic sense: even when one does see the
source and location, the discrepancy between this source and its sound
effect still persists: there is always more in the sound than meets the eye.
There is a moment of disappointment or surprise or wandering: how could
this sound stem from this banal origin? There must be some trickery or
magic at work.
Fifth, there is the edge of the strange loop between time and
space, the temporality of sound being forced to find its spatial translation,
and the sound is always caught in the gap between the two. The sound
implies a missing link of time and space at the point of their overlap-
ping. This is the point from which it sounds. This also entails a curious
transposition between the two worlds of hearing and seeing, the acoustic
and the visual, sight and sound: hearing a mysterious sound converts
into the sound returning the gaze, as it were, its ubiquitous impossible
location looking back at the subject who cannot hide from it. The very
notion of an acousmatic sound or voice presupposes the realm of visibility
as the backdrop against which to gauge all sound phenomena; it places the
sound at the point of their never-matching encounter.
Sixth, there is the edge between the one and the multiple: the
heterogeneous multiplicity inherent in the sound has to be accounted for
in terms of one, hence made countable, enabling the sound to count for
one and/or disentangling its discrete countable components. And even the
simplest of sounds, isolated by this story, turns out to be more than one;
there is a mixture in it, an ineradicable hybridity. Thus, listening is the
necessary and sustained attempt to impose on sound the realm of one and
the countablean attempt that is never quite successful.16 Still, we should
nevertheless not too hastily assume that there is an originary multiplicity
and heterogeneity in the sound that then in the next step one tries in vain
to squeeze into the straitjacket of one, the operation of one (thus extort-
ing the representation out of the presentation of sound, as Alain Badiou
might put it). Perhaps this constellation should be considered in reverse,
the imposition of one having the retroactive effect of opening multiplicity.
Is there a multiplicity prior to and independent of one? Is the alterna-
tive between the one and the multiple an exhaustive alternative? Perhaps
the sound is something that can serve as its pivotal point, not to be too
quickly placed on either side, a point obfuscated by espousing either the
one or the multiplicity.
Seventh, the sound implies the edge of duration and intermit-
tency. It comes and it goes, it is fickle and quirky by its nature, and hence it
poses the question of nonsound, of silence as its backdrop and its internal
other interrupting it. The sound is not sound, to make a quick pun. But the
sound of silence is never quite an absence of sound. It endows sound with
its essential inner difference and rhythm. Sound, by its temporal nature,
is always on the edge of fading away, but also in the impossibility of ever
quite dying (hence the paradoxes of its wavering volume). One could make
the simple opposition between existence and insistence of the sound: one
can never be quite certain about the sounds existence, of its soundness;
it is always on the move, fading in and out, between the lawless and the
lawlike, between duration, repetition, and unpredictability, yet through its
very capriciousness it adamantly and implacably insists, giving no respite,
not by its steady permanence, but by the unpredictable intermittency of

its permanence. It is the glitch of durability that is durable and enduring.
Eighth, the sound is the edge in the relation of the subject and
the Other. This is the point that Lacan tries to develop in his reading. This
brings together a topological problemthe separation and connection of
the inner and the outer space, a torsion linking the twowith the object
sound emerging as a symptom of this torsion, as it were, the point of
extimacy, to use Lacans excellent neologism. It brings together the Other
of the spatial outside, the Other of alterity, and the Other of demand/
desire. There is something in the sound that produces an immediate
effect of interpellation: one is interpellated into a posture of listening,
interpreting, figuring out the meaning, seeking, sieving, maximum alert-
ness. Ultimately, this entails the posture of not being up to the markthe
mark of soundof failing to measure up to it. But it is in this way that this
interpellation yields the subject: not by recognition in the call of the Other
(which is the Althusserian mark of interpellation) but by its impossibility,
by the failure of recognition, by its backfiring. The Other of sound agitates
the subject in his/her intimacy as an alien body that one cannot be rid
of, that one cannot dispose of, and that cannot be allocated to a proper
place. Lacans topological angle further brings together the relation of an
organism to its environment, the human organism to its cultural environ-
ment, ultimately the relation between nature and culture, the Other being
precisely the environment wrapping the natural organism into a cultural
mold, with the simultaneous topological link and cut, the way in which
the human animal, as the animal of the burrow, inhabits culture.
Ninth, there is the edge between reality and fantasy. The impos-
sibility of finding a univocal location of the sound in reality opens up a
crack where fantasy comes flooding in, with the capacity to contaminate
the wholeand one can here appositely use the homonymy of whole/hole.
By virtue of its dis-location, the sound has the structural propensity of
leading to the assumption of the beast. Only the beast can straighten out
its crooked causality and provide it with being, location, oneness, stability,
duration, meaningall those things that one was incapable of achieving.
With the mere supposition of the beast, by a single stroke, it all makes
sense, if beastly sense. It displays the beastly part of making sensethe
part where the sense fills in the crack, underpinned by fantasy. It makes
a whole out of its hole. And fantasy, in one of Lacans famous adages, is
what fills in the lack of the Other and establishes a relation between the
nonrelated (precisely subject and object, in his minimal formula, but the
barred subject and the object a, the subject that cannot be a self and an
object that cannot be objective). But this is not the fantasy that would put
things in order and relocate everything to the rightful places, presenting
a meaningful world with which one could be at peace. Quite the contrary,
it is an assumption that makes the reality itself coincide with the intrusion
that disrupted it. The disruption, instead of being repaired, gains reality
and thus the upper hand over reality. Making sense backfires, or it makes
too much sense for reality to cope with or to bear. This is the hazard of
making sense as such, and making sense of sounds in particular. It is a
sense that is by its nature a hidden sense, a sense in retreat, lurking behind
the visible and the audible, behind the appearances, regulating them from
its retreat, inaccessible to senses. It oscillates between a universal assur-
ance and a universal threat, salvation and damnation. Should it appear as
a sense being (as both sensual and sensible), this would entail a struggle
to annihilationfatally, of the subject.
Tenth, there is the edge between the sound and the voice. The
first seemingly evident discriminating factor would be the line animate/
inanimate, but sound always blurs this line, it always seems to be the sound
of something moving and hence alive, it is always a live sound, a sign of
budging and hence of animation. But there is more, there is a trajectory
between the sound and the voice leading from the inanimate to anima-
tion and then from life to meaning. What singles out the voice among the
infinite array of sounds and noises is its inner relationship with meaning.
It points toward meaning, and there is in it something like an arrow that
raises an expectation of meaning, an opening toward meaning. One can
ascribe meaning to all kinds of sounds, yet they seem to be deprived of it
in themselves, independent of our ascription. The voice, however, has an
intimate connection with meaning. It is a sound that appears endowed in
itself with the will to say something (the French language has a handy
pun, vouloir dire, where wanting to say and meaning coincide). The
voice implies a subjectivity that inhabits the means of expression (Dolar,
A Voice 1415). Sound is on the verge between being pure sound and thus
meaningless in itself, and being a voice to which one must not merely
ascribe a meaning but that is already inwardly propelled by pointing
toward meaning (so that the ascription, the interpretation, would merely
spell out what is already there; explicate the implicit).17 There is a struc-
tural wavering of sound between the senseless and the senseful. Is every
sound potentially a voice? As Chion puts it: Thus every sound, if listened to
long enough, becomes a voice. The sounds speak (Le son 71). Conversely,
is every voice potentially a sound? For after all, the voice, such as Lacan
singled it out as one of the paramount embodiments of the object a
in psychoanalysis, occupies this position precisely insofar as it doesnt
speak; its status of the object depends on its being entirely divorced
from its sense-making capacity. It is, rather, its sound value in the midst
of sense making that makes it an object. But if the voice is entitled to this
special status of the object, why not the sound, which, as we have seen, is
endowed with all the disruptive traits assigned to the object a? There is a
subplot in Lacans list of the objects with claims to the status of object a
(and the lists he makes at various points are curiously inconsistent). Briefly
put: the breast, the oral object; feces, the anal object; the voice and the
gaze (to stick to the systematic progression in his seminar on anxiety) (Le
sminaire, livre X ). Namely, they are all shaped by the bodily apertures,
by the orificesthat is, precisely by the points of transition between the
inside and the outside, at the topological junctures (hence the topology
meeting the object sound in the burrow) where the bodily inside extends
into the world and the world extends into the body. They all pertain to the
zones of topological junction/disjunction, following the utter contingency
of anatomy, not some transcendental considerations. This is the materialist
bottom line (and one can read a pun into this if one wants) that psycho-
analysis never loses from sight, the point where the elevated questions of
being, subject and object, reason, signification, knowledge, mind, world,
and so on cannot be quite disentangled from the baseness of contingency.
Voice is what links sound to the bodily topology, and the burrow is but an
extension or extrapolation of it. So let me put it this way: what the sound
points to, ultimately, in its crack of dislocation, can be described as an
orifice of being, and the object that is at stake emerges in the link, the
passage, the transition, the equation between this orifice of being and the
bodily orifice, the point where the ontological orifice crosses its path with
the contingency of bodily orificesthe ontological crossover, as it were,
at the heart of the human experience.18
Eleventh, three (of the) most remarkable, most ambitious, and
most staggering books of ontology in the past century bear the titles Being
and Time, Being and Nothingness, and Being and Event. They span the
century. They were written by very different authors at very different
points in time, with very different assumptions and results (although it
wouldnt be impossible, it would be enticing and has been attempted to
some extent, to disentangle a developing common plot underlying the
sequence). The three titles have the same form, no doubt the subsequent
ones being calqued on the previous, and they all involve the edge of being
and ... , being and something that would offer a clue to unravel the ques-
tion of being posited at the starting term. Being requires a second term, a
vantage point from which to address it; it divides into two in the very title.
Would it be too muchI know, it would be, but neverthelessto propose
that the curious ontology of the sound that I have been pursuing could be
placed precisely in the and of the three titles?
Twelfth, and last, the sound is placed on the edge of the modern-
ist turn. Kafkas burrow is seemingly a timeless place of a timeless par-
able. All it needs is an animal and its burrow, animals being self-evidently
deprived of historicity.19 Yet this parable stands on the cutting edge of a
historic moment. The experience of sound it describes, the curious ontol-
ogy, and the topology it spells out and passionately examines epitomize an
opening, an ontological crack, as it were, intimately linked to the advent of
modernity, enabling a turn in literature, philosophy, the very emergence
of psychoanalysis, and not least a turn in music in its relation to sound. On
this last count, one could say that all modern sound art, the contemporary
fascinating research in the realm of sound, stems from Kafkas burrow, is
its heir. There were always sounds, but did one lend them an ear, properly?
The moment one did, with the modern tenacity, the world was out of joint.
Kafkas burrow is the modernist version of Platos cave, so finally, can we
take this flickering and fickle unsettling object sound that it so powerfully
presents at the point of the greatest claustrophobic closure as the point of
pursuit in our way out of the very modern, postmodern cave?
Let me somewhat arbitrarily stop at the even dozen.
mladen dolar is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of

Ljubljana, and the Advising Researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Nether-
lands. He is the author of ten books and more than a hundred papers published in scholarly
journals and collected volumes in several languages. His most recent book in English is
AVoice and Nothing More (Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006).
Notes 1 I have this from a conversation out, out of the fortress where the
with Agamben himself. badger is the sole master.
2 If the Castle in the novel presents 3 Read in this way, this could
the impossibility of ever getting invoke something like the pri-
in, into the unfathomable place mary scene of Badiouean phi-
of power, then this underground losophy. One can recall Badiou
castle presents the inverse prob- insisting on the first pages of
lemif not the impossibility then Being and Event that being is a
the high riskof ever getting multiplicity, indeed a multiplicity
of multiplicities, and that one 8 To quote the Shorter Oxford Eng-

is an operation performed on this lish Dictionary: Anastomosis:
irreducible multiplicity. Is the Intercommunication between two
badger a prototype of a Badiouean vessels, channels or branches, by
philosopher, his philosophical a connecting cross branch. Orig.
animal, as opposed, for example, of the cross connections between
to the Deleuzean tick sticking to the arteries and veins, etc.; now of
the surface? Curiously, Badiou those of any branching system.
off handedly mentions the badger,
le blaireau, in a completely differ- 9 I must point out the brilliant book
ent context in his book on Sar- by Roberto Calasso, K., which
kozy, making a makeshift pun on gives an extended analysis of this.
the name of Tony Blair.
10 A remark by Walter Benjamin in
4 In retrospect, all the previous his brilliant essay on Proust: And
nightmares seem but a trifle there is no telling what encoun-
compared with this one. I have ters would be in store for us if
had a great deal of luck all those we were less inclined to give in
years, luck has spoiled me; I have to sleep. Proust didnt give in to
had anxieties, but anxiety leads sleep (23839). Benjamin, a great
to nothing when you have luck reader of both Proust and Kafka,
to back you (The Burrow 351). actually cotranslated two volumes
Luck is the retroactive product of Prousts saga into German.
of calamity, ones luck never
11 One can recall that the most
coincides with one.
extreme modernist novel by
5 In the Heideggerian vein, one James Joyce is called Finnegans
could venture this: [T]he mean- Wake, evoking both the wake over
ing of the beast is the beast of the dead and the strange tempo-
meaning. But he is so easy to rality of awakening, a novel again
parody. written in the realm of the edge.
6 To take the simple example of the 12 Lacan uses a peculiarity of

Borromean knot: it was initially French language, namely, the
meant to illustrate the particu- expletive ne, to make his point:
lar connection between the three What am I avant que je ne me
dimensions of the symbolic, the reveille? What am I before I wake
imaginary, and the real, each pre- up?or before I dont wake up?
sented by one of the three circles The ambiguity gets lost in Eng-
knotted together, connecting lish. What does the ne of negation
the unconnected in such a way mean? It is semantically super-
that any two are held together fluous and makes the meaning
by the third. Yet there is a real at vacillate. Is one awake or is one
stake in the knot itself, which is asleep?
of a different order than the real
13 Le son is the best book on sound
epitomized by one of the circles
that I know of, and I am aston-
forming the knot, and it is this
ished that there is no English
real that the theory should take as
translation yet.
its object.
14 Here I am leaving aside another
7 Lacans Seminar 9 remains
thread that should be carefully
unpublished in both French and
scrutinized and that leads to an
English; Seminar 10 remains
analogous conclusion. It is the
untranslated into English.
thread of technological novelties
that have, precisely at the turn to Being). But what of the sound
of the century, profoundly modi- of Being? The sound that is not a
fied the experience of sound and voice, it is beneath the threshold
voice. Gramophone, telephone, of sense, or more precisely at the
tape recorder, radio, all devices limit of making sense and the
of fixed sounds, to use Chions senseless, between the visible and
expression, and tele-sounds the invisible, between the clatter
they all had far-reaching and and the beast. Does Being have a
shattering consequences for the sound rather than a voice? Is this
ontological status of the sound a better metaphor to encapsulate
and the voice, their relation to Heideggers endeavor or some-
presence. I have touched upon it thing that goes beyond it? Maybe
in my book on the voice (A Voice this could serve as a telling limit
6365, 7478) and at more length line in Heidegger: between the
in a text published in Slovene sound and the voice. Neither
(Telefon), taking up some texts voice nor writing nor word nor
on the telephone by Proust, Kafka, cry, the transcendental rustling
Benjamin, and Freud. The two [bruissement], condition of all
lines of reasoning intersect, the words and all silence (Nancy 49).
burrow is seemingly as far away
from technology as possible, yet it 18 My makeshift list of edges inter-
addresses the same experience. sects in various ways with the
list of ten reasons why the sound
15 For the spread of this concept, see cannot be an object, proposed
Chions La voix au cinma. by Chion (Le son 3851), why it
is inrfiable, in his parlance (the
16 At some point the badger says:
impossibility of its placement in
If reason is to be reinstated on
the divides cause/effect, order/
the throne, it must be completely
chaos, acoustics/physiology/psy-
reinstated (349). If reason can be
chology, its evental character, the
taken under the auspices of the
impossibility of isolating or total-
imposition of one, then the bad-
izing it, etc.). He proposes a nice
gers position may be described as
formula: non-object with prop-
the crack of reason. Could one
erties. It is in regard to its rela-
propose a simple definition: the
tion to object a that I see things
sound is the crack of reason?
differently.
17 If Heidegger took so much to
heart the metaphor (if this one, 19 I have left completely aside the
this is the edge of metaphoricity) consideration of the extreme
of the voice of Being, then voice strategic importance of animality
is something inhabited by (poten- in Kafka. I can only summarily
tial) sense even if it is soundless single out Deleuze and Guattaris
(as is the voice of Being, bringing book on Kafka, Kafka: Pour une
the voice to a pinnacle at its zero littrature mineure, and the lucid
point) and even if it doesnt con- reflections by Eric Santner, On
vey anything (but a pure opening Creaturely Life.
Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005.
. The Meaning of Sarkozy. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Verso, 2008.
Benjamin, Walter. On the Image of Proust. Selected Writings, Volume 2: 19271934. Ed.
Michael Jennings. London: Harvard up, 1999. 23749.
Calasso, Robert. K. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Chion, Michel. Le son. Paris: Nathan, 1998.
. La voix au cinma. Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 1982.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Kafka: Pour une littrature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975.
Dolar, Mladen. Telefon in psihoanaliza. Filozofski vestnik 1 (2008): 724.
. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, m a: mit p, 2006.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vols. 4 and 5. London:
Hogarth, 1957. 1627. 24 vols. 195374.
Kafka, Franz. The Burrow. Complete Stories 32559.
. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum Norbert Glatzer. Trans. Willa and Edwin
Muir. New York: Schocken, 1983.
. Die Erzhlungen: Originalfassung. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1996.
. Metamorphosis. Complete Stories 89139.
. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Revised by E. M. Butler. London:
David Campbell, Everymans, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A. Sheridan.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
. Le sminaire, livre X: Langoisse. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil 2004.
. Le sminaire, livre IX: Lidentification. 21 March 1962. Unpublished ms.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. lcoute. Paris: Galile, 2002.
Proust, Marcel. Swanns Way. In Search of Lost Time. Vol. 1. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York:
Penguin, 2002.
Racine, Jean. Iphignie. Paris: Larousse, 2008.
Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life. Chicago: u of Chicago p, 2006.
. The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. Chicago: u of Chicago p, 2001.
Schaeffer, Pierre. Trait des objets musicaux. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
Waterfield, Robin, ed. and trans. The First Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford up, 2000.
dominic pet tman
Pavlovs Podcast:
The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s
Ears Wide Open
If I had a talking picture of you, And applaud each time you whispered,
I would run it every time I felt blue. I love you; love you.
I would sit there in the gloom of my Sunnyside Up
lonely little room
S
ometimes it is not enough to have a photographic likeness
of ones beloved when obliged to be apart. The comfort of the voice is often
somehow more reassuring than mere visual verisimilitude. Of course, as
the popular song from the 1920s quoted above suggests, a coincidence of
the two can throw the lover into ecstasies. This playful little ditty goes so
far as to imply that the flesh-and-blood presence of the desired person is
somewhat superfluous, provided one has access to the kinds of technolo-
gies of capture that emerged from adolescence into maturity in this self-
same decade.1 But what does it really mean to hear the other breathing,
and not to share the same air? What changes between intimates when
the exchange takes place in a time-shifted manner, rather than in the
here and now?

For a certain influential school of thought, each time we hear

that special someones voicewhether in real time on the phone or cap-
tured via voicemail or other recording deviceswe subconsciously reenact
the fort-da game of Freuds infant. That is to say, we are swaddled in phan-
tasmatic echoes, both traumatized and emboldened by the inexplicable
comings and goings of the mother. Subjectivity, in this allegorical scene,
is forged not only through the initial painful epiphany that ones body and
consciousness are separate from the mother (The milk-giver is in the next
room. And yet I am here!) but also through the first tentative babblings
of speech ( fort-dahere-there). Weaned from the soothing sounds from
the mothers mouththe aural substitute for the umbilical cordthe infant
begins to sever the connection, only to replace it with its own nerve fiber,
tied to a spool of thread, in order to have some mimetic agency over the
presence or absence of the (m)other. 2 In other words, the child decides to
play at having control over the schedule for comfort, nourishment, and
attention. At the same time, the child sublimates the trauma that necessar-
ily stems from the realization that the individual, once separated, does not
have such omnipotent power. Shrieking for attention is no doubt the most
common demand that maternal presence materialize itself immediately,
but such a strategy soon discovers the law of diminishing returns. So in
this famous psychoanalytic scene, the young child is cradled by a thorny
nest of desires, drives, fears, resentments, confusions, sublimations, iden-
tifications, alienations, and perhaps even exhilarating liberationsmany
of which are expressed or experienced between larynx and ear, across
the cusp of language.
No matter whether we actually played a game of fort-da with
a spool of thread or were raised by a father (or even a wolf) rather than
a mother, the geometry of the situation holds true. There is always a psy-
chic realization of, and capitulation to, the reality of banal monadological
existence. The self is not the other, at least not in the sense of regularly
and reliably satisfying the pleasure principle. (This experience of being
thwarted, however, is itself the libidinal motor for much of our repeti-
tive, drive-driven behavior, at least according to Freud.) In any case, the
voice of the otherthe other whose attention we desireremains a highly
charged and intangible object, replete with feathers to tickle our fancy and
barbs to painfully catch in our skin, highly charged depending on how it
is deployed, solicited, experienced, or remembered. As time passes, the
subject gathers quite a playlist of voices capable of triggering intense feel-
ingsemotional, physical, even spiritualbut, unlike Freud, and indeed
142 The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s
unlike Friedrich Kittler (see Ernst), I shall not be content to trace the
originary influence of the mothers voice in terms of sonic forms. Rather, in
the following pages I emphasize the affective architectonics of desire and
longing in the absence of the physical or visual dimension, an inevitable
absence foreshadowed from the crib and rehearsed many times during a
singular lifetime in the typically urban cribs of adulthood.
The noises off of early childhood are the aural streams in
which our pliable sensoriums are nurtured, having been wrenched from
the all-encompassing heartbeat that pulsed through our first nine months
or so. They shepherd us from the prenatal to the parental. Just as the par-
ent is biologically attuned to the babys cry, the infant is sensitive to those
noises emitted from the parents. 3 Indeed, it is this privileged link between
the unclosable ear and the human habitus that sets the love tone (to bor-
row a term from Jakob von Uexkll) for the childs subsequent experiences
(61). That is to say, the mother (or father) can be heard in several extra-
linguistic modes before we get to the induction into language. These are
the cries of the mature human: cries of laughter, cries of sorrow, cries of
pain, and cries of pleasure. Cognitive and social development depends on
being able to distinguish these different types of cries, before the prag-
matic matter of responding appropriately. And it is here we first encounter
the acousmatic voicethe voice with no obvious or visible sourcein
perhaps its purest form, acting on the acoustic nerves of the child (see
Tolstoy 94). The original understanding of the term acousmatic voice
comes from the context of Pythagorean pedagogy, in which the master pro-
vided lessons to his students from behind draped material in order to not
distract from the voice and to lend it a rather divine authority. Anticipating
the conclusions of this essay, Pierre Schaeffer notes, The tape recorder has
the virtue of Pythagoras curtain: if it creates new phenomena to observe,
it creates above all new conditions of observation (81).
Within the Freudian model, the Oedipal complex could be said
to emerge from the dawning awareness that the mothers cries of pleasure
are inspired not by the child but by the father. Nothing could be more trau-
matic, therefore, than the sound of the jouissance of the mother. It creates
a negative excitation, entangled within the rather agonistic ambivalences
of attraction/repulsion of the primal scene. Likewise, the climactic groan
of the father is heard through complicated filters: jealousy, envy, awe, and
the shock of realizing that the logos that underpins patriarchal law can
dissolve into a strange, pathetic glossolalia. 4 As John Lanchester writes,
addressing his fellow male reader, [T]he grunt (or cry, or moan, or roar,
or mew) one utters at the moment of ejaculation exactly mimics, is an

unheard rhyme of, the noise made by ones father at the moment of ones
own conception (9495).
The fact that the child in these scenarios is gendered as male is
not the only limitation of its hermeneutic model, but it is perhaps the most
glaring. 5 The question of gender is crucial if we are to follow the various
trajectories linking the ear to the voice, especially as the latter informs
and influences the libidinal economy of different iterations of subjectivity. 6
Nevertheless, the song that opened this discussion has been performed
over the years by both men and women without needing to change any
pronouns, as one often does in concession to heteronormative conventions.
There is a certain structure at work when it comes to the sonic source of
desire, as well as sonorous solutions to dealing with, or enduring, that very
same desire. And it is this structure, as well as the gendered dynamics that
both produce it and emerge from inside it, that will be addressed below. It
is thus necessary to turn to a different kind of primal scene to account for
that vexed vector between the (male) ear and (female) tongue.
Mythological Voices
The vocal trope through which women have been pigeon-

holed in mythologyin both the ancient sense and the modern muta-
tion so well understood by Roland Barthesis that of the Sirens. These
traditional emblems of seduction, intent on leading vulnerable mortals
astray, symbolize the destructive potential and capacity of the hindered
gender. Mladen Dolar, in his remarkable book A Voice and Nothing More,
describes the Sirens as the depositories of the voice as authority (198),
equating such a state with a certain mercilessness. Furthermore, he
notes that the Siren song emanates from a nonhuman place and executes
an automated, indifferent program. Ulysses may have escaped, but that
cant dismantle the mechanism (173). Ulysses is thus one of those classi-
cal heroic figures who manages to escape the mortal symbolic economy.
The price of the bliss of hearing the Siren song is death, and yet, unlike
Icarus, he manages to avoid paying this price, thanks to what Franz Kafka
calls his stratagems. The supreme aesthetic experience is revealed
as a matter of cheating the system: a system based on, and laced with,
gendered suppositions.
In her book For More Than One Voice, Italian philosopher
Adriana Cavarero sees the Sirens differently, arguing that their complex
depiction in the Homeric source has since been simplified and neutral-
ized in the interests of creating a female stereotype within a didactic
moral universe. For in the original tale, The monstrous singers do not
simply emit from their mouths [stoma] a voice that, like that of the Muse,
has a sound of honey (which is identified with the very voice of Homer).
They sing words, they vocalize stories, they narrate by singing. And they
know what they are talking about. Their knowledge is, in fact, total: we
know all [idmen], they sing (1045). Moreover, the Sirens are rendered as
frightening birdlike hybrids and not at all the languid beauties that cur-
rently circulate within the popular imagination. Within this domesticating
metamorphosis, [I]t is feminine song that is at stake (105).
Cavarero goes on to note that in the storys iconography, [M]ost
Sirens sing, but they no longer narrate. Nor do they know all like their
ancient mothers. They become sinuous, fishlike creaturessomething
that the Homeric monsters never werewho seduce men not only through
their song, but also by their beauty. The charm of the voice, rendered even
more disturbing by the absence of speech, still calls men to a pleasurable
(and often explicitly erotic) death (106). She continues:
And yet the reception of the myth in the western tradition con-
signs this song to the depths. This change of abode is highly
significant. The descent of the Sirens into the water, their meta-
morphosis into fishlike creatures, is in fact accompanied by
their transformation into very beautiful women. This process
corresponds, in a rather significant way, to one of the most
stereotypical models of the female sexnamely, the stereotype
according to which, in her erotic function as seductress, as
an object of masculine desire, the woman appears first of all
as a body and as an inarticulate voice. She must be beauti-
ful, but she must not speak. What she can do, however, is emit
pleasing sounds, asemantic vocalizations, moans of pleasure.
Given that the voice comes from the internal body and comes
out of the mouth to penetrate the ear of the listener, this figura-
tion obviously works because the voice and body reinforce one
another. [...] The division of logos into a purely feminine phone
and a purely masculine semantikon, finally, accomplishes and
confirms the system. (107)
In short, the Sirens have become limited to raising their melodious

voices in a nonsemantic seduction (116). They function today, therefore,
as anachronistic witnesses to the subliminal laws of gendered voices: laws

that result in complex but regulated sociopolitical taxonomies.
Keen to add his own voice to the mix, Kittler, along with a team
of associates from Humboldt University Berlin assisted by members of the
Center for Media Arts and Technology Karlsruhe, recently embarked on
a research expedition at the Galli Islands, off the Amalfi coast in central
Italy, the supposedly original historical scene [of Ulysses and the Sirens]
(Ernst 2). The guiding question of the experiment: Can the acoustic phe-
nomenon of the Siren songs be located media-archaeologically, traced by
measurements (analytic rather than performative) and thus verified? (1).
According to the only report on this fascinating folly that I have managed
to find translated into English, one participant notes:
We emitted both synthetic signals (sine tones, white noise) and

natural voices (vocalizations of Monk seals, voices of two female
singers) via loudspeaker. The signals were then recorded along
a thought line along which Odysseus could approach the Siren
Island. [...] So the acoustic analysis of the recordings revealed
strong evidence for an acoustic effect which could explain the
nature of the Siren song. The specific position of the three islands
yielded in a deformation of the acoustic signal in form of ampli-
fication and changes in the timbre. We can be sure that there is
a trace of the real in the myth of the song of the Sirens, maybe
based on natural voices transformed by specific acoustic condi-
tions of the landscape. However it remains still under question
who was the emitter of the song. (3)
The findings are thus as charming and misguided as the entire enterprise,
stating in the same sentence that we can be sure that maybe the myth
is based on a trace of the real. However, the desire to verify scientifically
the acoustic conditions of Homers story tells us nothing about historical
possibilities and everything about the enduring metaseduction of the Siren
song itself, not to mention the power of publicity stunts, even from within
the academy.
In marked contrast to the Sirens, the swan is traditionally
considered good luck for sailors. Interestingly, the English word swan (or
German Schwan and Dutch zwaan) is derived from the Indo-European
root swen (to sound, to sing), whence Latin derives sonus (sound)this
despite the fact that the common genus is known as Cygnus olor, mean-
ing mute swan. While not truly voiceless, the mute swan embodies the
idea of beauty, holiness, mystery, and strength through silence. Its ability
to float on the water and its tendency to mate for life have resulted in its
symbolizing grace, love, and fidelity. The phrase swan song refers to
the legend that it is utterly silent until the last moment of its life, at which
point it sings one achingly beautiful song just before dying. Studies of
global archetypes tell us that the swan represents the fatal culmination
of desire satisfied: a romantic rendering of sexual climax.
Even closer to our topic is the gender politics inscribed in the
various versions of the Swan Maiden tale, in which a supernatural
woman [is] forced to marry, keep house, and bear children for a mortal man
who holds the key to her imprisonment. When she manages to regain this
key, she escapes to the otherworld, never to return (Leavy 3940). In her
study In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender,
Barbara Leavy argues that this particular figure allegorizes the ambiva-
lence with which patriarchal culture views women, suspecting them as
double agents between the natural and the civilized worlds, liable to switch
from one to the other at the drop of a feather.7 Thus among the sororal
signifiers of the Siren, the swan, and the swan maiden, we see just how
preoccupied certain traditions have been with discursively regulating the
female voice, especially in terms of when it is and is not allowed to break
free (see Jung Changs best-selling memoir, Wild Swans). 8 Bad women
cry out and lead men to their doom. Good women cry out only once, and
only in martyred celebration of fidelity and obedience (the prerequisites
for grace). Women not yet on the threshold of death are to be seen and
not heard. But, returning to our central problematic, what about women
who are heard but not seen?
An Avatar of Sex-Insomnia
Two decades ago Kaja Silverman pointed out, It has some-

how escaped theoretical attention that sexual difference is the effect of
dominant cinemas sound regime as well as its visual regime, and that
the female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and
functions as is the female body (viii). For Silverman, as for Guy Rosolato,
from whom she borrows the phrase, the voice is an acoustic mirror upon
which the various distortions of narcissistic reflection take place. Hol-
lywood has been determined to synchronize the female voice with the
female body, she argues, for fear that it could break free and begin a lib-
erated, more acousmatic existence, thereby challenging the disembodied
male voice-over for enunciative authority. This last can come to be

invested only in a voice which refuses to be subordinated to and judged
by the bodya voice that resists the norm of synchronization (83). Or
as Dolar puts it, The voice is boundless, warrantless, andno coinci-
denceon the side of woman (5051). Silverman is therefore interested
in the migratory potential of the voice, along with the ongoing cultural
attempt to restrain it within established boundaries, and so to prevent its
uncontrolled circulation (83; emphasis added).
There is, however, one glaring exception to the idea that the
female acousmatic voice is difficult to findnamely, recordings of popu-
lar (or operatic) music. 9 If the female voice, serenading and seducing the
ear, has been around as long as wax cylinders, why does Silverman insist
on a challenge or threat to the patriarchal order in this type of acoustic
mirror? The answer begins with our acknowledging the narrow proto-
cols within which women have been permitted to express themselves,
phonologically speaking. As Dolar insists, [S]inging, by focusing on the
voice, actually runs the risk of losing the very thing it tries to worship and
revere: it turns it into a fetish objectwe could say the highest rampart,
the most formidable wall against the voice (30).
Female singers are affective lightning rods and have histori-
cally run the gauntlet of social strictures to remain ladylike even while
representing civilizations darker, more primal half. On one end of the
spectrum we have the turn-of-the-century Swedish superstar Jenny Lind,
who was so angelic that she represented the purity of nature and was
thus dubbed the nightingale.10 On the other end, we have Eva Tanguay.
According to Jody Rosens Vanishing Act: In Search of Eva Tanguay,
the First Rock Star: For roughly two decades, from 1904 until the early
1920s, [Eva Tanguay] was the biggest rock star in the United States [...]
out-earning the likes of Al Jolson, Harry Houdini, and Enrico Caruso.
Tanguays fameor infamy, ratherstemmed from her grotesque vocal
parodies of femininity and her flouting of the same. She would growl and
squawk and warble without shame, delighting and appalling the crowd
in equal measure. It is perhaps fitting that two agents of Satan would thus
be the ones to recognize this particular fallen angel: Edward Bernays
and Aleister Crowley. The former called Tanguay our first symbol of
emergence from the Victorian age (qtd. in Rosen); the latter wrote in 1912:
[She] is like the hashish dream of a hermit who is possessed of the

devil. She cannot sing, as others sing; or dance, as others dance.
She simply keeps on vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords

without rhythm, tone, melody, or purpose. [...] I feel as if I were
poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body goes; I jerk, I writhe,
I twist, I find no ease. [...] She is perpetual irritation without
possibility of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia. Solitude
of the Soul, the Worm that dieth not; ah, me! She is the Vulture
of Prometheus, and she is the Music of Mitylene. [...] I could kill
myself at this moment for the wild love of her. (qtd. in Rosen)
Strong words indeed, which crystallize the stakes involved when the female
voice slips the sonic corset of propriety. In Crowleys description she is not
really singing, but vocalizing possessed. It is a form of speaking in tongues.
She simply keeps on vibrating [. . .] without possibility of satisfaction.
(Of course he is talking of his satisfaction, not hers.) Tanguay obviously
relished her effect on such sensitive listeners, and she had only scorn for
her critics. Indeed, her biggest hit was called I Dont Care. She was a
modern siren, not the classical kind who presumably could stay on key.
In fact, female singers are ambassadors for all three Lacanian
registers, ranging among them, as ifin the liminal space of performance,
at leastthese isolated tuning systems form a continuum, like a piano
keyboard. They are symbolic in the sense that they almost always sing
lyrics that convey linguistic meaning (Meredith Monk or Elizabeth Fraser
notwithstanding).11 They are imaginary in the sense that they embody
what the symbolic cannot completely encode: suggestive gendered alterity.
And they are real, in the animalistic grain of the voice that gives sonorous
body to the abject.12
Cavarero singles out the female singer as a particularly bur-
dened figure within logocentric history and androcentric culture. Woman
is consistently cast as a timeless, universal songbird, befitting her posited
role as emissary of the body. So while she may not be able to speak for
herself, she can sing for her supper, by virtue of the persistent romanti-
cized mythology of her outsider status: half angel, half animal. Hence
women will always be associated with the seductive, carnal, primitive,
feminine voice (4). To put it formulaically, writes Cavarero, woman
sings, man thinks (6). What is more, this symbolic division of labor
obfuscates the profound metaphysical bias against recognizing the voice
as tethered to a unique human being and to the unrepeatable particularity
of a given situation of vocal exchanges. For Cavarero, all concepts based
on the dialogic or communicability, across the board, ignore the most
essential constitutive element: A voice means this: there is a living person,

throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from
all other voices (Calvino, qtd. in Cavarero 1).13 The voice is always the
voice of someone (207). Her book goes to great lengths to remind us that
the intimacy of aural texture precedes the abstract nature of meaning. It
thus represents a salvage operation for sonorous materiality or phonic
substance before and above semantic valence (1). Why exactly? In order
to ultimately rescue the unique individual from its unbroken history of
being metaphysically effaced into formalized and universal systems (such
as speech or language).
Cavarero does not mince words about her Arendtian belief in
unprecedented selves. The uniqueness of the voice is an incontrovertible
given of experience, technologically proven by digital machines that can
trace it; this is not a problem (8). And yet this is a problem, and not only
because such appeals toor lapses intoscientific positivism reverber-
ate with bad faith, especially when embedded into sustained critiques of
abstract reasoning.14 Acoustic or organic signatures certainly exist, but
biology should not be so smoothly translated into the symbolic realm of
culture, which is, after all, Cavareros target. No uniqueness is irreducible,
at least not without venturing into the treacherous waters of essentialism.
The embodied self may be, from a certain angle, unique. However, the sub-
ject, a necessarily crystallized anagram of everyone else, is not. My voice
may be mapped by machines to provide a completely distinctive sound
wave, but this does not register the plurality of my biological inheritance
or the dialectical, inherently mimetic character of my soul.
No doubt Cavarero is aware of the risk involved in her polemi-
cal insistence that the systematic repression of, or deafness to, the unique
embodied voice is threatened by acknowledging it. Uniqueness is not an
unreachable treasure, or an ineffable essence, she writes, or still less, a
sort of secret nucleus of the self; rather, it is a deep vitality of the unique
being who takes pleasure in revealing herself through the emission of
the voice (4). And yet what could be less uniquenot on the level of dna
but on the level of a shared, distributed species-anonymitythan ones
entrails witnessed in endoscopic footage as stains on the streets of a war
zone? Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and their followers share the
impulse to rescue the unique being from such anonymity, and no doubt
there is an ethical pressure, even obligation, to perform such acts of
redemption. But if insisted upon in a certain tone, it is also an impulse to
succumb to the romantic neoliberal mantra of individualism and ignore
the politically liberating secret that emphasizes the shared pulse beyond
identity, rather than the potentially narcissistic logic of reified, stabilized
identification.15 For Cavarero the voice is a discursive fiction; there are
only voices. And indeed, this is an important reminder to the rather tin-
eared history of philosophy. But so long as we are aware that the voice
always pertains to this or that voice, his or her voice, or even its voice, we
are still in the position to make important observations across space and
time. The general is only a problem when it loses sight of the particular.
Indeed, it allows a greater understanding of the particular when used in
the right way, for it builds bridges between people rather than stranding
them on their own monadic islands.
In any case, Cavarero neglects the existence of digital machines
as she insists, When the human voice vibrates, there is someone in flesh
and bone who emits it (4). The voice for her is always embodied, never
acousmatic, as if she were writing in the middle of the nineteenth century,
before human voices migrated into their devices. This amnesia is symp-
tomatic of the humanism driving her project, for while she notes that the
Greek word phone is applied to both human and animal voice, as well as
to any other audible sound (19), she does not follow this suggestive inclu-
sivity into the modern world, in which it is often undecidable whether any
given sound embedded within a popular musical hit was in fact produced
by human, animal, or machine.16 Cavareros desire to illustrate the crucial
vocal aspect of what her translator calls the politics of the scene is all
very well when applied to something like the balcony scene from Romeo
and Juliet, but it does not prepare us for the possibility of Juliet listening
to Romeos playlist on her iPod, oreven more likelyhearing the ding of
her iPhone as his sext message arrives in her inbox. The acousmatic voice
is now everywhere except in the kinds of interlocution that Cavarero finds
so crucial and empowering. Perhaps it is only when the authority of the
human voice is disappearing into an electronic Babel that the stakes of its
power enter into the field of the audible. What we might call the splinter-
ing of solicitation into the commercial, the governmental, the civic, the
familial, and the erotic means that the acousmatic voice is ubiquitous to
the same extent that the individual voice is drowned out in the cacophony.
After all, in Tokyo a Coke machine is as likely to talk to you as a human
being is, a fact that only makes Althussers notion of interpellation more
relevant, albeit more complex.17
So to speak, Cavareros vocalic topography is complicated by
the invention of the gramophone and all the subsequent refinements (and
regressions) of audio recording and engineering, of which Auto-Tune is

the most recent instance. This technology, which evolved from a software
program designed to help locate deep-sea oil deposits, is now used ubiqui-
tously in the studio to ensure that mediocre performances stay precisely
on pitch as well as to digitally distort the voice for a post-human melodic
effect (Tyrangiel). Auto-Tune is a heavy, somewhat intrusive form of
hypermediation.18 Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to argue that there
is any kind of subjective trace of the actual Cheras a signified source of
singularityin her pioneering 1998 hit Do You Believe in Life after Love?
The echography at work in the vocals here is not only a long way from the
indexical, it seems to relish being detached and deployed from the body,
the site of a subjective aura, in Benjamins language. To highlight the
stakes in the terms we have been discussing thus far, it is unlikely that
Chers beloved, whoever that may be, would choose this track over other,
more human recordings in order to restage or simulate phonic presence.
There is simply no there there, in the sense of ontological traction for
the ear-heart-hippocampus-viscera assemblage (see Storrs).
Auto-Tune aurally airbrushes any vestige of singularity out of
the voice of the performer so that the sonic performance becomes, to wax
Agambenian, a whatever-vox: a voice without qualities (or rather, a voice
displaying the homogenized quality shared by all other artists who utilize
the same software). Even the culturally gendered binary of the larynx is
revealed to be a rather ambiguous modulation of the sonorous spectrum:
a woman can sound like a metallic man, while a man can sound like a
fiber-optic woman. Specific identity, the vocal signature, is swallowed
up in this process at an unprecedented speed and in a virtually unprec-
edented fashion.19 As we shall soon see, Dolar emphasizes what he sees as
the always already object status of the voice, even before it is captured
and replayed with modern technology. That is to say, there is something
profoundly impersonal about the voice, something alien, even as it emerges
from the intimate depths of the self. For its part, Auto-Tune amplifies and
caricatures this usually unacknowledged aspect through modulation and
manipulation. It externalizes it and paints it with neon-colored aural pix-
els. The public, popular, digital voice increasingly asserts itself as distinct
from the private, organic voice. 20
Ones mother does not yet sound like millennial Cher, and
one hopes she never will. But the Auto-Tune of the acousmatic voice
complicates the notion of the acoustic mirror, as the voice becomes too
unstable to function as a site for Lacanian identity formation by virtue of
its interchangeability, its electronic equalization. The more generic the

vocalsphere becomes, the more opaque a signifier of (human?) expres-
sion it is. In other words, due to such digital techniques and technologies,
the subject is increasingly vulnerable to being lost in an aural version of
Fredric Jamesons Bonaventure Hotel. The cues for recognizing individu-
ality via the ear become something other than the timbre of the voice: the
melody, the beat, or a catch phrase, for instance. Traditional environmen-
tal cues blend into each other, so navigation of the self in relation to the
other is compromised.
On the one hand, new media tools for making music are becom-
ing more and more sophisticated in terms of sonic options and configura-
tions. On the other, the most popular audio format for listening to music
today, the MP3, notoriously degrades music more than its analog ancestors
did. The acousmatic voice therefore mutates in the digital age in at least
two distinct ways. The first is the umbilical break from the image. Michel
Chions original definition related to cinema, so that the soundtrack was
still framed as it were by the mise-en-scne. The noises off were
precisely that, off, measured in terms of their distance from the screen,
novel in not being matched with glossy celluloid lips. In our era, as the
iPod waxes and the music video wanes, the acousmatic voice comes to the
fore in the very same motion through which it loses its lingering fidelity to
the source. The voice dematerializes to a second degree: even its medium
of capture is no longer graspable. It becomes more ambient, spectral, and
ubiquitous: everyware.21 Subjectivity is sculpted by this disorienting
echo chamber as much as by the visual spectacle. For every identifiable
voice, there are a hundred anonymous solicitations. For every James Earl
Jones, there is an invisible choir of whoevers and wherevers. Whats more,
this is not necessarily a linear progression. As a culture we are constantly
playing with the levels between signal and noise. Early vinyl 78s were all
hiss, scratch, and fizzle; todays MP3s are all glitch, fuzz, and crackle,
whether by design for sonic effect or simply by the compromise of five-
megabyte-file convenience. The perfect warm reproduction so cherished
by audiophiles from the 1960s to the 1980s is today merely a Platonic ideal
or, at best, an expensive type of nostalgia.
To force the issue into a nutshell, there are certain continu-
ities and discontinuities concerning the acousmatic voice this century
when compared with that of the previous one. The continuity is its end-
less repetition, its eternal return, of the fort-da that underwrites the
human unconscious. Since Victorian times, the acousmatic voice has
been simultaneously uncanny, unsettling, banal, and omnipresent. The

discontinuities, however, appear in terms of its portability, its mutability,
its absolute liberation from the image, and its saturating ubiquity. Dema-
terialization encourages dehumanization and rehumanization. The Sony
Walkman, in the 1980s, inaugurated the paradigm-changing moment when
people could provide an internal soundtrack to their mobile lives. With
the almost magical compression allowed by mp3 technology, we can now
carry tens of thousands of voices in our pockets at any given moment. The
average twenty-something-year-old person of means listens to a greater
variety of voices in a day than the average person listened to in a lifetime
a few generations ago. We need not be media scholars like Marshall McLu-
han to understand that this entails a nuanced combination of sensory
extension and amputation.
All of the above notwithstanding, twentieth-century technolo-
gies make two or three cameo appearances in Cavareros book, such as
when she asks the reader to [c]onsider the rather banal, everyday occur-
rence of the telephone or intercom, where one asks me who is it?and
I respond without hesitation its me, or it is I. The depersonalized
function of the pronouns I or mehighlighted here by the fact that the
speaker does not show her facegets immediately annulled by the unmis-
takable uniqueness of the voice (175). And elsewhere, The intercom and
the telephonewhere communication invites the other to make his whole
body converge in the voice and which lets me gather everything in my
earannul this distance, but they do not negate the material relational-
ity of the vocalic (208). Relying exclusively on such examples, Cavarero
fails to consider the voice apart from real-time exchanges. She assumes
technology to be about bridging distance only; she altogether ignores
technologies that shift time, like the tape recorder. Even when she refers
to electrified music, the scenario painted is of a live concert and not a
recording of the event:
For there is a subversive potential in the voice, which is redou-

