2
and absolute otherness while losing none of the experiential relativity thats crucial to
aesthetic theories. Further, the withdrawn ambiguity of entities in OOO ensures that
ontology remains an open question. In fact, the difficulty involved in either committing
or objecting to sounds thingness demonstrates that sound calls the ontology of objects
into question. Sounds make questions out of thingness and things.
Keywords
sound object, object-oriented ontology, Graham Harman, anthropocentrism
___
Is a sound a thing?
To doubt the productivity of this question is only reasonable. Neither
philosophy nor empirical science can prove or disprove sounds thing-status.
One would be justified in wondering if the matter isnt an ontological conundrum
but a semantic quibble based on the vagueness of the terms. But the meaning of
the word thing hinges on how real things actually are, not just on what people
think they mean when they speak about things. Words are real relationships
between humans and other beings, and these relationships have real, sometimes
dangerous effects.
Its standard in certain practices to treat sounds as things. Electroacoustic
composers such as Chris Cutler, Curtis Roads, and Steve Takasugi use terms
Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise (New York: Oxford University Press), 125.
Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham: Duke University Press), 191.
3
Theodor Adorno, On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, In Essays on Music, trans. R.
Leppert, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 288-317.
4
LRAD Corporation, LRAD for Public Safety Applications Fact Sheet. Accessed 23 July 2014.
http://www.lradx.com/site/content/view/323
2
and bullets are the same kind of entity: those who make and buy sound cannons
use, understand, and advertise sounds as self-contained, tangible objects
durable enough to permanently damage human flesh.
But the manufacturers seem to anticipate that the harmful aspects of their
products would not escape those (thoughtful TV viewers and liberal
Congresspersons) who take the conception of sound-as-thing to its logical
conclusion. 5 To preempt humanitarian criticism, then, the manufacturers
downplay the autonomous physicality of sound, emphasizing instead its
intangible, communicative qualities. The idea is to dissimulate the cannons
cruelty and allow it to masquerade as a harmless mass-communication device.
This tactic takes advantage of prevailing ideologies that tout the fleeting
intangibility and relativity of sound, and discourage or decry its thing-power: its
physical impact and otherness.
Its all too easy to perpetuate ideologies of transience and relativity by
insisting that sounds are not objects but experiences or practices. Discourses
that abjure the thingness of sound tend to close themselves off to alternate
views, foreclosing the possibility of further questioning by reducing sound to
relativistic origins that are too subjective to contest. Temporality and relationality
are integral aspects of the being of sound, but they do not tell the whole story.
Anthropocentrism desensitizes theorists to the other aspects of sound which are
irreducible to human experiences and circumstances.
5
LRAD Corporation, The Global Leader in Long Range Acoustic Hailing Devices: Public Safety. Accessed 23 July
2014. http://www.lradx.com/site/content/view/254/110
1 Against Autonomy
Ibid., 512.
Johannes Ritter quoted in Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance (Cambridge: Zone, 2010): 198-9.
11
Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music. Science and Culture: Popular and
Philosophical Essays, ed. D. Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46-75
10
but of a persons sensory sphere more generally and of everything else along
with it: meaning, subjectivity, language, and thought. 12
Regarding the conflation of sound and hearing, Erlmanns concern isnt
sounds loss of autonomy the others loss of otherness, which I hope to
foreground here but our own. Depriving sounds of their autonomy means
depriving us of ours: the more that the boundaries of the object world appear to
dissolvethe more [ones] own self loses its substance. 13 That said, restoring
sounds autonomy admitting their self-contained existence by acknowledging
that what one hears isnt just oneself shuddering in an empty world does not
restore the freedom of the human subject. Rather, self-contained sounds are
authoritarian and oppressive in Erlmanns analysis. He therefore disapproves of
music that seems to achieve autonomy from its perceivers or total object status.
In such music, the attendant concept of a for someone or audience have all but
vanished. Existing only for itself, such music is inhuman in the cruel sense of
totalitarianism, Erlmann writes. If a listener cannot hear (or impose) echoes of
herself in what she hears, Listening becomes Gehorchen, an act of
obedience. 14
What Erlmann calls obedience Harman calls sincerity. In OOO, every
object essentially exists for itself, not for someone, i.e. not for the sake of or
because of any human requirement or presence; but from the object-oriented
12
13
10
11
Brian Kane, Sound Unseen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25, 16.
Ibid., 36.
19
Ibid., 16.
20
Ibid., 19.
21
Ibid., 34.
22
Brian Kane, The Music of Skepticism, PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2006, 131.
18
12
24
13
disguises its human origins in order to appear self-sufficient and that smacks of
ideology. 28
But so does Kanes assertion that sounds are simply a sedimentation of
historical and social forces. Like Erlmanns, this analysis is phantasmagorical in
the opposite sense: it conceals the self-contained, nonhuman otherness of sound
so that sound may appear ontologically dependent on human productive forces.
As Cox notes, this kind of analysis falls prey to a provincial and chauvinistic
anthropocentrism...for it treats human symbolic interaction as a unique and
privileged endowment, perpetuating the falsehood that human beings inhabit a
privileged ontological position. 29
In that sense, despite Kanes disagreement with Schaeffer, the two
theorists make the same reduction on different scales. Schaeffers guileless use
of recordings to divorce sounds from their instrumental sources deprives the
sounds of their specific nonhuman otherness, reducing them to subjective human
experiences. For Schaeffer the essence of sound is the content of a particular
human subjects deliberately honed aural perceptions. While Kane opposes this
solipsistic analysis, his objection boils down to the claim that the sociohistorical
situations of listening subjects must be taken into account. From that more
encapsulating perspective, Schaeffers basic thesis may hold true: a sound is its
28
Kane, Unseen, 40. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. R. Livingstone. (London: Verso, 2005), 74.
Christoph Cox, Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism. Journal of Visual Culture
10(2): 147.
29
14
30
15
16
34
Ibid., 189.
Ibid., 193.
36
Martin Heidegger, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstader (New York: HarperCollins, 2001),
170.
37
Harman, Tool-Being, 16.
38
Ibid., 19.
35
17
2 Against Durability
18
42
43
19
sound is to upset the ontology of objects and beings, suggesting that the latter
are themselves events and becomings. 48 This is the beginning of an idea that is
at home in OOO; but unlike Cox, Harman realizes that it cuts both ways: if being
means occurring, then occurring is also being. Entities are events and events
are entities (see 3).
OCallaghan and Cox are unwilling to go this far. In their analyses, despite
the latters commitment to Deleuzian flux, events and objects do not ontologically
flow into each other but stumble into an ancient paradox. If objects are merely
events of long duration or as Cox says, becomings that, however, operate at
relatively slow speeds then presumably sounds (which in Coxs view are not
objects) are events of short duration or becomings at higher speeds. 49 Does this
mean that protracted sounds are in fact objects? Does it mean that short-lived
objects are not objects? A mayfly lives for twenty minutes: its lifetime is shorter
than a Romantic symphony, shorter than the average piece of drone music. Yet
isnt a mayfly a thing, in the sense of an autonomous, durable entity? How long
must staying stay in order to be thinging?
This is a version of the Sorites paradox, first attributed to Eubulides of
Miletus: how many hairs must someone lose in order to be bald? If a rock loses
its atoms one by one, how many can it lose before its no longer a rock? How
long must a sound be in order to be a thing? These questions are paradoxes
because their solutions rely on indeterminable limits. The durability of sound is
48
49
20
relative. The blare of a car horn might fade out of my hearing in a matter of
seconds but linger in the ears of a street elephant or imperceptibly flutter a thread
on a tasseled awning long after the fact. The durability of things is equally
variable: compare a quick-dissolving tablet with a mayfly or sequoia. But the
problem runs deeper than that. Where do sound and tablet end, breeze and
water begin? The problem with sounds and things is ontological vagueness.