bled when the voice itself vibrates with the universe of sounds
instead of merely clothing the concept in acoustic vesting. Of
course, Plato could not even imagine the impact of jazz, r &b ,
rock and roll, and similar rhythms on the western ear. He could
not imagine how, in modern times, the unsettling effects of the
melodramatic theater could be passed on to an audience at a
rock concert, where the ritual of a loss of self-control, collective
delirium, tears, fainting, fanaticisms of all sorts is once again

renewed. (60)
One wonders, then, about the relevance or applicability of an analysis of

communication that effectively ignores the ubiquitous existence of com-
munication technologies. 22 There is a willful nostalgia at work common to
a certain stripe of Continental philosophy; it is not so much a provocative
untimeliness but a straightforward anachronism. Which is not to say that
Cavareros exploration of the eroticized apparatus of phonation (138)
is entirely without merit but that such an exploration must acknowledge
actual existing technics that shape and inform the libidinal register (131)
of vocalic pleasure (199).
To be clear, the theoretical value in Barthess notion of the
grain of the voice is lost when Cavarero ties this phenomenon to the
unmediated human. Missy Elliot and Karin Dreijer Andersson can be just
as affecting and relevant as Aretha Franklin, Chan Marshall, Rokia Traor,
or the Bulgarian State Television Female Choir. 23 It is therefore necessary
to argue for a position somewhere between Cavarero, who fetishizes the
singular human element to an almost infinite degree, and Dolar, who dis-
misses it as inadmissible. This middle way, as we shall soon see, is indeed
proposed, or at the very least obliquely suggested, by Barthes.
One thing is certain: there is an externalized essence of expres-
sion called the voice, which has realized the expedience of attaching
itself to the vector of music. But which came first?24 Is the voice a parasite,
or is music?25 However we decide to approach such questions, it must be
acknowledged that mobile telephones and MP3 players can potentially cre-
ate connections and encountersevents, evenon the plane of intersub-
jectivity, even if one of those subjects is no longer alive. As our existence
is increasingly experienced within digitized networks, the challenge is
not only to rescue the grain of the voice but also to be attuned to the voice
of the grain, to listen attentively to the environment, an environment that
includes both paradises and parking lots.
The Aural Punctum
At the beginning of this discussion we referred to a generic

mother figure. But what happens when we look at a very specific mother?
Barthess mother figures prominently in his meditations on technologies of
capture. What if we superimpose her key role as witness to, or embodiment
of, the punctum, on her sons notion of the grain of the voice?26 What
dialectic of meaning and materiality emerges from the interplay between
them (Dunn 53)? Might they supplement each other in a way that does
justice to the shadings of mortality, melancholy, and (prerecorded) indi-
visible remainders? Barthes defines the grain as the materiality of the
body speaking its mother tongue (Grain 182). Dolar is not sympathetic
to this concept or to the way it is anchored in the organic. He states that
this formula simply will never do, since the uncanny alterity of the object
voice is the real issue. The problem is that the voice cannot be pinned to a
body, or be seen as an emanation of the body, without a paradox (197). And
yet paradoxes exist, and should be respected, if not absolutely accounted
for. For while appeals to the individual are almost always dubious, there
are times when it is appropriate to salvage the identity of the mother, of
this mothernot to throw her out with the bathwater, as it were.
The enigma of the voice stems from the inscrutable way in
which it exists in the singular plural, to gesture to Jean-Luc Nancy. 27
Indeed, Dolar himself notes that the voice is like a fingerprint, instantly
recognizable and identifiable (22). And yet it is not necessarily proper
to the person from whom it resounds. Perhaps Dolars most provocative
insight is that [t]he voice is the element which ties the subject and the
Other together, without belonging to either (103). But that does not mean
we need block our ears to the singular aspect of this pluralized phenom-
enon (while at the same time resisting the relatively narrow ontological
focus of Cavarero). The recognizable vocal shadow of the beloved Other,
whether in person or recorded, is an event or intensity on the intersub-
jective level, and something vital is lost when we diagram this into the
bracing, crystalline string theory of the Lacanian universe and leave it
at that. Thus Barthess notion of the punctumusually reserved for the
visual spheremay be applied and adapted to the acoustic realm, in order
to hear or understand better what is at stake on the surface of our
eardrums 28specifically, the impossible science of the unique being
(Camera 71).
Variously described as marks, wounds, so many points, a
sting, speck, cut, little hole, a cast of the dice, as well as that accident
which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me) (27), Barthes
classifies the punctum within the order of the loving. It emerges from an
unexpected detail that catches the eye in an unexpected mode of address,
shifting the impersonal gaze to something altogether more affecting and
intimate. His examples include two nuns walking behind some Nicaraguan
soldiers with bad teeth and dirty fingernails, and the way a kilted groom
holds the bridle of Queen Victorias horse. Barthes goes on to describe this
interruption of smooth perception as a form of infra-knowledge (30), as
well as a partial object that elicits great sympathy [...] almost a kind of
tenderness (43). Such an interesting detail is not, or at least not strictly,
intentional, and probably must not be so [...] like a supplement that is at
once inevitable and delightful (47). The visual punctum pricks the viewer
through the eyes, whereas the aural equivalent is a kind of prick up the
ears (to gesture to the innuendo often only half-buried in the phrase). It
can be anything from the way a voice cracks unintentionally, 29 to an idio-
syncratic accent, to a type of unself-conscious emphasis, which betrays
the audible unconscious of the individual qua the collective (to poach
and twist yet another canonical concept).
The punctumwhether via the eye or the earis thus very dif-
ficult, if not impossible, to pin down. What I can name cannot really prick
me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance (51). So
while a familiar voice can soothe on one level, it can disturb on another,
especially when the body we associate it with is no longer visible or pres-
ent. The grain of the voice for Barthes is located in the materiality of
the body, yet this should not preclude its being captured within analog or
digital traces. (What is remarkable about the latter is how the grain or
punctum can survive even the slicing and dicing into variable bit rates, at
least to a certain point, so that one need not revert to lossless formats to
carry the contingent singularity of the other in ones pocket.)
In A Lovers Discourse, Barthes states:
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is

as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my
words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives
from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of
discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified,
which is I desire you, and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the
point of explosion [...]; on the other hand, I enwrap the other in
my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend
myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation
endure. (73)
This lover is coy, however, about whether his language is written or spo-
ken. Either way, the voice pulses through Barthess thoughts addressed
to the other, tracing his or her outline, spoken on paper or held under the
tongue. To talk up this contact is to participate in the intense feedback

loop of mutual (mis)recognition that forever catches in the throat (since
there is never any last word or guarantee in such matters, especially in
the age of a mute God). 30
But what happens to the punctum when it is translated from
the visual register to the sonic? What is retained and what is jettisoned?
Moreover, how is Barthess key conceptseemingly the very essence of
particularitycapable of avoiding the polarized extremism of both Cava-
rero and Dolar? No question, Barthes initially seems closer to Cavareros
perspective or sensibility, and both could be accused of warming certain
romantic, neohumanist chestnuts. Yet Barthes acknowledges that the
science of the unique being is impossible, something Cavarero would
never do. And yet it is still worth pursuing, if only with pataphysical tools.
Barthess oeuvre, taken holistically, dwells in that fascinating no-mans-
land where structuralism blends into poststructuralismthat is to say,
where the metasystemic acknowledges the anomalous, the idiosyncratic,
the unaccountably catalytic. His sentimental confessions, or even indul-
gences, are particularly poignant because he understandssometimes
explicitly, other times only implicitlytheir impersonal significance. At
least to my mind, he therefore earns the right to forge his own license to
drive through the stereoscopic valley of the Both/And. And he, like many
of his location and generation, does so by suggesting that, yes, this cap-
tured moment is equally significant and insignificant, equally moving and
insipid. One needs the studium for the punctum to signal its special mes-
sageless message (and the only difference between Barthes and someone
like Niklas Luhmann is that the latter would place no particular value on
the dynamic, while acknowledging that this is the mechanism by which
value is created for those within the code).
By borrowing and repurposing the punctum for the aural sphere,
I loosen the grip of the Oedipal, melancholy subject who first proposed it,
and use it to counterbalance two temptations: the first to focus on singular-
ity at the expense of plurality (Cavarero), the second to render the affect
of the subject as inadmissible or irrelevant (Dolar). The very fact that the
aural punctum is indeed aural dissolves the possibility of fetishizing par-
ticularity, or at least renders it more ambiguous. For a scopophilic culture,
in which seeing is believing, being unexpectedly pierced by sound does
not leave the same kind of wound or trace as seeing an image. It cannot
be verified or fixed, as Walter Ong notes; a sound leaves the same moment
it arrives. One cannot point to an image and say, Herelookthats what
really gets me! One can only do that awkward staccato anticipation in
which we say to the other person in the room, Its coming up ... here ...
no wait ... sorry ... after the chorus ... wait ... wait ... here! There is
a different temporality involved, one that changes the stakes, especially
in terms of how one is supposed to respondaesthetically and ethically.
The aural punctum invites us to listen on two registers at once, those so
well articulated by Cavarero and Dolar. It conveys the improper within the
proper, the plural within the singular, the contingent within the essential,
the alien within the humanand vice versa.
The challenge of Auto-Tune, for instance, is that it is sandpaper
for the aural punctum. It eschews the timberlike timbre of the grain of the
voice, replacing it with a reflective pastel-tinted chrome vector. This is
what is so seductive about it, and also so vexing for those who seek onto-
logical tractionthat is, those who are accustomed to the audible textures
of an other. As my use of quotation marks suggests, however, a lot of work
is being done by that preposition. Does ones voice belong to oneself at all,
and if so, in what sense? This is the crux of the debate between the Italian
feminist philosopher and the Slovenian Lacanian theorist.
As Dolar observes:
[V]oice is not a primary given which would then be squeezed into

the mold of the signifier, it is the product of the signifier itself,
its own other, its own echo, the resonance of its intervention. If
voice implies reflexivity, insofar as its resonance returns from
the Other, then it is a reflexivity without a selfnot a bad name
for the subject. For it is the same subject which sends his or her
message and gets the voice bounced backrather, the subject is
what emerges in this loop, the result of this course. (161)
But this need not oblige us to cast the other as Echo to our Narcissus,
or vice versa. For while it may be true that the acousmatic voice is a
redundant phrase, it bears witness to a certain, vital mode of sharing. It
sings an antiphonal allegory of the mutual understanding ofor at least
struggle withthe fact that presence eludes us and that we slip through
each others fingers just as we elude our own selves.
A Dying Echo: Toward a Conclusion
Nothing more lacerating than a voice at that almost nothing of the loved and
once beloved and exhausted: a broken, distant voice, becomes in me a sort of
rarefied, bloodless voice, one might monstrous cork, as if a surgeon were
say, a voice from the end of the world, thrusting a huge plug of wadding into
which will be swallowed up far away my head.
by cold depths: such a voice is about to Barthes
vanish, as the exhausted being is about
to die: fatigue is infinity: what never You are lissssstening to Los Angeles.
manages to end. That brief, momentary Soul Coughing
voice, almost ungracious in its rarity,
My intention has not been to romanticize a hauntology of human

traces within the smooth magnetic surfaces of our new media (or at least,
not only that). We can hear the aural punctum or the grain of the voice
in the impatient meowing of our cat, in the recorded call of a humpback
whale, or even in the imploring squeal of a garden gate crying out for oil.
The issue is a question of response, in real timeor the solicitation of a
response, in time-shifted contexts. A recorded track, synthesized or not,
is notable to the extent that it asks an/other to listen, rather than merely
purchase and hear. 31 It initiates, or at least partakes in, the discordant
chorus of voices increasingly outsourced to the wider technological envi-
ronment. The essential aspect is the yet to be coded potential coiled within
the response mechanism itself, whether made of human cartilage, catgut,
or nylon.
Indeed, we miss something (perhaps most things) when we
assume that the voice is a human one. There is an anthropocentrism
at work in this concept, assuming that what counts as a voice must be
attached to human biology (as Keats could surely attest). One need only
listen to Eddie Hazels guitar solo in Funkadelics Maggot Brain to real-
ize that the sound of the secular soul need no longer be tethered to the
tongue and the breath but has other avenues of expression. The voice is
far ahead of the face, write Deleuze and Guattari, very far ahead (333).
The challenge is thus to recalibrate our relationship with our own ears,
to listen to something as it is disappearing (since everything is disappear-
ing), as it is becoming an object of loss, like the omnimaternal, amniotic
envelope we have escaped or been exiled from. 32
Listening to Mother Earth or nature or the city, in Schaeffers
sense of the acousmatic, is a way of attuning ourselves to a more radical
alterity than the gender distinction within our own species. 33 This is not
to advocate recovering the organic in a romantic salvage operation. The
lyre birdmimicking perfectly the sound of chainsaws, camera shutters,

or car alarmsneed not be quite as depressing as it initially seems, for this
creature bespeaks a kind of mimesis perched on the edge of an uncanny
and unexpected sharing of refrains. Such sounds offer an acousmatic
mirror in which it is possible to see a very different reflection than we
are used to, one that should disturb us beyond automatic hand-wringing
about human impact on the surroundings. Were we capable of reciprocat-
ing, then the whole notion of environment could be reconceived for the
benefit of all terrestrial creatures. (But this is a whole other topic, to be
explored elsewhere.)
Such closing remarks ratifying the object status of the voice
may sound closer to Dolar than to Cavarero. Certainly a global increase
of technoacousmatic voices in everyday spaces encourages this view. But
it is still the subject that scans the existential radio dial for a recognizable
signal to which he, she, or it can respond. Cavareros error was to insist that
this subject is exclusively human. This is not so much psychology as a blend
of affect, physiology, and physics: resonance theory. Whether it is a mother
listening to her daughters voice on the telephone, a dog listening to his
masters voice on a gramophone, a lamp listening for the clap of a hand, or
a microphone listening for specific patterns determined by an algorithm,
there is a subjectively inflected object paying heed to its environment.
This listening thing is Mbius-minded. And to emphasize its subjective or
objective nature is to play the duck-rabbit game for rhetorically strategic
reasons. Whereas Martin Heidegger would tell us that an animal is poor in
hearing, Uexkll would insist that each mode of attunement to the world
creates its own Umwelt (environment), which is largely incommensu-
rable with any other Umwelt. The aural punctum, I would argue, has the
potential to pop or connect these ontological bubbles. Human eardrums
of the twenty-first century have become both stimulated and benumbed
by the digital acousmatic voice, which has confused distinctions not only
of gender but of species as well. Pavlovs dogs were trained to respond to
the sound of a bell whether food was served or not. Steve Jobss pod-people
have been trained to respond to the sound of the ironically named Lady
Gagatodays more cynical incarnation of Eva Tanguay. The question of
nourishment is an ongoing one.
Suffice to say in closing that in all these years, parrots may not
have been merely parroting but prompting and provoking. And I hope we
willsooner rather than laterconceptualize and conjure technologies
that are harbingers not of the soundscape of colonization, deracination,
and displacement but of a planetary cohabitation, hospitality, and solidar-

ity. Perhaps (and admittedly it is a very big perhaps) we will finally hear
Echo without casting ourselves in the self-blinding role of Narcissus.
For Lhasa de Sela, 19722010.
I would like to thank Rey Chow and James Steintrager for their rigorous, helpful, and insight-
ful feedback. Any lingering incoherence, contradiction, or underdevelopment in this piece
remains as a stubborn, unintentional rebuke to their best editorial efforts.
dominic pet tman is Chair of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College, as well as Associate
Professor of Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research. He has held previous positions
at the University of Melbourne, the University of Geneva, and the University of Amsterdam.
He is the coauthor of Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture, and the Object (Amsterdam
University Press, 2004) and the author of After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion
(State University of New York Press, 2002), Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros
for the Information Age (Fordham University Press, 2006), Human Error: Species-Being and
Media Machines (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and The Technopoetics of Capture
(Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
Notes 1 Despite the convenience of bio- innate pieces of mechanism (134).

graphical metaphors for any While admitting some reserva-
given mediumthat it develops tions concerning Freuds assump-
from embryo to child to adultwe tions about the childs psychic
should of course be wary of the technology, Dolar agrees that a
fixed teleology these assume. See fantasy is a confabulation built
Rudolf Arnheims book Film as around the sonorous kernel (136).
Art, for instance, as an influential
example of the argument that 4 Silverman is, rightly, careful to
the introduction of sound to cin- stress the retrospective aspect of
ema was in fact an aesthetic step these phantasmatic scenes (75
backward. 76). See also Lawrence.
2 Silverman reminds us that Michel 5 An interesting, if sordid, twist on

Chion gives a much more sin- this familiar theme is found in
ister inflection of the mothers Joseph Catess exploitation movie,
voice, which not only envelops Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), in
but entraps the newborn infant which a ten-year-old girl is obliged
in the terror of a uterine night to overhear her detective fathers
or umbilical net (7275). obsessional thoughts on perverse
predators as he speaks them every
3 Dolar quotes Freuds discussion of evening into a Dictaphone. Here,
the sounds which betray parental the absent (murdered) mother is
intercourse (133), in which the replaced by the machine that will
father of psychoanalysis notes, hopefully one day facilitate the
Children, in such circumstances, revenge of her death. In the mean-
divine something sexual in the time, the poor girls soul, via her
uncanny sounds that reach their ears, is constantly assaulted by
ears. Indeed, the movements homeopathically traumatic words,
expressive of sexual excitement smuggled within the grain of the
lie within them ready to hand, as fathers voice.
6 As Cavarero observes, The libidi- There is a too-much of the voice

nal economy [...] makes language [...]. One is too exposed to the
into music and thus has an ear voice and the voice exposes too
cocked to the rhythmic enchant- much (81). Which is to concede
ment of the first voice. The first that [t]he voice is the excess of
song announces, in the song the signifier (81).
itself, the sonorous relation that
inimitably forms its soundtrack 13 Cavarero uses this quotation from
(145). Italo Calvinos short story A King
Listens as the epigraph for her
7 See also Sax. book.
8 See Engh. Lest we forget, the 14 The fact that Cavarero neglects to
Sirens were also obliged to for- cite such digital proof of organic
sake their dangerous voices in uniqueness does not help clarify
order to marry among mortal the issue.
men. One wonders, as with
Bewitched and I Dream of Jean- 15 Cavarero attempts to counter the
nie, what on earth would motivate fetish of the individual preemp-
them to surrender such powers. tively by also emphasizing the
relationality of local, quotid-
9 Strangely, Silverman does not ian encounters and situations.
mention female recording artists She thus refers to the chains of
as an unsynchronized sonic phe- individuality (131) in addition
nomenon. Another major excep- to uniqueness as an under-
tion to Silvermans rule is female standing [...] and a reciprocal
announcers and voice-overs in dependence (182). But this bal-
radio and television, suggesting ancing act is decidedly unbal-
that the gender politics she finds anced in one direction, and such
at issue in the acoustic mirror is a caveat is drowned out by her
specific to cinema. I have broad- own demonstrative approach.
ened the scope significantly, Deleuzes notion of the dividual,
given the prevalence of interme- Nancys being singular plural,
diality and digital convergence Agambens whateverbeing,
today, as well as acknowledging Luhmanns systems theory,
Silvermans own concern with Lacans formalizations of alleg-
migration and circulation. edly unique beings, as well as
Bersanis call for impersonal
10 Were they around today, one won- intimacy all, in their different
ders what Jenny Lind, or indeed ways, provide persuasive chal-
Keats, would make of Hatebeak, lengeseven deterrentsfor
a death-metal band fronted by a any philosophy that has such
Congolese African Grey Parrot. emphatic recourse to the singu-
lar as its primary building block.
11 See, or rather hear, Luciano That is to say, zooming down to
Berios pioneering work for the the level of the unique being is no
female voice, Sequenza III (1966). threat to the status quo. Indeed, it
is the modus operandi of Googles
12 Dolar would take issue with this
advertising revenue and Chinas
last point, since he believes that
regime of political punishment
it is only through language, via
alike.
language, by the symbolic, that
there is voice, and music exists 16 At one point Cavarero goes so far
only for the speaking being (31). as to claim boldly, Because it
Nevertheless, he is wont to admit: belongs to the world of humans,
the voice is for the ear (178). golden radio voice. The stag-
Such anthropocentric presump- gering popularity of the original
tion is surprising, to say the YouTube clip of Mr. Williams
least, from someone intent on parroting a smooth dj, while beg-
deconstructing the metaphysi- ging for money on the street, can
cal edifice engineered largely by in large part be attributed to the
Aristotle (including his distinc- stimulating cognitive dissonance
tion between human speech and created by the polished, public
animal voice). In other words, voice emanating from a body
Cavareros project would be bet- codified as anything but.
ter served if she listened less
to Arendt and more to the later 21 I borrow this term from Adam
Derrida (the one whose trace Greenfield.
became less and less recognizably
22 Describing the flute as an acous-
human), rather than the earlier
tic prosthesis of the mouth
one, to whom she dedicates a long
(Cavarero 72) does not go nearly
appendix.
far enough.
17 One fascinating mutation of the
23 Andersson, lead singer of The
acousmatic voice is the text-
Knife and of Fever Ray, is an
to-speech technologies made
interesting figure in the geneal-
famous by Stephen Hawking.
ogy linking Eva Tanguay with
More recently, the film critic
other punkish or elfin singers
Roger Ebert had his own voice
like Lene Lovich, Souxie Soux,
restored after it was robbed
Kate Bush, Cindy Lauper, Bjrk,
by cancer. On this occasion the
Joanna Newsom, and so on. By
possessive makes a certain kind
using postproduction to distort
of miraculous sense, as his own
her voice downward into a rather
recorded words were painstak-
spooky androgyny, she reminds
ingly assembled and fed into the
us that gender should not be teth-
program in order to create an
ered too tightly to biology and that
extensive vocabulary database
the voice is part of the performa-
in his voice. Sadly, this is not an
tive ensemble underscored by
option for most people with a sim-
Judith Butler. Indeed, transgender
ilar affliction, since most people
Antony Hegarty of Antony and the
have not spent their adult lives on
Johnsons does the same with only
camera or behind a microphone.
a microphone, carrying the torch
18 In 2009, hip-hop artist Jay-Z lit by Nina Simone and troubling
expressed his impatience with the the patrolled binarism that pro-
overutilization of this technol- duces certain types of desire
ogy in his single d.o.a. (Death of while precluding others.
Auto-Tune).
24 For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
19 One precursor, which remained coevolution of music and speech
stranded in the realm of nov- was most easily observed in
elty, would be the vocoder, made arid regions, where water could
famous in Peter Framptons epic only be had from wells [...] [and
1970s song Do You Feel Like We where] the first meetings between
Do? the sexes took place (qtd. in Head
6). The fable he develops from
20 As I write, the mainstream media this (rather ahistorical) primal
are obsessed with the (possibly) scene rests on the assumption
rags-to-riches tale of Ted Wil- of the libidinal genesis of vocal
liams, a homeless man with a expression.
25 On a different occasion, the ques- by sound and meaning: A self

tion could be posed specifically is nothing other than a form or
to Michel Serres, who argues that function of referral between
the parasite is the most silent of these two modes (8); perhaps no
beings, and that is the paradox, subject at all, except as the place
since parasite also means noise of resonance, of its infinite ten-
(237), at least in French. Serress sion and rebound (22). And as
idiosyncratic and influential such, the subject of listening is
extension of the concept relies on always still yet to come (21).
a quasi-cybernetic understanding
of the parasite as an asymmetri- 28 Malcolm Gladwell tells us that
cal, linear, enabling (even trick- when Alexander Graham Bell
sterish) ur-relation; it is anala- traveled to Brantford in 1874,
gous to the first term in the noise/ he brought with him an actual
signal dynamic so dear to recent human ear, taken from a cadaver
systems theory. and preserved, to which he
attached a pen, so that he could
26 Cavarero takes Barthes to task for record the vibration of the ears
not escaping logocentrism, stating bones when he spoke into it (51).
that he does not write of a body
whose singularity is foregrounded, 29 See my piece After the Beep:
nor of a voice whose uniqueness is Answering Machines and Crea-
given any importance. Rather, the turely Life for an emotive
grain refers to a body of the voice example.
and should be understood as the
30 In relation to a different God, one
way in which the voice lies in the
wonders what difference, if any,
bodyor in which the body lies
was registered on the ear of the
in the voice. But here both body
supreme Islamic deity during the
and voice are still presented as
adhan, or call to prayer, when
general categories (15). Moreover,
the muezzin began electrically
in Barthes writing, the voice and
amplifying his song a few decades
the body are categories of a deper-
ago.
sonalized pleasure in which the
embodied uniqueness of each exis- 31 Nancy asks, What secret is at
tent (something that Barthes never stake when one truly listens, that
thematizes) is simply dissolved is, when one tries to capture or
along with the general categories surprise the sonority rather than
of the subject and the individual the message? (5).
(14). In contrast, I would argue that
Barthes demonstrates stereoscopic 32 For a remarkable tale of this
or stereophonic skill in being able literal recalibration, see Michael
to account for the unique being Chorosts Rebuilt: How Becom-
via (and by virtue of) that beings ing Part Computer Made Me
essential and a priori being-with, More Human, which describes
ethically and aesthetically speak- the experience of undergoing a
ing. In other words, the punctum cochlear implant and the sub-
cannot be fully understood outside sequent realization that hear-
the grain of the voice, and vice ingor indeed any sense percep-
versa. Each corrects the ontologi- tionis always already heavily
cal emphasisor excessof the mediated.
other.
33 Schaeffer borrows the word
27 Nancy locates the emergence of acousmatic in order to attach it
the subject within the liminal to a new type of relationship to
space held open between and
the ear, whereby we listen to itself (78). Here we could also

the sonorous forms, without any cite the Futurist Luigi Russolo,
aim other than that of hearing who stated in 1913 that our ear
them better, in order to be able to is not satisfied and calls for ever
describe them through an analy- greater acoustical emotions
sis of the content of our percep- (11)especially those created by
tions (78). In short, acousmatic new machines. And so [l]et us
listening brings the sonorous cross a large modern capital with
object to the fore as a percep- our ears more sensitive than our
tion worthy of being observed for eyes (12).
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john mowit t
Like a Whisper
I have given a name to my pain and call

it dog.
Nietzsche
T
he sonic boom rattling frames of intelligibility at the bor-
der between the humanities and the social sciences is as blatant as it is
undertheorized. It seems many scholars are making noise about sound but
often in ways that feel resolutely empirical. Sound is the new structure,
the new substantive of a future post. It has emerged as a new object of
academic attention, but in ways that have made it difficult, if not impos-
sible, to think about why those of us monitoring this border had not heard
it before. Doubtless there are reasons for thisfor example, the triumph of
cultural studies and the end of theorybut it is time we ignore them.
In what follows, ignoring such reasons will take the form of a
reflection on whispering. Why whispering? Most fundamentally, whisper-
ing recommends itself in this context because it is a sound (both sonic
and sane) problem. As I propose, whispering is a problem not only for lin-
guisticswhere one might expect it to be graspedbut for philosophy and
politics as well. As a problem it calls to us, not so much for a solution but to
answer to its problematic statusthat is, to render in theoretical terms the
source or condition of its problematization (to invoke a Foucaultianism).

To make headway here will require, as my title suggests, that

we approach the whisper from the side (it being often an aside). To in
effect not start by trying to say what the whisper is (perhaps problem is
the only name it can bear) but to track what whispering seems to be doing
in some of the insistent discursive practices active in and around us. To
think patiently about what such practices show it is like to whisper in the
global North. As this geopolitical specification makes clear, this reflection
is far from the whole story, even about those narrative practices it purports
to address. Nevertheless, because it leads to dimensions of the problem
that is whisperingthe unvoiced in vocalization, the absence of work
in the labor of the concept, not to mention the traumatic entanglement of
the animal and the humanit touches on matters that have global reach,
if only in ways as yet unrecognizable from here. Reading under such cir-
cumstancesneither closely, nor distantly, but carefullyis where theory
comes and goes. This, we ought not ignore.
Doubtless because in Ferdinand de Saussures characterization
of the object of linguisticsthe double articulation of the signhe insists
that it is unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic sign (7), he
says little about vocalization of any sort. Indeed, the struggle to specify
this object virtually consumes the Course and nowhere more openly than
when Saussure addresses the question of the relation between linguistics
and semiology. It is, then, not altogether surprising that when the Brit-
ish linguist John Laver takes up the matter of the whispery voice, he
does so by insisting upon the need to supplement the linguistic account of
speech with a semiological one that expressly engages what he calls the
paralinguistic (171) dimensions of speech activity. While Laver does not
declare himself on the matter of epistemic subordination, his appeal to the
Peircean concept of the index as a way to grasp how signs referring to the
speaker appear in his or her speech represents a challenge to Saussurean
phonocentric orthodoxy. In fact, one of Lavers important insights is that
the whisper is an unvoiced vocalization, in effect a part of the voice that
is not the voice and thus not used phonemically in any known language.
The whisper is in that sense a signifier that while capable of bearing a
signified, fails to do so. This complicates the whispers very indexicality.
As Laver writes in Language and Non-verbal Communication:
Consider the case of a participant in a conversation speaking in

a whispery voice. The listener has to decide whether the speaker
is using whispery voice as a paralinguistic feature, signaling
170 Like a Whisper
secretive confidentiality, or whether whispery voice is part of

the speakers voice quality (either habitually or because of tem-
porary laryngitis). Listeners often draw the wrong conclusion,
and sufferers from laryngitis have often had the experience of
people whispering back at them, mistaking the physical medi-
cal side of laryngitis for a psychological, attitudinal index of
conspiracy. (143)
In other words, precisely because the whisper lacks even a reliable indexi-
cal signified, it frustrates interpretation and complicates speech activity
from within.
Laver, having repeated the well-known Saussurean distinction
between physiology and psychology, turns much of his analytical energy to
describing carefully the physiology of whispering. This is a sensible strat-
egy, but his doggedness only underscores the malingering confrontation
with psychology, drawing attention to what strikes me as the fundamental
issue, namely, how precisely is one to grasp the meaning of whispering as
the nonvocal part of the voice or, in disciplinary terms, the nonlinguistic
part of linguistics, or even the nonsemiological part of semiology? For just
this reason whispering leads, without delay, to a disciplinary reflection
on the limits of knowledge in its encounter with sound.
To flesh out the general problem of the disciplinary frame,
consider the status of the murmur (le murmur) in Michel Foucaults The
History of Madness. I cite from the 1961 preface at length.
History is only possible against the backdrop of the absence

of history, in the midst of a great space of murmurings, that
silence watches like its vocation and its truth: I will call desert
this castle that you were, night this voice, absence your face.
[...] The plenitude of history is only possible in the space, both
empty and peopled at the same time, of all the words without
language that appear to anyone who lends an ear, as a dull
sound from beneath history, the obstinate murmur of a language
talking to itselfwithout any speaking subject and without an
interlocutor, wrapped up in itself, with a lump in its throat, col-
lapsing before it ever reaches any formulation and returning
without a fuss to the silence it never shook off. The charred root
of meaning. (xxxixxxii)
The absence of history invoked here is an allusion to Maurice Blanchots

absence of an oeuvre, and it designates Foucaults argument that both
history and historiography, grounded in the principle of reason as they are,
are actually founded on the exclusion of madness. Put differently, history
has as its condition of possibility an absence produced by its unfolding,
which means that Foucaults text is as much about madness as about the
tremulous politico-epistemological boundary that reduces its unintelli-
gibility to a murmur. In short, History poses as a critique of the history of
philosophy from the standpoint of what it can neither think nor work out.
It is telling that Foucaultwho frames his discussion around
language, speech, words, and so onappeals repeatedly to the motif of
murmuring to designate where philosophy cannot think. This prompts
us to recognize that murmur is here deployed in a self-consciously dis-
ciplinary way, presumably so as to get at what is unreason in reason, the
unthought. Significantly, Foucault does not appeal here to the unconscious,
a gesture indicating that his focus is not on the ontology of the psychical
apparatus but on the historical ontology of knowledge. Although one could
argue that some such distinction lay at the core of the heated exchange
with Jacques Derrida, more immediately pertinent is the theoretical status
of the murmur, particularly as it exemplifies the disciplinary provocation
of whispering.
Laver is not alone in differentiating murmuring and whisper-
ing (the former is voiced, whereas the latter is not), but compared to
what is at stake in Foucaults analysis, this seems like a quibble whose
explanatory power falls flat when faced with a methodological formula-
tion like the following, also from Foucaults 1961 preface: This [adopting
a structural study] will allow the lightening flash decision [ for reason,
against madness] to appear once more, heterogeneous with the time of
history, but ungraspable outside it, which separates the murmur of dark
insects from the language of reason and the promises of time (xxxiii).
The murmur of dark insects? Contextually, this formulation appears to
reiterate the reason/unreason distinction, but in a way that associates the
mad and dark insects, a gesture one would not expect from someone oth-
erwise concerned to destigmatize those deemed mad. Although the more
interesting and pressing matter is the way Foucault uses the distinction
between language and murmuring to reiterate that between reason and
unreason, the figure of the insect swells.
At a minimum, this reminds us that French prompts one to
distinguish murmuring (murmurer) from whispering (chuchoter) and
172 Like a Whisper
to do so along the human/nonhuman animal frontier. In general usage,

whispering applies to people, the wind, or leaves, but one characterizes
birds as murmuringthat is, twittering. Although the distinction is cer-
tainly not policed by the immortals, it seems important to Foucault that
insects would murmur, for among other things this lexical association
of animal and sound evokes the langage des oiseaux, the archaic secret
language thought to allow initiates to predict or otherwise control events.
A conceptual cognate of Adamic language, the language of birds
installs the language-like sounds produced by animals (whether birds or
insects) in the space of the encounter between humanity and creation. As
such, the language of birds, like murmur, is a way to think the limits of
reason, if clairvoyance and the episteme that supports its authority are
recognized as correlates. That language is here consistently attached
to murmur is likewise important, for it means that murmur is a way,
however compromised, to sound the name of what incessantly breaks
contact between reason and unreason, philosophy and its others. This
is the problem it stirs, and here this problem expressly involves animals
other than humans.
Doubtless one of the more probing recent challenges mounted
within and against philosophical reason has been the emergence of ani-
mal studies. In the hands of some, this challenge has restricted itself to the
ethical strand of philosophy, but for Cary Wolfe (and Derrida before him),
animal studies has reached so intimately into the concept of the subject
that its preoccupations have been made to resonate, as madness did half
a century ago, in every corner of Western thought. In his 2003 anthology,
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, Wolfe had the foresight to include
among its contents a treatment of the animal, specifically the horse, which,
in putting linguistic knowledge back on the table, points us in a useful
direction. Paul Pattons Language, Power, and the Training of Horses
discusses the horse trainer Monty Roberts and reminds us of the puzzling
but altogether enigmatic place of whispering in the face-off between
humans and horses, thus setting the stage for Wolfes own later remark-
able study of Temple Grandin, Animal Studies and Disability Studies, or
Learning from Temple Grandin, a study that also appeals to the figure of
Roberts, among many other things. Doubtless because they have other fish
to fry, neither Patton nor Wolfe do much more than mention whispering,
thereby soliciting my effort to attend and attune to what I have called the
sound problem of whispering, especially as we are given discursive access
to what it is like to whisper in fiction, film, and television.
Horse whispering is a technique for training horses that may

date back to Kikkuli in Asia and Xenophon in the Mediterranean but that
consolidates historically in the nineteenth century, first in Ireland with
Daniel Sullivan (literally called a horse whisperer) and later in Britain
and the United States with Willis Powell, John Solomon Rarey, Monty
Roberts, the Dorrance brothers, Ray Hunt, and Buck Buchannan, the man
who served as the adviser to Robert Redford when he adapted Nicholas
Evanss novel, The Horse Whisperer, to the medium of film. Surely it is not
without interest in this context that when this film was released in France
it was titled Lhomme qui murmurait loreille des chevauxliterally, the
man who murmured at the ear of horses, where the idiomatic link between
murmuring and nonhuman animals is redirected such that it is the man
who murmurs, not the horse. Either way, whispering and murmuring
assume a proximity that prompts one to hear in whispering echoes of the
problems heralded in Foucaults agitation of the murmur.
In Evanss novel, the sense of what whispering does is devel-
oped in deeply suggestive ways. This occurs in the opening chapter of part
2 as Annie Graves (whose daughter and horse have suffered a traumatic
accident) spends an afternoon researching horse care and rehabilitation
in the New York Public Library. After establishing the prehistoric presence
of horses in North America and the deep fear lodged in their souls as a
result of being driven off cliffs by early humans, Evans writes:
Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered,

there were men who understood this. They could see into the
creatures soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often
they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought
their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from
moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance
root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed.
There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And
those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it
was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him
in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand and
then dance around the flames while they burned you in the vil-
lage square. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled
ears, these men were known as Whisperers. (94)
The narrator follows this by noting Annies surprise at the fact that most
Whisperers were men and then reports descriptionspresumably found
174 Like a Whisper
in texts consulted by Annieof famous male horse whisperers, such as

Sullivan and Rarey and the like. While it is true that the accent here falls
less on whispering than on Whisperers, whispering is indeed called out.
Surely it is significant that in this passage whispering is plot-
ted along the decisive biohistorical transition of domestication: first is the
moment when horses exist prior to human beings, then the moment when
they are herded/hunted by humans, followed by the moment when they
are haltered, and concluding with the moment in which domesticated
animals exhibit wounds that postdate domestication itself. A link is
forged here between training and healing, and while whispering seems
to apply more directly to the latterit is a channel through which secrets
pass from humans to horses through pricked and troubled earsit is clear
that the link joins the capacity to heal with the capacity to train. Indeed,
the Whisperers described by Evans are all characterized as individuals
who know how to retrain horses that, for whatever reason, have forgotten
their training. This relation is given acute shape in the scene where Tom
Booker (the Whisperer in Horse) meets Pilgrim (Annies daughter Graces
horse) and encounters two kids attempting to manipulate two colts using
a whip. In a fit of disgust, Tom takes the whip and throws it in a ditch as
he departs. Whipping is thus marked as whisperings other.
But the passage from the novel is also filled with the figures
and rhetoric of what Freud famously called demonic possession. Pre-
cisely to the extent that the Whisperer is not a gypsy, showman, shaman,
or charlatan, heif truly giftedmay be a witch, or even the devil. He
may for that very reason be subject to the hysterical persecution inflicted
upon witches in both Europe and North America prior to and during the
Enlightenment. This at first strikes one as odd. Why would the domestica-
tion of animalsespecially a working animalbe linked to possession?
Here what seems urgent is precisely the divide between training and heal-
ing, where the latter is set off from the former in order to protect domes-
tication, the benevolent violence of training, from critical scrutiny. This
encounter between the human and the nonhuman animal carries biblical
sanction (Genesis 1:26), whereas the encounter between a human and an
animal that has become dangerous to humans is conducted under the sign
of Satan. The passage suggests a reason for this. It begins by linking the
Whisperer to those who recognize in horses their archaic fear of human
violence, stressing the importance of relating to horses responsibly. In
effect, the Whisperer recognizes the horses inability and thus refusal to
separate herding from haltering. As such, the Whisperer bears witness to

the violence of domestication and acts as if in consort with the devil. That
the Compendium Maleficarum would figure the devil as a goat god with
whom possessed women copulate should then come as little surprise.
Although it might otherwise pass unnoticed, it seems impor-
tant to stress that in his evocation of the persecution of witches, Evans is
linking domestication with enclosure and the epistemic violence perpe-
trated against typically women healers by the forces of Enlightenment.
Through this, he is channeling a rich vein of feminist scholarship that
extends from Barbara Ehrenreich and Darby English in the early seven-
ties to Silvia Federici, who, in Caliban and the Witch, both links the per-
secution of witches to the enclosure of the commons and aligns the rise
of science with the decline of folk culture and knowledge. Even as she
criticizes Foucault for his lack of attention to the place of witches in the
history of sexuality, Federici insists that his account of the development of
modern power/knowledge is crucial to a political understanding of the
disciplining of witches. This is vital because it again points to the decisive
way that whispering touches directly on a fraught disciplinary matrix.
Even Annies expectation that Whisperers might more likely be women
than men appears, however dimly, to mark the texts acknowledgment of
precisely this fraught history.
But how precisely are we to think the sound of this disciplinary
problem, of the secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears? For
reasons that may seem obvious, the novel is not as forthcoming on this front
as is the film that, paradoxically, contains no clear depiction of secrets or
anything else uttered softly by Tom Booker to Pilgrim. At best, late in the
film we witness (and overhear) a scene where Tom walks up to Pilgrim
in his stall and says, stroking his blaze, There is something you gotta do
tomorrow. The camera has tracked Toms approach and when this line
is utteredin a normal speaking voicehe and Pilgrim are shot in pro-
file. We are close to their closeness. But there is nothing secret about the
something Tom is asking Pilgrim to do. At this point in the film every
spectator knows that the broken relation between Grace and Pilgrim needs
to be mended. She must ride her horse again. Here whispering just sounds
like dialogue, its sole complexity residing in the by no means insignificant
matter of to whom Pilgrim is being asked to submit: Tom or Grace.
A far more resonant scene occurs earlier in the film. It is divided
into two major sequences, with segments lending interior structure to
176 Like a Whisper
both. In all, it is composed of over a hundred shots, some barely a second

long. The novel dispatches with it in a few lines in chapter 5. The scene
opens with a medium-long shot of Pilgrim chest deep in water. Voices and
splashing dominate the diegetic sound and guitar picking the extradi-
egetic sound. By the fourth shot, the extradiegetic sound has faded, and
everything is focused on the horse and those watching him: principally
Tom, Annie, and Grace. In the fifth shot, Annie, wearing sunglasses and
clutching a sheaf of papers, asks: Whats he doing? No reply. Three shots
later, she adds: Is this some sort of physical therapy? No reply. In a brief
cutaway, Grace glares at her mother in silence. Then, in shot ten, Annies
cell phone rings, cutting across all other diegetic sound, notably Pilgrims
breathing and snorting, producing an answering sonic binaryringing/
snortingto the visual binary of people/horse. Instantly, Pilgrim lets out a
vigorous, panicked neigh, rearing up in the water and thrashing out with
his front legs. Tom is shot glaring back at Annie, who in the subsequent
shot turns away to take the call, saying in shot seventeen: No, youre
breaking up, emphasizing that she is attending to the wrong break.
This sequence ends with Pilgrim, who Tom has managed with consider-
able exertion to calm, all of a sudden bolting and knocking Tom down into
the water. As others seek to restrain or chase Pilgrim, Tom says: Let him
go, let him go. In the penultimate shot of the sequence, the camera pans
right to follow Tom as he sets out walking after the fleeing horse.
The second sequence opens with an extreme wide shot in
Montana. On the far left and in the distance stands Pilgrim. As the shot
unfolds, a match on action cut allows Toms head and then body to enter the
landscape of the frame from the lower right. There is still no extradiegetic
sound; indeed, the soundtrack is dominated by the sound of insects and
the rustle of wind in the brush. In the following shot, Grace enters with
Toms nephew Joey and they sit together on the slope of a hill to observe
Tom and Pilgrim. A stilted conversation ensues, and insects and wind are
joined by Thomas Newmans score on the soundtrack. As the two kids talk,
Tom sets up his own observation point opposite the meadow from Pilgrim.
Eventually, he sits and begins to wait in the silence that constitutes the
mysterious frontier between the score and the wind as registered in the
flora of the meadow. The conversation between Joey and Grace breaks off
when he asks: How was he to ride? Grace turns abruptly away, linking
the traumatic question to the mysterious silence defining Toms relation
to Pilgrim. If one were to infer, at this point, what whispering sounds like,
it would appear to be the sound(s) of this painful waiting.
With obvious emphasis, as Joey turns to leave and Grace looks

away and down, Annie enters the extreme wide shot in which Pilgrim
stands in the left background and Tom sits in the right foreground. New-
mans score bridges the two segments. She says, Ahem, followed shortly
by, Are we in the way? As before, Tom says nothing, turning only to
acknowledge her presence. Annie persists: Should we leave? No reply.
Toms nonreaction is framed in direct address to the spectator, a position
the object of Toms stareconsistently marked as Pilgrims point of view.
With audible frustration, Annie adds, I guess well go then. No reply.
She leaves the frame, walking away from behind Tom, and this segment
ends with the first of three overlapping dissolves, all meant to enunciate
waiting. Then, as night falls, Pilgrim begins slowly to approach Tom
from across the meadow. Added now to the wind and score are the blows,
grunts, and snorts of the horse. If secrets are being softly uttered, Pilgrim
is doing the uttering. Again with obvious emphasis, as the horse begins
its wary approach to Tom, Annie and Grace drive up on their way out.
The music on the soundtrack fades, giving way to Toms waiting and Pil-
grims snorting and blowing, sounds soon accompanied by the slow thud
of hooves and the hum of insects. Annie gets out of the car and looks on in
disbelief. Now she says nothing. As the scene concludes, Pilgrim makes his
way over to where Tom is waiting. He lowers his head, and Tom strokes
his cheek and blaze. No words are exchanged. As Tom leads Pilgrim out
of the meadow, passing Annie, the horses tread, the wind, and insects are
accompanied on the soundtrack by the final line of dialogue. Tom says to
Annie: From now on leave your phone somewhere else.
None of the dialogue spoken in this scene is actually whispered,
yet surely whispering takes place. Tom has bewitched Pilgrim; indeed,
it is this scene that establishes clearly Annies belief that she has found a
true Whisperer. The effect, therefore, is to complicate what we might be
listening for when listening for whispering. It is neither what nor where
we expect. Sonically, the scene puts this puzzle in motion by organizing it
around a ringtone. That is, whispering is the sound that opposes without
answering the cell phone. It is the muted backdrop against which the ring
becomes audible. In one sense, of course, the sound of the cell phone might
be heard as a metonym for modernity. Given the scenes studied repeti-
tion of heterosexual coupling (Grace and Joey, Tom and Annie), the cell
phone sounds like Annies professional identity pulling her out of the
moment and away from what matters: the relations developing around and
through the horse. In the novel, the issue here is put with telling concision:
178 Like a Whisper
The whole had become clear. All threemother, daughter, horsewere

inextricably connected in pain (Evans 175). The cell phone is thus the
sonic signifier of Annies attachment to this pain, her guilty relation to a
daughter she neglected for her career and to whom she gifted a horse in
futile compensation. The ringtone traumatizes the horse precisely because
it bespeaks the neglect that occasioned the freak accident Pilgrim should
not have survived. As both novel and film make clear, Grace sneaks out
to ride with her girlfriend Judith on the snowy morning of the accident.
Opposite this is the whispering, the secrets delivered into
Pilgrims pricked ears by Tom, secrets apparently conveyed in the sonic
weavebuzzing, rustling, and finally snortingof waiting. It seems crucial
that every time Annie actually tries to speak to someone in the moment,
her words are met with silence. She is not there. In this sense, she too is
waiting, which suggests that, as in analysis, what waiting achieves is the
space within which ones ears open to secrets. Remarkably, one such secret
is that Pilgrim is telling these secrets to himself, or picking them up from
the insects, the wind, the thud of his own hooves. Here the whisper begins
to approximate the voice that keeps silent, which may well explain why
none of the dialogue is presented as actual whispering.
As the film winds down, we learn that Annie is most guilty
about her loveless marriage and the sacrifice of desire for duty it has gently
extorted from her. This crystallizes as she enters into an affair with Tom,
who remains haunted by the failure of his own previous marriage. He thus
attaches himself to the chain of pain linking the mother, the daughter, and
the horse, and despite his strong messianic power (the novel is rife with
the rhetoric of Christian apologetics), he too needs a Whisperer. His link
to the chain of pain produces an equation between the traumatic hobbling
of both Grace and Pilgrim and the lived failure of heterosexual monogamy.
It is in this sense that Toms line to Pilgrim, There is something you gotta
do tomorrow, refers to himself.
This raises two important issues. On the one hand, it suggests
that the unspeakable character of traumatic experience serves in this dis-
course as an incarnation of the unvoiced vocalization of whispering; it is
not simply that trauma is addressed through whispering but that trauma,
because words fail it, bears within its unspeakable relation to language
the unvoiced character of whispering. On the other hand, whispering
also seems to take on an allegorical function. The disjuncture that binds
whispering to and separates it from speaking functions as a realization of
the analytically charged notion that trauma, regardless of its precipitating

cause, repeats the becoming human of the animal. Freud, in Civilization
and Its Discontentswhere guilt is installed as the drive of civilization
puts this in terms of the triumph of the eye over the nose when hominids
achieved erect posture, but much of what Nietzsche earlier called asceti-
cism is clearly caught up with the torturous fight against the animal in
the human.
One might argue that the human susceptibility to trauma is
conditioned by the phylogenetic significance of the triumph of sight and
that this is perhaps the deepest articulation of the novels obsessive alle-
gorical impulse: Grace, Pilgrim (Judiths horse is named Gulliver), Annie,
and Robert Graves (in the film they are the MacLeans), not to mention
the novels repeated intertextual engagement with John Bunyans The Pil-
grims Progress. As with Bunyan himself, who insisted upon the decisive
role of grace in salvation, both novel and film pivot around the figure of
Grace, whose recovery provides the narrative with its arc. Indeed, the
very name of the Booker ranch, The Double Divide, would appear to
draw attention to the allegorical structure of a textual enunciation split
by another scene. By proposing that whispering assumes an allegorical
function and does so by touching upon the traumatic confrontation in the
human with the nonhuman animal, I mean to argue that whisper is a sonic
signifier divided by its oblique address to the side. It speaks about speaking,
but inaudibly, in the sense that it is not just taking place within an allegori-
cally charged context but is structured by allegory, that is, a speaking that
is phatic in the metalinguistic sense, where meta is beyond linguistics
in such a way that invites the philosophically charged question: where
must language come from such that animals do not have access to it? It
must come from what passes between what is neither human nor animal.
The link proposed here between allegory and whispering is
not fortuitous. Two other examples will suffice to drive home the point.
In 2004, the National Geographic channel began broadcasting a dog-
training program hosted by Cesar Milan. Clearly trading on the figure of
the Whisperer, the program was titled The Dog Whisperer, and its success
has both spawned imitators and provided Milan with a lucrative career
as an author and speaker. A year later, in 2005, cbs aired a series starring
Jennifer Love Hewitt titled The Ghost Whisperer that ran successfully
for five seasons. While both shows appealed directly to the figure of the
Whisperer, both also introduced nuances in this figure that bear on the
180 Like a Whisper
allegorical structure of whispering. This occurs most dramatically in The

Ghost Whisperer, where, under the influence of the spirit communicator
James Van Praagh, whispering opens a channel with dead humansin
other words, ghosts.
In the second season of The Ghost Whisperer, in an episode
called Children of Ghosts, the two shows, as they say in the industry,
crossed over (an expression with strong Bunyanesque resonance also
used in Ghost to connote passing into the light). The scene in which this
crossover is effected warrants sustained attention.
As is typical of broadcast televisual narrative, Children of
Ghosts twists together two story lines. The more substantial line narrates
Julies story. She is the abandoned daughter of a woman she believes is her
mother, who turns out to have kidnapped Julie in the wake of a traumatic
miscarriage. Melinda comes to be involved first as a foster parent but then
as the Whisperer who discovers that Julies kidnapper died before she
could take her back to her biological mother, who lives in Grandview
(Melindas home town). The second story line is Bobs. Bob is the golden
retriever that belongs to Melindas coworker, Delia Banks. For reasons
unknown, Bob has been disturbing Delias sleep by barking uncontrollably.
As the episode unwinds we discover that Bob is haunted by the ghost dog
Homer, an animal visible only to Melinda, whose behavior remains largely
mysterious. The crossover is set in motion early on, when Delia, who has
lost patience with Bob, tells Melinda that a superstar dog therapist is
visiting Grandview. They agree to seek his counsel.
Needless to say, the superstar dog therapist is Cesar Milan,
identified as the Dog Whisperer both on posters displayed around his book
signing and by Melinda when she gets face time with Cesar. The whole
scene unfolds in fewer than fifty shots and roughly divides between two
sessions: one with Delia and Bob, the other with Melinda and Homer. Both
are short. Both make persistent use of the shotreverse shot enunciative
pattern, here recrafted as the very rhythm of transference. In Bobs session,
Delia begins by explaining that he has been behaving strangely. Cesar
asks whether anything has changed in his world. Delia responds, You
know, I am dating someone new, but Bob seems to really love him. Cesar
listens and nods. Delia adds, He gets very excited every time hes around.
During this exchange, Delia strains to control Bob, who pulls at his leash
and barks. Cesar then offers his diagnosis. He is exhibiting something
more territorial like, as if there is another dog around us here. But there
is no dog in here. Throughout this scene, the camera cuts, often briefly,
to shots of Homer as seen by Melinda, underscoring the limits of Cesars

powers. In fact, there is another dog there, but one that Cesar senses only
through Bobs behavior, a setup complicated by Delias line, He gets very
excited every time hes [Delias new beaux? Homer?] around.
The second session, in some sense already underway, begins
in earnest when Bob, as if in pursuit of Homer, yanks Delia after him out
into the street. Important dialogue ensues.
Melinda: Can I ask you a question about my dog, since you

are the Dog Whisperer?
Cesar: Sure. Is he here?
Melinda: In a manner of speaking. I need for him to go
somewhere.
Cesar: Um hum.
Melinda: Lets just call it a room.
Cesar: Okay.
Melinda: Its not a living room, but a . . .
Cesar: Um hum.
Melinda: Anyway [aware that her aposiopesis has failed], he
doesnt want to do it.
Cesar: All right, what you need to do is you need to embrace
a pack leader mentality, become calm and assertive. And then
he will go. He will follow you.
Melinda [as Delia and Bob storm back into the bookstore
behind her]: Okay, problem. I dont really want to go into that
particular room. Not yet anyway [anxious laugh].
Cesar: Well, its actually very simple. Your dog is feeding on
your energy. Hes not hearing what youre saying. So, until
you change your feelings about the room. Then he will go into
that room.
Melinda: Thank you.
Delia [to Bob]: Sit!
Cesar: Youre welcome.
The scene and session conclude with Melinda leaving the bookstore (signed
copy of Cesars Way in hand), where she finds Homer waiting for her on
the sidewalk. In an actual whisperas if concerned not to appear mad to
those around herMelinda tells the invisible Homer that she is his pack
leader and that he needs to go! After she repeats this, supplemented
with the appropriate hand gestures, Homer exits screen right.
182 Like a Whisper
In effect, what this scene establishes is that there is an essen-

tial continuity between the two Whisperers. Melinda helps ghosts (in this
episode Julies kidnapper/mother) cross over, and Cesar helps Melinda
help Homer cross over. But the scene also gives new depth to the oblique
character of the whisper. First, the plural, the two dogs: Cesar thinks he
is helping Bob, but it soon becomes evident that he is also helping a dog
that is present only in a manner of speaking. Within this manner of
speaking, Melinda and Cesar converse about a dog that is not quite a
dog and do so in a highly coded and thus oblique way. Consider here the
notion of going into the room that is not a living room. To the spectator
this coded manner of speaking is metaphorical. She or he knows that the
implied dying room is the light. However, given the enunciation of the
sequence, where Delia and Bob enter the room of the bookstore precisely
as Melinda and Cesar discuss her reluctance to go into that particular
room, the room becomes the room of Whisperers speaking of death and
dogs. It seems crucial that in these rooms the Dog Whisperer says to the
Ghost Whisperer: Hes not hearing what you are saying. This is not
because she is speaking unclearly; it is becauseas the final exchange
with Homer makes clearshe has not been whispering.
What foregrounds the allegorical dynamic of the scene is the
fact that Cesar uses the session with Melinda to invoke, obliquely, the
secret of his way. In telling her that until she changes her own feelings
about the room her status as pack leader will fail to reach Homer, Cesar is
being true to his oft-repeated dictum: I rehabilitate dogs, and train peo-
ple. Put differently, to work with dogs, you must not work with them. You
must work with their owners, as if the world of the dog is split by another
scene, the scene of the owner. It is as if the dog, like Bunyans Christian,
is simply acting out a script writ large in the very mesh of its kennel. This
finds its direct corollary in Julies story, where it is clear that her world,
and the world of her encounter with her foster parents, Melinda and Jim,
is a double divide. It is haunted by a mother, for whom Julie is a failed
transitional object, a pure compensation for the loss inflicted upon her by
the trauma of her miscarriage. The following exchange from Evanss novel
confirms that this is indeed about whispering. Responding to a woman
attending one of Tom Bookers horse clinics who has queried the source of
his knowledge about horses, Tom says: Well Dale, you know a lot of this is
nuts and bolts. She frowned. What do you mean? Well, if the riders nuts,
the horse bolts (117). While Dale regards this as witty obfuscation, Tom
insists that his wisdom comes from the horses themselves, as if they had
softly uttered in his pricked ears secrets about their owners. Moreover, in
both novel and film, Pilgrims progress is completely overdetermined by
what is going on with Grace, Annie, and Tom. In the film, it is only when
Grace is able to ride Pilgrim again, when she is able to let go of the guilt
she feels about the accident and Judiths death, that Pilgrim is himself
saved, rehaltered. As in Children of Ghosts, the encounter with the
animal is split by the parental scene, the affair between Annie and Tom.
Here too, what Pilgrim has taught Annie and Tom about the traumatic
wounds that bind them allows them to relinquish, however ambivalently,
their adulterous fantasy. At a certain level, this simply bears witness to
the totemic drive to sacrifice the animal to the labor of fabulation, but
what is the source of its appeal? Put simply: whispering speaks toward us
about the place from which it emanates, a place that is at once too remote
and too intimate to be accessible to the speaking animal. This speaking
is oblique, allegorical, and traumatic.
But what relation exists between these qualities and the lin-
guistic construal of the whisper as unvoiced vocalization? It is the
relation between two absences: the unvoiced and the unspeakable.
It is useful here to recall the important theoretical link between
trauma and voice or, more precisely, the unspeakable, forged in the writ-
ings of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman. In Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, Caruth urges us to recognize that the unspeakability of trauma
has everything to do with the inherent belatedness of the pathology. She
writes: The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of experience
or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time,
but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences
it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event
(45). Here the motif of possession reappears, but now it seems to have
less to do with sorcery and more with the temporal displacement of the
voice. Belatedness means that one does not speak (of) trauma, it speaks
you and does so repeatedly.
In Unclaimed Experiences, Caruth elaborates her appeal to the
voice by interpreting Freuds recourse to Torquato Tassos Gerusalemme
Liberata in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There, Freud reads this belated
epic of the Crusades as an example of what it means to bear a passive
relation to repetition. Tasso has Tancredi unknowingly kill Clorinda
twice. In Caruths probing introductory chapter, Wound and the Voice,
she places less emphasis on the motif of repetition, drawing attention
instead to Tassos figure of the wounded tree that groans when slashed
184 Like a Whisper
by Tancredis sword. Her point, as the chapter title says plainly, is to fore-
ground the literary articulation of the claim that trauma is always the
story of a wound that cries out (4). Voice is thus marked within the very
drive of utterance by a wound, by something that separates it from itself.
But one must also note that Tasso frames Clorindas cry in ways that hark
back to Tom and Pilgrim. In Edward Fairfaxs early translation, her cry is
preceded by whistling wind and rustling leaves, a point Caruths evoca-
tion of Freud lets slip. She misses that the voice of the wound traverses the
space of whispering. By the same token, Caruth invites one to conclude
that whispering, as a voice marked by the unvoiced, by that which sepa-
rates it from itself, harbors the same belatedness as trauma. As such, the
reiterated link between Whisperers and trauma emerges as crucial to the
linguistic characterization of whispering as a phonemic dead zone, crucial
as well to the sound of the whisper.
Caruth, her inattention to whispering aside, brings the belated-
ness of trauma into direct contact with ghosts. She proposes not only that
trauma is structured around the absence of what cannot be assimilated,
but that this absence lends a ghostly character to every trauma. Indeed,
the sense one has of being possessed by a trauma finds expression in the
feeling of being haunted by a ghost that is the absence of the trauma for
its bearer. In this sense, The Ghost Whisperer is always already about
trauma, about wounds that speak. In fact, this is repeatedly displayed in the
shows title sequence where, again in an actual whisper, one hears, Can
you see us? Although it seems important here to note that the question
concerns seeing, not hearing, my point is a different one. In the Children
of Ghosts episode, the trauma affecting Julies mother verges on clich.
Not only has she committed a felony and misrepresented herself to Julie,
but she has abandoned Julie. Her guilt is palpable, and when her ghost
first speaks it groans: take her back, a line that speaks ambiguously to
both the felony and the abandonment. Indeed, guilt is as fundamental to
The Ghost Whisperer as it is to Freuds theory of civilization.
And Homer? Nothing in the episode illuminates his trauma,
his guilt. Cesar tells us that Bob is behaving territorially toward the dog
that isnt there, but this is merely the way in which Homers haunting of
Bob appears. Nor do we know anything of Bobs trauma or guilt such that
he might invite such a haunting. As the episode ends, we leave Homer on
Melinda and Jims front porch, where he growls sequel-ishly at something
or someone. In this, he is a bearer of the absence given voice by Jim when
earlier he remarked sadly on Julies recent departure and when Melinda
teasingly responded by intimating that Julies absence might be filled by a

child of their own. Homer is absence, he does not know absence, unless we
are to interpret his status as the ghostly guard dog to be an expressionless
expression of his guilt. Did he fail in his duty to protect his human owners?
Was he, in Nietzsches idiom, unable to remember his promise to serve
and protect humans? Did he fail at, in effect, being a dog? Such possibili-
ties fall within the realm of plausibility, but what is clearly emphasized
in the figure of Homer is that the animal is trauma, is absence, is ghostly.
Indeed, it is precisely this that seems to underlie the crossover between
the two shows/channels, urging us to consider that what is ghostly about
the nonhuman animal, specifically the dog, is its allegorical function, the
way it becomes the scene, the body on which whatever requires rehabili-
tating in its owners is acted out. The Whisperer must address this ghost,
and what comes up in this exchange of secretsas Evans stressedis the
fear the animal has of the violence of domesticity. On this score, Cesar is
certainly correct in insisting that animals must be treated as animals, but
the problem is that he does not appreciate the trauma that the animal and
the human are for each other.
Freud, of course, urged readers to consider that ghosts were,
as he says in the well-known footnote to Totem and Taboo, disguises for
the patients parents (65), an idea with considerable traction in The Ghost
Whisperer and, if one takes seriously the widespread tendency among pet
owners to treat their companion animals as children, in The Dog Whisperer
as well. But surely Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are right to pres-
sure the limits of this discourse by insisting upon a political dimension
to the uncanny fear of ghosts. In the Notes and Sketches that follow the
five chapters of Dialectic of Enlightenment, they write, Freuds theory that
the belief in ghosts comes from the evil thoughts of the living about the
dead, from the memory of old death wishes, is too narrow. The hatred of
the dead is jealousy as much as a feeling of guilt (178). What Horkheimer
and Adorno are doing here is questioning Freuds question. The issue is
not simply why people believe in or fear ghosts but rather why they asso-
ciate ghostseven if unconsciouslywith those with whom they have
experienced the guilt of Oedipal rivalry. The proposal here, condensed
around the concept of jealousy, is that ghosts have something essential
to do with the conditions of historical life under which families live. If
such conditions are hopelessand recall that Dialectic is an exilic text
marked profoundly by the war of the worldsperhaps the living are more
frightened of life than death. While this line of argument leads quickly
186 Like a Whisper
to the stance taken in Adornos critique of horoscopes (The Stars Down

to Earth) and thus to the conclusion that Whisperers are simply avatars
of the new irrationalism, a more patient unfolding brings whispering,
politics, and the animal into a less dismissive arrangement. After all, the
repudiation of irrationalism forgets the fact that jealousy is presented as
supplementing, not replacing, guilt.
Crucial here, because the sound and sense of whispering
remain in the foreground, is the matter of the voice. Recently both Gior-
gio Agamben and Mladen Dolar have stressed the continuing relevance
of Aristotles contrast between language and voice in The Politics. Agam-
ben in Homo Sacer is keen to draw attention to the way this distinction
founds what Aristotle understands by the domain of the political as the
activity through which beings articulate the means by which to live (and
presumably die) in common. In turn, the contrast between language and
voice is shown to bear on the human animal relation. In effect, humans
and animals share a voice but do not share language. For reasons that may
seem obvious, Agamben does not entertain the langage des oiseaux thesis,
emphasizing instead the way Aristotle links the political (the association
of living beings) to language so as precisely to exclude nonhuman animals
from the political. While humans may be political animals, it is in the
name of the political that they struggle against the animals that they are.
Voice, then, for the political animal, is marked by what language requires
it to take out, by something unvoiced, nonvocalized within it, something
that for Agamben and Aristotle designates the animal.
That this line of inquiry leads directly to the animal/trauma
link, and does so via the problem of the voice and the excision of the ani-
mal in the political animal, is vital to the sound and sense of whispering.
Nietzsche, who collapsed while attempting to whisper to a horse, was
among the first to recognize that the political animal, the human being,
was alsoin its very moral fibera traumatic animal. In On the Geneal-
ogy of Morals, he not only insisted upon the link between punishment
and morality, but he confected the term Selbstierqulerei, self animal
torture/cruelty, to draw out the foundational role of animal cruelty in the
constitution of the human. The problem is not simply that we experiment
with, destroy the habitats of, and consume animals, it is that we do this
to ourselves in order to promise not to do this to them. We fail. The dog
can name Nietzsches pain not simply because it is faithful, obtrusive, and
shameless but because the pain that exposes the human to trauma is that
of the very domestication that produces dog in the first place.
If the Whisperer addresses the animal like an animal, then

surely whispering engages what produces the animal in the political
animal, that is, the Selbstierqulerei that founds what stands to the side,
not accompanying the animal, namely, the human. Evans stressed this
even as he failed to spook the human. That said, whispering, as teased
out of Redfords film, addresses itself to the animal insofar as it appears
within language as what haunts language, as it were, obliquely. Regard-
less of the sorcerers secrets it utters softly into pricked ears, whispering
is also always about the violence of the animal/human encounter, about
the trauma of domestication and speciesism. This stands always to the
side, on the other scene, of the statements uttered by Whisperers and is
yet cortical to their effects. It is not that Whisperers think like animals
or otherwise establish that they are animals too. It is that they produce
a speech haunted by the violent exclusion of the animal from the very
medium of communication and for which that communication offers to
take responsibility.
This prompts us to consider a distinction between whispering
and what I have from time to time called an actual whisper. In Orlando
Figess The Whisperers, a history of private life within the Soviet Union
after the death of Lenin, he insists upon the importance of the distinction
in Russian between shepchushchii and sheptun, between those who fear
being overheard and those who tattle or inform on them. While critiques
of Stalinism may now strike us as beating a dead horse, Figess distinc-
tion has the advantage of situating whispering squarely on the terrain of
the political. As such, it invites one to consider where on this terrain the
sound of the animal human encounter belongs. Although the point may
seem merely linguistic, the Whisperer I have been engaging slips (in)
between the two senses of the whisperer in Russian. An actual whisper
can readily be grasped as either discretion or informing, but what about
the whispering of waiting, of the ghostly belatedness of trauma, of a sound
that is a problem? It would be a mistake simply to exclude such whisper-
ing as nonpolitical because, as we have heard, it is precisely here that the
constraints of the political are being pronounced and are thus very much
at stake.
If the politics of the voice (to use Dolars formulation) is
largely concerned with the issues of possession, expression, and efficacy,
then concern with the political sense of the voice is obliged to orient itself
toward the voices role in producing the sense of the political. At a crucial
level, that of articulation, this manifests as a disciplinary problematic.
188 Like a Whisper
Which institutionalized forms of knowledge production, where, are autho-

rized to speak about speech or sound off about sound? In relation to such
questions, whisperingprecisely because it designates, as did the murmur,
the constraints of the discipline authorized to speak about it to others
becomes crucial to the project of thinking the concept of the political.
The fact that it slips between discretion and either tattling or laryngitis
prompts us to entertain the notion that it flees altogether. Indeed, the
sound of whispering may precisely register as the rush of haunted asides.
Political animals will thus only know its likeness, its effect in the spaces
separating disciplines from one another, as the sound of whispering spurs
us to demand that different and superior ways of organizing the work of
being in common remain possible. As Tracy Chapman knew, what is revo-
lutionary about the whisper is its uncertain and split status as similitude.
Not whispering about the revolution, but revolution as or like a whisper.
john mowit t is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of numerous texts on the topics of culture,
theory, and politics, most recently Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages
(2005) and the coedited volume The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal
Road (2007), both from the University of Minnesota Press. This past year he collaborated
with the composer Jarrod Fowler to transpose his book Percussion: Drumming, Beating,
Striking (Duke University Press, 2002) from a printed to a sonic text. His most recent book
project is Radio: Essays in Bad Reception (University of California Press, 2011). He is also a
senior coeditor of the journal Cultural Critique, a leading Anglophone academic publication
in the field of cultural studies and critical theory.
Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford: Stanford up, 1998.
Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Modern Library, 1941.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experiences: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins up, 1996.
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1995.
Evans, Nicholas. The Horse Whisperer. New York: Delacorte, 1995.
Figes, Orlando. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalins Russia. New York: Holt, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Hogarth, 2001. 764. 24 vols. 195374.
. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. The Standard Edition. Vol. 21. 2001.
64145.
. Totem and Taboo. 1913. The Standard Edition. Vol. 13. 2001. 1161.
The Ghost Whisperer. Creator John Gray. Touchstone Television Productions, 2007.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund

Jephcott. Palo Alto: Stanford up, 2002.
The Horse Whisperer. Dir. Robert Redford. Touchstone Pictures, 1998.
Laver, John. The Gift of Speech: Papers in the Analysis of Speech and Voice. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh up, 1991.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle: Open
Court, 1983.
christopher lee
Rhythm and the Cold War Imaginary:

Listening to John Adamss Nixon in China
Theres virtually nothing to say about

rhythm for theres no time.
John Cage
From Space to Sound
M any critics have argued that the postwar period is marked

by a spatial turn that has led to an unwelcome effacement of time across
different spheres of social life. In his account of postmodernism, for
example, Fredric Jameson asserts that under late capitalism, Different
moments in historical or existential time are [...] simply filed in different
places; the attempt to combine them even locally does not slide up and
down a temporal scale [...] but jumps back and forth across a game board
that we conceptualize in terms of distance (373). In a similar vein, David
Harvey argues that the postmodern time-space compression has given rise
to a political ideology that sees place and Being with all its associated
aesthetic qualities as a proper basis for social action (304). To these well-
known diagnoses, we might add that the spatial turn was a direct result of
the Cold War, which not only engendered many of the social changes of this
period but demanded a new spatial imaginary that could reflect the Mani-
chean conflict between capitalism and communism.1 Global in scope, this
imaginary effectively downplayed colonialism in favor of a discourse of
modernization that, according to Harry Harootunian, ranked non-Western

societies according to spatial distance from an empowering model that

radiated the achievement of industrial and technological supremacy
namely, the countries of Euro-Americaand expected identification with
it. In a sense, this was simply a replication of the hierarchization of political
power that froze positions and history during the Cold War (30).
Under these conditions, visuality became the dominant means
of perception; in the age of the atomic bomb, writes Rey Chow, there
emerged a global culture in which everything has become (or is mediated
by) visual representation and virtual reality (2627). As Matthew Farish
observes, during the Cold War, Those in possession of [...] cartographic
representations could, as with any other conflict, see its geographical
dimensions and reaffirm its premise of difference: we are here, they are
there; this is friendly territory, and this is hostile (xiv). As technological
advancements rendered the global accessible in unprecedented ways,
the expansive scale and intensity of these deliberations resulted in new
sensory and cognitive possibilities. For Harvey, the compression of spatial
distances results in an experience of homogenization in which, paradoxi-
cally, local particularities become even more noticeable, a condition that
he theorizes as the production of fragmentation, insecurity, and ephem-
eral uneven development within a highly unified global space economy
of capital flows (296).
This essay takes up Harveys formulation as the point of depar-
ture for a reconsideration of the Cold War global imaginary through the
sensation of sound. Its purpose is not to reconstruct an archive that can
tell us what the Cold War sounded like but rather to trace how auditory
experiences that emerged during this period rendered the relationship
between homogenization and fragmentation accessible in temporal terms.
Even in an age saturated with broadcasts and recordings, in which per-
ception was thoroughly mediated by technology, sound remains arguably
tied to the operations and effects of temporal difference. In order to track
this relationship, I focus on rhythm, what John Mowitt defines as all the
elements that bear on the duration of sounds (24). 2 Rhythm, in the most
basic sense, denotes palpability itself (24), but as a concept it exceeds
these sensual parameters and functions as a means to theorize issues such
as temporal flow, repetition, duration, and cessation and their social impli-
cations. I turn first to Henri Lefebvres attempts to mobilize rhythm as a
means to critique what he considers the compromised status of visuality.
His account of rhythm, however, turns it into an abstract concept even as
he insists on the primacy of listening. What remains to be articulated is
192 Rhythm and the Cold War Imaginary
a theory of listening as a social practice. In order to sketch out the con-

tours of such a theory, I reframe the topic of rhythm in relationship to
music, understood here as the intersection between sound and the social.
In postwar art music, the compositional style that most directly engaged
changing experiences of time and space was minimalism, which offered
auditory experiences that resemble Harveys description of homogeniza-
tion and fragmentation. Returning to the geopolitics of the Cold War, I
offer an analysis of John Adamss minimalist opera Nixon in China (1987),
a cultural artifact of the late Cold War whose use of rhythm reveals the
limits of a Manichean global imaginary on the brink of disintegration.
Vertical Time and the

Limits of Rhythmanalysis
Although Lefebvre is best known for his writings on space and

everyday life, his critique of postwar industrial societies in the West led
him to return frequently to rhythm in texts such as volumes 2 and 3 of The
Critique of Everyday Life and Elements of Rhythmanalysis (published post-
humously in 1992) in order to theorize the conjunction of time and space. 3
In Elements, he offers an expansive definition of this topic: Everywhere
where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure
of energy, there is rhythm (15). 4 Any situation or locale can be analyzed
as a collection of rhythms that interact and interfere with each other
while generating new configurations. For Lefebvre, rhythm originates
in cyclical temporalities that belong to bodily functions, environmental
processes, and the premodern social practices associated with them. These
essentially natural rhythms are repetitive but possess a gift of oblivion
that protects the rhythmical from obsolescence [...] without erasing all
memory (Critique 3:129). In modern societies, the multiplicity of rhythms
has been shattered by rational and [...] industrial techniques (2:48)
that seek to control cyclical time frames through the imposition of linear
time. Insofar as it can always be reckoned along a trajectory or distance,
linear time possesses a spatial character, a point that becomes clear when
we notice how Lefebvres description of linear time bears a striking resem-
blance to Harveys account of postmodern space as homogenous and frag-
mented: Linear time is both continuous and discontinuous. Continuous:
its beginning is absolute, and it grows indefinitely from an initial zero.
Discontinuous: it fragments into partial time scales assigned to one thing
or another according to a programme which is abstract in relation to time.

It dissects indefinitely (2:48).
As a signifier of the embattled heterogeneity of everyday life,
rhythm persists as a trace of what escapes the repressive and destructive
effects of modernity. In this context, rhythmanalysis consists of the study
of rhythms as a means of dismantling the conditions that seek to homog-
enize them in the present. Moreover, Lefebvre formulates a subjectthe
rhythmanalystwho can simultaneously catch a rhythm and perceive
it within the whole (Elements 21). The rhythmanalyst listen[s] to the
world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said
without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaningand finally
he will listen to silences (19). While this emphasis on listening is hardly
surprising, its theoretical significance can be grasped only in relation to
Lefebvres critique of visuality. The goal of the rhythmanalyst, he argues,
is to perceive and understand the present, but the present is itself an
adulterated product that simulates presence as a forgery imitates a fact of
nature. [...] A kind of (dissimulating) simulator of the present: the image!
(Elements 22). Lefebvres iconophobia clearly recalls the Marxist critique of
the fetish: Through a kind of magic, images change what they reach (and
claim to reproduce) into things, and presence into simulacra, the present,
the this (23). Rhythmanalysis strives to recover presence by avoid[ing] the
trap of the present, and it is precisely in this context that audition offers
a means to overcome the ossified present and its visual manifestations.
Lefebvres writings are replete with discussions of rhythm,
ranging from traffic and street noise to classical music. But it is as a meta-
phor for the premodern or naturaland therefore as a potent alternative to
the reified visuality of the presentthat rhythm is conceptually at its most
suggestive. Although Lefebvre strives to combine empirical analysis with
theoretical critique, these divergent goals end up producing a methodologi-
cal tension that is never completely resolved, a point that can be readily
seen in his treatment of music. Music is a somewhat minor topic in his
writings, but he suggestively describes it as a restoration of the sensuous, a
victory of the rhythmical over the linear, integrating it without destroying
it (Critique 3:130). For Lefebvre, musical rhythm refers not only to matters
of beat, meter, and pulse but more broadly to how sounds differentiated by
pitch, speed, texture, expressivity, and so on are assembled together and
interact with each other over a shared temporal duration. The unfolding
of music, whether through live performance or technologies of recording,
is embedded in its surrounding sounds and rhythms as well as those that

emanate from the body of the listener. By foregrounding and concretizing
these multiple relations, music offers an opportunity to grasp the signifi-
cance of rhythm in general: it resembles the rhythms of everyday life
but also reassembles them into a bouquet, a garland from a jumble
(Elements 64). Indeed, the rhythmanalyst will come to listen to a house,
a street, a town as an audience listens to a symphony (22).
As rhythm gets applied more widely in Lefebvres thinking, it
becomes an increasingly abstract concept whose relationship to sound as
such becomes less certain. Rhythm incorporates and traverses the phe-
nomenal as well as the metaphorical, a capacity that makes it difficult if
not impossible to isolate it as an object of analysis. Rather than suggest that
this predicament indicates a failure on Lefebvres part, I contend that it is
built into the very notion of music as socially ordered or formed sound,
whose sonic materials are thoroughly mediated by conceptual as well as
technological apparatuses. In this regard, Lefebvres description of music
as resemblance and reassemblage conveys its artificiality as an aesthetic
form whose reliance on particular rules and procedures distinguishes
it from other everyday rhythms. Consequently, while it is certainly pos-
sible to perceive musical rhythms as sensations, to listen to music as such
and grasp its structures and meanings is to engage in a socially situated
practice with specific protocols and expectations.
The peculiar status of music is perhaps best captured by Jacques
Attalis well-known distinction between music and noise: whereas noise
refers to the general sonic field, music is defined by the (re)ordering of
sound according to codes that originate in external political and economic
structures. Music, he writes, is inscribed between noise and silence, in
the space of the social codification it reveals (19). This insight subtends
his analysis of the political economy of music, which seeks to correlate the
development of music to changing modes of economic organization. 5 In a
manner that resonates with Lefebvres condemnation of reification and
false presences, Attali pessimistically situates postwar music in an age of
repetition in which the stockpiling of use-time in the commodity object
[that is, music] is fundamentally a herald of death (126), a characteriza-
tion that reminds us of the inextricable relationship between the Cold War
and postwar late capitalism. Nevertheless, the typological distinctions
between noise, music, and silence posed by Attali turn out to be somewhat
restrictive if only because these categories were constantly reconfigured
in avant-garde music of this period. 6 For example, the totalizing adherence
to compositional rules and procedures that characterized serialism would

seem to accord with Attalis definition of music, but serialism was fre-
quently criticized for producing works in which its structures were, for
all intents and purposes, imperceptible to the listener, rendering it more
akin to noise.7 Other composers, such as John Cage and R.Murray Schafer,
challenged the ontology of music by assembling sounds from the world
at large and utilizing chance procedures and improvisation. The most
famous example of these latter experiments remains Cages 433 (1952),
in which the complete lack of notes or actions by the performer collapses
the distinction between the ostensible silence of the piece and the exter-
nal sounds that permeate the duration of its performance. 8 By the late
1960s, composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass were rejecting the
severity of serialism and the aleatory approaches of Cage and his follow-
ers by writing music that was formally rigorous while readily graspable
by listeners. Celebrated and reviled, what became known as minimalism
engendered unique auditory possibilities that reflected the sociohistorical
context from which it emerged. 9
Before proceeding further, let me sketch out some of the theo-
retical issues that will inform my discussion of minimalism below. Lefeb
vre, we recall, imagines the rhythmanalyst listening to the everyday world
as an audience listens to a symphony. Although this comparison is meant
to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, it overlooks the mediating work
of music as an aesthetic form: what gets missed is the fact that one does
not actually listen to music as one listens to a street scene. Lefebvres ref-
erence to the symphony is especially telling, because the symphony has
long represented the epitome of Western art music, a tradition that has
privileged the formal contents of music above other aspects of auditory
experience. Rose Rosengard Subotnik labels this approach structural
listening, a method that concentrates attention primarily on the formal
relationships established over the course of a single composition (148).
The abstractions of form exist in a dialectical relationship with what she
calls medium, a historical parameter that entails the public domain of
sound and culture (149). Structural listening has consistently favored form
over medium and constitutes a truncated mode of listening that largely
effaces meaningful engagement with concrete sound: One is tempted,
Subotnik writes, to argue that structural listening makes more use of the
eyes than the ears. Certainly, to an important extent, structural listening
can take place in the mind through intelligent score-reading, without the
physical presence of an external sound-source (161). Severed from sound,
music becomes visual and typographic, as well as a rarefied art form that
can be truly understood only by an educated few.
The paradoxical possibility of listening to music in the
absence of its sound highlights the privileged status of form and structure
in determining the meanings attached to music. Since the seventeenth
century, the use of rhythm in Western art music has been closely tied to
the developmental and teleological protocols of tonality, the hierarchical
ordering of equally tempered tones based on eventual resolution to a stable
tonic. Tonality dominated composition until the emergence of atonality in
the early twentieth century, which also had the effect of fracturing previ-
ous arrangements of musical time into markedly discontinuous forms. In
postwar art music, these newer forms included what Jonathan Kramer
calls vertical time, which seems to unfold in an endless now that none-
theless feels like an instant (New Temporalities 549). Unlike teleologi-
cal forms that require building and releasing metrical, timbral, melodic,
and/or harmonic tension, music that uses vertical time creates a bounded
sound world that simply starts and ends (550). The listener accustomed
to tonality must either give up expectation[s] [of resolution] and enter the
vertical time of the compositionwhere expectation, implication, cause,
effect, antecedents, and consequents do not existor become bored (550).
In conceptual terms, vertical time can be understood as a simu-
lation of postmodern spatialization in a temporal medium (in fact, Kramer
cites Jamesons writings on postmodernism as a point of departure in his
longer study The Time of Music). Kramer illustrates this parallel by way
of a telling comparison worth quoting at length:
Listening to vertical musical time, then, can be like looking

at a piece of sculpture. When we view sculpture, we determine
for ourselves the pacing of our experience: we are free to walk
around the piece, view it from many angles, concentrate on
some details, see other details in relationship to each other,
step back and view the whole, see the relationship between the
piece and the space in which we see it, leave the room when
we wish, close our eyes and remember, and return for further
viewings. No one could claim that we have seen less than all of
the sculpture (though we may have missed some of its subtle-
ties), despite individual selectivity in the viewing process. For
each of us, the temporal sequence of viewing postures has been
unique. The time spent with the sculpture is structured time,
but the structure is placed there mainly by us, as influenced by

the piece, its environment, other spectators, and our own moods
and tastes. A vertical musical composition, similarly, simply is:
we can listen to it or ignore it. (551)
Constructing an extended metaphor that draws on the experience of view-

ing a sculpture, Kramer explains that vertical time is not devoid of time
but rather produces an experience of temporality untethered to teleologi-
cal timescales that places the listener in an extended present that, like
postmodern space, is simultaneously fragmented and homogenous.
As the most recognizable use of vertical time, minimalism
employed this structure to differentiate itself from its avant-garde prede-
cessors. While the exact definition of minimalism is a matter of ongoing
debate, it can be characterized, according to Timothy A. Johnson, by a
continuous formal structure, an even rhythmic texture and bright tone, a
simple harmonic palette, a lack of extended melodic lines, and repetitive
rhythmic pattern (751).10 Minimalism, in its strictest form, involves the
careful control and manipulation of sonic materials, which usually include
recognizably tonal chord structures. The treatment of these harmonies
differs, however, from earlier conventions: rejecting the relatively com-
pact timescales of tonality, minimalism involves the constant repetition
of metrical figures and tone patterns over long stretches of time. Changes
to these figures occur gradually through additive processes that slowly
alter various sonic details. While minimalism often features an energetic
and constant pulse, its pace of change can be glacial. For this reason, it
has been accused of inducing boredom and fatigue, but a more accurate
assessment would be that it elicits a fragmented auditory experience: it
may well be exhausting to listen to a piece that goes through only eleven
chords in the span of over an hour (as in Steve Reichs 1976 classic Music
for Eighteen Musicians), but once the listeners attention is fragmented into
shorter durations that no longer coincide with the pieces overall structure/
duration, other auditory experiences become possible.11
Robert Fink argues that what makes minimalism unique is its
severing of any analogical relationship between musical time and bodily
cycles and rhythms, an argument that readily recalls ideas first raised
in works by Lefebvre and Attali (the latter figures prominently in Finks
thinking). He explains:
Most goal-directed music in the Western tradition maintains a

basic phenomenological congruence with the way we perceive
quotidian bodily rhythms. The timescale of the individual (or

cumulative) arcs of tension and release in classically teleologi-
cal music is closely related to the timescale within which basic
drives like hunger and sexual desire manifest themselves to
consciousness [...]. [Minimalist pieces] create musical universes
in which tension and release are pursued on a scale that far
outstrips the ability of the individual human subject to imagine
a congruent bodily response. (44)
Carried along unaware, one only clicks in at a moment of

dramatic release; or one begins doggedly to follow a process
and then loses track because its progression is simply too slow
and regular. The actual experience of repetitive music is often
a series of fragmented tensionings and releases with (lets be
honest) periods of directionless ecstasyor wool-gatheringin
between. The shape of the piece no longer coincides with the
shape of the teleological mechanism as we experience it. (45)
In short, what minimalism reproduces and foregrounds is an experi-

ence of sound that corresponds to Harveys description of postmodern
space: it is both fragmented (the listener can only focus on snippets of
music rather than the whole duration of the piece) and homogenous (the
degree of listener attention varies, but the overall texture and sound of
the music stays relatively static). Unlike those who denigrate minimal-
ism as totalizing, static, and repetitive, Fink argues that it demonstrates
what he suggestively calls recombinant teleology, the fragmentation of
musical time into intermediate timescalesshort and uneven phrases,
incomplete tension-release arcs, sudden climaxes, and so onthat are not
coordinated into a larger whole.
In pursuing this line of argument, Finks stated purpose is to
offer an alternative to overly pessimistic (and even apocalyptic) accounts
of minimalism by showing how its treatment of time and rhythm reveals
structures of desire that operate in postmodern society and culture. Mini-
malism thus emerges as a hermeneutic for late capitalism. My examination
of Nixon in China follows a related trajectory, but unlike Finks somewhat
celebratory approach, I am concerned with how minimalism enables us to
analyze Cold War culture in ways that foreground the ethical and politi-
cal dimensions of this global conflict. As I suggest below, Adamss opera
can be read as an Orientalist work that reproduces aspects of American
imperialism. But in contrast to critiques of Orientalism that assume an

objective standpoint from which to render judgment, a position that could
conceivably be occupied by an expert (and politically engaged) rhythm-
analyst, my goal is to consider how sound might shape notions of politi-
cal temporality and its spatial forms. What follows, then, is not exactly a
rhythmanalysis but a more modest reading of a specific moment in Cold
War culture that examines how a musical work engages with the limits
of its own ideological parameters.
Nature vs. Revolution
If the emergence of minimalism was closely tied to postwar

capitalism, then we might add that this was precisely the social order that
the United States and its allies sought to entrench, protect, and expand
through military and other means. The spatial imaginary that underlay
these actions drew on a much older colonial episteme structured on the
binary division between the West and its Others.12 The case of China aptly
illustrates this genealogical relationship. After the 1949 revolution, writes
Jodi Kim, Red China emerged as a monstrous merger or marriage of
the historical yellow peril and the red menace, effectively recycl[ing]
tropes of American Orientalism (7273). The shock of losing China to
communism momentarily displaced other fantasies of China as the fabled
open door for the Wests market interests, which nevertheless remained
sublimated in American cultural and political consciousness (64).13
In light of this background, President Richard Nixons visit
to China in 1972 was a historic turning point that prompted a geopoliti-
cal realignment and subsequently rekindled fantasies about China as a
market. During the 1980s, Chinas reintegration into the global economy
unfolded along with the gradual relaxation of Cold War tensions around
the world even as spatial divisions between communism and capitalism
remained in place. Nixon in China registers the anxieties generated by
these changes by revisiting Nixons journey in a recognizably minimalist
musical idiom that deploys signature compositional techniques such as
extended timescales, constant rhythms, and tonal harmonic structures.14
Created in cooperation with director Peter Sellars and libret-
tist Alice Goodman, Nixon is divided into three acts. Act 1 opens with the
arrival of the presidential party in Peking (the spectacle of a full-sized
replica of Air Force One landing on stage is one of the operas most memo-
rable moments), Nixons meeting with Chairman Mao, and the welcome
banquet held later that day.15 The second act consists of two scenes. The
first follows Pat Nixon on various goodwill visits, while the second features
a performance of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women
hosted by Maos wife, Chiang Ching. Act 3 is set during the Nixons last
night in Peking and consists of a single long scene comprising separate
private conversations between each leader and his respective spouse and
Premier Chou En-lais solo reflections. The organization of the plot pro-
duces an inverted sense of momentum as the excitement of the first two
acts gives way to the melancholy and introspection of the final act.
As perhaps the most widely performed minimalist work in the
operatic repertoire, Nixon has elicited responses that mirror minimal-
isms mixed reception more generally. Disparaging critics dubbed it the
first cnn opera and dismissed it as a flawed and pretentious project. The
clearly irritated reviewer from the New York Times wrote, Mr. Adams
does for the arpeggio what McDonalds did for the hamburger (Henahan).
Scholarly accounts of the opera tend to situate its significance in relation
to the overall trends of postmodern culture.16 In a virtuoso analysis that
extends the implications of this approach, Peggy Kamuf argues that Nixon
deconstructs the ontology of the historical event as such by undermining
the distinction between an originary event and its technological repro-
ductions.17 In the age of satellite communications, the live transmission
of events subverts the distinction between the first time and its countless
repetitions (Kamuf 94) by uncover[ing] the interval of reproducibility
within the simul-, the same moment and the same event (99). This para-
doxical interval installs repetition [...] at the beginning or the center of
the event, which does not so much unfold as continue to fold back on itself,
as if it were on a continuous playback loop (94). For Kamuf, the operas
deconstruction of origins ultimately destabilizes its geopolitical frame-
work by undermining the distinction between East and West, revealing it
to be an effect of a hypermediatized culture.
While Kamufs reading offers a brilliant account of Nixons
participation in the postmodern episteme, it ends up underplaying what
can only be described as the operas blatant Orientalism. Nixon readily
recalls a tradition exemplified by classics such as Madame Butterfly and
Turandot, works in which the East is rendered into a spectacle through
a process indicative of the Wests will to knowledge and power.18 In the
opening scene, Nixon compares himself to our Apollo astronauts and
describes his journey in historic terms: The Eastern Hemisphere/ Beck-
oned to us, and we have flown/ East of the sun, west of the moon/ Across
an ocean of distrust/ Filled with the bodies of our lost.19 Sellars makes
no secret of the operas American perspective, with all its attendant limi-
tations: What the opera finally gets to the point of is that all night long
you have had this illusion that you understand Chinahere we are, its an
open book etc.then the second act begins to imply with Pat [Nixon] that
there are certain things that she will never know. [...] Because the opera
is written for Americans by Americans we are busy identifying with the
Nixons, which is ironic (14).
Instead of concentrating my critique on the operas Orientalism,
however, I would like to consider how Nixons minimalist aesthetic, espe-
cially regarding its treatment of time, works alongside (and sometimes in
conflict with) its subject matter and narrative content. Running at around
three hours (with some noticeably slow scenes), the extended timescales
of minimalism are readily palpable in the rhythmic textures of the music.
But instead of effecting the collapse of temporal order described by Kamuf
or the infinite spatialization of time posited by other critics, Nixon might
be described as an extended duration in which a rich set of sonic materi-
als operates: chords change, different instrumental sounds are featured
in turn, meters speed up and slow down, and the beat/pulse is heard in
varying degrees of intensity. Unlike strict minimalist works, the opera
does not proceed as a homogenous texture but rather moves between dif-
ferent parts while extensively employing minimalist procedures. It is, in
other words, at once dramatic (its sounds are constantly changing) and
static (due to its use of minimalist techniques), thereby providing a vivid
illustration of Finks concept of recombinant teleology. Even though its
narrative premises can be characterized as Orientalist, its sonic content is
noticeably devoid of anything recognizably Chinese, a point that extends
even to the reenactment of Red Detachment, since Adams does not try at
all to reproduce the original ballet score. Nixons political import, then,
does not inhere in a flawed attempt to convey China mimetically as an
object of sonic representation but rather in how it engages the Cold War
global imaginary through its treatment of rhythm and time.
To elaborate this point, let me turn to a key scene in act 1, in
which we witness the meeting between Nixon and Mao. An encounter of
ideologies as well as personalities, it shows an earnest Nixon being repeat-
edly outwitted by an unpredictable but commanding Mao. The orchestra
provides a continuous sonic background, usually featuring a prominent
pulse and varying degrees of harmonic tension and dissonance. The char-
acters frequently repeat their lines and sing over each other, producing
a complex rhythmic bundle that challenges the attention of audiences.