Theres no decisive boundary between what they are and are not.
Thomasson believes that this is a problem with language, not an
ontological problem or even a philosophical one: vagueness resides in our
representations, not in the world and its denizens. 50 Phenomena themselves
arent vague, only our descriptive terms. This includes the words object and
thing, which Thomasson says are too vague to make ontological distinctions.
To ask if some phenomenon qualifies as a thing is therefore an underspecified,
unanswerable question, she attests. 51 But this argument simply shuts the
question down.
Why couldnt there be vague objects without rigid ontological boundaries?
Arent human bodies such objects? Wouldnt my body remain my body if
someone took a kidney out of it? Yet isnt it simultaneously true that there is no
difference between my body and my kidney? The boundaries between us are
fluid, fuzzy questions.
50
51
Amie Thomasson, Ordinary Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 105.
Ibid., 114.
21
Might a sound be a vague object? Ive cited several theorists who believe
that the boundaries between sound and not-sound are questionable, yet some
boundaries must exist. Even these theorists sense some kind of division
between what sound is and what its not. Otherwise, they wouldnt argue a
distinction between sounds and things. Just as quantum physics turns the
difference between particles and waves, entities and changes, into an open
question, so the question of sounds thingness reopens the question of things
vagueness.
It therefore isnt true that vague predicates like the word thing say
nothing about reality. Vague predicates reveal that reality is vague; they open it
for questioning. Its durability that is purely arbitrary as an ontological
criterion. 52 The Sorites problem demonstrates that duration isnt evidence
enough for or against the thingness of sound or any other event. Rather, sounds
apparent lack of durability complicates the questionable relationship between
durability and things.
In other venues, Ive made every objection to sonic thingness. Ive argued
against phantasmagoria, atemporality, ideologies of reification and domination.
These objections remain valid in any realm that assumes: clear distinctions
between human and nonhuman beings; the ontological, ecological, and ethical
priority of humans over nonhumans; and the idea that all it takes to make and
perceive art is sociohistorically conditioned human creativity. I no longer believe
52
22
in any of those things. However, thats not to say that all aspects of prevailing
sonic theories are not true. Chauvinism and totalitarianism are unacceptable. A
sound is a wave, temporal phenomenon, and subjective experience. It is indeed
reductive to represent such phenomena as entities and vice versa. Sonic
experience is one of the most intimate experiences we have with our own bodies,
as it happens in the depths of our heads; at the same time, this experience is
sociohistorically conditioned. But none of that is all there is to it. Sounds may be
all of that as well as objective, non-ideal entities that exist in and for themselves,
possessing and questioning autonomy and durability.
3 Object-Oriented Ontology
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), viii.
Morton, Hyperobjects, 29.
23
Sounds are indeed causal agents: in music they inspire emotions, in sound
cannons they inflict injuries. Shaken by the sonic thing-power of music, Morton
writes: it tunes to me, pursuing my innards, searching out the resonant
frequencies of my stomach, my intestines, the pockets of gristle in my
facesound as hyperobject, a sound from which I cant escape, a viscous sonic
latex. 55 On this view, sounds are things, their effectiveness reminds us of all
things potency and its reasonable to acknowledge that music is a collective
encounter between human and nonhuman bodies. 56
Thing-power is non-equivalent to Heideggerian affordance, which is for
humans alone. Instead, thing-power is the effect that things have on any and all
other things, which may or may not be human. Yet from Harmans perspective
even this idea is incomplete. In vital materialism, he argues, each object seems
exhausted by its presence for another, with no intrinsic reality held cryptically in
reserve. 57 But this unreachable reserve exists in OOO, wherein things are
radically autonomous and durable, irreducible to any relationship or set of
relations even as they are inherently relational, contextual, temporal, and
effective. This is one of many contradictions metabolizing at the heart of every
being.