The ailing Mao is vocally supported by a chorus of three female secretar-
ies who act like backup singers and repeat many of his lines. (Adams has
referred to the secretaries as the Maoettes.) Singing, for the most part,
several beats behind him, their parts consist largely of drawn-out chords
and ostinatos that provide a contrast to Maos energetic tenor line.
This polyphonic and polyrhythmic texture conveys the dif-
ficulty of communication and stands as an allegory of the divisions that
separate the two nations and their leaders. For the audience, the spectacle
of these misunderstandings and differences playing out on stage produces
the effect of observing a seemingly static map of cultural and ideological
differences. 20 Particularly important moments in the dialogue, however,
are signaled by a shift in sonic texture as various vocal lines settle into
a coherent conversation. In one such moment, the music slows down
considerably as Chou, singing by himself, poses a riddle to his visitors:
Chou: Youve said

That theres a certain well-known tree
That grows from nothing in a day,
Lives only as a sapling, dies
Just at its prime, when good men raise
It as their idol.
Nixon: Not the cross?
Mao: The Liberty Tree. Let it pass
It was a riddle, not a test.
The revolution does not last.
It is durationthe regime
Survives in that and not in time.
While it is young in us it lives;
We can save it, it never saves.
Catching his guests off guard, Mao brings up the doctrine of continuous
revolution, the assertion (made by the historical Mao) that socialism is an
extended stage in which class conflict persists and the restoration of capi-
talism is an imminent threat. Goodman reconfigures these claims into a
meditation on revolution and time. Declaring that the revolution does not
last, Mao insists that it inheres in duration, which arrests and stands
outside the movement of time. Dramatically halting the pulse-driven
music, the word duration is sung as a coloratura passage without orches-
tral accompaniment (the syllable tion is held for several seconds before the
orchestra resumes). Mao insists that his regimes survival depends on its
revolutionary fervor, for only this can exempt it from the corrosive effects
of time. (Goodman is also alluding to the violent attacks that were waged
on the state during the Cultural Revolution in the name of preserving the
revolution.) But Maos zeal starts to fade as he discusses the topic of youth
and draws attention to his advanced age and ill health. The libretto turns to
what Lefebvre would call a natural cyclical temporality and gestures back
to Chous riddle about a trees life cycle (as we will see, natural rhythms
play a key role in Nixons reimagination of Cold War geopolitics).
The rather abstract character of this exchange stands in con-
trast to a sharp moment of disagreement that takes place later as Nixon
unwittingly articulates Maos dystopic scenario of capitalist restoration:
Nixon: Think of what we have lost and gained

Since forty-nine.
Chou: The current trend
Suggests that Chinas future might
Nixon: Might break the Futures Market.
Mao: That
Would be a break. No doubt our plunge
Into the New York Stock Exchange
Will line some pockets here and there.
Goodmans clever wordplay articulates the Western fantasy that China

might leave communism behind and rejoin the world market, a fate that
Mao clearly finds abhorrent. In another moment of word painting, his vocal
line includes a sharp octave leap during the word break, whose double
meaningto rupture as well as to enter (to break into the market)can
be extended to describe the auditory experience of a momentary break
that immediately gives way to the churning pulse. Maos proclivity for
interruption reinforces his characterization as an aging enfant terrible
whose outbursts turn out to be ephemeral and quickly reabsorbed into
the larger soundscape.
When Nixon presses forward with his vision of Chinas return
to world marketshe complains, You dont want China to be richMao
turns the tables with a lecture on Western imperialism. He accuses his
guests of wanting to crucify China on the cross of usury and declares:
The people are determined to

Divide the land to make it whole.
Piecing the Golden Bowl.

The world to come has come, is theirs.
We cried Long live the Ancestors!
Once, its Long live the Living now.
Maos invocation of the people, the idealized collective subject of revo-

lutionary practice, reconnects with his earlier thoughts on history and
duration. Pointing to land reform that had taken place years earlier, he
insists that a utopian social order has been actualized in the ongoing
revolutionary present. The first three lines are sung in a high tenor line
against a dissonant harmonic background, but this tension recedes as Mao
sings the next lines in a more relaxed pulse, as the harmony moves seam-
lessly between two closely related triads (B minor and G major) that soon
sound like extensions of each other. As the last three lines are repeated
at length by Mao and his secretaries, the music sounds very much like a
minimalist pulse pattern and creates the feeling of an extended present
that in turn reinforces the librettos description of socialism. Nixon tries
to interject by singing, History holds her breath, but these words, which
might suggest the interruption or suspension of its surrounding rhythms,
are quickly covered over by Chou, who repeats Maos line The people are
determined to divide the land to make it whole. The antithetical pairing
of division and wholeness describes the rhythmic texture of the scene as
extended repetitive patterns alternate with brief moments of rupture as if
to mirror the leaders arguments over models of world history. 21
I want to suggest that the importance of Adamss music lies not
in its mimetic or illustrative relationship to the libretto (in its attempts at
word painting) but rather in how it actualizes in sonic form the political
claims made by the various characters and their temporal implications.
If Goodmans libretto, assembled out of textual fragments drawn from
historical documents and sources related to Nixons historical visit, tries
to figure out what happened during that event, then Adamss music
supports this endeavor by using a compositional idiom whose treatment
of time and rhythm enables him to imagine and articulate a set of claims
about geopolitics and world history.
The stakes as well as limits of this project become more pro-
nounced in the final act, which returns to the topic of natural rhythms in
order to envision the end of Chinas revolutionary epoch. As the characters
retreat into isolated conversations, the Nixons and the Maos seem stuck
in memories of their youths. Only Chou stays engaged with the present
(Kissinger ignobly exits early on in the scene in search of a toilet), but

unlike Chiang Chings determined assertion that [t]he revolution must
not end or the confidence he demonstrated in the first act, his lines are
marked by fatalism and nihilism: We fight, we die./ And if we do not fight
we die [...]. And to what end?
In the last moments of the opera, Chou articulates the uncertain
prospects of the revolution:
I am old and I cannot sleep

Forever, like the young, nor hope
That death will be a novelty.
But endless wakefulness when I
put down my work and go to bed.
How much of what we did was good?
Everything seems to move beyond
Our remedy. Come, heal this wound.
At this hour nothing can be done.
Just before dawn the birds begin,
The warblers who prefer the dark,
The cage-birds answering. To work!
Outside this room the chill of grace
Lies heavy on the morning grass.
Chou returns to the cyclical rhythms of nature as his aging body vis-
cerally evokes the limitations of human agency and, by extension, the
prospects of the revolution to which he has devoted his life. He draws a
stark contrast between his dwindling days and the ongoing movements of
time. Predawn bird calls and morning frost herald the renewing promise
of cyclical rhythms but serve only to further highlight the powerlessness
of the revolutions leaders. Chou thus diverges from Maos conception of
revolution as eternal duration and draws our attention to another mean-
ing of revolution, one that recalls its etymological relationship (in Eng-
lish) with the revolving rhythms of time. 22 Unlike the driving pulse that
has permeated most of the opera, the final moments are sung to chords
that shift very slowly (the orchestration combines long-held chords with
occasional repetitive patterns and solo lines in a much subdued pulse).
The harmony does not resolve in any recognizable manner, but the slow
tempo and overall feeling of stasis draws the opera to an end.
By giving Chou the last word, the opera confirms his role as the
wise baritone tasked with delivering the truth. But what truth is being
conveyed here? What does the interplay of Nixons formal elements and
sonic materials reveal about its relationship to the sociohistorical context
in which it emerged? If the final scene suggests the physical as well as
intellectual exhaustion of the Chinese revolution and its leaders, Adamss
music appears to reinforce this message by offering a glacial soundscape
that conveys the dissipation of the rhythmic energy that has driven much
of the opera. As a political allegory that goes much beyond the detente that
the historical Nixon envisioned, the finale naturalizes the end of revolu-
tion through its subordination to the rhythms of nature. Although Nixon
himself was hardly a symbol of vitality or integrity in American politics
(Watergate was still very much on the minds of Nixons creators), the opera
does not, in the end, undermine the legitimacy of the United States in a
comparable manner. Instead, Chous appeal to cyclical rhythms seems to
herald the end of ideological conflict, a sort of postCold War triumphalism
avant la lettre that foreshadows claims about the end of history that would
become widespread after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We might understand this conclusion as an illustration of
Attalis claim that music possesses a prophetic character that enables it
to articulate social structures before their actualization. Conversely, we
might conclude that Nixon is complicit in American triumphalism and
stands, despite the political sympathies of its creators, as an articulation
of imperialism and nationalism. Both conclusions, however, impose a
measure of semiotic closure that misses the ambivalence generated by the
operas use of sound and rhythm, which constantly fragments the audi-
tory experience of time in ways that undermine expectations of formal
or narrative closure stemming from the operas ideological and thematic
materials. Relying on a musical aesthetic that emphasizes the disjunc-
ture between auditory experience and teleological forms, Nixon exploits
this gap to convey the unraveling of ideological narratives that became
entrenchedthat is, spatializedduring the Cold War. In doing so, it dis-
closes the uncertainty of a historical moment in which political conditions
around the world were shifting, even as the dominant geopolitical imagi-
nary remained in place. We are listening, in other words, to the cusp of an
epochal change, to a hypothetical future that can only be intuited by the
dissolution of available timescales. The opera asks what might lie outside
these temporal frameworks, a question it cannot concretely answer except
to posit the continuation of rhythm itself, which persists in the background
until it is barely audible.
I am very grateful to Rey Chow and James Steintrager for their editorial patience and gen-
erous suggestions, as well as to Mary Chapman for commenting on an earlier draft of this
essay. This essay is dedicated to an exemplary teacher, Rose Rosengard Subotnik.
christopher lee is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Principal of St. Johns
College at the University of British Columbia. He is author of The Semblance of Identity:
Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (forthcoming from Stanford University
Press) and articles on Asian diaspora literatures and cultures. His current research focuses
on transpacific literary formalisms during the Cold War.
Notes 1 For a fascinating account of how 7 I am not thinking here of the

this spatial imaginary emerged vulgar dismissal of avant-garde
in the United States in the early music as noise but rather of the
years of the Cold War, see Farish. ways in which increasingly com-
plex musical forms resulted in
2 Perhaps the most common under- works that were increasingly
standing of rhythm has to do with difficult to grasp in their aural
matters of beat. In musical forms, a problem that Theodor
practice, notes Mowitt, rhythm Adorno famously diagnosed in
is formed in relation to a pulse relation to twelve-tone music in
that is executed at a certain rate his 1947 Philosophy of New Music.
of speed and that is organized by To be sure, this problem of acces-
groupings that exhibit a conspicu- sibility also indicates the distance
ousone might also say mea- between a large portion of con-
suredregularity. The events that temporary art music and musi-
order the pulse are beats, and the cal audiences, a large topic that
iterative pattern that they form is cannot be addressed here.
the beat (25).
8 Cage recalls visiting an anechoic
3 See Harootunian for an extended chamber, in which all sounds
discussion of this theme in are extracted, and hearing
Lefebvres work. two inescapable sounds that
he later learned were rhythms
4 Elements takes a somewhat that emanated from his nervous
unorthodox approach to the use and blood systems. Pace Lefeb-
of italics and bold text. I have vre, this anecdote confirms the
reproduced Lefebvres formatting inescapability of rhythm in any
here. place experienced by a listening
subject.
5 Although Attalis account tends
to be somewhat reductionistic 9 For historical and critical
as he emphasizes these correla- accounts of minimalism, see
tions, his central argument is that Mertens, Strickland, and, more
music has a prophetic function recently, Fink.
that enables it to articulate socio-
economic structures that have 10 See Gann for a related descrip-
yet to materialize. I will return to tion of minimalism. The follow-
this point at the end of this essay. ing description of minimalism
is meant to sketch its prototypi-
6 Due to constraints of space, cal form even though the actual
the following discussion of the application of these principles
postwar musical avant-garde is involves much variation.
meant to be schematic rather than
comprehensive.
11 Some of Steve Reichs early works 16 In a nuanced study that neverthe-

pare away particulars such as less bears a certain affinity to
timbre, tone, or harmony to focus negative responses to postmodern
primarily on time and rhythm. culture in general, David Schwarz
For example, his 1971 piece Drum- describes Adamss music as a
ming explores rhythmic patterns sonorous envelope in which
and phrasing in a work written familiar harmonic conventions
for a large percussion ensemble. are quoted but not integrated into
His 1972 classic Clapping Music any single compositional cohe-
reduces the instrumentation to sion (113). Schwarz is referring
two performers who clap through here to Adamss use of harmonic
a series of intricate rhythmic figures such as simple triads and
patterns. seventh chords without linking
them according to the rules of
12 An alternative model of Cold tonality. Instead of proceeding
War politics divides the globe teleologically toward a tonic,
into three worlds: the capital- Adams often rotates among a set
ist nations as the first world, the of chords that usually share at
socialist bloc as the second world, least one common tone without
and the decolonizing nations as a clear end point. Schwarz cor-
the third. While this approach relates the music to what he con-
foregrounds the importance of siders the spatial structure of the
decolonization during this period, plot and libretto; it is paratactic,
it replicates the spatial logic of the two-dimensional, a space (neces-
dominant geopolitical imaginary. sarily presented as a linear series
Recognizing that the Cold War of events) upon which diverse
world order was a continuation of elements are placed side-by-side
earlier imperialisms, Mao Zedong (109).
later proposed a countertheory of
three worlds in which the u.s. and 17 When Nixon steps off the stairs of
the u.s.s.r. together formed the his plane and shakes hands with
first world while the second world Chou En-lai, the two men pause
was composed of their allies in for a moment and reenact the
Europe as well as Japan, Canada, famous photograph of the his-
and Australia. By aligning China torical meeting of the two lead-
with the third world, the decolo- ers in 1972. In acts 1 and 2, the
nizing nations of Asia, Africa, and onstage presence of cameramen
Latin America, he tried to stake a reinforces the fact that Nixons
leadership role in the worldwide visit was consciously staged as a
struggle for decolonization. media event (in a recent original
production staged in Vancouver,
13 See Kim for an extended discus-
video footage from act 1 is played
sion of the contradictory ways in
in the background during the
which China was conceptualized
more introspective act 3). Nixons
during the Cold War.
famous disdain of the news media
14 Adams is one of the most promi- is also repeatedly thematized in
nent minimalist composers even the libretto.
though his work often avoids
strict adherence to its procedures. 18 In Nixon, bright costumes and
ancient practices have been
15 All Chinese names and places in replaced by the drab fashions
the opera are rendered according and (no less) exotic political ritu-
to the Wade-Giles romanization als of socialist China. The opera
system, and these spellings are presents China as a thoroughly
retained here. politicized society characterized
by conformity and repression. partially drawn from the piano

Ensemble choruses are often reduction score.
rhythmically rigid and melodi-
cally static, consisting of closely 20 I thank Glenn Deer for this
voiced chords that sound like a observation.
constant ostinato. Since perfor-
21 Or perhaps the other way around,
mances of Nixon feature over-
since Goodman wrote the libretto
whelmingly white casts (and, for
before handing it over to Adams,
obvious reasons, have never been
who only requested minor
staged in China), they also partic-
changes to make the words fit the
ipate in the tradition of theatrical
vocal line more seamlessly.
yellowface.
22 There is almost no Chinese in this
19 The published version of Good-
opera; the element of translation
mans libretto is not paginated.
that was so central to Nixons his-
Much of the libretto was assem-
torical visit has been completely
bled with quotations from various
erased. In a literal sense, then,
historical materials, which she
the opera fails to recognize the
turned into a text that consists
very cultural barriers it posits,
mostly of rhyming couplets.
rendering China into a creation of
My comments on the music are
the American imagination.
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Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004.
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eugenie brinkema
with composition by Evan Johnson
Critique of Silence
The regime of silence draws to itself the puzzlement of silence,

failures of or lesions in silence, even encompasses the radical impossibility
of silence. The regime of near-inaudibility is another matter altogether.
Suspended at the limit of what is called silence is every manner
of rustle refuting the possibility of the total absence of sound: murmurs
and husks and hums and hiss, these whistles and ticks, the breezes and
whines of the machinery of the body that, at least since John Cage, are a
version of the law offered in his 45 for a Speaker: There is no such thing
as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound (191). The
busy body always fails silence, as in the oft-repeated story of Cage in the
anechoic chamber, hearing not a radical absence of sound but the rushing
churn of his blood and central nervous system; the resultant composi-
tion, his famous 433, was meant to form a frame around this infinity of
possible present contingent sounds.1 The regime of silence comfortably
absorbs this gesture of the bodys noisy too-muchness as the negation of
its sonic system. Even if silence is figured as impossible to reach in a state
of absolute purity, or an ever receding horizon, as Susan Sontag frames

212 Critique of Silence
it in The Aesthetics of Silence (a true frame: both enclosure and snare),

the regime of silence places approaches toward silence ever in relation to
that horizon, as vectors that can be defined as with, or against, its (with
apologies to Stephen Dedalus) soundlessnessnessness.
Determined by the difference marked at its instant of failure,
the regime of silence imagines its object as what noise interrupts or pre-
cludes or is not. The absence of sound is thus given a specific epistemo-
logical and aesthetic disputative form. Sontag defines this relationship
explicitly: Silence never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend
on its presence [...]. [T]he artist who creates silence or emptiness must
produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a
resonating or eloquent silence (11). The Derridean version of this claim
would be that silence constitutes a possible/impossible aporiathe condi-
tion of possibility for a pure state of silence is the interrupting noise that
retroactively marks where such a condition was constituted only as it is
destroyed and after it has come to an end. Tellingly in a context of the
difficult phrase my death, one that speaks a state of imagined silence
of being, Derrida writes that this syntagm relates the possible to the
impossible[...] flashing like a sort of indicator-light (a light at a border)
installed at a customs booth, between all the borders (Aporias 23). The
border of silence/negation of silence relates each to the other, refers the
possibility of each to each other, but that bar of referral is one that simul-
taneously marks violence and destruction as the necessary condition for
the positing of the other. The collective possibilities that break into silence
are the singular condition of possibility for silence as such; it is therefore
the case that the impossibility of silence and the regime of silence are
one and the same thing.
The void of silence is a plenitude; its other is contained within
it in a future anterior tense: this silence is what will have been destroyed,
or what is not able to take place but might at some other point. This is why
a profusion of discourses can refer to the sound(s) of silence; speaking
through silence; and iterations of the canard that silence says more than
words. If Simon and Garfunkels Hello darkness, my old friend will not
do, there is always John Keatss Though still unravishd bride of quiet-
ness,/ Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,/ Sylvan historian, who
canst thus express/ A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme. The
folk musicians and poet share this form of silence with the philosopher:
for Heidegger, Dasein is constantly listening but also refraining: Dasein
hears, because it understands (206). The twin of hearing is Schweigen
(keeping quiet/being silent) and the more performative Erschweigen (a

telling silence); Heideggers allowance that literal keeping silence can still
speak is of a piece with Cages refusal of silence altogether. Keeping silent
is another essential possibility of discourse, Heidegger writes. In talk-
ing with one another, the person who keeps silent can make one under-
stand (that is, he can develop an understanding) and he can do so more
authentically than the person who is never short of words (208). Likewise,
later in Sein und Zeit, Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the
mode of keeping silent, forcing Dasein into the reticence of itself (318).
Given all this, Christopher Fynsk writes that for Heidegger, Silence is the
mode of genuine disclosure (42). (Heideggers thought on the matter no
doubt was influenced by Max Picards 1948 formulation that the word not
only brings the things out of silence; it also produces the silence in which
they can disappear again [141].) The formulations above amount to the
same claim. The regime of silence encompasses this totalizing gesture:
noise and silence are reversibleit is the other in itself to which the one
is always addressed.
Like Friedrich Nietzsches fear of the embroilment of lan-
guageI am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have
faith in grammar (Twilight 170)my concern is that with each posited
venture (There is no such thing as silence), silence returns to the language
of being that precludes a serious consideration of a regime of near inau-
dibility. My argument is that, while the regime of silence is linked to a
dialectic of being and nothingness, plenitude and finitude, the fullness of
meaning or the ground of nonmeaning from which meaning is drawn, by
contrast, a form that commits to near inaudibility is linked to a separate
set of conceptual and aesthetic terms: pressure, tension, intensity, and
force. Silence and near inaudibility pose entirely different formal problems
and set in motion opposing formal gestures; the former concretizes the
discourse of silence into a concern with being, while the latter concerns
itself with formal gradations of intensities and with duration. And finally,
each regime also contains within itself a theory of violence. The specula-
tive gesture in this article is that, for the regime of silence, the central-
ity of the language of being (and the orientation toward an ideal state of
pure, absolute silence) leads to the fantasy of beings elimination; I argue
that near inaudibility, on the other hand, is linked to a formal violence
that imprints its force on and as an effect of tension in form. Following
an evocative figuration from Jean-Luc Nancy, which I discuss later, near
inaudibility or the form of radical quiet, as opposed to tarrying with the
language of presence and absence, is rather suspended on the limit of its

own presentation (Presence 383).
Cages statement of negation, There is no such thing as silence,
is simultaneously one of affirmationof unintentional, contingent sounds;
indeterminate sounds; the aural cacophonies of the performance space;
the turning of pages; the whispering, doubting irritation of the audience
in other words, the totality of the otherwise excluded residue and sonic
detritus marshaled and disavowed by traditional notated composition.
Everythingintended and contingentis therefore sound and is therefore
music. Sonic context becomes sonic text; the environment itself becomes
musical material. (Inheritors of this tradition have taken this interest in
extraordinarily interesting directions, preeminent among them works by
members of the Wandelweiser Group. In Kunsu Shims 1994 expanding
space in limited time, the bow of the violin may move only inches over
a duration of five minutes. 2 Among the more whimsical descendants of
Cages polemic is Clarence Barlows 1972 Stochroma, the score of which
consists of hundreds of pages of computer code, written in fortran, pro-
ducing random combinations of piano notes; between event 4 and event
5 is a rest of the duration 2 52 seconds, which amounts to 109 billion years
and change. The sheer impossibility of performing the piece, of which
duration is only one problem, constitutes an orientation in relation to the
regime of silence and absence, but an admittedly novel one. 3) The target of
Cages dispute was the notion that unintended, unnotated sounds should
be excluded by the parameters of the notated score; in Silence, he frames
it as the realization that sounds occur whether intended or notfor the
artist, a fearlessness comes from turning in the direction of those he does
not intend (Experimental 8). A cinematic articulation of this claim,
which replaces Cages polemikos with fidelitas, is the nearly three-hour
Die groe Stille [Into Great Silence] (2005), Philip Grnings documentary
about the Grande Chartreuse monastery, in which, despite a praxis of
silence on the part of devout beings, the world is noisy with details: ticking
clocks, the rhythmic reediness of woodwork, pulsing snips and clips of
scissors. If silence is gro, it is because it is an impossible frontier whose
presence is marked by its failure to be present in the film. In its absence,
silence remains virtual and therefore remains possible. The form of this
pronouncement of plenitude in sound against which some negative is
measured is epitomized in Edmund Burkes broadest sweep from On the
Sublime: All general privations are great, because they are terrible; Vacu-
ity, Darkness, Solitude, and Silence (113). The regime of silence provides
that silence is great because its affirmative form is these terrible priva-
tions (every nothingness) and it is great because of its certain failure: its
nonappearance is precisely what preserves its ideality.
Cages polemic and the silent piece 433 require the retroac-
tive definition of silence as the radical absence of sound; the total pres-
ence of sonic possibility embraced in the negative claim defines itself
against and in relation to a silence that is nothing more than a zero point,
a pure state of nothingness, an imaginary origin. 4 Cages very denial of
the absence of sound is inescapably bound to the phantasmatic state of
silence that renews hope for silence even as it negates it. This paradox
is discernible in a contemporary profusion of manifestos for silence and
naive phenomenologies of the search for a state of true silence; while
they have a predecessor in modernitys anxieties about the terrible din of
the cities, such tracts are now particularly visible as part of a post9/11
zeitgeist. 5 These texts repeatedly discover this radical failure in the quest
for an absolute state of silenceand silence is always a questagainst
which those failures are measured but for which those failures require,
parasitically, that pure state as ideal; they, however, tend to nostalgically
introject or mourn that failure as loss instead of affirming its generative
aesthetic potential.
This eschatological languagethat silence is now no longer pos-
sibleis a familiar trope in the treatment of modern music at least since
Theodor Adornos dour claim that [m]odern music sees absolute oblivion as
its goal (133). Edward Said, reading this line of musical criticism, writes:
So powerful is musics alienation from society, so difficult and esoteric is
its technique, so heedless has it become of anything resembling an audi-
ence, that its reverse course towards silence becomes its raison dtre, its
final cadence (10). This language of a reverse course towards silence is
symptomatic of this broader figuration of silence as destination or end and
each course toward it as ineluctable. For Adorno, this ever-certain approach
suggests an extinction, a turning away in the nothingness of silence that
is a historical telos but also an aesthetic state of absolute oblivion. For
Said, [T]he precariousness and vulnerability to silence, an arc of sound
emanating from and then returning to silence, suggests that music as such
is a silent art; it does not speak the denotative language of words (11).
Both ground and end of musical possibility, then, silence is figured as the
alpha and omega, contingency and destiny, fullness and nothingness of the
sonic itself. Put another way, silence is taken as constituting a pure end.
Perhaps this is why a critique of silence is necessary: The task of a critique
of silence can be summarized as that of expounding its relation tobut,

precisely, to what? For silence, as defined by the regime that figures it as
absence against presence, would seem precisely to constitute that which it
might have a relation toethics, aesthetics, even politicsas coming after
it, as breaking or puncturing it. Silence, perhaps, can have no relation at
all from within a regime that posits it as the a priori, as what is, in the
beginning. That it is the figure of silence that should be deployed for this
metaphysical bind is appropriate: everything and nothing, it constitutes
the fecundity and simultaneous annihilation of the sonic.
The form of Cages famous declarative is a denegation, a nega-
tion of the negation that silence stands for: the limits of language and
comprehension; ethical impossibility; the void of being; nothingness;
absence of sound; all that is suggested in Franois Andrieus fourteenth-
century ballade Armes, amours / O flour, on the death of Machaut. In
the phrase la mort Machaut, le noble retorique, at the word mort and
after the name of the dead, each time there is a pause, a notated silence to
denote where beings voice should have been but is now and forever more
missing: []. 6 This link between silence and the unspeakable, unknow-
able, unsayable is why criticism regularly makes connections between
silence and monochromatic paintings, themselves supposed (problem-
atically) to say nothing or offer up only their absent meaning.7 Likewise,
the dialectical relationship between absence and presence inscribed onto
silence is also why it is not difficult to locate criticism that makes claims
for a profusion of speech in modernist writing as itself a form of silence. 8
Despite efforts to pluralize its violation, proffer many silences, however,
the target silence, either affirmed, yearned for, or negated, is continu-
ally made singularit remains, above all, a metafigure of repression, the
battery of the un-: the unspoken, unspeakable, unvoiced, unthought. In
its singular form, it even stands for supreme ethical and historical fail-
ureas in the phrases, analyzed at length for a time, de Mans silence,
Heideggers silence. Whether the unthought of a discourse or a silence
that speaks in and as silence, silence cannot avoid giving voice, cannot fail
to noisily articulate itself as plenitude or finitude. It goes. Without saying.
It performs the obviousness of its status as negation. The regime of silence
pivots on this pull toward the zero point of sound and meaning, draining
like Artauds No works, no language, no words, no mind, nothing. Nothing
but a fine Nerve Metre (86).
This broader tendency of discourses of silence is thus not
limited to composition or to musicologists; the regime of silence also
offers enargeia to metaphysics language of presence and absence. (As

one theorist asks, [W]ho among the successors of Hegel has not made
silence into the supreme philosophical theme? [Fenves 279].) Too much
is written of silenceand each time, a performance of the first interdic-
tion of silence: that to speak it is to destroy the object about which one
speaks. Critical theorys breaking of silence that orients itself in rela-
tion to silencethis reversal of silence such that it founds, punctuates,
reveals, and also speaksnot only reduces the category of not-silent to a
discursive/linguistic one (making of all instances of nonsilence spoken
or communicative ones), it also each time figures silence in relation to
an absolute or pure silence, a silence of the dyad meaning/nonmeaning.
Even for a thinker like Gilles Deleuze, from whom one would expect a
noisy, affective plurality of near silences that do not figure themselves in
relation to a void, his silence is simple, it is absolute, and it is flat. Writ-
ing of the possibilities of the stutter, of a silence in words, Deleuze says:
When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or
stammer[...] then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks
its outside and makes it confront silence. [...] [L]anguage in its entirety
is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent (113). Whether it is
language or silence, silence or voicing that remains pure while the other
is degraded does not matter; each orients itself in relation to the ideality
of the other, and both the failure of silence and the possibility of silence
remain within a regime marked by stillness and limit.
There is a collusion between this tendency in critical theory
and musicological discourse, which likewise does not quite know what to
do with silence except invoke it as both a presence and absence: one that
noisily announces while simultaneously being marked by abstention. In
an article on the relationship between modernism and silence, musicolo-
gist David Metzer considers the fecundity of silences expressive potential;
however, his argument requires and exploits a stunning idealism of the
target of his analysis: A state, as used here, is a sonic and/or conceptual
ideal to which a work aspires. Silence is one such ideal, as are purity,
complexity, and the fragmentary. Works aim to achieve a state by having
the musical language emulate qualities of a condition; for example, having
music become pure or approach silence (333). This formulation obliterates
any attempt to think near inaudibility except by subsuming it to silence;
figuring the near as an approach toward a pure form of silence, it colludes
to a transparent degree with the metaphysical language that haunts the
regime of silence. Metzer thus calls silence the ideal of nothingness
(334). The various forms Metzer identifies in his reading of Anton Webern,
Luigi Nono, and Salvatore Sciarrino include an ideal (that of absence),
symbol (of mystery and death, for instance), a sensation (unease, tran-
quility), or even [...] a sound (stillness) (334). Even when Metzer turns
to quiet (a prominent feature of Nonos musical material, in particular),
he writes of it in relation to the nothingness of absolute silence: unlike
other artists, he posits, in the case of silence, musicians have access to
the real thing, the patches of quiet gapped in rests and pauses. Noting
that his chosen composers rarely deploy this real thing, he speculates
that they instead rely on musical means of evoking quiet, a paradox of
having something convey nothing (334). The possibility that that some-
thing conveys not silences nothing but affirms that something as such
does not enter Metzers argument. While I appreciate Metzers linking
of duration to silence (writing of brevity and the fragmentary), it is the
rigid orientation toward silence that deprives those aesthetic concerns of
the power they might have as a resistance to the idealism of silence. The
plurality of aesthetic quietnesses he analyzes is all the more frustratingly
co-opted to the absolutism of the regime of silence. Mournings language
(loss, absence, nothingness, death) is fitting for the figuration of silence
as terminus, even if an impossible one.
Even at the farthest reaches of poststructuralist thought, one
entirely aware of the critique of metaphysics, silence remains an ideal-
ized figure, one taken for granted to tarry with discourses of presence and
absence; in turn, problematics of near inaudibility are subordinated to this
logic. Take the dogfight between Derrida and Foucault on the relation of
madness to reason; it is, at heart, a debate about the possibility of silent
silences. Foucaults methodological gambit at the beginning of Histoire de
la folie pivots, contra Cage, on a declaration of the affirmative possibility
of silence, one determined to be breakable, traceable, speakable: The
language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness,
has been established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried
to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that
silence (Madness xxi). By the later date of Histoire de la sexualit 1: La
volont de savoir, Foucault will pluralize that a silence, that that silence,
by writing, There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral
part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses (27). Fou-
caults definition of silence is as a reticence or hesitation in production:
the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that
is required between different speakers. Accordingly, he is resistant to
the notion that silence itself constitutes the absolute limit of discourse,
the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary. Rather, he
argues that silence functions alongside the things said, with them and
in relation to them within over-all strategies. [...] [W]e must try to deter-
mine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and
those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse
is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case (27).
Pluralizing silence retains, for Foucault, a true possibility of not saying,
one that therefore commands an archaeology, a critical-theoretical stance
that might pull silences into voicing.
By contrast, Derridas famous rebuttal to the claim made in
Foucaults earlier work is that one cannot speak madness from the side
of reason:
Either do not mention a certain silence (a certain silence which,

again, can be determined only within a language and an order
that will preserve this silence from contamination by any given
muteness), or follow the madman down the road of exile. This
misfortune of the mad, the interminable misfortune of their
silence, is that their best spokesmen are those who betray them
best; which is to say that when one attempts to convey their
silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the
enemy, the side of order, even if one fights against order from
within it, putting its origin into question. (Cogito 36)
Instead, for Derrida, silence is only affectively conveyable: I mean that

the silence of madness is not said, cannot be said in the logos of this book,
but is indirectly, metaphorically, made present by its pathos (37). In many
ways, Derrida is to critical theory what Cage was to composition: in his
question, asked in relation to negative theology, How to avoid speaking?
(Comment ne pas parler?), Derrida refuses the possibility of refraining
from speaking. The composers declaration that There is no such thing as
silence becomes, for the philosopher, the claim: There is no such thing as
not speaking. At the moment when the question how to avoid speaking?
is raised and articulates itself in all its modalities [...], Derrida declares,
it is already, so to speak, too late. There is no longer any question of not
speaking (Avoid 97). In a move that Blanchot and others will echo,
Derrida figures silence as the origin and ground of speech, the source
of all speaking, whereby silence plays the irreducible role of that which
bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can
emerge [...]. Like nonmeaning, silence is the works limit and profound
resource (Cogito 54). The rest is silence.
Foucaults intensely direct rebuttal to this insistence that
silence speaks is that Derrida is the paragon of a system marked by the
invention of voices behind texts to avoid having to analyze the modes of
implication of the subject in discourses. In other words, Foucault wants
to resist the notion that silence speaks, and louder than speech, criticizing
a pedagogy that teaches the pupil there is nothing outside the text, but
that in it, in its gaps, its blanks and its silences, there reigns the reserve
of the origin (My Body 416). The very stakes of this debate are about
whether one must speak for silence (because silence is possible) or remain
silent in the face of silence (because that silence speaks, and silence is
therefore impossible). Must one speak in the place of silence, such that the
positing of its possibility requires a self-cancelling obliteration, or must
one refrain, thus remaining silent in the face of a silence that speaks?
The dilemma is that if the ethical obligation to silence is to remain silent
(because that silence speaks, but only if its silence is not destroyed), then
what commands the duty to silence in the first place? It appears to do
just fine on its own. While Said views Foucaults as an anorexic theory of
silence (What puzzles me is [...] how someone as remarkably brilliant
as Foucault could have arrived at so impoverished and masochistically
informed a vision of sound and silence [17]), we might turn this around
and argue that it is Derrida whose theory of voicing is abysmally impov-
erished, narrowly consisting of the certain possibility that a nonsilence
will take place.
The crux of the matter is the epistemology of the erasure of
silence: how to know whether it speaks in its absence or must be spoken;
whether it is ground of meaning or target of discursive archaeology? Must
silence be left alone within philosophical discoursethat it may speak, and
expunge its record? Or must silence be spoken in its plural modalities that
it not remain the unspoken, that which does not speak and must therefore
be spoken for? Regardless of with whom one sides on the question of the
affirmative possibility of silence(s), my argument is that the victor does
not matter as much as we might imagine, that the debate as such occurs
within the regime of silence. For all of Foucaults insistence on listening
for murmurs, the debate with Derrida exposes the absolute nature of the
terms employed by both thinkers. Although for Foucault, contra Derrida,
silence is not originary but ensuant, not founding but caused (one is always
silenced after), nevertheless, despite that marked and crucial difference
between the two positions, silence remains the pathos of the inexpressible
or the fullness of that which is beyond or has been excluded from (histori-
cal) expression. There is a profound collusion among claims that there is
no silence in order to affirmatively capture aural detritus, frame its failed
positivity (Cage); the claim that silence itself speaks, that it constitutes
the unthought or ground of any discourse (Derrida); and even, yes, the
claim that silences are epistemologically possible because of constraints
on discursive utterances (Foucault). The regime of silence encompasses
all three of these positions, effortlessly absorbing what haunts it as its
heterogeneous negativenoise, even an unbearable sonic plenitudeand
its failure as a limit or horizon of aural and epistemic possibilities.
Silence is thus a sticky leech, a stubborn, absorbent, renewable

regime, to which aesthetics, philosophy, musicology, and critical theory
are drawn and attached. Its language of presence and absence, fullness
and failure, are as difficult to shed as the metaphysical language on which
its regime is modeled. The consequence of this language of the regime of
silence, I wrote above, is a certain relationship to violence. The language
of being, plenitude, and finitude that subtends the regime of silence, that
figures silence as a limit state, that pulls all nearing approaches toward
the zero degree, produces a theory of silence and force that turns on the
problem of beingand, specifically, of the being of beings. There is a
long-standing anxiety associated with sounds inescapability, its intrusive
presence that imposes itself on will, ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseaus
writing of accents to which one cannot close ones ear and which by way
of it penetrate to the very depths of the heart (25051) to Ludacriss 2004
plaint from The Red Light District, Why you all in my ear / Talking a
whole bunch of shit I aint trying to hear. But my claim for the violence of
the regime of silence is of another order: that this version of silence col-
ludes with disquiet about the being of beings and ends in an aural desire
to eliminate being. 9 Nowhere is this more transparent than in the horror
film, a genre whose aesthetics are bound up with anxieties about being,
presence, and its attendant terms (absence, nothingness, finitude). For
example, Brad Andersons taut, one-hour horror film Sounds Like (2006)
tells a story about sound in order to tell a story about violence; or it tells a
story about violence in order to tell a story about sound. The film literal-
izes (to the point of making absurd) this relationship between a quest for
silence and a quest to eradicate being: the narrative follows a grieving
man, Larry, extraordinarily sensitive to sound, who becomes overwhelmed

by that sensitivity, silences his pregnant wife by smothering her to death,
then eventually, driven to madness, cuts off his ears.
Sounds Like takes its vision of hell on earth from Poes Silence
A Fable, whose speaking demon says of a certain place, and there is no
quiet there, nor silence (459). In the film and the short story on which
it is based, Larry is undone by an inability to escape sound, and what he
must unmake is the lively noisiness of being itself. The hauntological
aspects of noise in horror film and literature are well documented, but
Sounds Like requires and performs a different relationship to sound: one
that is not atmospheric or metaphorically violent, alluding to violence or
setting its scene; rather, sound itself is the agent of force and sound as it is
linked to being is what must be eliminated through force. Larry is a call
monitor who surveils a network of layered telephone sounds; he is aurally
virtuosic, a superhearer. The editing of the sync isolates and heightens
the sonic landscape around him in bursts of claustrophobic, constant
pain: the scraping of wood, the metallic clack of knitting needles; sounds
emerge without cause. In a therapists office, he can hear an addiction to
cigarettes in the ticky tremors of nervous nails and wheezing of difficult
breaths. The film begins in grief, after Larry and his wife have lost their
sonwhose irregular heartbeat Larry heard through the structure of the
young boys body, listening to the deterioration of cardiac health before
death confirmed its presence.
The ambiguity of the title is the metaphorical richness and hor-
rible dilemma of the sonic: the absent punctuation, no ellipses to suggest
the completion of the phrase, suggests at once the displacement or deferral
of meaning, whereby sound can only be identified as something other to
itself (Sounds like this), or the metaphoricity of sound, ever retreating from
the presence of sonic information into the linguistic or allusory (Sounds
like that). (Roland Barthess question of all musicAre we condemned to
the adjective? [180]is even more apt in the case of silences: they are like
ever so many things and therefore are like nothing.) Both the story and
film are concerned with the anechoic dilemmathey, as much as Cage
and Derrida, are polemical about the unavoidability of a failed silence,
that silences negation will not fail to be negatedframing the failure to
totally obliterate sound as an inevitability that originates with the noisy
materiality of the body. In the original story, Larry cannot escape or
adequately cut off his own body: [T]hinking hes found the silence, he
becomes aware of a new sound. Except its not really new. In fact its all
too familiarthe modulated sound of his own autonomic functions, those

regulatory processes over which he has no control (ODriscoll 122). When
Larry murders his pregnant wife, Judith, smothering her with a pillow to
try to achieve, finally, that pure state of singular (always the) silence, he
finds that Judith hasnt let up for one second. The irony of it is that shes
louder dead than she ever was alive. [...] He hears it in the awful drone of
the flies and the soft hiss of her putrefying organs, but more than that, its
revealed in the sounds of his own treacherous body. There it is in the dry
rasp of his frown, and in the rush of air through nasal cavities (125). In
the film, at the murder of the wife, brought on in part by the left to right
typewriter clicks of her eyes in rem sleep, Larry intones the order, Be
still! The sonic demand is simultaneously a kinetic one. The spectator
does not see the death; we encounter it in its noisy aftermath: that voices
start to address him in inarticulatable hisses; that guilt renders the lan-
guage of others a jumble; that madness is crunchy or crackly or swooshy.
The earth at Larrys sons grave vibrates with noise; pulling up the wrig-
gling life underneath it, confirming noise even in and after death, Larrys
impossible silence of plenitude is devastated. The agitation of audibility
surrounds him totally and inescapably. The film ends by answering the
noisy rotting of the corpse with the attempt to eliminate the corpustaking
a hatchet to his ears, Larry cuts off his auricles. The tragic frustration
and sonic lie of the beatific smile that results is precisely sounds liminal
status in relation to the machinery of the body: without digging much
deeper into canal and bone and cochlea, this act of violence is addressed,
ultimately, only to amplification. The promise of silence is fulfilled only
through a violence done to the being of the other, and a violence enacted
on the meat of the self.
The regime of silence, with its dialectic of presence and
absence, orients itself in relation to being, and the violence it compels is
likewise to being and beings; while Cage celebrates the certain noisiness
of the bodys vitality, Sounds Like answers the very same sonic dilemma
with the attempted annihilation of the body. By contrast, the regime of
near inaudibility, which advances pressure and intensity and force in
place of presence and absence, plenitude and nothingness, produces a
relationship to force based on form: a formal violence. The distinction I
am drawing here is reflected on the level of many languages; the Greek
siga: to be silent, an absence of sound, to say nothing, orients itself in
relation to absolute refusal; by contrast, hsychia suggests quietness, being
settled or undisturbedit finds itself on the side of degrees of retreat and
gradations of intensity. The etymologies of silence and quiet (the radical,

sustained form of which I am calling near inaudibility) bear out this cru-
cial distinction with formal implications. Silences absence of sound, the
abstention and suppression and reticence explicit in it (and its renuncia-
tion), derives from silere, to be noiseless or still; Larrys imperative at the
murder of his wife reflects this double desire for silence. To her impinging
being of noisiness, he orders, Be still; be still! It is not enough that there
be noiselessness; the regime of silence demands beings inactivity. The
aural order is a dynamic one addressed to material vitality, demanding
the absence of sound at the simultaneous death of movement. The death
in the film fails this demand on both counts, the body noisy in decay and
frenetic in rots progress. The impossibility of noiselessness and still-
ness orient themselves, are guided by, the possibility of those states of
suppression and withdrawal. To the contrary, the etymology of quiet is a
peculiarly different thing: quiet from quietis (rest, quiet, peace) shares the
Proto-Indo-European base *qwi- rest; the Latin quies suggests at once
quiet but also rest, peace, repose, a resting place. If one traces the etymol-
ogy of the word while (hweile, hwil, a space of time), it likewise shares
the root of rest (hveila, space of time, while originally rest).10 At the
risk of etymological determinism, this striking alliance of silence with
stillness, and quiet with a durational pause or spacing in time, suggests
the different relationships between silence and being and between near
inaudibility and intensity. The violence of silence is to being, in order to
render that kinetic stillness; the violence of near inaudibility is to form,
sustaining the pressure of a durationcreating that space of time for
the sensation of extreme quiet to manifest.
While philosophy does not acknowledge near inaudibility

except as a version of silence (emptying it of particularity, thereby destroy-
ing it), musicology, as I wrote above, tends to draw it toward silence (luring
it, thereby drowning it). In both discourses, the very, very quiet, almost
imperceptible, is co-opted to the language of a quiet approaching, nego-
tiating or tarrying with, a silence to which the sonic material ultimately
fails in relation. But when taken as supreme metaphor for transcendence
and ideality, let alone when critical theory linguistifies it, silence loses its
sensual dimensionthe troubling of resonance. There is a form of silence
evoked in Nancys Listening that he calls not privation but arrangement of
resonance (21), and though he uses the word silence in this passage, the
refusal to link silence to privation or absence and, rather, the bonding of

silence to a formal figureto arrangementsuggests the near-inaudible
tension that I am arguing is entirely other to the regime of silence. The
affectivity of near inaudibility approaches the quality that Nancy invokes
elsewhere, in reference to monuments, dsaffects: things that are dis-
used, deconsecrated: they are emptied of their responsibilities and, with
them, emptied of the affects they once roused (Fall of Sleep 4). The tension
of sustained near inaudibility constitutes this diminishing of the affective
pull of sounds as such; emptied of their responsibility to sounding, cast
into an aural disuse, they begin, in their difficulty, their impossibility, to
generate formal possibilities no longer tethered to presence, to absence.
The distinction between silence and the nearly inaudible is not music with
a silence building to a sound, nor is it a gap or caesura or approach toward
a state of silencerather, this formal limit I am describing, it hovers; it
suspends; the aesthetic is one of pressure at that suspension. It is neither
approach nor departure from silence, but another regime altogether, one
inured to beings dominance that, instead, pulses in the duration of its
deactivated affectivity.
A sustained aesthetic of near inaudibility, one that tarries with

this extended state, is rare. One obvious precedent for its appearance in
contemporary composition is the work of Morton Feldman. However, while
Feldmans music is very quiet, his musical material sits comfortably in this
quietnothing hides within or because of it; the sonic material is spare
(one thing happening at a time), and gestures are in the service of what is
hearable. Nothing goes missing in such music; despite its beautiful chal-
lenge to audibility on the level of volume and presence, there is a plenitude
despite the quiet; the quietness is worn on the surface. This is very differ-
ent from a quietude that runs deep, indeed is structural, indeed is utterly
almost imperceptible. At the limit of audibility, form sets extreme inaudi-
bility against a freneticism of bodily gesture and density of scored musical
material. In the regime of near inaudibility, then, things go missing. The
regime of near inaudibility is the radicalizing of quiet, and it has nothing
at all to do with silence. It is by far the less common aesthetic scheme. It
is very difficult to sustain. Thus have you, Reader, ever attended a concert
at which you could not hear a single note played, despite the maximal
contortion and difficulty of the straining performing body, following the
strict demands of a frenetically dense textual score? It is exceptionally
uncommon to find an aesthetic that puts form under such duress, under
maximal tension, in the name of the regime of near inaudibility instead
of relegating it to an approach toward silence, a retreat from it, or, in the
language of idealism, a failed iteration of absolute silence.
Consider the work of Russian composer Vadim Karassikov. His
instructions in November Morphology II (1999) indicate what is at stake:
[T]his work is where the visual aspects of music: gesture, performers
body language, mimic expression are endowed with significance and
importance equal to those of the acoustic ones. The density of those
visual aspects of music not only effects a break between the written
text of the score and its sonic lived result, it produces a doubling of the
performer as both origin of gestural density and solipsistic audience of
the inaudible aspects of the densely notated score. Passages containing
textual density (what Karassikov calls the passages concerned with
visual information exclusively) are meant to be experienced by the per-
former with utter inward concentration and emotional strain so that they
make an impression of a silent catastrophe; indeed, the whole piece is
to make this very impression. Despite the evocation of silence here, it is
the regime of inaudibility that produces strain, intensity, pressure, and
force; the dialectic of being and nothingness that subtends the regime of
silence is replaced with a leap into tension without recourse to either its
origin or its resolution. Indeed, Karassikov redirects the possibilities for
expression from the musical material itselfthe intense burden of expres-
sion that silence itself is normatively asked to bear (in other words: what
silence is always meant to be breaking by saying)into the corpus of the
performer suspended between textual density and sonic difficulty. It is the
performers body under the strain of this suspension that constitutes the
expressive possibilities of the piece.
The sonic range of November Morphology II is marked by pppp,
ppppp, pppppp, and so forth to 9p, which Karassikov notes stands for prac-
tically/almost inaudible. Types of pitch are practically indiscernible;
bow movement is of the softest (!) sort; toneless, indefinite pitches. Set
against this vulnerable, almost inaudible sonic force is a density of bodily
instructions: of the wrist in m. 13, the whole passage can be described as
an utterly hardly noticeable motion of the left hand wrist; the wrist is to
utterly slightly, as if involuntarily turn up (as in the case of the hands bend-
ing) at the peak-point of the passage. The dimension of foreclosure and
difficulty is not a performative one, nor is it marked by textual invisibil-
ityquite the contrary, as the detailed instructions demonstrate. Tension,
rather, is produced in the triangulated encounter between a density of tex-

tual instructions, a dearth of sonic presence or traces of those instructions
in their achievement, and the body of the performer who realizes the text,
fails to register it sonically, and is meant, in this realization and failure, to
nevertheless imperceptibly acknowledge the action him- or herself. The
distension of the wrist, its barely slight motion, is meant to be practically
invisible and inwardly utterly hardly perceptible even for the performer;
it is to be virtually imperceptible for the audience. The tradition that is
realized in this series of instructions is the radical opposite of Cages: the
notation of the frame, apparently absent, in Cages silent score, is meant
to preserve and perform the wild contingency of sonic possibilities that
will never fail to appear as perceptible. By contrast, Karassikovs rigor-
ously determined, anticontingent instructions are deployed in the service
of what will never fail to be imperceptible.
The metonymic instruction in the score that epitomizes this
refusal of contingency is the statement that, in the crucial passage at m.
13, the motion of the bow be performed as if unintentional. The directive
plays all possibility in contingency into the anticontingent scripted (and
imperceptible) gesture of the body. Cageas representative of the regime
of silenceputs the absence of silence on display that the absence of silence
be announced as demonstrably false, whereas Karassikov displays the
density of the imperceptible and inaudible that the intensity of audibility
as such be announced as affirmatively possible. While the density of the
textual score creates the conditions of possibility for this affirmation, in
the performance in time of the piece, that textual freneticism, in fact, is
meant to disappearto be replaced (utterly) with the body of the performer.
The final performance note indicates that due to the nature of the work,
the piece must be played by heart. That language is Karassikovs: it is
not simply that the score, with its densely articulated gestural instructions
and multiple pianissimos (each amplifying the sign of lessening) be memo-
rized; the debt for this density is paid for with the body of the performer.
The strain of inaudibility is registered in traces on the body that fail to be
perceptible; the piece itself is played, then, truly, by heart. The opposite of
Pythagorean acousmaticsin which the source of sound is hidden, with
only the effect severed from cause made presenthere it is only cause,
only ever cause, only ever the imperceptible tension of the body as cause.
Near inaudibility becomes a form of expanded aesthetic means; there is
neither end nor aim. The strain and tension of near inaudibility becomes
a matter of meat and form, and not ear.
Cages declarative, There is no such thing as silence, is, as I

wrote above, the negation of an absence. Karassikovs version in Novem-
ber Morphology II, that gestures be utterly hardly perceptible, takes a
different grammatical form altogether. While Cages denegation suggests
an infinity of possible sounds in the obliterating refusal of a negative, the
doubled adverbs here function as a reduplication of emphasis: an over-
loading of imperceptibility through repetition and amplification. Utterly
hardly, utterly slightlywhile the former term is without qualification, a
marker of totality and fullness, the latter pivots on its adverbial almostness,
that it is in the realm of the barely or with great difficulty. Unlike Cages
doubled negative, the supplemental language here functions to intensify
the tension in the state of near-inaudibility that does not turn over into
silence or await its realization in it. The repeated demandthe totality of
the very difficult, the absolute of the almost or the nearlyfunctions, like
the crucial word in the title, as a matter of morphology. The piece, through
its rigorous instructions, functions as just such a study of the structure of
words in language: the tension between the supplemental adverbs explores
the possibilities of compounds at the limit of form. Seemingly contraven-
ing admissible sonic and lexical arrangement, the fraught doubled pairs
manifest the relationship between supplement and audibility, suggesting
that inaudibility as such is a problematic of the maximizing of that which
is without qualificationin other words, stretching to the limit the affec-
tive register of sonic possibility itselfnot without difficulty. The utterly
each time modifies the prefix of the compound near inaudibility: what
is absolute is not the state of negation (what silence in the other regime
stands for). What is absolute is the imperceptible but positive difference
between silence and the inaudible.
If I am demanding that something like silence but not silence be
released from the language of being, that the regime of near inaudibility
be treated separately from worries of plenitude or failures that punctu-
ate and puncture that plenitude, it requires not a departure or approach
or slide into silence but a leap that is altogether otherwise. Opening up
something beyond silence, in the true spirit of Nietzsches Jenseits, makes
present a formal generation of what is suspended at the limits of audible
and gestural form. This regime, in one sense, requires we be far less
serious about silence. Near inaudibility suggests, in fact, what Nancy has
evocatively written of the form and temporality of laughter. The question
demanded at the outset of his inquiry is the very one asked and affirmed
of silence: Does laughter have a presence? (Birth to Presence 368). Unlike

the regime of silence, with its fixation on There is, on modes of presence
and absence, Nancy concludes that, ephemeral and ever surprising, laugh-
ter is neither a presence nor an absence. It is the offering of a presence
in its own disappearance. It is not given but offered: suspended on the
limit of its own presentation (383). While silence continually is deployed
to represent something (its allegorical prolificity revolving primarily
around forms of nonbeing), near inaudibility, I have argued, is a form of
offering, of arrangement, of tension in a presentation that is always yet
to take place. Like laughters durational quality of being something that
bursts out, extreme quiet functions as a break or surprise; however, what
near inaudibility adds to Nancys figuration of laughter is a different dura-
tional structure for what bursts. Instead of the burst as an instantaneous
offering, near inaudibility lets duration as suchthe space of time that
haunts quietbear the pressure of what breaks through. The burst is
thus redescribed from a sudden temporal rupture to an elongated intensity
that affectively manifests in its suspended form, as opposed to resolving
it (even manifesting as a sonic deflation or radical frustration of all that
is perceptible). Near inaudibility thus reimagines the force of duration as
something that in itself can surprise again.
Like Nancys pendulous laughter, near inaudibility sustains its
simultaneous rising out of and disappearance into another scene, without
orientating itself in relation to that scene; it is suspended in a refusal to
determine its relation to idealisms silence. It bursts and thus does not
appear or disappear, but is caught after it has come into being and before
it has departed. It is ephemeral; its form is the leap. What is left, as at the
scene of some indeterminate crime, are the traces of the affective pos-
sibility of what sound might become. Nancys formulation, his version of
Cages There is no such thing as silence:
There remains sound (but inaudible: this is not music, it is the

dissolution of musical prose itself). Laughter is the sound of a
voice that is not a voice, that is not the voice it is. It is the material
and the timbre of the voice, and it is not the voice. It is between
the color of the voice, its modulation (or its modeledness) and
its articulation. Laughter laughs a voice without the qualities
of a voice. It is like the very substance of the voice, indeed, like
its subject, but a substance that disappears in presenting itself.
( Birth to Presence 388)
Near inaudibility is like silence but is not silenceprecisely because it

resists the language of being that finds its grammatical analog in the for-
mulation that would suggest: There is, or There is no, such thing as. The
radical pressure of quiet affirms and plays with disappearance even as it
manifests the pressure of its force on the tension of aesthetic material.11 It
plays precisely with disappearance and duration, leaping into the promise
of what is quiet for a
hwil.
Composed by Evan
Johnson. 2011.
An aesthetic of near inaudibility thus has more in common

with nonsense, with joyful mirth, with other releases from the tyranny of
beings discourse than with the somber, the deathly, the funereal posit-
ing of an absence, some idealized presence or some nothingness. If the
regime of silence is condemned to its fundamental metaphysical orienta-
tion around presence and absence, plenitude and void, each presence con-
verted into silences absenceand its form therefore ever put in relation to
negation, even the negation of a negation, even the negation of beingthen
the regime of near inaudibility is the opening of affirmation, of aesthetic
positivity, even, perhaps, of a care toward being. What is revealed in the
tension of the suspensions of near inaudibility is the affirming of the pos-
sibility of formal intensityforms There is followed by no negation. Not
denegation, but supplement. Not There is no, but There remains sound. Near
inaudibility thus constitutes the devastation of the seriousness of silence.
It affirms the duration of the form that it takes and puts under suspended
pressure, but it also affirms the possibility as such of the generation of
forms that persist. That leap into what is suspended on the limit of form
affirms intensity and the vitality of sound, it makes present the vitality of
the possible, suspended at the moment it neither arrives nor departs, but
lingers, for a while. In place of commanding a violence against being, near
inaudibility suggests how intensities might act on behalf of life. Silence is
great but deathly; near inaudibility is joy.
The author is grateful for the editorial insights of Jim Steintrager and the aesthetic insights
of Evan Johnson, both of whom undoubtedly made this a stronger work. To Rey Chow,
however, gratitude for everything.
eugenie brinkem a is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her doctorate in 2010 from the Depart-
ment of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her articles on film, violence,
aesthetics, and ethics have appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Criticism,
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Recent work includes a contribution to the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Rainer Werner
Fassbinder and an article on pornography and rough form.
evan johnson is a composer whose works are being commissioned and programmed with
increasing frequency by prominent soloists and ensembles throughout the United States,
Europe, Australia, and Asia, including at festivals of contemporary music in Darmstadt,
Witten, and Huddersfield. In 2011 he will hold residencies at the Aaron Copland House and
the Millay Colony for the Arts. His work has been released or is forthcoming on cd on the
hcr, Metier, and Mode labels.
Notes 1 See John Cage, Experimental 5 At minimum, 20092010 has seen

Music, Silence 8. Anne Leclaire, Listening Below
the Noise: The Transformative
2 See http://www.timescraper.de. Power of Silence; Sara Maitland, A
Book of Silence; George Michelsen
3 Hence the oddity of the polemic Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest
advanced in Nicky Losseff and for Absolute Silence; and George
Jenny Doctors Silence, Music, Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence:
Silent Music: the target of the Listening for Meaning in a World
collection is a view of silence as of Noise.
negative qualities: absence of
sound, prohibition on speech, 6 For a discussion of la mort Mach-
refusal to communicate. The aut, see Harris. In How to Avoid
advocating of silence as com- Speaking, Derrida writes: There
municative, generative, produc- is a secret of denial [dngation]
tive, and, in a problematic word, and a denial of the secret. The
cognitive, and the pluralizing of secret as such, as secret, separates
possible signifying silences that and already institutes a negativ-
take place so that something else ity; it is a negation that denies
might begin, appears to arrive itself. It de-negates itself (95).
well after this claim is not only
accepted but in fact founds post- 7 See, for example, Sim; and Toop.
Cagean discourses of silence. See
Losseff and Doctor 12. 8 See Sim 12854 for a discussion of
such claims across the arts.
4 Though this move is most often
associated with Cage, there is 9 For a different treatment of vio-
a longer history of such experi- lence, music, and silences, see
ments and ventures, including Vladimir Janklvitchs account
the writer/humorist Alphonse of silence as where music annuls
Allaiss Les grandes douleurs sont itself (42). He aligns it with the
muettes: Marche funbre inco- violence of inexpression and
hrente (Great sorrows are mute: the grimacewhich could be a
Incoherent funeral march), con- provocative line of inquiry given
sisting of twenty-four blank bars Karassikovs work on gesture.
bearing the instruction Lento
10 See entries for silence and quiet in
rigolando, changed in 1897 for
the Oxford English Dictionary.
the Expositions of Incoherent Art
to Marche Funbre compose pour 11 Notation: : depress key from
les funerailles dun grand homme second escapement; x: tap key
sourd (Funeral March Composed with fingernail without sounding
for the Funeral of a Great Deaf string; >: tap side of key; : push
Man). See Whiting 8085. See forcefully, with pressure, along
also Gann, No Such Thing as top of key.
Silence: John Cages 433 11819.
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Cage, John. 45 for a Speaker. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover:
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Losseff, Nicky, and Jenny Doctor, eds. Silence, Music, Silent Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
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. The Fall of Sleep. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham up, 2009.
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and Other Political Writings. Ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, m a: Cambridge
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michel chion
Translated by James A. Steintrager
Dissolution of the Notion of Timbre
Translators note: The two essays by Michel Chion translated

in this special issue originally appeared in the French journal Analyse
musicale.1 Separated by an interval of some twenty years, they confirm
both a continuous concern with and development in thought regarding
the value of the sonic sources of music. I would merely add that the essay
Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit, rendered here as Lets Have Done
with the Notion of Noise, poses a peculiarand indeed intriguing and
heuristicproblem of translation. Of course, translations frequently come
up against mismatches between source and target languages. Even words
that seem to denote primarily the same objects or concepts will often
almost inevitablyconnote differently or cover ranges of meaning that
do not fully overlap. Further, where the meaning of a word in the source
language echoes perfectly the sense of a word in the target language, there
is no guarantee that their semantic equivalence will carry over to the level
of discourseto the level of words embedded in sentences and of sentences
in context. It is precisely these idiosyncrasies that are the starting point for
the authors reflections, and the reader will want to keep in mind that bruit

236 Dissolution of the Notion of Timbre
is precisely notor rather not justFrench for noise either in meaning or

in use. As for context more narrowly speaking, the reader should recall that
the authors remarks initially appeared in a periodical aimed at readers
interestedin both the weak and strong sensesin music in general and
the institutions of French music in particular. As the author indicates in
the course of his argument, this investment entails a certain passiveand
at times activeresistance among the otherwise musically forward look-
ing to removing the otherwise contingent distinction between sounds of
illustrious origin and supposedly ignoble noise.
Recently a collection of essays appeared on the question of

timbre in contemporary music. 2 I am surprised that this termlong since
inadequateis still in circulation. Of course, theres nothing to stop one
from wondering about the meaning of timbre in todays music, but if
you put the question this way, it is not only the noun timbre that is prob-
lematic. With its aura of self-evidence, the modifier today is no less so.
How would one go about locating this today of music? If we understand
it as the most up to date, the cutting edge, then whoand in the name of
whatin the current concert of diverse and not always compatible ten-
dencies will lay claim to it? On the other hand, if it is a question of the
totality of different sorts of music produced, performed, and heard in the
world in 1988including those musics written in previous centuries and
more often played and performed today than ever beforewho will have
sufficient familiarity to put forward the least generalization about them?
We can therefore only speak of todays music in a deliberate
mannerthat is, in order to defend a particular conception. This is what
Pierre Boulez did when he published his Darmstadt lectures under the title
Penser la musique aujourdhui. Of course we then risk getting it wrong. But
isnt this risk preferable to the current neutralism, which appears objec-
tive and thus serves entrenched positions? I mention these matters to clear
the ground for the question of timbre today, because in fact no simple and
singular response can be given. Depending on the perspective one adopts,
timbre is a notion that is either alive or dead, current or outmoded. As long
as we remain within the framework of a music grounded principally in
relationships of pitch and destined to be played traditionally on traditional
instruments, the notion is still of value. If we leave this frameworkby the
use of new means or new playing techniques on the same instruments
then it no longer is. This is what I will now try to demonstrate.
When the Western system of musical notation and training

proposed that the four dimensions of musical sound were pitch, intensity,
duration, and timbre, it was not without the knowledge that the last on
the list merely represented a qualitative catchall. It gathered together all
the perceptions that the other dimensions did not captureeverything
that makes the sound of an oboe played at the same pitch, intensity, and
duration as one on the piano unmistakably different and recognizable
as such. Only recently have we seen the desire emerge in some quarters
to give the dimension of timbre at least theoreticallyin practice it has
been a complete failurethe same standing as the other three: measur-
able, quantifiable, comparable, and capable of mastery. If we were to
believe certain speculative approaches, timbre ought to be considered as
the qualitative perception of the harmonic spectrum specific to a sound.
Such a spectrum appeared easily synthesizedor at least such synthesiz-
ing was imaginablestarting from pure frequencies. Confronted with the
acoustic insignificance and poverty of the results of this doctrine, which
was put forward at the beginning of the 1950s, it had to be admitted that
this was an oversimplification and thatas everyone now agrees, but
without going on to infer the consequencesthe perceived timbre of an
instrument encompasses, depending on the individual instance, many
other constituents, such as the curve of the global intensity of the sound,
the feeling of a more or less rough grain, the presence of a certain vibrato,
certain characteristics of attack, and a multitude of givens that are always
particular to a specific sound.
In fact, timbre is nothing other than the general physiognomy
that allows us to identify a sound as emanating from a specific instru-
ment (or more generally from a specific source, which can be imagined
or imaginary). It thus links to an auditory image formed in the memory
on the basis of variable and acoustically heterogeneous givens, and this
image is often the result of an extratemporalas it were, carved up
apprehension of sounds that, once heard, are reassembled and grasped
in the form of their overall unfolding. 3 The classical definition of sound
by pitch, intensity, duration, and timbre could therefore be compared to
the description of an individual by height, weight, age, and general physi-
ognomy (including his or her particular characteristics). The first three
parameters provide us with objective informationor at least information
that can be rendered objective, relatively measurable, and comparable
from one sound to another, just as from one individual to another. But as
for general physiognomy (or timbre), it is defined according to criteria
that can be quite variable depending on the person (or sound) in question:
one person might be defined by a characteristic body shape, such as long-
limbed or stocky, whereas a person of average proportions might be defined
according to facial features. If one puts three general physiognomies side
by side, each one maintains its particularity; no physiognomic melody is
produced until, from the three individuals so juxtaposed, one can com-
pose a little height melody, a little weight melody, or a little age melody.
From this analogy we can easily understand why the inherently seductive
Schoenbergian idea of a timbre-melodyof a Klang farbenmelodiehad
no chance of success. 4 Indeed, timbre is not a musical value. No ordering
relation in the mathematical sense, which is the basis for melodic effect,
is possible among three different timbresamong three sonic colors.
Having gotten to this point, some may think that the only thing
in question is the limited scope of our current knowledge and experience
and that we might soon enough discover the physical determinants and
acoustically objective qualities of timbres. But this would be to misun-
derstand the fundamentally causalist character of this notion, for which
no determination is possible other than this: that which enables us to
recognize (incorrectly or correctly) a sound as emanating from such and
such family of sonic sources, a recognition that is only a matter of habit
and convention. Just as there is only an individual physiognomy, there is
only timbre in relation to a sonic source, either recognized or supposed,
unless one understands by timbre everything that defines a soundin
which case the term, overly general and identified with sound itself, dis-
solves all on its own. Some, however, persist in their use of the term by
giving it a new meaning. But doesnt one thereby risk confusion, given its
weighty historical connotation?
Indeed, what does the expression a trombones timbre mean
once one strikes the instrument rather than blowing through it in the tra-
ditional fashion? Or, even more emphatically, what does the timbre of a
piano wire mean when it is attacked according to the various techniques
of musique concrte and when the sounds thus generated are recorded
and then submitted to diverse transformations that entirely reconfigure
the acoustic visage, as it were? Even according to classical technique, you
could already say that the violin has two timbres depending on whether
the playing was col arco or pizzicato. Current scores produce an even more
total scattering of the acoustic identity of the instrument, treating it as a
vulgar sonic body. At this point, timbre becomes a pure acoustic fetish and
a misleading concept that enables musicians to cleave to the reassuring
idea of sonic sources. In truth, however, in an authentic music made up of

all sounds, real sources are of no importance. The only things that count
or should count are sonic materials, morphological criteria, acoustic forms,
textures, and profilesin short, everything that allows us to consummate
the rupture of sound with its real source. 5 On the contemporary scene
and with the exception of musique concrte, the majority fears and tries to
conjure away this rupture. Meanwhile, there is so much to discover and
to uncover in the realm of imaginary sources. For this to happen, we need
only allow the traditional idea of timbre to dissolve and to perish, naturally.
michel chion
Lets Have Done with the Notion of Noise
S ome twenty years ago, the journal Analyse musicale asked

me for an article on the notion of timbre. Titled Dissolution of the
Notion of Timbre and since republished in my collection of essays, Le
Promeneur coutant, this contribution aimed at demonstrating why this
empirical and fuzzy word timbre, valid up until the beginning of the
twentieth centurythat is, prior to the recording and electronic produc-
tion of soundshas been unacceptable for quite some time. And it is much
more than invalid: the continued use of the concept of timbre limits our
understanding of sonic and musical phenomena by continuing to treat
musical sound in a conceptually causalist mannerthat is, it makes the
description of a sound dependent on its causationat a time when, with
the fixing of sounds by recording, their manipulation, sampling, synthe-
sis, this initial causation and the role that it plays in the determination of
sound have completely changed in nature. No one responded to my refu-
tation or leveled a counterrefutation, and lets just say the word timbre is
still carrying on just fine.
This is because the current musical culture, which claims to be
progressive or at the very least forward looking with respect to ideas and
techniques, tends toward conservatism with respect to words. Of course

there are colloquia, writings, reflections, and scientific researchor
research that presents itself as suchthat aim at rejuvenating the old
words. But as far as I am concerned, you cannot indefinitely preserve
the same signifiers, in the manner of old brands that one might be able
to brighten up and revitalize. In spite of the deliberately provocative
title of this essay, then, I ought to tip off the reader that I have no hope of
seeing abandonedor not quickly at leasta word such as bruit, that is,
roughly, noise. It is a word that for my part I never use, that was never
given a very precise meaning in French as far as the realm of sound is
concerned, and that not so much in spite of this but much more because of
this is put to work for the maintenance of certain smoke screens, certain
shams to which the prejudiced adhere.
First of all, there is the questionas simple as it may seemof
language. In modern French, the word bruit is derived from the past parti-
ciple of the verb bruire, itself derived, as up-to-date etymological dictionar-
ies attest, not from one verb but from two vulgar Latin verbs: bragere (to
bray) and rugire (to roar). In short, a strange hybrid of ass and lion that
leaves me perplexed (it would seem that this etymological explanation is
a sort of tradition transmitted among dictionaries). This gave birth to the
French masculine substantive that we now recognize. As such, it has a
history, and as such, it is not exactly translatable into another language,
even though there seem to be words in other languages that are synonyms
for it: noise in English, Lrm or Gerusch in German, rumore in Italian,
ruido in Castilian. None of these are exactly translated by bruit, nor do
they translate bruit exactly into these different languages.
In works of French classicism, the word bruit, which one
encounters constantly in the plays of Molire and Racine, almost always
designates not a sound per se, much less an animals cry, but rather a
piece of news, renown, reputation, an honoror a dishonora quarrel, a
rumor, and so forth, even if there are attested examples of the words use
in the modern sense. In contemporary modern usage, the word bruit is
more often applied to sounds, and it now signifies:
a) A disturbing sound. In this sense, a piece of music that bothers

us because it is played too loud or too late also qualifies as noise,
as bruit. Children who speak loudly make noise. By extension,
that part of a message that confuses or contaminates it (as in
signal-to-noise ratio).
242 Lets Have Done with the Notion of Noise
b) Sounds that are neither musical nor linguistic. One rarely

speaks of noise or bruit to designate words from the moment
they are understood. It is only used once several people talk-
ing at the same timeor in another languagemake matters
unintelligible.
Inevitably, the first meaning contaminates the second meaning. To be

precise, it does so in French because, whereas in contemporary English
one speaks of sound (as in the sound of steps), in French one says bruit
des pas (literally, the noise of steps), which, even when these noises or
bruits are pleasing to our earseven when they are pleasant and lively
stigmatizes them. Indeed, the word sound in English gathers together at
the spot where the French bruit segments, as they say in the advertising
business. That is, it divides into categories.
The word bruit is really and truly a segregationist word, and
in my judgment it ought to be placed in the category of terms that have
servedsometimes honorablybut that are no longer fit to do so. In the
historical archives, it would join certain words once used in medicine,
such as the peccant humors of doctors in Molires day, or in physics, such
as the infamous phlogiston by which, in the eighteenth century, prior to
Lavoisier, one sought to explain the phenomenon of combustion. These
words were not absurd but rather corresponded to a particular state of
knowledge and of culture.
The term noise appears to some to have a certain scientific
legitimacy: they would use it to designate sounds that cannot be heard at
a precise pitch because they correspond to nonperiodic vibrations. At this
point, why not class as noises the extreme notes of many instruments such
as the piano or the organ? This would hold for the extreme high register
or the extreme low register, since in both cases one can no longer discern
pitch. Then the response comes: but those sounds, as opposed to the stroke
of a hammer or the grinding of an engine, come from a musical instru-
ment. And so we slip from a definition grounded in sound and the physics
of vibration to a causalist definition grounded in the source of the sound.
But then why should a sound be ennobled as a musical sound for hav-
ing come from a musical instrumenthowever ugly or commonwhile
another sound finds itself stigmatized as nonmusical for having been
produced from any number of source causes not considered musical: from
objects, from natural, bodily, or mechanical phenomena? And who decides
what is musical or nonmusical?
In any case, making the criterion for sound precise pitch does
not suffice to categorize, let alone to hierarchize, sounds. We hear precise
pitches in a considerable number of animal and also industrial sounds: the
purring of computers, the buzzing of air conditioners, the rich sounds of
trains, and, of course, the clinking of glasses, and so forth. It goes without
saying that these pitches are often mingled with sounds without precise
pitch, but this holds just as much for a solid proportion of instrumental
music.
What is true and remains so is that our ears hear the relation-
ship between sounds that are superimposed or successive differently
depending on whether these sounds possess a precise pitch. In the first
instance, apparently universal specific relationsor in any case relations
that have attained universalityare created that are classed as harmonic
or melodic. But when two sounds follow one another or are superimposed
on one another but do not have a precise pitch, a considerable number
of interesting and vital phenomenaincluding different comparisons
between their respective placements within the tessituratake place in
their relations. These, however, are phenomena that cannot be grasped in
terms of exact intervals, even if the mass of these sounds is more or less
low (in which case Pierre Schaeffer speaks of site) and if they are more or
less bulky and thick (here he speaks of caliber). For these sounds without
precise pitch, the equivalent of a perfect fiftha pure relationship, trans-
lated by our ears as an absolute quality that is independent of the sounds
that together create it (between D and A, or between B flat and F)does
not exist. But this does not mean that these irreducible, unsystematizable
relationships do not exist or are inferior in dignity and complexity.
It is not a matter of denying the difference between the two
types of case. In his Trait des objets musicaux, which I summed up and
restructured under the title Guide des objets sonores, Pierre Schaeffer
(191095), who invented musique concrte, certainly recognizes the differ-
ence established for the ear between sounds with a precise pitch and those
that do not have a precise pitch. He proposesthe terms can be disputed,
but the idea is clearthat we call the former sounds with tonic mass or
tonic sounds and the latter sounds with complex mass or complex sounds.
One might consider this semantic nuance hardly useful. After
all, doesnt Schaeffer thereby continue to segregate sounds along the same
lines as the academic distinction between musical sound and noise? And
in so doing perpetuate discrimination? No, because a crucial gesture
has been made: in Schaeffers formulation, a substantive has become an
adjective. The matter of the perceptibility or not of a pitch is now but one
of the predicatesone of the attributes of the sound as heardinstead of
being identified with its essence. The contrary occurs when we continue
to distinguish musical sounds and noises, as if they enclosed an essen-
tial, natural difference. I refer here to that which in Schaeffers Trait des
objets musicaux and in my Guide des objets sonores concerns the notion
of mass, defined as the manner in which a sound occupies the field of
pitch, in whatever way that may take place.
Schaeffer and those who were part of his circle at different peri-
ods (among them Abraham Moles and Pierre Janin) thus stepped across
an important threshold in understanding and research. If this move has
yet to be recognized, it is because the lifting of the essentialist distinction
between musical sounds and noises upsets the caste mentality of many
musiciansthe feeling they have of not having to work with everyones
sounds. It is a bit like in classical French literature, where a solid propor-
tion of words in contemporary use to be worthy of inclusion in poetry or in
verse drama had to cede their spot to a noble synonym. Writing or saying
water was not allowed; one had to use wave instead. Likewise with other
terms: not horse but courser, not earth but glebe, not house but dwelling,
and so forth.
The problem gets more complicatedbut at the same time this
is quite logicalthanks to the fact that a certain number of artists have,
during precise historical periods (notably at the beginning of the twentieth
century), reacted against academicism and conservatism by laying claim
to noise as their means of expression and have sought to create an art of
noises. The most famous of these was of course Luigi Russolo, yet his work
LArt des bruits (LArte dei rumori), albeit likable and inviting, is remark-
ably weak. 6 It never manages to escape from the contradiction in which
it entraps itself from the outset: claiming to liberate the art of sounds,
all the while depriving oneself of a large proportion of them, namely, the
sounds of instruments. Instead of opening the noise cage, Russolo enters
it, shuts the door on himself, and claims that here lies paradise and that
all is fine and dandy amid the noises, thereby confirming the idea of an
absolute distinctionan essential distinctionbetween musical sounds
and noises. Many initiatives that later claimed an adherence to Russolo
have had paradoxically reactionary effects. By claiming noise as trivial
sound thanks to its trivial source, they continued to uphold the idea that
it is the triviality (pots and pans) or the nobility (violin) of the source
that constitutes the triviality or the nobility of the sound itself, whereas
between source and sound there is not a simple and linear relationship.
There are many sounds more interesting, rich, or beautiful than others,
but this is not because of their sourceor for that matter in spite of it.
In the practice of music, to decausalize our relationship to
sound remains the most difficult and most revolutionary task, to which
many set up a fierce resistance (take note: it is not a matter of wanting
to prevent the listener from conjuring an imaginary cause but rather of
liberating him or her from the real cause of the sound). I lay this out in
my book Le son in the chapter titled Le cordon causal, that is, the the
causal cordon, where I propose in particular that we distinguish between
causal listening and figurative listening. Pace those who have formulated
it in this way and have made it a topic of reflection, the question What are
the relationships between noise and music? is therefore faulty. First of all,
it compares nonequivalent terms: noise is supposed to be an element, a
substance, a material; music an art, a discipline. For a long time, musi-
cians from different countriesand not only in the Westhave wanted
to believe in the idea that there ought to be in musical art a necessary
relationship between the material and the work. Just as a jeweler needs
precious stones to work his art, musical art would require musical and
premusical sounds (and in Schaeffers treatise, the notion of a sonorous
object suited to music strikes me as potentially reactionary and contrary
to the orientation of the work as a whole). It is not a questionwhich would
be simply a trite reversalof placing at the peak what had been at the bot-
tom but of declaring the abolition of the sound/noise distinction because
it is unfounded and segregationist.
Ideally, for me the word noise (bruit) is one that we ought to be
able to do without, except in its current usage as designating noise pol-
lution (nuisance sonore). Acoustically as well as aesthetically, it is a word
that promotes false ideas. In the same way the word timbre, in my opinion,
should not be used in musicology outside its traditional empirical meaning
(where it designates empirically the group of characteristics of an instru-
mental sound that allows us to identify it as coming from such and such an
instrument rather than another) because it promotes an instrumentalist
conception of music. Likewise, the word bruit, similarly vague, promotes
a segregationist conception of the sonic universe. The French language
has at its disposal a short word to designate that which is heard, without
placing it immediately in an aesthetic, ethical, or affective category. This
is the word son, that is, sound.
Above all, we must not replace the word noise, which, in the
usage under consideration here, marks off a deceptive territory, a bit like
the word race marks off within the human species beings, categories,
families that, independently of the fact that they constitute a ground for
racism, maintain the racialist illusion, or, put another way, the illusion
scientifically refuted but still tenaciousaccording to which differences in
skin pigmentation correlate to a group of inherited biological and cultural
particularities. Yet we see quite well that racialismthe idea that there are
racespersists, just like bruitisme, for reasons that must not be mistaken
or misunderstood. Every form of racism produces an effect among those
who are the objectsor rather, the victims. For example, among black
people who are the target or victims of racist prejudice, we find claims to
ngritude.7 And this explains the bruitisme that some profess.
This does not prevent us from informing ourselves about the
word noise. Open, for example, the Grand Robert dictionary in six volumes
to the entry for bruit. You will find a throng of descriptive and extremely
precise French words. (Why here and not under son? By dint of lexico-
graphical arbitrariness.) For several years, I have undertaken a census of
words for sounds in several languages and have found quite a few. Put-
ting both the public and researchers in the position of activating these
words rather than contenting themselves with understanding them when
read or heard (passive vocabulary) is among the undertakings that I am
pursuing.
michel chion is best known in the English-speaking world as the author of several scholarly
studies in translation on the relationship between sound and vision in film: Audio-Vision:
Sound on Screen (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1998), and most recently Film: A Sound Art
(2009), all published by Columbia University Press. He has also written widely on music
and is an accomplished composer of musique concrte. As a teacher, he is associated with
a number of institutions, most notably the Universit de Paris III, the cole Suprieure
dtudes Cinmatographiques, Paris and the cole Cantonale dArt de Lausanne.
Notes 1 Dissolution de la notion du tim- 2 See Barrire. [Trans.]

bre was originally published in
Analyse musicale in 1986. The 3 The term translated above by
essay underwent minor revisions extratemporal is hors-temps in
for inclusion in Chions collection the original. Chion uses the term
Le Promeneur coutant: Essais to indicate that the perception of
dacoulogie, and that is the ver- a given timbre requires an act of
sion that is translated here. Pour mental synthesis and totalization
en finir avec la notion du bruit and that there is a short time lag
appeared in Analyse musicale in between the moment of percep-
2007. [Trans.] tion of a sound emanating from a
given instrument and the positing
of the instruments timbre. This sources are noted for certain

use should not be confused with terms used above, and the reader
Iannis Xenakiss theorization may find it helpful to have this
of a distinction between the information recalled. Pierre
hors-temps (outside-time) and Schaeffer coined morphological
the en-temps (in-time) in his criterion as a replacement for
critique of serialism. Xenakis timbre (Chion, Dissolution 8).
was troubled by what he saw as The term acoustic forms refers
a tendency inherent to Western us to Franois Bayles provisional
musicreaching a sort of apothe- new classification of sonic mate-
osis in serialismtoward in-time rial in La musique acousma-
structures to the ultimate loss of tique. Also see Bayle, Support
outside-time structures, which he Espace. [Trans.]
likened to architecture. See Xena-
kis, Vers une mtamusique, 6 Russolos work originally dates
originally published in 1967 and from circa 1913. [Trans.]
translated as Towards a Meta-
7 Ngritude refers specifically to
music in 1992. [Trans.]
the movement among Franco-
4 Klang farbe, the German term phone writers from Africa and
for timbre, literally translates the Caribbean that called for an
as sound color, a meaning on examinationand to a degree
which Chion subsequently plays. a celebrationof their common
[Trans.] blackness in relation to French
political and cultural hegemony.
5 In the earlier version of Dis- [Trans.]
solution de la notion du timbre,
Works Cited Barrire, Jean-Baptiste, ed. Le Timbre, Mtaphore pour la composition. Paris: Christian
Bourgeois, 1991.
Bayle, Franois. La musique acousmatique ou lart des sons projts. Paris: Encyclopaedia
Universalis, 1985. 22118.
. Support Espace. Cahiers-Recherche/Musique 5. Paris: ina-grm, 1978. 1339.
Boulez, Pierre. On Music Today. Trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett.
London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
. Penser la musique aujourdhui. Mainz: Gonthier, 1963.
Chion, Michel. Dissolution de la notion du timbre. Analyse Musicale 3 (1986): 78.
. Dissolution de la notion du timbre. Le Promeneur coutant 98102.
. Guide des objets sonores. Paris: Buchet/Castel, 1982.
. Guide to Sound Objects. Trans. John Dack and Christine North. Paris: Buchet/
Chastel, 2009. http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/IMG/pdf/Chion-guide/GuidePreface.pdf.
. Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit. Analyse Musicale 56 (2007): 710.
. Le Promeneur coutant: Essais dacoulogie. Paris: Plume, 1993.
. Le son. Paris: Armand-Collin, 1998.
Russolo, Luigi. LArt des bruits. Trans. Giovanni Lista. Lausanne: LAge dhomme, 1975.
Schaeffer, Pierre. Solfge de lobjet sonore. ina-grm, 1966. Audiocassette.
. Trait des objets musicaux. 1966. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
Xenakis, Iannis. Towards a Metamusic. Trans. G. W. Hopkins. Formalized Music: Thought

and Mathematics in Music. Trans. Sharon Kanach et al. Hillsdale: Pendragon, 1992. 180200.
. Vers une mtamusique. La Nef 29 (1967): 11740.

michel chion
Dissolution of the Notion of Timbre
Translators note: The two essays by Michel Chion translated

in this special issue originally appeared in the French journal Analyse
musicale.1 Separated by an interval of some twenty years, they confirm
both a continuous concern with and development in thought regarding
the value of the sonic sources of music. I would merely add that the essay
Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit, rendered here as Lets Have Done
with the Notion of Noise, poses a peculiarand indeed intriguing and
heuristicproblem of translation. Of course, translations frequently come
up against mismatches between source and target languages. Even words
that seem to denote primarily the same objects or concepts will often
almost inevitablyconnote differently or cover ranges of meaning that
do not fully overlap. Further, where the meaning of a word in the source
language echoes perfectly the sense of a word in the target language, there
is no guarantee that their semantic equivalence will carry over to the level
of discourseto the level of words embedded in sentences and of sentences
in context. It is precisely these idiosyncrasies that are the starting point for
the authors reflections, and the reader will want to keep in mind that bruit

is precisely notor rather not justFrench for noise either in meaning or

in use. As for context more narrowly speaking, the reader should recall that
the authors remarks initially appeared in a periodical aimed at readers
interestedin both the weak and strong sensesin music in general and
the institutions of French music in particular. As the author indicates in
the course of his argument, this investment entails a certain passiveand
at times activeresistance among the otherwise musically forward look-
ing to removing the otherwise contingent distinction between sounds of
illustrious origin and supposedly ignoble noise.
Recently a collection of essays appeared on the question of

timbre in contemporary music. 2 I am surprised that this termlong since
inadequateis still in circulation. Of course, theres nothing to stop one
from wondering about the meaning of timbre in todays music, but if
you put the question this way, it is not only the noun timbre that is prob-
lematic. With its aura of self-evidence, the modifier today is no less so.
How would one go about locating this today of music? If we understand
it as the most up to date, the cutting edge, then whoand in the name of
whatin the current concert of diverse and not always compatible ten-
dencies will lay claim to it? On the other hand, if it is a question of the
totality of different sorts of music produced, performed, and heard in the
world in 1988including those musics written in previous centuries and
more often played and performed today than ever beforewho will have
sufficient familiarity to put forward the least generalization about them?
We can therefore only speak of todays music in a deliberate
mannerthat is, in order to defend a particular conception. This is what
Pierre Boulez did when he published his Darmstadt lectures under the title
Penser la musique aujourdhui. Of course we then risk getting it wrong. But
isnt this risk preferable to the current neutralism, which appears objec-
tive and thus serves entrenched positions? I mention these matters to clear
the ground for the question of timbre today, because in fact no simple and
singular response can be given. Depending on the perspective one adopts,
timbre is a notion that is either alive or dead, current or outmoded. As long
as we remain within the framework of a music grounded principally in
relationships of pitch and destined to be played traditionally on traditional
instruments, the notion is still of value. If we leave this frameworkby the
use of new means or new playing techniques on the same instruments
then it no longer is. This is what I will now try to demonstrate.
When the Western system of musical notation and training

proposed that the four dimensions of musical sound were pitch, intensity,
duration, and timbre, it was not without the knowledge that the last on
the list merely represented a qualitative catchall. It gathered together all
the perceptions that the other dimensions did not captureeverything
that makes the sound of an oboe played at the same pitch, intensity, and
duration as one on the piano unmistakably different and recognizable
as such. Only recently have we seen the desire emerge in some quarters
to give the dimension of timbre at least theoreticallyin practice it has
been a complete failurethe same standing as the other three: measur-
able, quantifiable, comparable, and capable of mastery. If we were to
believe certain speculative approaches, timbre ought to be considered as
the qualitative perception of the harmonic spectrum specific to a sound.
Such a spectrum appeared easily synthesizedor at least such synthesiz-
ing was imaginablestarting from pure frequencies. Confronted with the
acoustic insignificance and poverty of the results of this doctrine, which
was put forward at the beginning of the 1950s, it had to be admitted that
this was an oversimplification and thatas everyone now agrees, but
without going on to infer the consequencesthe perceived timbre of an
instrument encompasses, depending on the individual instance, many
other constituents, such as the curve of the global intensity of the sound,
the feeling of a more or less rough grain, the presence of a certain vibrato,
certain characteristics of attack, and a multitude of givens that are always
particular to a specific sound.
In fact, timbre is nothing other than the general physiognomy
that allows us to identify a sound as emanating from a specific instru-
ment (or more generally from a specific source, which can be imagined
or imaginary). It thus links to an auditory image formed in the memory
on the basis of variable and acoustically heterogeneous givens, and this
image is often the result of an extratemporalas it were, carved up
apprehension of sounds that, once heard, are reassembled and grasped
in the form of their overall unfolding. 3 The classical definition of sound
by pitch, intensity, duration, and timbre could therefore be compared to
the description of an individual by height, weight, age, and general physi-
ognomy (including his or her particular characteristics). The first three
parameters provide us with objective informationor at least information
that can be rendered objective, relatively measurable, and comparable
from one sound to another, just as from one individual to another. But as
for general physiognomy (or timbre), it is defined according to criteria
that can be quite variable depending on the person (or sound) in question:
one person might be defined by a characteristic body shape, such as long-
limbed or stocky, whereas a person of average proportions might be defined
according to facial features. If one puts three general physiognomies side
by side, each one maintains its particularity; no physiognomic melody is
produced until, from the three individuals so juxtaposed, one can com-
pose a little height melody, a little weight melody, or a little age melody.
From this analogy we can easily understand why the inherently seductive
Schoenbergian idea of a timbre-melodyof a Klang farbenmelodiehad
no chance of success. 4 Indeed, timbre is not a musical value. No ordering
relation in the mathematical sense, which is the basis for melodic effect,
is possible among three different timbresamong three sonic colors.
Having gotten to this point, some may think that the only thing
in question is the limited scope of our current knowledge and experience
and that we might soon enough discover the physical determinants and
acoustically objective qualities of timbres. But this would be to misun-
derstand the fundamentally causalist character of this notion, for which
no determination is possible other than this: that which enables us to
recognize (incorrectly or correctly) a sound as emanating from such and
such family of sonic sources, a recognition that is only a matter of habit
and convention. Just as there is only an individual physiognomy, there is
only timbre in relation to a sonic source, either recognized or supposed,
unless one understands by timbre everything that defines a soundin
which case the term, overly general and identified with sound itself, dis-
solves all on its own. Some, however, persist in their use of the term by
giving it a new meaning. But doesnt one thereby risk confusion, given its
weighty historical connotation?
Indeed, what does the expression a trombones timbre mean
once one strikes the instrument rather than blowing through it in the tra-
ditional fashion? Or, even more emphatically, what does the timbre of a
piano wire mean when it is attacked according to the various techniques
of musique concrte and when the sounds thus generated are recorded
and then submitted to diverse transformations that entirely reconfigure
the acoustic visage, as it were? Even according to classical technique, you
could already say that the violin has two timbres depending on whether
the playing was col arco or pizzicato. Current scores produce an even more
total scattering of the acoustic identity of the instrument, treating it as a
vulgar sonic body. At this point, timbre becomes a pure acoustic fetish and
a misleading concept that enables musicians to cleave to the reassuring
idea of sonic sources. In truth, however, in an authentic music made up of

all sounds, real sources are of no importance. The only things that count
or should count are sonic materials, morphological criteria, acoustic forms,
textures, and profilesin short, everything that allows us to consummate
the rupture of sound with its real source. 5 On the contemporary scene
and with the exception of musique concrte, the majority fears and tries to
conjure away this rupture. Meanwhile, there is so much to discover and
to uncover in the realm of imaginary sources. For this to happen, we need
only allow the traditional idea of timbre to dissolve and to perish, naturally.
michel chion
Lets Have Done with the Notion of Noise
S ome twenty years ago, the journal Analyse musicale asked

me for an article on the notion of timbre. Titled Dissolution of the
Notion of Timbre and since republished in my collection of essays, Le
Promeneur coutant, this contribution aimed at demonstrating why this
empirical and fuzzy word timbre, valid up until the beginning of the
twentieth centurythat is, prior to the recording and electronic produc-
tion of soundshas been unacceptable for quite some time. And it is much
more than invalid: the continued use of the concept of timbre limits our
understanding of sonic and musical phenomena by continuing to treat
musical sound in a conceptually causalist mannerthat is, it makes the
description of a sound dependent on its causationat a time when, with
the fixing of sounds by recording, their manipulation, sampling, synthe-
sis, this initial causation and the role that it plays in the determination of
sound have completely changed in nature. No one responded to my refu-
tation or leveled a counterrefutation, and lets just say the word timbre is
still carrying on just fine.
This is because the current musical culture, which claims to be
progressive or at the very least forward looking with respect to ideas and
techniques, tends toward conservatism with respect to words. Of course

there are colloquia, writings, reflections, and scientific researchor
research that presents itself as suchthat aim at rejuvenating the old
words. But as far as I am concerned, you cannot indefinitely preserve
the same signifiers, in the manner of old brands that one might be able
to brighten up and revitalize. In spite of the deliberately provocative
title of this essay, then, I ought to tip off the reader that I have no hope of
seeing abandonedor not quickly at leasta word such as bruit, that is,
roughly, noise. It is a word that for my part I never use, that was never
given a very precise meaning in French as far as the realm of sound is
concerned, and that not so much in spite of this but much more because of
this is put to work for the maintenance of certain smoke screens, certain
shams to which the prejudiced adhere.
First of all, there is the questionas simple as it may seemof
language. In modern French, the word bruit is derived from the past parti-
ciple of the verb bruire, itself derived, as up-to-date etymological dictionar-
ies attest, not from one verb but from two vulgar Latin verbs: bragere (to
bray) and rugire (to roar). In short, a strange hybrid of ass and lion that
leaves me perplexed (it would seem that this etymological explanation is
a sort of tradition transmitted among dictionaries). This gave birth to the
French masculine substantive that we now recognize. As such, it has a
history, and as such, it is not exactly translatable into another language,
even though there seem to be words in other languages that are synonyms
for it: noise in English, Lrm or Gerusch in German, rumore in Italian,
ruido in Castilian. None of these are exactly translated by bruit, nor do
they translate bruit exactly into these different languages.
In works of French classicism, the word bruit, which one
encounters constantly in the plays of Molire and Racine, almost always
designates not a sound per se, much less an animals cry, but rather a
piece of news, renown, reputation, an honoror a dishonora quarrel, a
rumor, and so forth, even if there are attested examples of the words use
in the modern sense. In contemporary modern usage, the word bruit is
more often applied to sounds, and it now signifies:
a) A disturbing sound. In this sense, a piece of music that bothers

us because it is played too loud or too late also qualifies as noise,
as bruit. Children who speak loudly make noise. By extension,
that part of a message that confuses or contaminates it (as in
signal-to-noise ratio).
b) Sounds that are neither musical nor linguistic. One rarely

speaks of noise or bruit to designate words from the moment
they are understood. It is only used once several people talk-
ing at the same timeor in another languagemake matters
unintelligible.
Inevitably, the first meaning contaminates the second meaning. To be

precise, it does so in French because, whereas in contemporary English
one speaks of sound (as in the sound of steps), in French one says bruit
des pas (literally, the noise of steps), which, even when these noises or
bruits are pleasing to our earseven when they are pleasant and lively
stigmatizes them. Indeed, the word sound in English gathers together at
the spot where the French bruit segments, as they say in the advertising
business. That is, it divides into categories.
The word bruit is really and truly a segregationist word, and
in my judgment it ought to be placed in the category of terms that have
servedsometimes honorablybut that are no longer fit to do so. In the
historical archives, it would join certain words once used in medicine,
such as the peccant humors of doctors in Molires day, or in physics, such
as the infamous phlogiston by which, in the eighteenth century, prior to
Lavoisier, one sought to explain the phenomenon of combustion. These
words were not absurd but rather corresponded to a particular state of
knowledge and of culture.
The term noise appears to some to have a certain scientific
legitimacy: they would use it to designate sounds that cannot be heard at
a precise pitch because they correspond to nonperiodic vibrations. At this
point, why not class as noises the extreme notes of many instruments such
as the piano or the organ? This would hold for the extreme high register
or the extreme low register, since in both cases one can no longer discern
pitch. Then the response comes: but those sounds, as opposed to the stroke
of a hammer or the grinding of an engine, come from a musical instru-
ment. And so we slip from a definition grounded in sound and the physics
of vibration to a causalist definition grounded in the source of the sound.
But then why should a sound be ennobled as a musical sound for hav-
ing come from a musical instrumenthowever ugly or commonwhile
another sound finds itself stigmatized as nonmusical for having been
produced from any number of source causes not considered musical: from
objects, from natural, bodily, or mechanical phenomena? And who decides
what is musical or nonmusical?
In any case, making the criterion for sound precise pitch does
not suffice to categorize, let alone to hierarchize, sounds. We hear precise
pitches in a considerable number of animal and also industrial sounds: the
purring of computers, the buzzing of air conditioners, the rich sounds of
trains, and, of course, the clinking of glasses, and so forth. It goes without
saying that these pitches are often mingled with sounds without precise
pitch, but this holds just as much for a solid proportion of instrumental
music.
What is true and remains so is that our ears hear the relation-
ship between sounds that are superimposed or successive differently
depending on whether these sounds possess a precise pitch. In the first
instance, apparently universal specific relationsor in any case relations
that have attained universalityare created that are classed as harmonic
or melodic. But when two sounds follow one another or are superimposed
on one another but do not have a precise pitch, a considerable number
of interesting and vital phenomenaincluding different comparisons
between their respective placements within the tessituratake place in
their relations. These, however, are phenomena that cannot be grasped in
terms of exact intervals, even if the mass of these sounds is more or less
low (in which case Pierre Schaeffer speaks of site) and if they are more or
less bulky and thick (here he speaks of caliber). For these sounds without
precise pitch, the equivalent of a perfect fiftha pure relationship, trans-
lated by our ears as an absolute quality that is independent of the sounds
that together create it (between D and A, or between B flat and F)does
not exist. But this does not mean that these irreducible, unsystematizable
relationships do not exist or are inferior in dignity and complexity.
It is not a matter of denying the difference between the two
types of case. In his Trait des objets musicaux, which I summed up and
restructured under the title Guide des objets sonores, Pierre Schaeffer
(191095), who invented musique concrte, certainly recognizes the differ-
ence established for the ear between sounds with a precise pitch and those
that do not have a precise pitch. He proposesthe terms can be disputed,
but the idea is clearthat we call the former sounds with tonic mass or
tonic sounds and the latter sounds with complex mass or complex sounds.
One might consider this semantic nuance hardly useful. After
all, doesnt Schaeffer thereby continue to segregate sounds along the same
lines as the academic distinction between musical sound and noise? And
in so doing perpetuate discrimination? No, because a crucial gesture
has been made: in Schaeffers formulation, a substantive has become an
adjective. The matter of the perceptibility or not of a pitch is now but one
of the predicatesone of the attributes of the sound as heardinstead of
being identified with its essence. The contrary occurs when we continue
to distinguish musical sounds and noises, as if they enclosed an essen-
tial, natural difference. I refer here to that which in Schaeffers Trait des
objets musicaux and in my Guide des objets sonores concerns the notion
of mass, defined as the manner in which a sound occupies the field of
pitch, in whatever way that may take place.
Schaeffer and those who were part of his circle at different peri-
ods (among them Abraham Moles and Pierre Janin) thus stepped across
an important threshold in understanding and research. If this move has
yet to be recognized, it is because the lifting of the essentialist distinction
between musical sounds and noises upsets the caste mentality of many
musiciansthe feeling they have of not having to work with everyones
sounds. It is a bit like in classical French literature, where a solid propor-
tion of words in contemporary use to be worthy of inclusion in poetry or in
verse drama had to cede their spot to a noble synonym. Writing or saying
water was not allowed; one had to use wave instead. Likewise with other
terms: not horse but courser, not earth but glebe, not house but dwelling,
and so forth.
The problem gets more complicatedbut at the same time this
is quite logicalthanks to the fact that a certain number of artists have,
during precise historical periods (notably at the beginning of the twentieth
century), reacted against academicism and conservatism by laying claim
to noise as their means of expression and have sought to create an art of
noises. The most famous of these was of course Luigi Russolo, yet his work
LArt des bruits (LArte dei rumori), albeit likable and inviting, is remark-
ably weak. 6 It never manages to escape from the contradiction in which
it entraps itself from the outset: claiming to liberate the art of sounds,
all the while depriving oneself of a large proportion of them, namely, the
sounds of instruments. Instead of opening the noise cage, Russolo enters
it, shuts the door on himself, and claims that here lies paradise and that
all is fine and dandy amid the noises, thereby confirming the idea of an
absolute distinctionan essential distinctionbetween musical sounds
and noises. Many initiatives that later claimed an adherence to Russolo
have had paradoxically reactionary effects. By claiming noise as trivial
sound thanks to its trivial source, they continued to uphold the idea that
it is the triviality (pots and pans) or the nobility (violin) of the source
that constitutes the triviality or the nobility of the sound itself, whereas
between source and sound there is not a simple and linear relationship.
There are many sounds more interesting, rich, or beautiful than others,
but this is not because of their sourceor for that matter in spite of it.
In the practice of music, to decausalize our relationship to
sound remains the most difficult and most revolutionary task, to which
many set up a fierce resistance (take note: it is not a matter of wanting
to prevent the listener from conjuring an imaginary cause but rather of
liberating him or her from the real cause of the sound). I lay this out in
my book Le son in the chapter titled Le cordon causal, that is, the the
causal cordon, where I propose in particular that we distinguish between
causal listening and figurative listening. Pace those who have formulated
it in this way and have made it a topic of reflection, the question What are
the relationships between noise and music? is therefore faulty. First of all,
it compares nonequivalent terms: noise is supposed to be an element, a
substance, a material; music an art, a discipline. For a long time, musi-
cians from different countriesand not only in the Westhave wanted
to believe in the idea that there ought to be in musical art a necessary
relationship between the material and the work. Just as a jeweler needs
precious stones to work his art, musical art would require musical and
premusical sounds (and in Schaeffers treatise, the notion of a sonorous
object suited to music strikes me as potentially reactionary and contrary
to the orientation of the work as a whole). It is not a questionwhich would
be simply a trite reversalof placing at the peak what had been at the bot-
tom but of declaring the abolition of the sound/noise distinction because
it is unfounded and segregationist.
Ideally, for me the word noise (bruit) is one that we ought to be
able to do without, except in its current usage as designating noise pol-
lution (nuisance sonore). Acoustically as well as aesthetically, it is a word
that promotes false ideas. In the same way the word timbre, in my opinion,
should not be used in musicology outside its traditional empirical meaning
(where it designates empirically the group of characteristics of an instru-
mental sound that allows us to identify it as coming from such and such an
instrument rather than another) because it promotes an instrumentalist
conception of music. Likewise, the word bruit, similarly vague, promotes
a segregationist conception of the sonic universe. The French language
has at its disposal a short word to designate that which is heard, without
placing it immediately in an aesthetic, ethical, or affective category. This
is the word son, that is, sound.
Above all, we must not replace the word noise, which, in the
usage under consideration here, marks off a deceptive territory, a bit like
the word race marks off within the human species beings, categories,
families that, independently of the fact that they constitute a ground for
racism, maintain the racialist illusion, or, put another way, the illusion
scientifically refuted but still tenaciousaccording to which differences in
skin pigmentation correlate to a group of inherited biological and cultural
particularities. Yet we see quite well that racialismthe idea that there are
racespersists, just like bruitisme, for reasons that must not be mistaken
or misunderstood. Every form of racism produces an effect among those
who are the objectsor rather, the victims. For example, among black
people who are the target or victims of racist prejudice, we find claims to
ngritude.7 And this explains the bruitisme that some profess.
This does not prevent us from informing ourselves about the
word noise. Open, for example, the Grand Robert dictionary in six volumes
to the entry for bruit. You will find a throng of descriptive and extremely
precise French words. (Why here and not under son? By dint of lexico-
graphical arbitrariness.) For several years, I have undertaken a census of
words for sounds in several languages and have found quite a few. Put-
ting both the public and researchers in the position of activating these
words rather than contenting themselves with understanding them when
read or heard (passive vocabulary) is among the undertakings that I am
pursuing.
michel chion is best known in the English-speaking world as the author of several scholarly
studies in translation on the relationship between sound and vision in film: Audio-Vision:
Sound on Screen (1994), The Voice in Cinema (1998), and most recently Film: A Sound Art
(2009), all published by Columbia University Press. He has also written widely on music
and is an accomplished composer of musique concrte. As a teacher, he is associated with
a number of institutions, most notably the Universit de Paris III, the cole Suprieure
dtudes Cinmatographiques, Paris and the cole Cantonale dArt de Lausanne.
Notes 1 Dissolution de la notion du tim- 2 See Barrire. [Trans.]

bre was originally published in
Analyse musicale in 1986. The 3 The term translated above by
essay underwent minor revisions extratemporal is hors-temps in
for inclusion in Chions collection the original. Chion uses the term
Le Promeneur coutant: Essais to indicate that the perception of
dacoulogie, and that is the ver- a given timbre requires an act of
sion that is translated here. Pour mental synthesis and totalization
en finir avec la notion du bruit and that there is a short time lag
appeared in Analyse musicale in between the moment of percep-
2007. [Trans.] tion of a sound emanating from a
given instrument and the positing
of the instruments timbre. This sources are noted for certain

use should not be confused with terms used above, and the reader
Iannis Xenakiss theorization may find it helpful to have this
of a distinction between the information recalled. Pierre
hors-temps (outside-time) and Schaeffer coined morphological
the en-temps (in-time) in his criterion as a replacement for
critique of serialism. Xenakis timbre (Chion, Dissolution 8).
was troubled by what he saw as The term acoustic forms refers
a tendency inherent to Western us to Franois Bayles provisional
musicreaching a sort of apothe- new classification of sonic mate-
osis in serialismtoward in-time rial in La musique acousma-
structures to the ultimate loss of tique. Also see Bayle, Support
outside-time structures, which he Espace. [Trans.]
likened to architecture. See Xena-
kis, Vers une mtamusique, 6 Russolos work originally dates
originally published in 1967 and from circa 1913. [Trans.]
translated as Towards a Meta-
7 Ngritude refers specifically to
music in 1992. [Trans.]
the movement among Franco-
4 Klang farbe, the German term phone writers from Africa and
for timbre, literally translates the Caribbean that called for an
as sound color, a meaning on examinationand to a degree
which Chion subsequently plays. a celebrationof their common
[Trans.] blackness in relation to French
political and cultural hegemony.
5 In the earlier version of Dis- [Trans.]
solution de la notion du timbre,
Works Cited Barrire, Jean-Baptiste, ed. Le Timbre, Mtaphore pour la composition. Paris: Christian
Bourgeois, 1991.
Bayle, Franois. La musique acousmatique ou lart des sons projts. Paris: Encyclopaedia
Universalis, 1985. 22118.
. Support Espace. Cahiers-Recherche/Musique 5. Paris: ina-grm, 1978. 1339.
Boulez, Pierre. On Music Today. Trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett.
London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
. Penser la musique aujourdhui. Mainz: Gonthier, 1963.
Chion, Michel. Dissolution de la notion du timbre. Analyse Musicale 3 (1986): 78.
. Dissolution de la notion du timbre. Le Promeneur coutant 98102.
. Guide des objets sonores. Paris: Buchet/Castel, 1982.
. Guide to Sound Objects. Trans. John Dack and Christine North. Paris: Buchet/
Chastel, 2009. http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/IMG/pdf/Chion-guide/GuidePreface.pdf.
. Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit. Analyse Musicale 56 (2007): 710.
. Le Promeneur coutant: Essais dacoulogie. Paris: Plume, 1993.
. Le son. Paris: Armand-Collin, 1998.
Russolo, Luigi. LArt des bruits. Trans. Giovanni Lista. Lausanne: LAge dhomme, 1975.
Schaeffer, Pierre. Solfge de lobjet sonore. ina-grm, 1966. Audiocassette.
. Trait des objets musicaux. 1966. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
Xenakis, Iannis. Towards a Metamusic. Trans. G. W. Hopkins. Formalized Music: Thought

and Mathematics in Music. Trans. Sharon Kanach et al. Hillsdale: Pendragon, 1992. 180200.
. Vers une mtamusique. La Nef 29 (1967): 11740.

james a. steintr ager
Speaking of Noise: From Murderous

Loudness to the Crackle of Silk
I
n information theory, noise has long been positioned as that
which a signal has to overcome through reduction or redundancy in order
to get across. Yet there is nothing paradoxical about the assertion that
noise is not noise. It simply remarks that the worddescriptive, refer-
ential, or conceptualis not the thing. But what is this thing, noise, about
which we might speak? And why speak of noise at all? Let me begin to
address these questions with a brief recapitulation of the moment when
noise well and truly entered critical theory, and with a flourish: Jacques
Attalis Bruits: Essai sur lconomie politique de la musique (1977; translated
as Noise: The Political Economy of Music in 1985). The overarching claim
of this work is that shifts in musical production and form are prophetic of
changes in social organization. The more radical implication of Attalis
thesis, moreover, is that music not only is ahead of changes; it can also
provoke them. Throughout, there is a line to Marx and Hegel in the impli-
cation that noise is the negative moment in the social dialectic.1 Coupled
to this dialectical account is noise as a sort of primary, material violence
that is channelized and seeking release; it would stand positively as the

250 Speaking of Noise
countervailing force to the repressive violence of society (channeliza-

tion). Music, then, is the sublimation of noise by form. We can most clearly
sense its presence in the music of medieval Carnival. 2 The violence of
noise is both realand Attali cites the fact that sounds pushed to a certain
decibel level can killand figurative: a metaphor of murder (143).
Attali makes clear his debt to Ren Girard and the latters
elaboration of the violence at the base of social relationsa violence that
reappears as ritual sacrifice, for example. The metaphor for murder is
precisely this: not simply a figurative transfer of meaning but a trace of
the original act that is simultaneously reactivated and occluded. 3 Beyond
Girard, the notion of symbolic violenceor simply the idea that any
imposition of an order such as language is violentwas part of the post-
structuralist landscape. 4 Not that this is the only way to situate Attali.
There is, for example, a clear precedent for his argument in Friedrich
Nietzsches account of Dionysian (chaotic and material) and Apollonian
(channelized and formal) musical tendencies and the possibility of their
conjunctionfor which Richard Wagners operas are a modelin The
Birth of Tragedy. 5 Closely related to noise as violence is noise as death.
Once again, we slide quickly into the realm of figure: death in the mode
of risk, disorder, and an excess of life (27). The precedents here too are
fairly obvious: Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the treatment of the
death drive as an antirepressive force in Herbert Marcuses messianic
melding of psychoanalysis and Marxism in Eros and Civilization, Nor-
man O. Browns similar thesis in Life against Death, not to mention the
connections forged earlier among death, the sacred, eroticism, and excess
in the writings of Georges Bataille. 6 And so noise is also characterized as
blasphemous.
Finallyand somewhat hastily grafted onto these points of
reference and lending an air of scientific credibilitywe also find ref-
erence to Henri Atlans information theory account that noise can be a
source of order, which is here given political resonances that are at best
latent in the original account (which has mainly to do with cybernetics
and communication, albeit with consideration of implications for physics
and biology) (see Atlan). Noise in Attalis argument is polyvalent, but its
various meanings all do hang togetherif not as a coherent paradigm, at
least in terms of family resemblances. Sliding between supposedly literal
effects and figurative meanings, between science and philosophy, gives
the impression of grounding in some original, objective, and material
noise. It is somewhat ironic to find in a work with clear Marxist theoretical
underpinnings that noise should thus find itself looking rather ideologi-
cal in form (doubly ironic because information theory had long specified
that whatever we call noise has to do with conceptual unity and that
the noise thing is relative to the context). The electrical engineer may
treat Brownian motion as noise, and so it will be in that instancebut
not in others.7 Attali recognizes such relativitythat noise does not exist
in itself but only in relation to a systemand yet he consistently turns
noise back into an essence or variety of related essences (for example, in
the reifying assertion that noise is violence) (26).
Taking up the matter of relativity and essentialism, I want to
return to the scene of Attalis intervention and ask how we might specify
noise in the context of musicthat is, in Attalis original context. What
exactly would noise be in or to music if we discarded murderous loudness
as an ultimately uninteresting limit case and treated figurative uses such
as blasphemy as suggestive at best? Would it be worth speaking of noise
anymore? In the first part of this essay I consider these questions by looking
at the directionor rather directionsthat the theoretical discourse on
noise has taken since Attali. I concentrate on the writings of Michel Chion,
who has had much to say on the topic and who also occupies an interest-
ingly oblique position vis--vis the sorts of philosophical and political
commitments that we see in Attalis Noise. On the whole, the movement has
been from an apparently unified and monolithic concept of noise, which
reveals its fissures on close inspection, to an understanding of noise that
insists up front on variability both across and within mediato the point
that speaking of noise itself becomes suspect. In the second part I move
seemingly far from French soil and theorybut as it turns out, not that
farwith a consideration of concrete practices and conceptual justifica-
tions of (musical) noise making in Japan. I conclude with a return to Chion
and some thoughts on how language, while incapable of determining audi-
tory perception, might in this very incapacity help explain how attention
to words contributes to the active listening he puts forward as a model.
French Noise: Bruit, Son, Remue-Mnage
Some thirty years after Attali proclaimed in a virtual manifesto

the transformative powers of noise, Chion called for an end to the idea in
a short essay titled Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit.8 The crux of
Chions case is this: the term noise can denote a sound of whatever source
and a sonic nuisance. There is here a problem of translation, for Chion does
not of course use the English word noise, but the French bruit, which has
a much wider application. To take an example given in the essay, whereas
in French it is normal to say le bruit des pas, it would be odd in English to
say the noise of footsteps, unless, that is, one wanted to draw attention
to their negative presence. To summon another French theorist of noise
and its relations, we might look to Michel Serres and his elaboration of the
parasitewhich among other things refers to the disturbing presence of
noise in the transmission of a signal. Bruit would be a parasite word par
excellence: a term that can be used to indicate whatever sound but that
infects the transmission of its own message with the negative connotations
of its more specific use. The tendency in English to use sound starts us
off with what we might call the assumption of neutrality. This tendency is
unwitting; it is merely the idiom. On the other hand, the French inclination
to use bruit colors sonic perception with an implicit negative judgment.
For general purposes, Chion thus suggests that his fellow Francophones
employ son instead of bruit in order to neutralize the sonic field.
Given his topic, and especially his project in the essay Pour en
finir avec la notion du bruit, we may be surprised to discover that Chion
never mentions Attali (though the latter does make a brief appearance
in Le Son 6667). This omission seems to me neither pointed nor care-
less, but rather a simple confirmation of how different are the authors
respective intellectual milieus, even within the French context. In this
case, as a musician writing about music, Chion has quite different con-
cerns from the broadly social and political agenda of Attali. These have
to do with what might be prejudicial both to composition or production
and to audition. Chion quite openly situates himself in what we might
with relative safety call a French school of twentieth-century music pro-
duction and theory: musique concrte, and especially the work of Pierre
Schaeffer. And it is in this context and in relation to the practices of
musique concrte, with its use of found sound and manipulation, that we
can best understand Chions critique of causalism, of which the rejec-
tion of the noise notionthe assertion of the inherent nature of noise and
the accompanying implicit hierarchization of soundsis a part. By this
expression, Chion means the usually latent valuation that attaches to a
sounds source. Causalism is a value judgment that can be most easily
grasped in the favoring of traditional instruments used in instrumental
music over sampling or extended techniques. In short, Chion is worried
about academicism and distinctions of cultural capital that continue to
mark the world of musicor rather, the world of French music. And it is
primarily in relation to this world that he rejects the currency of noise

as a technical term meaning any sound without precise pitch. This is the
form in which the everyday prejudice against noise is smuggled into a
musical discourse that would consider itself grounded in science and in
objective measurements. Chions aim is to draw attention to the lack of a
clear distinction between sound and noisebetween supposed host and
parasiteand to the fact that the attempt to provide such a distinction is
linguistically and ideologically underpinned rather than the recognition
of a supposed sonic fact.
Despite their apparently incommensurable positionswhich
so miss one another that to describe them as antagonistic seems grossly
inaccuratewe do glimpse in Attali and Chion a shared rhetoric. Is there
not, after all, an echo of the French Revolutionary pamphlet in Chions
call to do away with noise? If so, Chion is rather Girondist in terms of the
relative moderation of his positions as well as the looseness of his affilia-
tions with theory. He even allows that bruit might still be used if strictly
limited to noise pollution. 9 Moreover, in spite of the apparent abruptness
of his declaration against noise as a useful concept in music, we can find
traces of the argument implicit in his earlier writings on film in par-
ticular. In his foreword to Chions Audio-Vision from 1990, Walter Murch
mentions that French sound artists dealt with bruits and that the word
had negative connotations that colored the entire approach to sound in
film in France.10 This is a point that Murch may have extrapolated from
Chions overarching thesis, which was precisely that sound in film had
been devalued, disparaged, and largely overlooked and undertheorized.
Film had been treated as fundamentally a visual medium, and the advent
of sound pictures sixty years before had done little to change this attitude
(even if the reality was quite different). Chions aim was to show that one
had to talk of audio-visionthe mutually constructive interplay of sound
and spectacleif one were really to analyze film. And he would provide
at least some of the tools to do so.
While one of Chions key contributions has been to draw our
attention to and raise our awareness of the various ways in which sound
is handled, perceived, and functions differently across media and even
within a given medium, this is not to suggest that his analyses of one
medium have not influenced those concerning another. For example, it
strikes me as feasible and sensible that his rejection of causalism in music
stems only in part from the practices of musique concrte and Schaeffers
insistence on acousmatic listening (that is, listening without the visual
presence of musicians or instruments). It also stems from Chions engage-

mentas both theorist and practitionerwith sound in film, where it is
clear that effects are often added after the fact and that the cause might
bear only an analogous relation to what is heard and thereby signified.
For example, the crushing of a watermelonin itself somewhat ridiculous,
especially when linked to the sight of the samemay be converted into
an effect of horror when the audio-viewer sees or is visually led to infer a
human body.11 Moreover, it would appear that musique concrte has bor-
rowed and learned from the film medium when it comes to sampling and
sound artistry. In this regard, it is worth noting a parallel between Chion
and Takemitsu Toru, who similarly allowed his more strictly musical
compositions and his work on film soundtracks to positively parasitize one
another (so very different from the computer manipulations of Karlheinz
Stockhausen). This mutual influence and interplay, however, does not
mean that media are the same or that noise appears or works the same
way across media or even within a medium.
It is precisely the differences in media that help explain why
Chion in Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit makes the superficially
suspect claim that he, for one, has never used the French term for noise.
We must take this to mean, I think, that bruit has never been part of his
technical musical vocabulary. It would have been difficult for him to avoid
less technical employmentsas he himself notes, there is an idiomatic
tendency at work hereor to forgo bruit in his writings on sound in film,
where the word and derivations are part of the professional jargon.12 To
provide sounds for a film is bruitage and the Foley artist is a bruiteur. In
fact, the term bruit appears in the very titles of several occasional pieces
by Chion that appeared before Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit. It is
to these essays that I now turn, because they show Chion speaking of noise
in relation to a variety of media and media intersections. I would add that
their occasional nature is also of interest insofar as it helps reveal Chion
at work: many of the claims that would be rendered more abstractly in a
theoretical argument are here made usefully concrete.
I begin with Carnets acoulogiques: Bruits de mer (1990). The
title alone confirms the ordinariness of bruit: sea noises would create
an odd and ominous effect wholly absent from the usual sounds of the
sea. In this brief essay, Chion examines why sound recordings do not and
cannot reproduce the soothing ambience of the shoreline experience. He
speculates that such ambience is the result not of the sonic element alone
but rather of the interplay of the fine details and complexity of the visual
scene gathered and framed by the massive, undifferentiated aural com-

ponent: The sound is a stain whereas the image is a drawing; the sound
is like Soulages while the image is like Drer [Le son est une tache l o
limage est un dessin; le son est du Soulages quand limage est du Drer]
(47). Further, Chion suggests that it is precisely in the play of noncoinci-
dence between the two senses in which the specific charm of the ocean
resides. The charm is lost when the aural component is isolated and repro-
duced. Interestingly, accompanying this essay was a cropped reproduction
of Katsushika Hokusais woodcut print The Great Wave at Kanagawa from
the widely appreciated Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Whether intentional
or not, the illustration suggests that perhaps the medium of visual repro-
ductionalbeit not filmed or realisticmight be able to supplement the
deficit in ways that the aural cannot. The finely drawn black lines of the
engraving lend both complexity and energy to the illustration, and they
are balanced by the massive, undifferentiated color of the printthe two
aspects working together and against one another for effect.
This process of working together and against is echoed in Car-
nets acoulogiques: Le bruit et la parole (1990), where Chion turns to the
medium of theater. The occasion is a production of Macbeth where the set
design included a floor made of flexible slats that makes noise when one
walks about on it, recalling itself to the ear, to the point that it inhibits the
comprehension of the text [(I)l fait du bruit quand on se dplace dessus, et
se rappelle loreille, jusqu gner la comprhension du texte] (35). The
effect created by the design thus recalls the classical definition of noise in
information theory as that which inhibits the transmission of a signal. It
is in certain respects simply an extension of theater as a medium, which
since childhood Chion has associated with a certain remue-mnage or
hubbub. (Remue-mnage is literally the sound of furniture being moved,
an idiom for uproar.) This impression was doubtless increased because
he was listening to dramas on the radio, where the sounds of movement
were all the more prominent to the extent that through them one tried
to guess what was happening on a stage that remained unseen [o les
bruits de dplacement taient dautant plus sensibles qu travers eux on
essayait de deviner les jeux de scne quon ne voyait pas] (35). The bio-
graphical detail adds an intriguing, almost experimental layer to Chions
account. He asserts that for him theater initially had the visual element
removed and was instead experienced acousmatically. That is, through
the medium of radio, the sound element in the theater had been isolated
and, in retrospect, allowed Chion to perceive part of what the medium
does: it marks the passage from noise to voice. In the theater, we hear
the clash of materiality and signification, which for the latter is also a
necessary condition of existence. As a live vocal and more broadly sonic
medium, it highlights the fact that the voice as a carrier of semantic con-
tent must silence noise in order to inform but that it simultaneously relies
on and brings sound into relief.13 Chion thus writes, Wouldnt theater
be precisely this: noise, original confusion, living muck from which the
divine human word emerges halfway, in flashes [Ne serait-ce pas cela,
le thtre: le bruit, la confusion originelle, gangue vivante dont emerge
demi, par clairs, la divine parole humaine] (35). When Chion uses the
term gangue, which indicates the amorphous matter that encloses a gem,
we are not, I think, to take it that the voice is what we are meant to extract
from theater. Rather, theater would itself enact the relation between noise
and voice; it would be a sort of embodiment of signal-to-noise ratio where
the latter term is just as important to grasp as the former: the negated,
abject, nonsignificant, but still necessary material remainder. This notion
of theater is simply brought out in the production of Macbeth in question.
Indeed, because the stage design interferes with speech with apparent
purport, we are led to infer that this very clash is in effect the signal: a
call to second-order reflection on the signal-noise relationship and the
emergence and perhaps tenuousness of meaning (with a hint of Atlans
order-from-noise principle).
My last example of Chion on noise in various media returns us
to the more familiar territory of film. The essay Bruits de Chine takes
Bernardo Bertoluccis The Last Emperor as an occasion to narrate a certain
history of the use of sound in film. In the beginning and for a long time,
there were sound libraries that included largely denotative sounds. An
image of a train might be matched with a standardized whistleor the
whistle alone might signify travel. A scene of nature would inevitably
include the chirping of birdsonce again, often the same birds from one
film to the nextand so forth. As sound reproduction technologies have
progressed, however, what might strike us as a more and merely realistic
rendering of sounds in the new regime as opposed to the old, predictable,
limited vocabulary should not fool us. The new noises may be subtler at
getting messages across, but combined with images they are messages
nonetheless. In Technique et cration au cinma (2002), Chion likewise
notes that in film it is much harder to make a sound that does not carry
any particular meaning than to make a significant or meaningful one (un
bruit significatif ) (99). This is a history that Chion has given in greater
detail in Audio-Vision and other extended writings on sound in film, where

he has been deeply interested in the way that sounds (bruits) come to sig-
nify. For example, the choice of what sort of sound should accompany the
image of a man opening a newspaper depends on the meaning desired:
the nervousness of the gesture, the fragility of the paper, the presence or
importance of the personage. Chion calls this process le rendu of a sound:
that is to say, the translation by means of sound of a sensation or signifi-
cation that is not specifically sonorous (the rendu is always the rendering
of some thing) (Technique 99).14 Cinematic sound in this sense is rarely
redundant in relation to the image. That is, it is unusual to find sound pro-
viding no new information but simply reinforcing the visual given (merely
working against noise in the information-theory sense). Rather, it tends to
be on the road, as it were, to language as a system of meaningful distinc-
tions. It is connotation before or without denotation. Historically, the shift
has thus been from fewer soundsmore voice and musical soundtrackto
a proliferation of sounds and an increasingly nuanced expressive palate.
In Bruits de Chine and in other writings, Chion, while cau-
tious not to sound like an advertisement, has treated Dolby as the key
development in allowing a more detailed and more distributed sound and
thus more signifying and expressive narrative resources (Technique 105).
It is here helpful to recall that the original goal of Ray Dolby, who founded
Dolby Labs in 1965, was not fidelity of reproduction per se but rather noise
reduction using technologies of companding, that is, the compression and
expansion of signals. While Dolby noise reduction debuted in 1971 with A
Clockwork Orange, it was only some four years later with the introduction
of Dolby Stereo that channels increased. (Stereo was a misnomer, since
from the outset it could include the central and surround channels that
have since become synonymous with the brand.)15 Original Dolby simply
lowered the right half of the signal-to-noise ratio (rapport signal-bruit in
French). In the golden age of the Hollywood sound film, Chion suggests
that there was a sort of sonic horror vacui that was filled with prolixity
and music. But was this really or mainly some existential avoidance or
a more simple practical necessity? Without dialogue or swelling violins,
the noise of film might prove a positive distraction. Chion himself notes
that Dolby, by reducing hiss and other sonic nuisances, has enhanced
the use of silence as itself message or expressive force (Technique 105).
This can be particularly helpful in horror movies but more generally has
meant that little noises have been able to play an enhanced role. While
others had gone before, The Last Emperor marks a sort of coming out or
apotheosis of such detailed and nuanced sound, as opposed to the loud bass
rumble of a spaceshipthat is, the sort of overly eager and obvious early
demonstrations of Dolbys powers of reproduction and amplification. This
simply drives home the point that in cinema, where sound is coupled to
image, any noise or indeed silence is presumptively significant: a jammed
or absent transmission always appears jammed or absent for some reason
and thus as a metacommentary.
On this quiet note, we can make out why noise as a monolithic
category might also have little place in music for Chion. Compared to the
semantic-sonic voicing of theater and the significant interplay of sight and
sound in cinemaand even to the effect of the ocean itself considered as
an audiovisual mediumit would appear that noise in music is not posi-
tively recuperated as meaning, nor does it conceptually serve any func-
tion other than placing artificial limitations on production and audition.
Indeed, if in film sounds are turned toward significance and expression,
in the realm of music we witness a countermove toward and, I think, an
implied preference for insignificance and deconceptionalization. Music
appears as medium that, to be appreciated in its singularity, is or should
be quintessentially acousmatic: stripped of visual elements that might
serve as vectors of signification. Does this leave anything of the tradition
or paradigm in which Attali placed himself, where the negative is positive?
A paradigm in which noise is inherently loud and essentially violent, and
thus a force of disruption, change, and revolution? We do get a hint of such
violence in another brief essay by Chion titled Dissolution de la notion
du timbre, which, while published some twenty years prior, serves as a
sort of anterior pendant to Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit.16 Chion
here seems to advocate a sort of aggressive abuse of instrumental causes
as a way to free ourselves from them as hallowed sources or origins. What
happens to the timbre of the trombone when one strikes the instrument
rather than blowing through it in the traditional manner? Or again and
more emphatically, [W]hat does the timbre of a piano wire mean when it
is attacked according to the various techniques of musique concrte and
then its acoustic visage is reconfigured by recording and manipulation
of this recording? The symbiosis between human and horn, infused with
resounding withour breath and spiritualized, is brutally and physically
demystified; the caress of the fingers on the keyboard becomes an assault
on the instrument that is then prolonged into a tortuous reconfiguration
in the lab that ultimately results in a disfiguration.
One could easily push these points too far. Attack, after all,
in a technical musical context bears little or no connotation of violence. A
pianists attack on the keyboard can be light and tender. And to an extent,
Chion is simply describing the fact and the effectsobvious and less
soof the rise of extended techniques as part of the musical scene. Yet
he also clearly aims to destroy timbre as the acoustic fetish that holds
musicians and auditors in its thrall and to carry out the ritual sacrifice
that founds the new musical order: Current techniques enable an even
more total scattering of the acoustic identity of the instrument, from the
moment that it is treated as a vulgar sonic body. There is, then, a hint of
Girard and, indeed, of sparagmos: ritual dismemberment and scattering
of the remains. It is the form of sacrifice associated appropriately with
the mysteries of Dionysus. But just as much as this moment looks back to
Attali, in its attenuationin its faint echoing of the arguments of Attalis
Noiseand its attention to particularities within a generalization, it just
as clearly marks out the path to the rejection of noise in the later essay.
Further, if La dissolution de la notion du timbre is not cen-
trally about the relationship between sound and language, it does adum-
brate the critique of causalism that is central to Pour en finir avec la
notion du bruit. We can see in the first instance something along the lines
of an anti-Platonism. Chion does not argue in precisely these terms, but I
would like to say that the sonic image of an instrument or its gestalt tran-
scendentally unifies the fourth element of music as traditionally defined.
The notion of timbre suggests a quantifiable, objective feature that, along
with those other quantifiables of pitch, duration, and intensity, completes
our picture of what music is and can be. In fact, however, the term groups
together a number of particularities that can be assorted in different ways
and that change with each particular instantiation. Thus Chion writes that
timbre links to an image formed in the auditory memory on the basis of
variable and acoustically heterogeneous givens, and this image is often the
result of an extratemporalas it were, carved upapprehension of sounds
that once heard are reassembled and grasped in the form of their overall
unfolding. Which is to say that we mistake timbre for a transcendent fact
and guiding icon when it is actually a post hoc and somewhat arbitrary
construction. Critiquing timbre in these terms amounts once again to a
call to render sound acousmatic, this time by banishing the virtual image
that anchors and guides sound production and audition along certain pre-
established lines. Or, in the more Aristotelian terms that mark the later
noise essay, we might take pitch, duration, and intensity as the formal
causes of music and treat timbre as the material cause. When we shift
our point of view to efficient causes, howeverthat is, to the fetishized
source of soundwe are apt to read a final cause into this: the source of
the sound serves as an arche or guiding principle. This is once again why
acousmatic listening for Chion is itself paradigmatic: without knowledge of
the source, we cannot slip in value judgments having to do with causation.
Japanese Noise: , ,
Chions recommendation in Pour en finir avec la notion du

bruit is circumspect. It does not claim to be revolutionary but rather
advisory and only slightly monitory: a suggestion that we try and see what
would happen if bruit were replaced with son. Would we hear more openly?
Just a bit? He also puts before us a specific case: it is in French that bruit
not only carries negative connotations but through its very idiomatic cur-
rency has to some degree shapedclearly determined is too strongwhat
we might with hesitancy call the French cultural institutions of musical
production and listening. Chion notes that bruit is not the same as English
noise, and the same goes for Lrm or Gerusch (German), rumore (Italian),
and ruido (Castilian). Different languages entail different constructions
of noise, and they would differently condition local cultures of sound.
Can his argument, then, be usefully translated to other contexts? Can it
travel? And how far would we want to push the connection between lan-
guage and culture suggested here, however tentatively? To get us thinking
in this direction, I am going to turn not to the examples from European
languages mentioned but rather to Japanese and Japan, where noise is
distributed over a number of overlapping but nonequivalent terms:
(onkyou), (sou-on), (sou-on), (noizu). This series is obviously
not exhaustive; the terms are general, and Japanese, like other languages,
has a highly developed vocabulary for more particular sounds. And while
I think it would be difficult to demonstrate the degree to which inter- and
intralinguistic differences condition perception, these observations none-
theless provide a useful entre into what might be called the culture or at
least cultivation of noise in Japanese underground music. (The reasons
for my hesitancy will soon become clear.)
The first three are compounds, all of which contain the charac-
ter (otou). By itself, otou covers a wide range of sonic referents, ranging
from sound and noise to voice, tone, pitch, and timbre. Bashos
famous frog in the haiku drops into the pond with an otou. In English, this
is usually rendered as sound. As one might have come to expect by now,
French translations oscillate between son and bruit. In the first compound,
(onkyou), the second element comes close to redoubling the firstand
indeed the first character in the compound is incorporated into the second
as its radicaland simply means making sound or noise. This compound,
thus highlights the bare sonic element and might be considered the closest
equivalent to English sound or French son in their relative neutrality. The
second and third compounds are usually more negative. In both cases
the sonic element is modified by an initial character that designates dis-
turbance. (In Japanese is one term that can be used for noise in the
cybernetic sense. In Chinese, alone is the term for noise in this sense,
which does not mean that the character lacks other, wider applications.
For example, noise reduction is ; signal-to-noise ratio is rendered
, where the first character indicates message, trust, or fidelity, the
second noise, and the third comparison.) Historically viewed, appears
to be an onomatopoeia and rooted in the chirping of birds and buzzing
of insects (repeating the sound rapidly, one might make out the whirr of
deafening summer cicadas).17
The last on the list is clearly a loanword, as the katakana
script, generally reserved for foreignthat is, neither Japanese nor Chi-
neseimports suggests and as any English speaker can readily infer from
the transliteration noizu. It is also the other frequent term for noise in the
cybernetic and electronic engineering senses in Japanese. Visually marked
as nonnative, mimicking another tongue, and yet transformed into Japa-
nese by the script and by the modified pronunciation: is linguistic
hybridity in a word. If nothing else, the linguistic situation in Japanese
suggests alreadywithout any mention of culturethat notions of native-
ness need to be seriously questioned. This is not to say that Japanese is
unique. English noise is itself, after all, a gift of the Norman Invasion and
shouldered the (native?) Middle English din to the side. And noise appears
to have its roots in harm (nox) or nausea, that is, seasickness. These ety-
mologies suggest, moreover, that we should be wary of any implicit call
to origins when theorizing noise. There is no returning of noise from
figurative uses to its literal, that is, sonic, denotationthe sonic denotation
is already, historically speaking, a figure.
is also the usual term for the musical scene in Japan that
has generally specialized in loud, harsh, electronic cacophony. And while
it would be going too far to claim that language determined the shape of
the scene, there does seem to be at least an affinity between the word and
its connotations and the type of music or nonmusic filed under its rubric.
In Noise/Music: A History, Paul Hegarty sums up the variety of this scene
with a striking juxtaposition: If Japanese noise is zen, then it is also rope
bondage (134). The first term of equivalency signifies a certain studied,
extreme meditative calm and detachment. I will return to it shortly. The
second equivalency is perhaps less evident but nonetheless stands as a sort
of other pole in the definition of Japaneseness. The particular practice
in question is (kinbaku-bi or the fine art of tight binding). Photo-
graphs of nude women artfully bound fit with an array of practices and
types of representation that together define a Japan that is other to West-
ern sexual morality: from shunga or highly stylized and often grotesque
erotic woodblock prints to films that mix together violence and eroticism
(ranging from the highbrow avant-gardism of Oshimas infamous Empire
of the Senses, where the bereft heroine carries around her lovers severed
penis, to lowbrow horror films).18 Such practices and representations have
long been a source of fascination and repulsion outside Japan.19 To take
just one case at least marginally relevant to my topic, I would point the
reader in the direction of Olivier Assayass film Demonlover (2003), which
draws for inspiration on hentaianimated movies featuring, among other
things, bizarre sexual couplings of humans with tentacled monstersand
has a crackling, staticky soundtrack by Sonic Youth, an alternative band
known for its musical incorporations of noise. 20
Let me put aside the problems and complexities of representa-
tive sampling, selection bias, cultural essentialism, and exoticism that
immediately suggest themselves. They are obviouswhich is not to say
entirely without interest. Noise music in Japan has become one of those
exports that has earned national brand distinction as Japanoise. As such,
it is to J-Pop as J-horror is to the dreamy Japanimation of Miyazaki Hayao.
Granted, it also boasts a much smaller group of fans than any of the other
terms of comparison. The undisputed leader of the scene for over two
decades now has been Akita Masami, who goes by the nom-de-bruit of
Merzbow. 21 He is also an animal rights activist, a frequent contributor
to the pornographic press with a specialist interest in bondage, and an
occasional filmmaker (directing a short, gruesome film in the Legendary
Suicides series that features a woman erotically committing seppuku).
Merzbow seems to have gone further than most in attacking what Chion
has called the acoustic fetish. His initial instruments of choice included
tape decks and guitarsthe usual rock-and-roll noise machinedistorted,
treated, and accompanied in various ways. In recent years he has moved

to the laptop computer. And while the new technology has not meant a
fundamental change in his approach to noisemakingearsplitting sheets
of sound, hammering, often arrhythmic cacophonyit has rendered the
notion of timbre as a form of causalism a nonissue. It may appear as a sort
of hyperformalism in which form itself gives way to blocks of content, in
which mediation seeks to produce an encounter with the immediate. It is a
sort of sonic obscene, and, provisionally suggesting a transcultural dimen-
sion to the phenomenon, we might be little surprised that it is the female
body that appears in this context as an abject force to be both ecstatically
encountered and controlled. 22
If I make this comparison of what is usually taken as a visual
register with the sonic, it is not accidental. Akita has himself cross-refer-
enced the registers in such recorded pieces as his Music for Bondage Per-
formance. More to the point, he has suggested in an interview that noise
is to music as pornography is to sex, with the implication that the initial
terms of comparison carry, if not common content, a shared extremity. He
has also insisted on the non-Christian, non-Western approach to sexual
mores in Japan in particular. 23 To illustrate this difference, he alludes to
Hokusais infamous shunga of a human womans carnal encounter with
an octopusa woodcut that may serve here as the obscene pendant of the
Great Wave at Kanagawa. If the sort of tentacular encounters from hen-
tai have a classical cultural point of reference in Japan, it is surely here. 24
And yet Akitas musical pseudonym is a reference to Kurt Schwitterss
Merzbau, the Dadaist makeover of the artists Hanover house. This fact
alone should give us pause when it comes to assertions of cultural purity,
which hold here only to the extent that Japan has been frequentlyindeed,
stereotypicallytreated as not an originator but a perfecter of artistic
traditions and the purveyor of a studied and deeply formalist aestheticism
(the tea ceremony stands out in both respects). 25 In the conceptual appa-
ratus that accompanies Merzbows noise, there is just as much Georges
Bataille, with his entwining of death and eroticism, as anything suppos-
edly autochthonous. Indeed, Akita is well aware of a prominent (Western)
tradition of conflating death, cruelty, and excess with the erotic in which
Bataille looms large and of which Attalis Noise is a descendant. It will be
recalled that the latter precisely positioned bruit as violence and murder,
as death, as an excess of life, and as a potentially revolutionary force.
Merzbow seems to have attempted a literalization of Attalis
largely metaphoricor at least nonsonicuses of noise. Even with this
attempt to literalize, it is not clear that this is autonomous noise, since

it is marked by a profound conceptualism. Witness the Merzbox: a career-
spanning fifty compact disc collection that came bound in a rubber fetish
box along with a T-shirt, posters, and other paraphernalia (Extreme
Records, 2000; limited edition of 1,000). 26 But from a strictly sonic or acous-
matic standpointif such an abstraction is allowable given the amount of
context that surrounds his productionsit seems fair to say Merzbow has
boxed himself in exactly in the manner that Chion accuses Luigi Russolo,
the godfather of noise, of doing in his LArte dei Rumori (c. 1913): Instead
of opening the noise cage, Russolo enters it, shuts the door on himself,
claims that here lies paradise and that all is fine and dandy amidst the
noises, thereby confirming the idea of an absolute distinctionan essential
distinctionbetween musical sounds and noises (Pour en finir 9). That
is, there is something inherently limiting about being forced to choose
between noise and musica limitation that sound as a neutral category,
lacking precisely this distinction, does not entail. The limitation seems
to hold just as well for Japanese as for French bruit, and it would
appear that the decision to make noise, celebrating its negative connota-
tions, and to label oneself accordingly, acts, if not in terms of linguistic or
cultural determination, at least as a retroactive binding to a certain set
of concepts, criteria, and practices. Which is to say that in Merzbow the
attack on the acoustic fetish has itself become fetishized.
If Akita Masami and like-minded Japanese cacophonists such
as Melt Banana have carved out a spot in the global underground music
networks for noizu and loudness, another scene that emerged in the 1990s
and into the first decade of the twenty-first century (and counting) is asso-
ciated with (onkyou) and with machine-generated and manipulated
soundshushed rather than harsh or industrial. This is the Zen side that
Hegarty mentions, and it is once again worth noting the suggestive corre-
spondence between the term and the genre: both tending to sound without
further (value) distinctions. Among the more important contributors is
Sachiko M., who uses a sine-wave generator to produce subtly shifting
soundscapes. We should not jump to the conclusion, however, that onkyou
is somehow the distaff side of Japanoise, and I will concentrate on the
work of Nakamura Toshimaru, in large part because he, like Merzbow,
represents another extreme version of anticausalism, albeit without the
revolutionary trappings or pose. Nakamuras instrument of choice is a
no-input mixing board, and it would not qualify as an instrument at
all in the traditional sense. It is a piece of sonic apparatus that has been
taken on a driveto borrow from the Situationists terminology, which

of course focused on the spectacularthat begins and ends in the same
place: a mixing board in which input does not come from an outside source;
rather, the output has been plugged into the machine, creating a closed
circuit. The result is noise from the board itself that can be subsequently
manipulated. Of course, while feedback in music or sound amplification
has usually been treated simply as noise from an engineering point of
view, it would be better to speak of unwanted feedback (in cybernetics,
where the term originated, feedback has generally played a positive role
as the way that systems control and regulate themselves). In electroni-
cally amplified music production, feedback has long been relativized and
instrumentalized. Jimi Hendrixs deconstruction of the National Anthem
at Woodstockwith notes held until feedback bends them into lacerating
sirenshas become a sort of locus classicus in this regard. 27 And one might
note that a group such as Sonic Youth, which has situated itself between
noise and pop, has used guitars both to unleash howls of feedback as well
as for a more subtle play of amplified harmonics.
What Nakamura does is not new, then, but it does represent
a logical extension and almost reductio ad absurdum: a negation of the
traditional instrument and the conversion of feedback without notes into
the sole sonic register. It makes little sense to talk of harmony or melody
here, and anything approaching rhythm is a carefully extracted artifact
of the machine. In performance, Nakamuras sounds hover on the edge of
silence and demand the utmost attention if they are to be grasped at all.
The tactile metaphor is not apt, for one cannot grasp but must hearken to
these gentle, modulated buzzes and hums. appears a suitable, open-
ended term for such a form of sound production, which, while not exactly
music in the traditional sense, does not tie one to the violent, excessive
aspects of noise (nor, of course, does it exclude them either). But is there
anything culturally Japanese about Nakamuras approach to sound? Col-
laborations suggest at the very least affinities with musicians from the
West. I am thinking primarily of his work with the British musician
Keith Rowe, who was for over thirty years one of the principal members
of amm, whose sonic landscapes may have genealogical connections to
free jazz, British free improvisation, and avant-garde classical music but
remain somewhat in a class of their own. 28 Rowes instrument of choice
is the electric guitar, but it is approached in ways that are also distinctly
anticausalist. The guitar itself is laid on a table over which the operator
hovers like a surgeon more than a musician and produces sounds in a
variety of manners. 29 For example, a tiny electric fan may blow across the
stringsan attack that is no longer physical but given over to a caress
of air instead of solid objects (plectra, fingers). The electrical engine also
creates interference with the amplification technology, and this noise
is recuperated as sound and music rather than avoided as a nuisance. As
with the no-input mixing board, an element of reproduction, processing,
or amplification thus becomes instrumentalthat is, a part of the network
or circuit that is itself the instrument.
To hear Nakamura and Rowe perform puts one in mind of John
Cages 433 and the conceptual underpinning that the composer gave his
celebrated and disdained work: the near silence attunes the listener to the
rustle of the room, to the alternation of inhalation and exhalation, to the
traffic outside, and such sounds join in an experience that is not immer-
sive but resonant. The point of reference is as apt as it is inevitable: Cage,
who had attended lectures on Zen by D.T. Suzukiwho would become the
foremost popularizer of Zen in North America and help seal its association
in the American imagination with Japanopenly embraced the philosophy
as an appropriate way to approach his music. 30 Zen, with its emphasis on
meditation and emptiness, does seem an appropriate point of reference
for the type of listening that sound-based and anticausalist rather than
traditional instrumental musics call for. It thus comes as no surprise to
find, many years after Cage, Zen once again given as a model in Pauline
Oliveross work Deep Listening: A Composers Sound Practice. 31 A key figure
in twentieth-century electronic music in the United States as both com-
poser and accordionist, Oliveros has also crossed borders from avant-garde
circles into (certainly not the mainstream) thoughtful alternative music:
Sonic Youth played her composition Six for New Time on their millennial
tribute album Goodbye 20th Century, a compilation featuring the work of
crucial composers and pieces of experimental classical music. (Notably,
Oliveross piece was the only one specifically written for the album.) There
is a danger here that we may slip not only into exoticismand I have tried
to show just how difficult it is to speak of cultures, let alone cultural purity,
when it comes to noisebut also into the mystifying and precious. Just
as an emphasis on careful listening in conversation as a morally upright
openness to others can appear as a form of aural sentimentalismI hear
you as the assertion of sympathywe might be cautious in opting for deep
listening in music as a requirement or as inherently ethical. 32
Zen Noise: From Aesthetics to Ascetics
Beyond meditative practicessonic awareness and deep lis-

teningis there not something noisy about Zens most famous vehicle of
enlightenment, that is, the koan as absurd or meaningless, the disruption
of communication that provokes intuitive enlightenment? One of the most
celebrated, attributed to Hakuin Ekaku, is apposite: Two hands clap and
there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?33 In conclusion, I want
to return to Chions work, not so much to affirm it or even interpret it but
rather to consider what a close encounter with itas reader and transla-
torhas suggested to me as paths of development. In particular, I want to
rejoin the notion of the materiality of sound to that of language as a guide
to listening. Just as Zen seems a trifle portentous, should we not similarly
take our distance from what we might call Romantic particularism in
Chions considerations of timbre and noise? Is not the embrace of sound or
son rather than noise or bruit as a neutralization of value judgments and
exclusions also an attempt to purify the sonic domainto ensure that it
is unsullied by matter and instruments? Having banished the cause and
its materiality, do we now quest after an ineffable, transcendent aural
experience? I use the interrogative here both to leave open possibilities of
critique and alsomore importantlyto suggest that there are alternate
routes that lie open.
In his discussion of reduced listening in filmlistening atten-
tively to the sound-divorced imagesChion has made it clear that this is
only one manner of approaching the audiovisual medium. To be helpful,
acousmatic listening in this case must eventually return to the image in
order precisely to grasp the mutual interactions of the sonic and visual
registers. These mutual interactions demonstrate that the notion of prior
purity is spurious: it is the mutation of sound and image in interaction that
holds logical priority. Reduced listening is a pedagogical technique and
a preliminary approach rather than an end in itself. If it is ethical, it is in
the sense of building habits of listening and undertaking a certain sonic
asceticism as a useful exercise or labor. These notions of labor and exercise
(the original senses of askesis) are in quiet yet determined opposition to
the liberationist paradigm in Attali: the noise that will set you free from
order and all forms of symbolic violence. They do have a liberational
subtext nonetheless: promoting a freedom from determining concepts such
as noise, timbre, and cause in order to open one to sound in its variety and
to vouchsafe a freedom to produce and listen differently.
This variety and difference need not exclude traditional instru-

mental musicto do so would be to close the door once again on the noise
cagenor do they imply that sampling, prepared instruments, extended
techniques, in-time processing, or subsequent manipulations are somehow
immaterial. Moreover, if sound in music is turned away from signification
or expression, this does not mean that Chion has encouraged ineffability.
On the contrary, beyond neutralizing the sonic field with the rejection of
noise and its replacement with the neutral but all too general sound,
he has emphasized the importance of a rich and variegated sound lan-
guage, an active rather than passive sonic vocabulary that can open and
guide audition without determining it. We might think of this as a sort of
pragmatic Sapir-Whorff hypothesis for the ear: the notion that language
helps variegate or specify the phenomenal domain. Such variegation and
specification we cannot describe as correspondenceas in the represen-
tationalist notion that a word evokes an idea or images of its objective
referentbut rather as attunement. The matter of attunement was brought
before me when considering an observation that Chion had made about
translations into French of the line in Macbeth where life appears as a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: the word
sound is frequently and inexplicably rendered bruit or fracas (crashing). As
I have already remarked, the contrast of signification and noiseof voice
and soundmarks a certain essential quality of the theatrical medium for
Chion. Here the negative connotations of bruit or fracas may actually do
positive work in highlighting the constructive tension between the terms.
In this regard, fracas is of particular interest in that it seems to body forth
its signification: the first syllable, with its ending on the vowel a (voiced,
with open throat and breath vibrating the vocal chords), colliding against
the hard c (closing off the throat with the back of the tongue). Enfolded
in this example, we might see indicated a more radical or at least para-
doxical version of acousmatic listening. In cinema, we can separate the
perceptual registers of sight and sound. But can we not also contemplate
an acousmatic relation to the voice: a hearing of the sound without the
significance?
To do so might be strictly speaking impossible if it means
entirely negating not only the clearly significant but also the expres-
sive capacities of sound. It could be an interesting exercise, though, in
which the reduction of meaning to mere sonicality could be turned into
a moment of Zen: the paradoxical achievement of language heard as
signifying nothing. After this moment, we would return to the interplay

of sound and signification with a heightened awareness of the possible
mutual conditioning of the registers. Speaking of the resources of Dolby
in The Last Emperor, Chion draws our attention to the nuanced use of
sound in the film through a series of onomatopoeias at the outset of his
essay: Crissements dtoffes, frlements soyeux, froissements [Rustling
of fabrics, silken brushings-up-against, crinklings] (Bruits de Chine 112).
The very sound of these words, in which sibilants slide into liquids and
labials brush against uvular vibrations, while one would be hard pressed
to call it mimetic, does carry something of the sounds in question. This is
especially true in series, where otherwise nononomatopoeic terms such
toffes and soyeux are, in a manner of speaking, captivated and reveal the
sonic materiality and particularity that they share with their neighbors.
One of the things that the translator notices about onomatopoeia is that,
while it is often easy enough to find an equivalent in the target language
from the sourcethat is, the criterion of semantic equivalence seems satis-
fiedthe words, which do capture however imperfectly the sound object
to which they refer (in the mode of imitation), nevertheless differ in their
resonances, that is, in their sonic materiality. 34 A crissement is sonically
related to a crinkling but not the same. For if it is clear that, especially
when enunciated, such terms are the very stuff of sound; from the point
of view of semantics they always miss the mark of faithful reproduction.
And yet is it not precisely in missing the markputting into relief both
similarity and differencethat they better aim our ears at the target?
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Michel Chion for his gracious enthusiasm
when it came to having some of his shorter writings translated for this special issue. It was
in reading some of the many occasional writings that Professor Chion has produced that I
began to develop my own case in this essay. Any misinterpretations or mischaracterizations
are, of course, my own (although, as such, I hope they would at least confirm Chions posi-
tion that sources in themselves do not confer value; what counts is what you do with them). I
would also like to thank Stephen Nagy of the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong for lending his expert eye to the material in the second half of this
essay in particular.
james a. steintr ager is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Univer-
sity of California, Irvine. He is the author of Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the
Inhuman (Indiana University Press, 2004) and the forthcoming The First Sexual Revolu-
tion: Libertines, License, and the Autonomy of Pleasure (Columbia University Press, 2012).
He is currently working on global networks of mediaincluding music and filmand the
discursive construction of culture.
Notes 1 It is telling in historical and cul- 7 On this relativity in the con-

tural terms that Adorno is not text of information theory and
a point of reference in Attalis cybernetics, see Ashby 186.
examination of noise. Many of
Adornos concerns about disso- 8 Chions Pour en finir appears
nance and interruption as forms translated as Lets Have Done
of negativity in music would be with the Notion of Noise in this
appositeand his concern about special issue of differences.
the limitations of popular music is
9 In the original French, noise
an important rejoinder to Attalis
would be limited to les nuisances
celebratory approach. See Adorno.
sonores (Pour en finir 9).
2 Similar affirmations of the carni-
10 Murch writes:
valesque will be found in Turner
[S]ince the initial audience
andin historical perspectivein
for his books and articles has
Stallybrass and White.
alsountil nowbeen European,
3 See Girard. Freuds argument part of his task has been to con-
in the fourth part of Totem and vince his wary continental read-
Taboo that the actual murder ers of the artistic merits of film
of the powerful father led to the sound (the French word for sound
transformation of the primal effect, for instance, is bruitwhich
horde to the band of brothers translates as noise, with all of
and to the very emergence of the same pejorative overtones that
culture as a way to both figure the word has in English) and to
and hide this actis clearly an persuade them to forgive sound
important precursor for Girards the guilt by association of having
argument. been present at the bursting of
the silent films illusory bubble of
4 This aside on symbolic vio- peace. (Audio-Vision xiii)
lence follows Niklas Luhmanns
assessment of the critique of 11 The example comes from Chions
mass media, which he sees as discussion of Liliana Cavanis
incorrectly assuming that social 1981 film The Skin (Audio-Vision
order is built on consensus about 22).
background convictions and so
12 In Le son: Trait dacoulogie,
forever suspicious that the mass
Chion treats at some length the
mediathe social system respon-
relation between noise and music,
sible for generating a reality not
including the matter of causal-
subject to consensusis leading us
ism (6288). And the final two
astray. In this context, Luhmann
chapters of his Film, a Sound Art
archly remarks that if we hold the
take up the question of noiseand
mass media so responsible, we
indeed fundamental noisein
will always attribute to it duplic-
cinema (43964).
ity or something the French
might call symbolic violence 13 Drawing on Gregory Batesons
(100). celebrated definition of informa-
tion as a difference that makes
5 Nietzsches text gets surprisingly
a difference, we might say that
scant mention in Attali, but see
theater simultaneously occludes
Noise 9.
and gives us to hear differences
6 This discourse has proven that dont make a difference; it
remarkably long lived. See, for brings to our attention the non-
example, Bersani. informative materiality of the
voice as the vehicle of expression. own (sao4) indicates the sound

(See Bateson 44866.) of birds and is constituted by an
ideographically appropriate array
14 Chion also takes up the matter in of three mouths over a tree. These
Audio-Vision, ch. 5. reflections also lead one to wonder
what happens when a language
15 For a detailed account, see Sergi. evolves and what happens when a
sonic character travels from one
16 The essay Dissolution de la
language to another. The char-
notion du timbre is translated
acter and thus the meaning seem
as Dissolution of the Notion of
intact, but the sound is modified to
Timbre in this special issue of
suit native pronunciation and is
differences. It was originally pub-
also to an extent historically fixed.
lished in Analyse musicale. The
Indeed, Japanese on readings
essay underwent minor revisions
derived from Chinese pronun-
for inclusion in Chions collection
ciation as opposed to kun read-
Le Promeneur coutant.
ingswhile lacking in any tonal
17 For , the Japanese pronunciation element are usually deemed closer
sou is closely, albeit not exactly, phonetically to classical Chinese
phonetically reflected in current than is modern Putonghua.
Putonghua pronunciation: zao4 in
18 The longer history of such repre-
Pinyin. This leads one to wonder
sentations would have to take in
about how onomatopoeia works
Nikkatsu studios entry into pinku
ideographically, since clearly
eiga with the bondage film
sound words are not ideas in the
or Flower and Snake (1974; dir.
sense of images that are rendered.
Konuma Masaru; based on a novel
Contrary to popular misunder-
by Dan Oniroku) and followed by
standing, Chinese characters do
other films in its Roman Porno
have a strong phonetic aspect. Yet
series such as or Wife to
neither alphabet nor syllabary,
Be Sacrificed (1974; dir. Konuma
they obviously do not comprise a
Masaru). As for representa-
phonetic script. The association
tions from the outside, the self-
established between sound and
consciously exoticizing mondo
character is thus largely arbi-
exploitation documentary Shock-
trary. That is, a character does
ing Asia (1976; dir. Rolf Olsen)
not contain information on pro-
included a sequence on sado-
nunciation exceptand this is an
masochism in Japan, including
important qualificationinsofar
images of rope bondage.
as the nonradical component of a
composite character triggers the 19 For a now classical account of
echo of others of its form, with the bizarre sexual representations,
radical providing the semantic, see Buruma. On high film in
categorical information. With , this regard, see Desser.
for instance, the left-hand radical
indicates ideographically a mouth, 20 Another relevant example would
whereas the right-hand compo- be the now defunct American
nent hints at a shared phonetic band Rapeman, fronted by the
group without indication of tone: highly regarded independent pro-
(zao3; bathe); (zao4; irri- ducer Steve Albini, which made
table); (cao4; control); (cao3; ample use of noise and that took
anxious, sad); (sao1 or 4; rank, its patently offensive title from
fetid), and so forth. Interestingly, the eponymous hero of a manga
the onomatopoeic element in this series.
series appears primary: on its
21 On the scene in general, see Merzcar: an extremely limited

Hegarty (13351); he covers release in the form of a Mercedes
Merzbow in a separate chapter 230 in which a cd of Merzbows
(15565). See also Voegelins Noise Embryo was programmed
personalor necessarily subjec- to play without the possibility of
tive?account of listening to turning it off when the car was
Merzbow (6769). started. The Merzcar may or may
not have existed (an ontological
22 Julia Kristeva discusses the ambiguity that can only add to its
female and specifically the moth- conceptual allure).
ers body as what the child must
abject or differentiate itself from 27 There is certainly the possibility
in order to develop object rela- of political allegory herewith
tions at all in Powers of Horror Hendrix taking apart with noise
and her theoretical essay Labjet the ideological musical underpin-
damour. Her notion of abjection ning of the nation. Attali writes:
is closely related to the notion of [T]he work of Jimi Hendrix is
the obscene as an encounter with meaningless without the elec-
the Real beyond the realm of tric guitar, the use of which he
language and imaginary identi- perfected (35).
fications as developed by Lacan
and elaborated by iek. 28 Merzbow has himself collabo-
rated with many in the global
23 Merzbow, for example, has stated: noise improvisational scene such
We [the Japanese] have no devi- as Bastard Noise (United States)
ant sex, because we have no and Kapotte Muziek (Nether-
Christianity (Hensley). Hensleys lands); he has also appeared on
interview also includes Merzbow splits (traditionally records
making reference to the influence with one side dedicated to
of Bataille, as well as tentacular one band and the other side to
eroticism. another), including one with
a mm, which is also to say that the
24 Hokusais octopus fantasy has neat division implied abovefol-
been given film treatment in Edo lowing Hegartyis in actuality
Porn, dir. Shindo Kaneto (1988). much fuzzier.
25 On the question of Japanese noise 29 The table-top guitar has become

as culturally derived and specific, something of a staple in free
Hegartyin spite of the polar and improvisatory and related musics.
culturalist opposition mentioned Along with Rowe, Fred Frith
aboveotherwise argues that the has long made use of the tech-
scene itself can be read as a state- nique, documented on his Live in
ment of sorts against specifity Japan: The Guitars on the Table
and as an example of a messy Approach (1982). A similar use
and complex hybridity (134). of the guitar can be found on
his more recent Clearing (2001),
26 To give this conceptual aspect where chains, brushes, and other
its institutional credentials, I nontraditional modes of attack
should add that the Merzbox was are coupled with live manipula-
displayed at the Kunsthalle Wien tion using effects pedals and tape
in April 2002, with Masami pro- loops. Bruce Russell of the New
viding opening and closing live Zealandbased noise band The
concerts. This conceptualism has Dead C also uses a guitar-on-the-
been further mythologized in the table approach.
30 Zen was not the only Eastern 32 If I take my distance from cel-
influence on Cages musical con- ebration of aural violence that
ceptions. He also drew on the has as a visual analog depictions
writings of Ananda K. Coomara thatat the very leastmay give
swamy, and the I Ching became a us pause, I am equally suspicious
favorite compositional device. of the essentialism that would
posit listening and networks as
31 In Deep Listening, Oliveros female and commanding and
explains that the titular concept, hierarchies as malea charac-
while not tied to a particular terization made most famously
religious context or to religion in by Carol Gilligan in her aptly
general, nonetheless resonates titled In a Different Voice: Psy-
with meditative practices such as chological Theory and Womens
Zen: Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen Development.
Buddhist monk whose usage of
the term deep listening has a 33 In an appendix to Oliveross Deep
specific context as one of the Five Listening, Maika Yuri Kusama,
Mindfulness Trainings that he a student of Oliveros, uses this
proposes. This is a compassion- famous koan as a starting point
centered listening to restore to comment on the composers
communication in order to relieve teaching methods (8082).
suffering and bring happiness to
all beings. Listening (as a practice 34 Chion himself discusses ono-
in this sense) would be training to matopoeia and the different sonic
respond with calmness and clar- tendencies of languages such
ity of mind (xxiv). as French and English in Le son
(5861).
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caroline basset t
Twittering Machines:
Antinoise and Other Tricks of the Ear
Antinoise (ante-noiz, ant-) adj. 1. ordinance. 2. Capable of neutralizing

Designed to reduce environmental the sound of another noise.
noise, as in a community: an antinoise Free Dictionary
I
f noise is unwanted sound, antinoise is not quite its opposite.
It is an attitude to noise, a set of technologies, a particular kind of sound, a
sound-cancelling sound, a sound object held within various containers, a
container for various forms of utopian desire. It is also an operation. And if
it is tempting to begin by making a sharp division between the operations
of antinoise technologies of various kinds and those of humans who are
(singly or collectively) against more noise, this has to be resisted. Obvi-
ously there is no technical fix for unwanted noise that does not involve
the human ear. Moreover, the idealized desire for a particular kind of
sound that antinoise might promote, notably the idea of perfect silence
and by association the idea of perfectly natural silence, arises precisely
in the context of the rising volume that characterizes the sonic conditions
of modern urban life and that is a technosocial condition (acoustically
engineered natural white noise,1 anyone?). And then there are the oth-
ers that disrupt any binary. Antinoise involves other entities alongside
humans and machines: a popular ingredient in commercially available

peace and quiet, available by the downloadable megabyte, is recorded

birdsongs, for instance.
Different forms of contemporary antinoise involve complex,
tricky relationships and couplings between hearing bodies in various con-
figurations (e.g., physically together/apart, sonically colocated/dislocated)
and other agents and instruments of many kinds, many of which operate
in relations of what Bruno Latour might term delegation and prescription
to each other (Where Are). This article explores antinoise, considering
human and technological elements of its constitution as they emerge in
operation. Through what is a somewhat twisted circumlocution, I winkle
out an argument concerning noise and antinoise, the sonic commons,
and prospects for contemporary forms of sonic community or solidarity.
The latter formations chime with a certain reprioritization of the sonic
dimension that is characteristic of the contemporary urban experience but
are at odds with an age in which technologically achieved individuation
threatens public space through a form of delegated enclosurewhen the
world out there is often given to us as the extra promised by the laptop or
the iPod, the beach you choose to work on, the world at your fingertips,
the something for the weekend that comes with the cheap flight.
Technologically derived changes in what Marshall McLuhan
described as the ratio of the senses (24), explored suggestively in Michel
Chions consideration of audiovisiogenic effects within the apparatus of
cinema (203), are here explored in relation to cultures arising through
new media architectures that may tend to reprioritize hearing and/in its
relation to sight, at least at some registers. At issue are tricks of the ear
and tricks of technology: the further exploitation of the physiology of the
ear, the increasingly sophisticated channeling/directing of particular
sounds, perhaps what Chion, with reference to cinema, calls the ques-
tion of effects (201). These tricks with noise, often antinoise operations
of various kinds, do not replace but rather are in new relation to tricks
of rhetoric or discourse (and older tricks of the ear) with which we are
already familiar. Also discernible, therefore, may be an adjustment in the
modes through which forms of power operatefor instance, as outputs
operating ever more directly on bodies through various sensory routes.
Issues concerning noise/antinoise and the defense or restitu-
tion of the sonic commons may arise before questions of voice and the
conditions of its materialization within what Judith Butler has termed the
domain of the speakable (795) come into view, and they might therefore
be understood to stand before particular forms of politics, notably those
278 Twittering Machines
concerning (ideal) speech and its enablement in the public sphere. While
agreeing with Nick Couldry that global neoliberalism (an information
society of a kind) has resulted in a crisis of voice (Culture) that demands
attention, I explore not voice-as-speech but sound as noise/antinoise and
the terrains it frames, enables, and shapes. To read Henri Lefebvres con-
cern with the social production of everyday space through sound raises
questions about how sonic regimes, organized across bodies and machines
in various historically freighted microlocations, operate, how a particular
order of sound orders spaces. Processes of interaction and translation
among humans, sounds, objects, and technologies that operate this order
demand examination in their material specificityand by this is implied
a more fully sensual and fully technological (medium-specific), a more
material materialization perhaps, than that envisaged by Butler, whose
work remains, in important ways, in discourse.
Engaging with the political economy of noise (Attali) at the
level of sonic space making may well lead back to questions of voice and
its audibility in the public sphere. However, lingering longer on the terrain
of noise and sound rather than following the pathways leading to voice and
its materialization as comprehensible speech enables the exploration of a
certain emerging contemporary sensibility, a stress on sound itself. When
voice is invoked in this context, it is thus considered in its glossolaliac form,
as the form of voice in which language is sounded and may be sensed by
others, but in which it does not make semantic sense (de Certeau, Vocal
29). But this is not only about voice. In his beautiful history of twentieth-
century social metaphors of noise, Hillel Schwartz argues that noise has
increasingly moved from the acoustic to the metaphoric register (53).
Today, it can be argued, noise tends to transform back again, so that our
preoccupation is less with metaphor than with sound. This is not to deny
the metaphoric register but to consider new forms of sound and its produc-
tion that, while they may refresh this metaphoric register, do so in some
sense after the sonic event. At any rate, I want to suggest that contemporary
developments have tended to bring noise back as noise. As part of this, or
rather as its mechanism, soundand as Jonathan Sterne has shown us,
hearinghas become less increasingly metaphorical than increasingly
technological, a rather different change of state.
What stands behind this? A shift in the political economy of
noise partly inaugurated by media-technological developments themselves
and the changes in the ratio of the senses such shifts entail. To get at this,
it is useful to return briefly to Jacques Attalis 1977 critical investigation
of noise, which explored the nascent information society, prophesying the

networked form it later took on (137). Attali insisted on the annunciatory
vocation of music, its capacity to reveal the dynamics of a developing
social order beyond itself, a capacity that emerges because of its intrinsic
connection to a social totality (Jameson xi). Exploring this vocation, Attali
discerned signs of an escape from circuits of repetition characterizing
mass culture and glimmers of something new, a compositional turn that
might be a harbinger for a truly different system of organization, a net-
work within which a different kind of music and different social relations
can arise (137).
This analysis presciently figured features of the twenty-first-
century sonic landscape developing out of music sharing, ripping, and the
related crises of intellectual property for which MP3 technologies have
been both metonyms and operators (see Bull), and certainly many in the
first years of the last decade and the late 1990s took Attali to heart, discern-
ing new kinds of composer possibilities, from music to arranging files,
and new possibilities for the digital democratization of cultural produc-
tion in new media. Attali himself, however, guardedly optimistic or even
occasionally dazzled by the prospects of the information revolution, was
also aware that what was glimpsed as possible might fade rather than be
realized. For him, musics vocation was always utopian, as Frederic Jame-
son also notes (xiv), and perhaps two forms of utopia, the technological
fix and the continually receding but continuously refreshed ideal (Bloch),
compete in his account. If Attali was right in predicting that composi-
tion (user activity) might be central to a new dynamic of production, his
fearsthat what could provide the creativity and vitality to break through
mass consumptions repetition would instead be recuperatedwere also
well founded. Even by the late 1990s, such activity had already become the
business model of online community (e.g., Bassett, Arc 128).
The new new dimension, which takes us beyond Attalis 1970s
analysis or even its apparent partial fruition in the 1990s, is ecological
computing, that bundle of mobile, pervasive, locative technologies of
all kinds that, along with users, have redrawn the sonic environment of
everyday life, not only making it more information intensive (Hayles
47) but also altering the (perceived) balance and importance of the sonic
in intimate forms of public sociality and space making. These technolo-
gies are elements of larger existing networks, of course, but they are also
distinctive. The passage is from the late twentieth-, early twenty-first-
century Web with its inward textual focus to the still filament-rich but
widely dispersed and embedded network with its attenuated and phatic
use modes (where the iconic operation is increasingly synchronized to
the timescale of its bodily correlative: smile/J), a network that is now
coming to maturity and underscores the degree to which there is more to
connection in contemporary networks than can be explained in strictly
communicational terms. Indeed, the shift toward sound for itself identi-
fied above might be fueled by a certain dissident fatigue with Web loops
that, in their endless textual chatter, constitute terminal forms of (vir-
tual) communication. Thus, where Henry Jenkins demands that we only
connect, Jodi Dean argues that only connecting threatens to produce
nothing but more connection, permanent media (642), or communica-
tion that chases its own tail. The sealed loops envisaged in this position
seem to leave little prospect for meaningful critique or action (Chandler)
but also suggest that attention needs to be paid to whatnot reducible to
information or amenable to absolute enclosure within its mathematical
loopsmight be excessive noise, occupying this position both within com-
munication models (as the modeled outside, as signals other) and beyond
them (as what is sounded out).
Finally, a renewed focus on the acoustic might arise because
of a perception that there is more noise than before. Urbanization means,
among other things, that the world is louder than it was, and everyday life
in the West is a condition often said to be dangerous to our ears. The lat-
ter phrase floats through the net, a meme linking antinoise headphones,
noise-canceling technologies, antisocial street noise, iPods, windmills,
airports: a textual cacophony within which various voices can be heard
seeking or offering respite, tranquility, cover-up, compensation, canned
natural sound, weaponsor silence. This virtual melee finds resonances
elsewhere. Identifying an aesthetic of aural saturation in many contem-
porary films, for instance, Ed Hughes argues that a baroque overlay of
diegetic and extradiegetic sounds, often expelling filmic silence, may pro-
duce forms of unwanted dissonance (8), while Sandra Braman, for whom
anxiety around silence marks a more general societal stress, considers
noise nuisance legislation that puts nightingales on the wrong side of the
law (282). The old trope of natures unnatural silencing at the hands of
modern life, notably developed in Murray Schafers work, thus finds new
salience in relation to modes of life in conditions of intensifying (mobile/
pervasive/miniaturized) automation and computerization.
Rising noise produces rising antinoise. In what follows, I
explore some sonic compositions produced through the interplay of
noise and antinoise in frames constituted by everyday sites and in the

context of mobile sound art. In these conditions, divisions between sen-
sory environments defined as private and public spaces are renegotiated,
individual and collective noise making may be reframed, and the social
production of the sonic landscape, increasingly dominated by endog-
enous sounds (Conner 58), which may nonetheless intersect with sonic
outputs operating at larger scales, are contested in new ways. It might be
said that composition, or what Susan McClary, working etymologically,
described as Attalis put together aesthetic/practice (156), now multiplied
and overlapping, produces a put-together, put-together landscape; that
the acoustic landscape of the everyday, forged in part through the digital
elements embedded within it, becomes a cacophony of competing or ally-
ing compositionsor perhaps finds its shape as the outcome of uneven
interactions between them.
Supersonic Specificity?
This is not a matter only of more sounds but of modes of sonic

control and direction operating in tension with sounds own phenomenal
tendencies to absorb, connect, and migrate (Howes 41), to enable new forms
of sonic space making and space taking. Steven Conner notes that sound
lacks the separating qualities of vision. That notion of vision, famously
identified by Martin Jay (qtd. in Conner 54), has itself influenced moder-
nitys compartmentalization of the senses into self-contained fields
(Howes 4748). However, sound, being uncontained, resists such separa-
tion (Kruth and Stobart 3), so that while the eye tends to separate itself from
what it views and vision tends to separate the image out from other data
streams, sound easily crosses sensory boundaries, demands confirma-
tion from other senses, and, as Chion notes, is often completed elsewhere
(200). If an anthropology of sense perception demands recognition of the
located nature of any theory of the division of the senses (Howes 54), one
also needs to recognize that technology plays its part in this too. Explor-
ing the role of specific technologies in organizing sensory frames for the
ear and eye, Chion thus notes that in cinema it is the lack of an acoustic
frame and an easily discernable origin point for sound that encourages
asymmetric attachments (the tendency of sound to complete the image
rather than vice versa) (204). In new media architectures, sound, un-
homed from any specific location and easy to translate into other output
forms via digital equivalence, can potentially wander still further and
seems to become still more protean, but it is also increasingly constrained

by information technology as control device, by the high degrees of sound
programmability that contemporary sonic technologies provide. In these
new mechanisms for storage and distribution (Kittler), sounds migration
across the membrane dividing the senses (see Conner) can be contained
in new ways so that it cannot so easilyor at least not so promiscuously
become allied with other senses.
The pressures that motivate and constrain forms of sonic slip-
page produce, on the one hand, a tensioned relationship between demands
to use sound freely and to free sound (even from languagehence
the attraction of ambience, voice that is not speech, live music, and other
forms of nonvoiced sonic sociability, interaction, or cooperation), and on
the other, the increasing precision of sonic technologies designed to chan-
nel and control sound and noise. This tension operates in part discursively
(although the discursive register itself may rely heavily on the invocation
of sensation), but increasingly it operates directly. In contrast to Schwartzs
deprioritization of questions of tone, decibel, or the specifically sonic (52),
the issue here is how sonic qualities are deployed and to what effect. It is
also why the principle of Attalis exploration of sound (noise) as a social
relation of powerof noise itself as politicalis important, opening space
to explore specific technologies and specific forms of sound in their irre-
ducibility to the social, while at the same time enabling a form of sonic
critique. Out of this critique might come a politics of space, perhaps one
cohering around the right to the city, as David Harvey frames it (23),
which is negotiated in sonic terms. Coming back to the competing com-
positional activity defined above, Harvey argues that such a right, defined
more or less in direct opposition to John Lockes justification for enclo-
sure (see Dawson 9), as a right to the commons, also has to be regarded
as a common rather than an individual right (23; emphasis added). This
distinction is central to the remaining sections of this article. It relies on
a material conception of enclosure, a term that reaches back to English
histories of the appropriation of land through various acts of enclosure and
associated processes (Thompson, Making) in which land held in common
became land held in severalty, a shift involving the removal of communal
rights, control, and ownership over four centuries (Kain, Chapman, and
Oliver). 2 The commons as enclosures antonym (Linebaugh 11) therefore
also has a complex material history, one developed in political and moral
registers 3 as well as in relation to ownership and occupation or control
of terrain. If enclosure has become an important interpretive idea for
understanding neoliberalism, then, as Peter Linebaugh notes, it might

include traditions represented by Silvia Federici (on gender) and Michel
Foucault (on confinement) but also those represented by Harveys argu-
ments around accumulation by dispossession (Linebaugh 11), where the
connections with the earlier history are clear. Enclosure/commons has
also become important in information society debates on the creative com-
mons and digital enclosure (see Berry), network politics, and biogenomics.
These debates have often produced work foregrounding Gilles Deleuzes
formulation of enclosure as an exhausted mode of discipline that oper-
ates in contradistinction to control as a mode of modulation, an evident
response to Foucault. The modulation/control division developed in such
debates seems too absolute to me, but more importantly, in my argument
enclosure is explored as a complex material process rather than as one
term in a diagram of power that is said to have been largely superseded.
Great Western Ears
Susan Sontag said that the art of our time is noisy with appeals
for silence (qtd. in Hughes 136). This also goes for Englands trains and for
the noisy, disputatious bulletin boards of various commuter groups, ragged
collections of antinoise campaigners disagreeing on what might constitute
unwanted sound, sure that they know it when they hear it. enforce the
quiet carriage! These capitalized virtual disputes are textual echoes
of a more visceral series of sonic experiences, small wars on trains them-
selves, intimate events that the railways frame and contain, and in which
they participate. The campaigners feel there is too much noise and also
too much technology and are galvanized, as the generation before them
was by public use of transistor radios, by new noisemaking devices.
iPods, gaming consoles, and phones are among the mobile sonic
technologies that have imported new sounds and carved new sound layers
into what is no longer a more or less unified internal sonic space defined
by its relation to a continuous outside (the train itself and its travels
across the landscape it organizes). The internal environment of the train,
its passengers and their devices, is now one that simultaneously fragments
and organizes sound. Individual journeys may become more composed as
train users make their own auditory environment, but the shared envi-
ronment becomes a repository for unintended sonic consequences. The
carriage holds the noise exhaust 4 from individually wanted sounds (Bas-
sett, Up), becoming what Michael Bull has termed a cooled-down sonic
space (355). In response there has been a rising demand for more quiet and
more control, for the establishment of reserved sections, new rules, and
Quiet Carriages, and if the campaigners ire is directed at many forms of
noiseloud talk, childrens crying, personal talkit is at its most intense
when directed against the secondary noise emitted from personal audio
devices. 5 As one First Great Western railway commuter put it, in an odd
inversion that nonetheless makes a point, [Q]uiet is the new smoking.
However, there has also been an increased adoption of devices produc-
ing secondary noise, which are often sold as personal antinoise tactical
devices. 6
Many sonic devices contain noise reduction technologies of
various kinds, the simplest being the earplug. Antinoise might cover all
of these, but it is also a technical term for noise-cancelling technologies
first developed and used in industrial settings and now widely delivered
via a growing consumer electronics sector intensively cultivated by com-
panies such as Bose that are better known for their more audible products.
Noise cancellation involves the addition to the sound wave of matching
but offset sound, creating a phased repetition of the original, which oper-
ates to fill in the troughs and peaks of the sound wave (Taylor 45). Noise,
here a form of anti-sound (44), thus cancels noise, so it can be said that
a certain form of elective hearing loss is enabled, paradoxically enough,
through a process of addition rather than subtraction. This is perhaps an
auditory form of trompe loeil, although the ear is not fooled in relation
to the sound in the same way the eye is tricked by the image.
What is a technical operation at the level of the frequency might
be imitated as a strategy at the level of the device; an obvious response
to a noisy antinoise device is to take up another device to cancel it out.
However, the antinoise campaigners are often actively hostile to antinoise
technologies, refusing what they recognize as a trick of the earand a trick
organized by technology. From their perspective, antinoise technologies
are often nothing but more noise, although here noise includes not only
sonic leakage but visual pollution. Offending not only the ear but also
the eye, noise becomes clamour in many sensory registers. Thus if the
hearing of the First Great Western railway travelers is overwhelmed, this
is partly because something exceeding cochlear hearing, but something
still somehow viewed and felt as noise, informs their sensibility and fuels
their anger. It is also clear that their sense of affront arises because they
judge this noise in relation to a certain dimensionthat of the carriage,
to which they lay claim singly but often also in the name of the group.7
Wolfgang Schivelbusch famously argues that railways made the

American, and remade the European, landscape (89). With Leo Marx, he
explores the iron horse of fire (Marx 191), whose screams cut into the
quiet land, retraining the ears of whole populations, part of a rebalancing,
if Marxs account is accepted, of the American middle landscape, of distinc-
tions between nature and culture (222), and of the pastoral as a literary
and political construct. The internal engineering of the railway system,
notably the carriages, is an integral part of this history, both in European
and u.s. contexts, and this closely concerns sensory accommodations. For
instance, the thickness and quality of seat upholstery directly provided
varying degrees of comfort to different social bodies (Schivelbusch 11323),
designed so that it not only absorbed the vibratory shock of the new mode
of transport for individuals but also ameliorated the jolt to the social sys-
tem newly collectivized travel involved; to put it crudely, the differential
value of various backsides was directly experienced through the emergent
technology of upholstery (the drivers rigged pieces of old board against the
vibrations). A compromise between collective travel and the maintenance
of social distinction, but also a certain balance between traveling in the
external environment (the perception of movement) and internal stasis
(sitting comfortably) was thus not only attained but in a sense contained
or prescribed for train riders in horsehair and ticking.
To turn from the vibration of the early train chassis to the
organization of internal communications, and with it to public talk and
interaction, is to shift sense register but to stay with the same history. Early
compartment design varied, dividing passengers in different ways. u.k.
trains lacked connecting doors, for instance, isolating passengers in small
groups. 8 Later, the connected carriage became standard on European and
u.s. trains, producing a semi-discrete and intimate internal environment
that encouraged quiet, 9 overlaid by the louder noise of the train itself, the
latter perhaps operating as a form a white noise (Schivelbusch). It was
this relatively stable configuration, its elements embedding a particular
communicational affordance, that was disrupted in the early 1990s, in the
United Kingdom at least,10 when mobile media devices began to give pas-
sengers the power to reshape an acoustic arrangement that was previously
largely not user programmable or at least inflexible.
Talk Quietly When Talking . . .
Quiet Carriages, established on many uk routes in the 1990s,

were offered as solutions to the problem of incompatible expectations as
to how this reorganized space should be occupied by different groups of
passengers, and they came with instructions for use:
We ask that people who sit in the Quiet Carriage respect other
passengers and:
Use their mobile phones in the vestibule and not in the carriage
and keep them on silent throughout the journey
Do not listen to personal stereos or other electronic equipment
such as portable dvd players
Keep all other electronic equipment such as laptops and portable
games consoles on silent
Talk quietly when talking to other passengers
This way those that wish to have a peaceful, relaxing journey
may do so. First Great Western would like to thank you in
advance for your cooperation.
This rather bald code constitutes a form of antinoise operation, although

not a particularly effective one. In contrast to a complex set of prescriptions
embedded in a material assemblage and in the habitus of passengers and
operating in multisensory terms (the sound-image economy of the train in
the landscape/the landscape in the train defining an auditory and visual
near and far that might regulate internal volume, for instance), this code
issues new orders in writing. It might be said that the mode of delegation
employed in the two cases is very different. In a report on the failure of
Aramis,11 a mass transit system that sought to enable small group travel on
fixed rails by maintaining immaterial couplings between very small car-
riages, Latour considers what might be termed the hidden layers involved
in what seems to be a purely technical mode of delegation, arguing that
mechanisms designed to automate certain tasks also absorb the desires,
compromises, and even the moralities of their makers and silence them
even while making them operational (Aramis 206). In the case of the uk
trains, a change in the acoustic environment has reexposed compromises,
negotiations, and desires but also the thoroughly artificial nature of the
original arrangement that produced a particular sonic economy that
came to seem natural and that is still regarded as naturally right to
those defending it (as a right to peace and quiet). The new written code
meanwhile remains raw, and its attempts to impose peace and relaxation
are often viewed as misplaced.
The soundscape demanded by the antinoise campaigners
entails a romantic return. In a twist parallel to one described by McLuhan
in relation to media forms, the cultural memory of an older soundscape,
understood at the time of its creation as profoundly and disturbingly
unnatural, becomes the content of an idealized vision of how such an
environment should naturally sound. The newly fragmented public spaces
of contemporary trains, including the outputs from multiple portable
sonic devices that are felt by antinoise campaigners to be literally out of
place, stand in contrast to this. For the forlorn but often feisty contem-
porary antinoise campaigners, the journey they remember, the marker of
an impossible but desired middle landscape configured in specifically
sonic terms, can be taken only in the imagination. The sonic regime they
regard as natural, that the Quiet Carriage notices can only ineffectually
represcribe, is long gone; perhaps in some sense it never existed.
White Noise?
It is striking that the commuter protestors rarely object to or

even comment on the external noise of the track and the train. In fact,
their desired soundscape includes the industrial noise of the locomotive,
and this complicates any straightforward link between technological noise
and the antinoise sentiments of the campaigners; it is not purely because
the mobile devices make technological noises that they are disliked, but
because of where these noises are made. Heard from the inside looking out,
the train, producing its own rhythmic white noise, is essentially a form of
noise cancellation, and one that extends from sound into the image-sound.
I mean by this to reverse Chion, who writes of the sound-imageof sounds
tendency to complete itself in the imagewhile also invoking his sense
of an economy of complementarity and compensation operating between
vision and sound in close-up and long shot (112). Here this economy oper-
ates in the relationship between the interior of the train and the exterior
landscape, but rather than sound completing the image, it is the distant
image that fills in the sonic economy.
Thus, while personal devices wrap the sonic environment more
tightly around the body and its humming and the sound of its blood, a move
that tends to reduce common sonic space to a form of jointly occupied
nonspace, some of the antinoise protestors, in revolt at the constriction of
space, the narrowing of the image-sound horizon that might be implied

by individual device use, instead want to maintain this larger context and
continue to listen to (or at least accept) the noise of the train. A parallel
might be useful here: John Cage performed a timed chant in a museum
garden looking out onto a busy New York street, but Cages work might
have been the traffic outside. Moreover, If the concert was located beyond
the Gardens walls, did it actually begin or end? (Kruth and Stobart 14).
The sonic sensibilities articulated here, threading through bodies and
machines, operating over time, accepting or refusing various tricks of the
ear, might express something about that articulated and much discussed
desire for individual choice that finds its market form in individua-
tion, which concerns not only how space is fragmented but how personal
and shared time horizons might be held in common. In this fragment of
everyday carriage life and its small-scale incidents is thus an example of
the kind of disjunctive (discontinuous but connected) relation between
sound and the social world that Attali pursued.
Twittering Machines
Schafer defined aural space as limited on three sides by the

threshold of the audible and on one by a threshold of the bearable (115).
The Mosquito, an antinoise device housed in a small cage, suitable for
mounting outside commercial premises or in parks and other public
spaces, goes beyond that threshold. Designed by a South Wales company, it
emits a high-pitched (18kHz) whine, intolerable to the young (thirteen- to
twenty-five-year-olds) but inaudible to older people, whose ears no longer
have the acuity to register these frequencies. For hearers, auditory discom-
fort quickly mounts and becomes unbearable. Designed to act against a
group deemed noisy, disruptive, and often threatening (bbc, Calls to Ban
Mosquito), the Mosquito, naming itself for a pest, turns what is repellent,
by a neat inversion, onto the teenager (see bbc, Calls to Ban Anti-Teen
and Calls to Ban Mosquito; and npr for more on audio repellents). If
this inversion is smoothly achieved, it is because noise and antisocial
behavior are already categories increasingly fused in public discourse.
Liberty, the u.k. human rights organization, reflected this when its direc-
tor, Shami Chakrabarti, roundly denounced the technology as an abuse
of human rights and declared, [Its] the Mosquito itself thats antisocial
(bbc, Mosquito Anti Social). Liberty advocated a legal challenge based
on noise abatement regulations held in the Environmental Protection Act,
something that would not only halt the device but expose its largely hidden
noisiness. The Mosquito is viewed by its opponents as a form of antinoise
technology that, while claiming to be a technical solution to a social
problem, is thoroughly ideological and shields its own sonic operations
by defining others as the noisy ones.
The Mosquitos roots are in other sonic population manage-
ment strategies and technologies, notably musical deterrents in the tradi-
tion of Muzak (Sterne, Urban 7). However, the move from forms of sonic
deterrence based on taste (the culturally capitalized dislike of particular
kinds of music, for instance) to the bodily discomfort and pain inflicted by
the Mosquito frequencies points to a change not of degree but of kind, in the
forms of sonic discipline acceptable in everyday life. Many people find the
low-level but real violence of the device unproblematic, and the Mosquito
has been accepted with gusto by a series of organizations, with around
3,500 sites in the United Kingdom alone (bbc, Calls to Ban Mosquito).
Earlier methods of population management already aimed to
suggest a certain impartiality, and automation itself can mask the stench
of viciousness: a mechanism cannot take anything personally, and it never
knows whom it has repelled. The Mosquito begins not with individuals
but with the construction of categories to which individuals are involun-
tarily matched (hearers or not). Categorization and recruitment operate
simultaneously with action taken against individuals as a result of cat-
egorization. Moreover, the human ear takes on some of the functions of
this categorizing machine, a reversal of the MP3 principle where hearing
is automated in the interests of compression, so that as Sterne and others
have explained, the device anticipates the workings of the ears physiol-
ogy and models processes of sound perception (The MP3 837). Here,
being recruited into the mechanism, and thereby completing its circuits,
the capable ear becomes part of a techno-social sonic ensemble. Their
ears thus recruited into a machine, hearers are half-ejected from their
own bodies, as well as being ejected from what are now sonically policed
spaces. Being driven out of the hearing zone, taken past the threshold of
the bearable, they are perhaps no longer auditory subjects.
Paul Klees Twittering Machine, a work widely read as a critique
of technocratic modernity (Shapiro 68), depicts a line of artificial birds on
a wire, apparently components of a trap.12 Below them is a pit and at their
side a handle. In the absence of a human hand, the suggestion is that the
twittering birds (even the twittering of the birds) magically (sonically/
automatically) work the handle and thereby also work the limed trap
(68). In the case of the Mosquito, the sort of mechanism that the teenage
ear completes by registering the twitter/frequency as sound also works
the magical/technological/sonic mechanism that achieves its own trap-
ping. And if the ear becomes part of a machine, the design also allows the
general illusion to be entertained that nobody turns the handle: for those
legitimately within spaces policed by the Mosquito, its sound is inau-
dible; for the target group, its sound is inescapable. Moreover, because the
redoubled terrain produced operates differentially, those failing to register
the high frequencies overlook the Mosquito even within the zones where
it is operational. As a bbc reporter noted, [T]he sonic device to drive
away troublemakers easily becomes a little mythical (Catcheside), and
in fact it is already, despite its implementation, something of an urban
myth. Witnesses onsite see only the apparently incommensurate responses
of the young to an invisible/inaudible problem. And isnt this kind of
noncomprehension (you dont understand me) already the common lot
of teenagers?
The effectiveness of the Mosquito is intended to outlast its
proximate operation. Indeed, it claims to offer its victims a sonic educa-
tion: teenagers, it is said, like Pavlovs dogs, learn to want to stay out of
the way. Automation might thus be said to pass from the central sections
of the machinic device to its outpost, the ear, and then, once the ear has
been educated, on to storage in memory. The compulsory nature of the
auditory sort, producing the social order (stay out) as sound, thus tends
to be silenced or concealed still further. Latours assertion, it will be
recalled, is that mechanisms not only automate but take on the desires and
compromises that underpin their construction and silence them (206).
In the case of the Mosquito, a delegation mechanism that was designed
with concealment in mind is further perfected. The confused interpella-
tion of the older public music system (calling in/driving away) is modu-
lated to one commandleavecommunicated to a group designated as
deserving of this command by virtue of being able to receive it. The sonic
specificity of the Mosquito sorting mechanism hones the degree to which
it takes on delegated social imperatives, definitions, and categoriesfor
instance, those vaguely linking antisocial behavior to noise to the young.
In Mosquito terrain all teenagers are now firmly (sonically) attached to
these categories.13 However, what is happening here is more than simple
delegation of orders, and certainly more than a form of delayed causation:
First, because this is a mode of sonic surveillance, which no longer looks
before it acts, nor consults, but rather identifies and acts simultaneously,
constitutively, with no detour back to humans despite the fact that it both
operates directly on the body and operates through it; although this mecha-
nism is inescapably embodied, it is also profoundly inhuman. Second,
there is the question of process. In use, Mosquitoes may incite, or call to
order, new communities or new groups: the buzz off campaign launched
by concerned organizations (including Liberty), or those engaged in more
casual detournements, or u.s. and u.k. school students who have adopted
high frequencies as ring tones immune to adult interference.
Sonic Technology and Ambiguity
The Mosquito provokes small-scale skirmishes, and the local

operation of this kind of cultivated acoustic ecology, where antinoise
technologies produce hooded areas full of aggressive but half-silent noise,
disguises its potential reach and extent. Recently the bbc invited users to
create a sonic sound map of the United Kingdom. A future version, its con-
tours marking sonic pitch rather than elevation, might include increasing
numbers of no-go zones, areas unsafe for various unwanted population
groups unable to traverse them without pain. Harvey includes within the
call for the right to the city the right of inhabitationto live in, visit,
move freely around (23). Here the struggle over freedom of access to the
public or privatized public space in the city (or suburb) becomes a struggle
conducted on sonified terrain, a struggle in sound for common access that
may also scale up.
Demands for noise abatement made in the course of the Mos-
quito dispute resonate with Ivan Illichs call for a general defense of the
silent commons built around the idea of a shared right to silence that
would found the conditions for allowing voice to be given. In this case,
silencing the Mosquito would literally reenable common entrance to a
shared terrain. For Illich, silence is that shared condition, under threat by
machines that ape people, that is necessary for the emergence of per-
sons. This is a critique of technologys amplificatory possibilities, since
machines that ape people provide prostheses that give certain groups the
power as the louder hailers to silence others. Illichs uncompromising
humanism finds its roots in Karl Marx but is underpinned by a suspicion
of technocratic rationality and mechanization that resonates with Martin
Heidegger. In particular, the account of processes of technological framing
in The Question Concerning Technology has some relevance here, particu-
larly where Heidegger considers this in relation to the formal subsumption
of land as standing reserve (322). In the contemporary case, however, the

terrain rendered ready to be serviceablecontingently, at microscales,
and/in relation to a specific appealis a zone for consumption rather than
a site for primary exploitation.
The contemporary channeling of sound might be understood
in these antitechnological terms, but it is also possible to remain in
sympathy with Illichs demand for a silent commons while reading the
relationship between technology and its impacts on the acoustic environ-
ment in a less determining way. The acoustic economy, the organization
of a particular set of relations through a mode of sense perception, which
is also a political economy, is subject to material alterations that do not,
in and of themselves, have to tend in the direction of perfecting certain
kinds of control or dominance. In the case of the Mosquito, for instance,
it is relevant that auditory age is itself an increasingly infirm construct.
In an article on cochlear implants, Michael Chorost, now deaf, reports on
a quest to hear Ravels Bolero, noting that one of the peculiar but relevant
aspects of the upgradeable earand at one point Chorost was plugged
directly into (was hearing through) an external computeris that it defies
aging: [M]y hearing is no longer limited by the physical circumstances
of my body. While my friends ears will inevitably decline with age, mine
will only get better. Particular forms of categorization and prescription
increasingly perfected by one technology may cease to be operational,
being out-tricked by another.
Hum and Mumble:

The Glossolalia Machine
smSage, a sonic artwork designed to create public spaces in city

streets, also evidences an ambiguous but not entirely negative approach to
technology. It consists of a mounted surveillance camera casing contain-
ing equipment to rebroadcast text messages solicited from passersby via
broadcast appeal and Bluetooth. The work was designed in part as a wry
commentary on u.k.-based reports of real surveillance cameras that
spoke back, issuing orders to those in its sights (Redfern and Borland),
and once again produces and enframes a public space composed of noise
and antinoise, this time a sonic terrain marked out by the sound of human
voices.
Frauke Behrendt has explored smSage via Jrgen Habermass
consideration of small publics, suggesting it might produce a hermeneutic
bridge to link short message service (sms) microsites/micropublics. Cer-

tainly the acoustic commons, built around the idea of a shared right to
silence that would found the conditions for allowing voice to be given
(Illichs point), stands as one of the conditions for the establishment of an
effective public sphere. However, to stay with the commons, refusing the
shift of register to the public sphere, with its focus on discourse and com-
munication, might also be productiveexposing the outlines of a project
of sonic solidaritybased not on defending access to common space (the
tactic of the Mosquito protestors) but on building it. It is in its glossolaliac
aspects that smSage invites this approach, and these begin with the sms
contributions, characterized by their pared-down grammar and elliptical
phrasing and therefore already operating at the limits of coherence. These
are broadcast clearly once, and then they degrade. The result is what the
artists describe as a mad murmur (Redfern and Borland), fading away
into silence, so that as Michel de Certeau puts it in relation to glossolalia
in general, the pattern and texture of voice is given, but the meaning is
disassembled. De Certeau defines glossolalia as a trompe-loreille, just
like a trompe-loeil, a semblance of language that can be fabricated when
one knows its phonetic rules (Vocal 29). The glossolaliac speaks for
the sake of speaking: so as not to be tricked by words, to slip the snares
of meaning (29). This speaking, says de Certeau, may fill a space of
enunciation with polyphonic chatter or mad murmurousness. It can be
viewed, if not as a spatial tactic preciselysince de Certeau sees glossola-
lia as almost involuntary, a response to something felt as a need to speak
that is pressured before allowing it a way out (31)then still as a form of
sonic space making.
De Certeau argues that glossolalia already pushes up through
the cracks of ordinary conversation: bodily noises, quotations of delinquent
sounds, and fragments of others voices punctuate the order of sentences
with breaks and surprises (29). Technocratic rationality, famously con-
sidered elsewhere in de Certeau in relation to scopic versus embodied
experiences of space (Practice) and in relation to narrative voice, tends
to threaten that polyphony.14 In smSage, however, technologys effects
are reversed. The surveillance instrument, the camera-like device, takes
(in) a message and reworks it, not in order to freeze it and render it com-
prehensible but rather to fragment it into a something that is not even
speechsomething that wriggles out of the constraints of meaning while
retaining something of speechs appeal to an otherand to disperse it out
across the environment where it forms a temporary acoustic hood. This
sheltering murmur, slipping from language but remaining in voice, per-

haps sounding out something close to what de Certeau calls the tattoo of
the vocal, might tend to slide from something experienced as sound to
something felt more like a vibration, a sympathetic resonance or a form of
sonic solidarity, at once human and machinic, perhaps a form of wanted
white noise.
This resonance does not produce the forms of shared meaning
that might be explored in terms of communicative rationality, and thus it
remains suggestive rather than operational as a hermeneutic bridge for
the small texts that might constitute a modified public sphere. However,
if the trick played on language is accepted and the obligation to make
meaning is not forced (see de Certeau 33), it might produce a frame within
which another kind of sonic community might emerge, one defined not
by incorporation and exclusion but rather by solicitation and inclusion.
Thus, in some aspects, the sound of antinoise (here in the frame of art)
can become or can contain a utopian gesture and might be said to do so
even as it slips away from heard sound toward resonance or touch. De
Certeaus own utopian love song to contact as an everyday and miracu-
lous possibility operates with this light touch: The element of chance,
produced by circumstances [...] the most anodyne conversation, the most
anonymous man or woman, everything that speaks, makes noise, passes
by, touches us lightly, meets us head on (Practice xvi).
Exploring smSage as a Glossolalia Machine once again imbri-
cates technology, if somewhat ambiguously, in the production of a form of
annunciation. In this context smSages fragility, noted by Behrendt, who
has explored the work in situ in New York and who has also interviewed
the artists, is relevant. This fragility arises partly because of issues of
compatibility with international versions of software but also perhaps
because of a reluctance of the potential donors to this common space to
give up their voice on command. The intention is to make a public space
or a public sphere, but those invited to give their words, perhaps justifiably
suspecting that surveillance equipment operates a trapand it is true that
their words are taken from themare often silent. So it might be said that
smSage remains largely impossible, if also occasionally operational. Often,
like language falling into glossolalia, but also like Utopias real location
(see Bloch), it is no longer [...] or else not yet (de Certeau 30). I suspect
it is on this basis that Behrendt comments justly that the best in sonic art
is often found in the reasons for its failure. Turning this around, it might
be said that because the principle of breakage is at the heart of this work,
it also succeeds.
smSage certainly stands in contrast to the aggressively filled
silence found in the Mosquito-infested spaces that seek to define only
one kind of sonic subject, one whose hearing has become an abstract
(im)possibility. It might also suggest ways of remaking shared space dif-
ferent from those prosecuted through the rules of conduct that seek to
resolve the petty but heartfelt disputes over peace and quiet on the rail-
ways, where at root a series of different and competing claims to space
are made. Sensory divisions, amplified by machines, might mean that we
increasingly inhabit different worlds as well as desire to do so. The sonic
channeling that comes by way of technology can break up former sites of
solidarityantinoise of a certain kind might thus bring about a certain
neutralization of communitybut it may also be entailed in designing
sonic architectures enabling or imagining new kinds of shared space and
new ways of sharing space.
Intersectional politics demands both a form of distinction (a
recognition of difference) and a form of solidarity or alliance (Crenshaw),
and the kind of design project outlined above might be judged in relation to
the forms of intersectional engagement it enables. Demands for intersec-
tional politics have often been made in relation to a deficit of representation
or legibility (for instance, in relation to sex and race). However, demands
for the right to the city or the suburb, articulated through noise-antinoise
struggles, might also invoke an intersectional politics, one that begins by
making a distinction, but not in the name of project of the self or in the
name of the self, but rather, in the name of a form of community or in the
name of recognition of community, which can then go on to consider how
to form an alliance. If smSage is suggestive here, it is because it attempts
to upturn technologies traditionally used to curtail interaction or inter-
section so that they instead promote it. It thus gestures toward a space,
a sonic commons, that might also enable a form of social solidarity. This
would begin by recognizing that it is the tension between individuation
and the common use of common space, rather than the tension between
individuals, that is at the heart of sonic conflicts in which various forms
of noise and antinoise are invoked. It might thus aim to reduce rising
sonic violence.
An early version of parts of this article was presented at the Aesthetic Seminar at Aarhus Uni-
versity, Denmark, in November 2010. Thanks to Lone Hansen and others for their comments.
caroline basset t is Reader in Digital Media in the School of Media, Film, and Music at
the University of Sussex. She researches intersections between digital technologies and
cultural forms and practices, with a focus on gender, mobile media and sound, narrative and
life history, and critical theory. She is working on a monograph exploring anticomputing
(Manchester University Press, 2012).
Notes 1 See Naturalwhitenoise at on your mp3 player because the

Naturalwhitenoise.com. surrounding noise is too loud?
(Tracy and Matt).
2 Various acts of enclosure con-
straining common access rights 7 See Rachel Bowlby on the ritual
were enacted from the fifteenth habits of the train-riding public in
to the eighteenth centuries (Kain, England.
Chapman, and Oliver).
8 The first railway in the United
3 E. P. Thompson argued that Kingdom was developed at Oys-
enclosure was a complex form termouth around the turn of the
of material culture rather than nineteenth century and was horse
a question of formal ownership drawn. Rail travel using locomo-
and a plain enough case of class tive power was established in the
robbery (Making 218). Writing 1830s.
of the food riots in the eighteenth
century, Thompson also defined 9 The tradition of the silence of
moral economy in terms of com- the reading public began on the
mon expectationsof what was railways (Schivelbusch).
socially just, and thus about the 10 Oddly enough, it was a series
principles that should guide a of train crashes at the turn of
community (Moral 77). the century that established the
4 This exhaust space may itself mobile phone as part of the rail
become something akin to what landscape in the United Kingdom.
Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey See, for example, Jeffery: Rescue
Bowker, exploring a mode of workers heard the sound of aban-
silencing, call a residual cat- doned mobile phones ringing.
egory (274). In this case, it is 11 Aramis foundered in part because
not a none of the above (their
of fears that physical as well
designation) but ratherand
as virtual links were required
assuming that all spaces must
between cars to ensure the safety
belong to individuals, so that the
of passengers.
concept of a commons becomes
illegitimatea nowhere and 12 Shapiros report on Klee points
non-space. out the etymological connections
between the trap and the machina
5 My journey from Crewe to Milton (69).
Keynes recently was rather like a
concert for mobile phone geeks, 13 Those who are innocent are
who proudly aired their latest said to be able to prove it by their
downloads (Ciao). rapid and purposive passage
through the area to pursue their
6 Do you find that as soon as you legitimate business (Mosquito
get on a bus, train, or plane that Web site).
you have to turn the volume up
14 Here it may be useful to refer of sound through various forms

back to the channeling of what is of its instrumentation discussed
viewed as the natural promiscuity above.
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iain chambers
Sounds from the South
Rhythm inserts time into ethics.

Turetsky
T
o travel with sonorial cartographies, with musical maps,
is to hear and live a Mediterranean that continually exceeds its habitual
framing by national boundaries and limited linguistic communities.
Stretched, folded, and recombined, these interweaving and overlapping
soundscapes promote vibratory combinations and cultural resonances,
a poetics that consistently frustrates the conclusive. Such sounds chart
the limits of a modernity that has generally been unable and unwilling to
respond to multiple itineraries, opting instead for a unique and homoge-
neous narrative. The musicalized marginalities of modern rebetika, ra,
localized rap, flamenco, fado, and Neapolitan song condense in sound a
doubling and dispersal of history: both a history of perception and dis-
cernibility, of individual composers formal innovations, and of varying
problems and solutions evident in different periods; and an antihistory of
becoming, an antimemory of temporal blocks of differential speeds and
affective intensities (Bogue 53). To map the Mediterranean in figures of
sound that precede and exceed existing maps is also to confute generic
distinctions marked by both national protocols and institutional tastes.

In particular, the Occidental distinction between art and popular music

(and behind that, between classical and folk or primitive cultures) is
consistently queried (Slobin 4).
In North Africa, there is music most clearly exposed in the work
of Umm Kalthum, where refined poetry and classical Arab music compo-
sition became a mass mode accepted as both poetry and music. A further
example would be the Arab urban tradition of Tunisia represented by the
maluf and its claims to be descended from the music of the Islamic courts
of medieval Spain (Davis). This style is most probably an invented tradi-
tion, inspired by medieval Andalusian music and today widely popular.
Alongside traditions that transgress social and aesthetic categories are
those whose very materiality sustains a historical inquirya historical
inquiry, suspended in the sound itself, that refutes its nationalist framing.
If we consider the lengthy debate over preserving the ideological purity and
Greekness of rebetika, we are forced to confront its profoundly Turkish
and Anatolian formation (OConnell). As Elias Petropoulos, in his Songs
of the Greek Underworld: The Rebetika Tradition, puts it: I have a blind
and groundless conviction, as follows: the music of the rebetika tradition
is an amalgam of the melodic/rhythmic resonances of the peoples of Asia
Minor, combined with the local songs of the land that is now Greece, and
the amalgam was effected by that small and multi-ethnic caste known as
the rebetes (74). In this explicit association of the music with the urban
male subculture of taverns, smuggling, hash dealing, crime, and low life,
a particular musical genre and style in clothing, language, and attitude,
choreographed in street and neighborhood displays of power, reveal rebe-
tika as the direct cousin of the kapadais of Istanbul. Both are the rebel-
lious offspring of urban, Ottoman society. The Turkish trio of oud (lute),
ney (reed flute), and santouri (dulcimer) is replaced by the percussion of
the baglamas and the bouzouki (both words derive from Turkish) and
subsequently augmented by the guitar. Drawing on the Turkish (and
Arab) musical modes of makams (or maqam), the music came to be played
on equal-tempered European instruments that avoided the more com-
plex pitch divisions of the Turkish and Arabic musical world. The sound
itself is an explicit bridge between Asia and Europe. Emerging from the
forced migrations and population exchanges between Greece and Turkey
that followed World War I, the collapse of the Ottoman empire, and the
foundation of the Turkish Republic, the creolized historical conditions
of rebetikas sonorial genesis are unavoidable. Songs of hardship, prison,
poverty, war, and love are carried by melodies and dance patterns that
302 Sounds from the South
recall the hasapiko of Istanbul and the zeibekiko of Anatolia. Centuries of

communal historical and cultural formation are evident in sound, song,
dance, and musical sensibility (OConnell).
Elsewhere, we can consider cocek, found in Albania, Macedo-
nia, Kosovo, and Bulgariathat is, all over the Balkans. An improvised
dance, utilizing hand movements, contractions of the abdomen, shoulder
shakes, movement of isolated body parts (such as hips and head), and small
footwork patterns, cocek is clearly an heir to the dances of the Ottoman
engis, but its subtlety and restraint distinguish it from contemporary belly
dancing (Silverman 127). And there is the striking example of mizrakhit
music in Israel, which blends Hebrew lyrics with Arabic music traditions
to produce a cultural fusion that bypasses longstanding ethnic, political,
and religious hostilities (Magrini 20). In what Tullia Magrini refers to
as simultaneous syncretism and diversification, such musics insist on
the continual hybridization of sounds responding to, sounding out, and
complicating the diverse currents, folds, and opportunities of the urban
worlds of the modern Mediterranean and the world at large (20).
The period in which rebetika developed and flourished in
Greece corresponds roughly with the burgeoning of other urban popular
musical styles such as flamenco, tango, and the urban blues of the United
States. Rebetika shares a number of characteristics with these types of
music, including the fact that they are genres in which male musicians,
singers, and dancers play a role that is viewed, by the outsider at least, as
stereotypically masculine and distinctly disreputable. Viewed from the
inside, and with a more attentive gaze, the traditional roles of men and
women in all these popular musical genres may be more complex than
they first appear; they may even subvert the very stereotypes they seem-
ingly project (Holst-Warhaft 169). In this urban underworld, cultural
frontiers are often altogether more fluid and accommodating than those
in straight society.
Generation, gender, and genealogy: here, sounds situate the
voice, the singer, the musician, and the participating audience in an often
very different place from that prescribed by inherited roles, adherences,
and identities. Consider the famous singer Roza Eskenazi, a Turkish-
speaking Sephardic Jew born in Istanbul and raised in Thessaloniki,
Komotini, and Athens. Rosa perfected her art in the taverns of Pireaus,
singing in Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Ladino, and Armenian.
She was accompanied by oud and lyre players and in the 1930s at the height
of her fame was recording in both Athens and Istanbul. Her biography is
one of the multiple musical maps transmitted around the Mediterranean.

In another mode, Tony Gatlifs beautiful film on Rom culture, Latcho Drom
(1993), takes us in sound from northwest India to Egypt and then on to the
Balkans and Spain. Then consider the significance of such female per-
formers in modern ra music as Cheika Rimitti, Chaba Fadela, and Chaba
Zahouania. We are in each instance relayed in sounds that overwhelm
the stability sought in official accounts and institutional renderings of
what turn out to be multiple variations of a Mediterranean composition.1
Many of these voiceswomen in ra, heavy metal in North
Africa and the Muslim worldare frequently reduced to silence by the
commercial structures and even the political strictures of musical promo-
tion. Nevertheless, sound leaves a trace, installs an interval, and activates
the Deleuzian idea of the deterritorialization of the refrain. Soundthe
immediacy of voice, body, and localityboth crosses time and molds space,
folding it into a sonorial event whose passage, induced by the deterritorial-
ization and reterritorialization of sound, proposes the becoming-other that
inaugures the new. It is precisely this potentiality that transforms music
from the plane of artistic and aesthetic embellishment to that of a critical
cut. The sound is not an echo of an existing order but rather of another
order, one yet to come. Ronald Bogue glosses this idea drawn from Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus in the following man-
ner: The essence of music is to be found not in the macroscopic order of
celestial cycles, but in the molecular domain of transverse becomings. The
pulsations that play through music and the world are not measured recur-
rences of the same but ametrical rhythms of the incommensurable and
the unequal. And the time disclosed in music is less that of chronos than
aion, the floating time of haecceities and becoming (16). 2 In other words,
and running that quotation through the rough grooves of contingency and
locality, music is somehow always untimely (Nietzsche) or, in the French
translation of Hamlets words, off its hinges (hors de ses gonds) (Bogue
34). Music, as a form of becoming, is not so much what has been as what
could be: lines of flight, lines of life, a world to come.
An untimely sound, the dissemination of disruption, music sows
intervals in a world seeking seamless continuities. Abstract, measured
timethe time of labor and capital, of the regime of the clock and pro-
ductionthat hegemonizes the discipline of everyday life is also, as Henri
Lefebvre and Catherine Rgulier put it, shot through and cut across by the
larger rhythms of life and the cosmos. Perhaps, they continue, we should
think of music as a sonorial tissue that sustains a critical dissonance
between rhythmic time and the time of abrupt repetitions. By moving

between the innovative renewal of the cyclical and the deadening circula-
tion of labor-sustained linearity, they suggest that we can gauge the dark
and bitter struggle around time and the use of time. If the former is sold,
the latter is lived, and the lived is not necessarily the known (19093).
For the world to come is also the world that comes to meet us
from the past, disseminating its unanswered voices in the present, all
suspended in the flickering light of the now that flares up to illuminate
both the dangers and the potentials of the present. 3 For while we are
accustomed to considering the fluidity of cultural forces, flows, and forms
in the contemporary epoch of globalization, it is easy to forget that this
mobility is by no means solely a property of the present.
In his book Mediterranean Culture and Troubadour Music,
Zoltn Falvy explores the complex intermingling of musics in the late
medieval world, in which Arab and Hebrew metrical forms are central to
the whole realm of Mediterranean secular monody (a single solo line) and
subsequently to the twelfth-century cantigas of the Castilian Alfonso the
Wise and the music of the troubadours. The passage of Andalusian Arabic
music to the troubadours is actually much debated, but rather than seek-
ing explicit links, we sense overlapping, even shared, cultural constella-
tions that permit us to pick up the underlying resonance between secular
song in ninth-century Arab Spain and later developments north of the
Pyrenees in Occitania. For what we are talking of here, as Falvy rightly
points out, is not simply the influence of Arab culture (as though it were
a stable, homogenous entity) on Mediterranean music but a multilayered,
Near Eastern series of inputs (Jewish, Byzantine, Latin, Arabic) transmit-
ted and transformed in their passage though the Mediterranean and into
southern and northern Europe.
In this cultural mlange, the expansion of the Arab world from
the eighth century onward spread poetic forms, song structures, and musi-
cal models such as the ghazal, madil, and khamriyya: love, eulogistic, and
drinking songs. It also produced within Europe the rhyme and rhythms of
the muwashshah poetical song form, with its consistently recurring refrain
that spread out of Arab Spain, northward into Europe and southward to
North Africa. Here another history to trace would be that etched along
the fretboard of the oud and the instruments subsequent transforma-
tion into the equal-tempered tonalities of the European lute and guitar.
Then there were books, such as the Kita b al-musq al-kab r (The Great
Book on Music) and the compendium Ih.s.a al-ulum (The Classification of
Knowledge), an encyclopedia of all the sciences, including music, both

written by Al-Farabi (d. 950). The latter circulated widely in the Middle
Ages and was translated into Latin as De scientiis in the twelfth century
by Johannes de Sevilla and Gerardus de Cremona. Al-Farabis works on
music were used in the syllabus of the quadrivium of the seven liberal arts
(Falvy 21). Finally, Falvy insists on the tonal uncertainty of troubadour
music that points outwards to the musical phenomena of Mediterranean
culture (28) and a melodic structure which cannot be categorized (211):
melisma, fluctuating tonalitiesMediterranean blues.
Leaving London, or Paris, or Milan and traveling south and
east, there is no single culture or musical sound to be discovered. Rather,
a plurality unfolds from classical expressions in the Turkish, Arab, and
Andalusian traditions to diverse ethnic voices (Gnawa, Berber, Kurd,
Rom) together with a variety of metropolitan sounds that touch, remix,
and reroute local sonorities with heavy metal, hip-hop, and rap. 4 From the
choral singing and orchestration of the Ottoman court to the experimen-
tal itineraries of great contemporary oud players such as Munir Bashir,
Anouar Brameh, and Naseer Shamma or the electronic deviations (still on
the oud) of the Tunisian band DuOud, or moving from the stark Anatolian
folk poetry of Asik Veysel to the militant verses of the Palestinian hip-hop
group Dam, there is a musical multiplicity in which diverse traditions and
their differentiated survival and extension in the contemporary world
remain in play. This profusion of sounds and variations is also accompa-
nied by a cultural and historical dissemination that betrays present-day
national confines: Kurdish music in eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and
Iran; Berber culture throughout the Maghreb; Roma and Turkish melodies
throughout the Balkans; memories of slavery and black Africa in Gnawa
music. That the West is present in varying degrees in this musical mix is
undeniablefrom contemporary Egyptian, Lebanese, Israeli, and Turk-
ish pop music to heavy metal groups in Tehran, Cairo, and Casablanca,
together with the ubiquity of rap and hip-hop from the Atlantic shore to
the Golden Horn and beyond. But it is always a West and the modernity
associated with it that is distilled into local potential, which sings of a
particular time and place (LeVine).
The imported and culturally imposed cannot escape this modu-
lation and mutation. The sounds of Led Zeppelin in Beirut, hip-hop in
the Gaza Strip, Pink Floyd in Fez, and Michael Jackson in Algiers sustain
a cultural resonance and affective economy different from that encoun-
tered in Los Angeles, London, or Berlin. 5 There are both connections
and complications involved. An unsuspected supplement leads to the

same music living on elsewhere, both transformed and, in turn, becom-
ing a transformative force and practice. Being faced with the rigidity of
institutional power, subcultural sounds, youth revolt, and metropolitan
deviancy are not peculiar to Occidental urban culture. The sounds of the
subaltern, both local and transmitted from elsewhere, propose a continual
counterpoint to the rigid orchestration of everyday life: music, whatever
its genealogy, escapes the grid to sound out a world yet to come. Drawing
from the past and the memories condensed in its sounds, structures, and
execution, the musical act proposes a historical now, a vibratory force,
which configures a potential future that is neither simply the extension
of the present nor its prisoner.
Listening to a rhythm constructed over the regulated pulse of
an open telephone line (Aksser) that goes on to announce a transnational
communicationconnecting Beirut to the Barbs district of Paris or
Tangiers to Turin in Arabic, French, Italian, and Englishis to route and
rhyme the Mediterranean through alternative modernities. Such artists as
U-Cef, with his Marrakech Raggamuffins, and the Sonic Moor chart
musical and cultural connectionsin this case from Rabat to London
and Notting Hillthat produce a metropolitan ambient in which precise
localities are freed from provincial constraints to provoke unfolding
lines of transit. Here the very means of production and reproduction have
significantly changed, becoming altogether more mobile, both physically
and economically lighter. The digital possibilities of software installed
on portable computers, such as Apples Garageband, for example, provide
the same sound qualities and results that a few years ago would have cost
thousands of dollars or euros in recording studio time. Subsequent distri-
bution through Web sites and dedicated digital sound stores are destined
to extend this fluidity. Here, where cultural, historical, and musical roots
are provoking routes through a multiplying modernity, crossing ethnic
tradition with urban futurism (in U-Cefs case, that of local Moroccan
halal music with the sonic experiences of New York and London), the
resulting sounds provoke new coordinates. These not only map immedi-
ate soundscapes but also extend culturescapes and their emerging pos-
sibilities. The music that matters becomes an altogether more extensive
material matter, a sonorial power able to suggest intensities of sentiment
and becoming that exceed the commonsensical constraints of music
considered as a pastime or after-hours entertainment. A fellow Londoner
from Algeria, Ali Slimani, with his album Espoir, confirms the potential
of these unsuspected routes traced in sound and valorized in the multiple

and unruly mix of the metropolis.
Once our ears are open to these possibilities, the musical routes
become endless. In their continual transit and crisscrossings, moving
between origins and multiplying metropolitan sites, these musics spin
a web. Like their digital counterparts on the Internet, to which they are
viscerally bound, they sustain, create, and extend communities. They
produce a participatory networking in which cultural labor is constantly
proposing emerging horizons of sense and a future history responsive to
unexpected connections and coordinates.
What is perhaps most significant is that these are not subaltern
sounds repeating the Occidental metropolitan soundtrack and playing it
back with a different beat, a diverse timbre, an unsuspected accent. What
emerges here is the subtle rearrangement of cultural capital when domes-
tic certainties, invariably tied to the presumed stabilities of locality and
tradition, are rendered unstable in the cultural traffic of worldly transit.
This refers not only to the traditions of the elsewhere of the so-called non-
Occidental and nonmodern world but also, and increasingly, to the tradi-
tions of the West itself. The power that assumes its right to translate the
rest of the world into its needs and desires is itself translated. Mobilized
and metabolized, Occidental tradition and its seemingly universal exercise
of the concept of modernity is increasingly seeded with the elsewhere.
Contemporary technology reinforces the history of sound as an uncanny
intimation of the transformation of tradition. If sounds travel with scant
regard for locality and confines, they also usher in a further critical pros-
pect. Despite the obvious and frequently violent asymmetry of powers, the
transit and translation of traditionof all traditions and not only those of
subaltern cultures and worldsdisseminate a series of dynamics destined
to contest any appeal to cultural (and political) stasis. A sense of belong-
ing, an insistence on identity (even if structurally necessary in order to be
recognized: what Gayatri Spivak once called strategic essentialism), can
now only be registered as a step, a caravanserai, along a path that sounds
map as a continually uncertain unfolding.
Not only do tradition and translation rub shoulders, they mutu-
ally sustain each others trajectories in the incredible montage of musical
styles in the modern-day metropolitan mixes of the Mediterranean. Just
as Umm Kalthum was a metropolitan singer who transformed tradition
into a vehicle of transit, so the earthy, rootsy voice of ra singer Cheikka
Remitti is remixed by Chab Rassi in an Algerian studio or accompanied
by the sophisticated guitar riffs of Robert Fripp. Elsewhere, traditional

instruments are electrified, mixed down with echo, drum machines,
and multiple tracking. Then there are the proximities in the rebetika of
Apostolos Hadzichristos and the Anatolian Asik Veyse, and the rhymes of
resistance, from the collaborations in Egypt of Sheik Imam and the poet
Ahmed Fouad Negin to contemporary Muslim hip-hop and heavy metal.
There is ra as rebel music, not so much in its country of origin, Algeria
(where it has consistently suffered censorship and government control),
but in the Arab diaspora, particularly among the beurs in the banlieues
of France who seek a path through the syncretic complexities of being
in France and Europe but not necessarily solely of France and Europe.
Subsequently subsumed within the sonic subversions of the more aggres-
sive deterritorializing tonalities of rap, these sounds and sentiments dis-
seminate a dissonance within hegemonic cultural arrangements (Gross,
McMurray, and Swedenburg).
Music as a sensuous, affective geography sounds out space,
configures time, registers a place, a life. It proposes a nomos quite distinct
from the habitual referents of terrestrial accommodation. For this reason
it has generally been considered ineffable, beyond sense and reason, sim-
ply otherwise. If, on the contrary, we choose to take its ineffable quality
not simply as a sensuous escape but also as a critical challenge, then we
might begin to suggest a reorientation of what counts for cultural under-
standing and historical meaning. Listening and responding to the voice
of Demetrios Stratos, for example, which draws upon his Egyptian Greek
and Italian biographies, we hear the journey of the soundbeyond words,
into the breath of the bodyin the cultural traffic of the Mediterranean.
In the 1970s, before his untimely death, Stratos researched the voice that
transmits, the voice that transmits itself. The voice is not a metaphor
for a message; the voice is rather an image in sound, a transit in time, a
body in song, in flight. As Daniel Charles has suggested, representation is
abolished, to be replaced by the allegory of illegibility (qtd. in El Haouli
25). Beyond the stability sought by the controlling subject that directs a
meaning, a message, there is a fluidity that evades linguistic parameters
and refuses the status of object.
In the sonorities of the transnational musical languages of the
Mediterraneanwhether in the microtonalities of the oud; in Neapolitan
song; in the voice of the famed rebetika singer Roza Eskenazi; or in elec-
tronic treatments when Jamaican dub takes up residence on the shores
of the Bosphorus (in the Turkish hip-hop on the album Kingztanbul by
Makale) or in the Bay of Naples with Almamegretta; or when heavy metal

pushes into an Arab-Jewish musical and cultural mix with the Israeli band
Orphaned Land; or in the case of the well-known Palestinian trio Dam,
rapping in Hebrew and Arabic of the appalling daily conditions in the
Occupied Territoriesa largely unsuspected Mediterranean takes form
in the ear. Not only is this possible map a different configuration of what
is considered an all too familiar space; it also establishes a very different
sense of time. Progress and the assumed linearity of development is here
mixed and complicated by tempos that are part of modernity and yet irre-
ducible to a single or unilateral version of it. The long improvised vocals of
Umm Kalthum, relayed by Egyptian radio, are not simply the mass media
extension of an Arab musical tradition; they are simultaneously part and
parcel of the transformation of that tradition in the mobile syntax of met-
ropolitan modernities. Not only are popular and classical forms explored
and synthesized in song and musical performance, but the works of such
noted contemporary poets as Ahmad Shawq and Ahmad Ram are relayed in
Kalthums music to the often illiterate popular classes (Danielson 122). Like
jazz, with its historical interlacing of work songs, spirituals, gospel music,
and, above all, the blues, modern Arab music is part of a mobile continent
of sound. If much of that continent is out of sight and beyond the hearing
of the Western listener, it nevertheless exists and persists. Neither inclu-
sive nor autonomous, the sounds of the contemporary Arab world (where
the generic term Arab, as a stereotypical Middle Eastern other, stands in
for multiple formations: Berber, Kurdish, Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, and
Greek, as well as Arabic) are neither static nor uniform. Rock music from the
stony ground and desert of the Saharalike the Tuareg group Tinariwen,
with their album Amassakoulis not merely the sign of Occidental time
and its commodification of the globe reaching out to authorize the rest of
the world; it is also the sonority, simultaneously specific and fluid, of the
historical dissemination of difference and dissonance.
These musical maps of a minor modernity and a minor Medi-
terranean propose an archive that is simultaneously a crypt, the thresh-
old of forgetting and amnesia, while also the explicit site of a tombeau, a
perennial blues, a clearing of space in the present so that the past is freed
to counsel the future. Sustained in sound, there coexists the novel reas-
sembling of fragments of time that constitute a critical interval, an inter-
rogative trace spinning out of imposed temporalities. In such a suspension
lies an archival order that throws a radically diverse light on the present
and its making (Agamben).
This is to propose a paradigm of the Mediterranean that is

diverse, one drawn from the ignored shadows and the marginalized noises
of a seemingly triumphant modernity. Once again, we must ask whose
modernity this is: Does it merely belong to its Occidental proponents who
are unable to register its unruly and heterogeneous formation? Or to the
subaltern formations who survive and live on in its meshes? We are caught
here between the effective powers of the former and the affective powers of
the latter. Such are the documents of civilization that are simultaneously
documents of barbarism (Benjamin). While the former fail to respect their
historical and cultural provenance, the latter register a potential that is not
necessarily understood or recognized. Hence the sound that here insists is
not merely the historical insistence of music; it is a critical pronouncement.
I would like to thank Elliott Colla for providing me with access to much of this music.
iain ch ambers teaches cultural, postcolonial, and Mediterranean studies at the Oriental
University, Naples. He is the author of a series of books of which the most recent is Mediter-
ranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008).
He is presently preparing a publication on Mediterranean music and maritime criticism.
Notes 1 On gender and ra music, see suspended and sustained in the

Schade-Pulsen. potency of the now.
2 Haecceity is a Latin term that 4 As can be heard in Fatih Akins

Deleuze and Guattari borrow film Crossing the Bridge: The
from the medieval thinker Duns Sound of Istanbul.
Scotus; it refers to the discrete
qualities that make something 5 A good account of this Mediter-
particular. ranean metropolitan musical mix
and the cultural metamorphosis
3 This is obviously a direct refer- that takes us from Michael Jackson
ence to Walter Benjamins idea of to Islamic fundamentalism can be
Jetz: the concentrated, intersect- found in Aziz Chouakis powerful
ing intensity of pasts and futures novel, The Star of Algiers.
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In Pursuit of the Object of Sound:

Volume 22, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1428816

Turning to religion, myth, and fiction, we find that the occur-

actually did not sing (24849). In an inversion of the acousmatic, the

to-be-improvedness. If and when actualized, such to-be-improvedness

Chion, Michel. The Impossible Embodiment. iek 195207.

Descartess Resonant Subject

Volume 22, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1428825

must be forever renounced as detrimental to these fields larger agendas

foundation of modern subjecthood in far more ambiguous terms than the

Resonance, as a quick glance at the Oxford English Diction-

But it is in philosophy that resonance has perhaps given rise

A Man Opens His Mouth

The human voice seems most pleasing to us because it most

resonance, a voice will fail to find a sympathetic reception. Similar to the

ar motus], or rather, repercussed air [repercussus] that is perceived

(ictus) results in the condensation (addensatio) where previously there

Needless to say, sympathetic resonance is key to this coin-

The Physiology of the Beautiful

consonances, mathematical calculations serve only for showing which

distinguished from rational thought. It overlapsor resonates, one might

shift was an important step in granting listening a modest autonomy by

The Quill and the Nerve

One prominent place where this project appears to have reached

As to the filaments [filets] that serve as a sense organ of hearing

Elsewhere Descartes had made similar propositions, albeit with minor

To Descartes, nerves were tubes, which he called filaments

By the same token, the soul is being downgraded to an ancillary

[W]hen many [blows] succeed one another, as one sees in the

No longer the supreme arbiter it had been in the scholastic tradition of

Contrary to conventional belief, Descartes held that each

Descartes elaborates two conditions of such intimacy, one natu-

The second, cultural, requirement for the unity of reason and

Contrary, then, to the entrenched view of Descartes as the

compelling of the perils of using resonance to question feminisms or

I was your resonance.

critique of the Cartesian roots of modern rationality is limited. Hence to

Notes 1 In accordance with Descartes 3 An excellent overview of seven-

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. Tympan. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: u of Chicago

. Descartes Mersenne. Amsterdam janvier 1630. Oeuvres 1: 10514.

. Descartes Mersenne. 18 mars 1630. Oeuvres 1: 12835.

. Descartes Regius. Oeuvres 3: 45964.

. crits physiologiques et mdicaux. Trans. and ed. Vincent Aucante. Paris:

. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff,

. Treatise of Man. Trans. Thomas Steele Hall. Cambridge, m a: Harvard up,

. The World and Other Writings. Trans. Stephen Gaukroger. Cambridge:

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Wever, Ernest G. Theory of Hearing. New York: Wiley, 1965.

The Poetics of Signal Processing

Volume 22, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1428834

drone of road noise, similar to the kinds found in headphones worn on

Signal processing is itself a term with a complex and politi-

recording, editing and mixing, artistic creation, wired or wireless trans-

Signal processing happens in the middle of media. Signal pro-

encompasses the range of social actors and institutions invested in the