OOO is a plausible foundation for a credible theory of sonic thingness.
Harmans metaphysics provides all entities with enough relationality and
55
Ibid., 30.
Citation omitted for blind review, 207-208, emphasis added.
57
Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford: Zero, 2011), 12.
56
24
Ibid., 19.
Harman, Tool-Being, 2.
60
Ibid., 1.
61
Ibid., 2.
59
25
62
Ibid., 227.
Ibid., 220.
64
Ibid., 171-174.
65
Ibid., 4.
66
Ibid., 2.
63
26
Ibid., 169.
27
68
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 68.
70
Ibid., 145.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid., 220.
73
Ibid., 23.
69
28
itself[T]he supposed static instant is not really static at all, but rather ek-static
already torn apart by its own incurable ambiguity: that internal strife between an
entitys subterranean force and its seductive faade. 74
Thus an apparently static thing isnt unchanging or ahistorical but quite
the opposite. A thing is strife, relation, and context even as it is not. Moreover,
the converse is also true: every set of relations is also an entity. 75 Morton
builds on this last point in his postulation that an autonomous object may be a
grand system of relations on spatiotemporal scales too vast for any human to
take in. On this view, global warming is a thing, even as it is also an event and a
condition. An earthquake is a thing, so is a climate. Such grand objects, which
Morton calls hyperobjects, are ambiguous, at once nonlocal and contextual,
viscous and withdrawn. 76 Even the most humble objects share these qualities.
And so does sound. Since things in OOO are ek-static systems and selfcontained essences, the OOO perspective neither brackets nor entirely submits
to the contingencies so vital to sonic theories. There is room in OOO for sounds
to be sociohistorical, temporal relations as well as durable entities that are
irreducibly other.
OOO has other advantages too. First, if all relations are incomplete, since
no entity includes all of itself in any relation, then no entity or type of entity is
ontologically prior to any other. Even the relationship between a thing and its
74
Ibid., 64-65.
Ibid., 260.
76
Morton, Hyperobjects, 201.
75
29
own phenomenal qualities excludes the essence of the thing. Hence neither
humanity nor any of its practices or constructs can claim ontological privileges.
Rather, in OOO, things are absolutely first, not just as facets of a viscous cosmic
mesh, but as self-contained, withdrawn individuals known to nobody, not even
themselves. Every being includes an infinite regress: every essence has a
deeper essence as well. 77 OOO posits an irreducible dark side to every object,
which in the end is unanalyzable as it contains objects wrapped in objects
wrapped in objects. 78
This is OOOs second advantage. Rather than foreclosing attempts to
question the being of things, by virtue of its infinitude this paradoxical regress
always resists foreclosure. Things withdraw their singular truths from the briefest
surface-encounters and the deepest ontological probes, which means that there
is always more to ask. Where visible objects like the jug tend to obscure, in a
dazzling display of pretended obviousness, the relational non-relational
contradiction that essentially metabolizes them, sounds foreground this
contradiction. Sounds strangeness illuminates the fact that all things and
relations are stranger than they ever seem. Sounds make questions out of
thingness and things.
In the shifting but inclusive light of OOO, sounds put rigidifying ideologies
and ontologies in their place. Additionally, as OOO illuminates the weird
viscosity of entities and encounters, sounds extreme otherness and bizarre
77
78
30
4 Questioning
79
David Cecchetto, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2013), 47.
80
Ibid., 153.
81
Ibid., 51.
31
32
Radical ecology critically opposes the capitalist principle that humans ontological
and ethical priority entitles us to a coldly utilitarian view of nonhuman beings.
Instead, radical ecology promotes an ontological anarchy in which no entity is
sovereign over any other, but each entity celebrates the absolute otherness of
every other.
Using OOO, Morton calls for ecological awareness in the form of a double
denial of human supremacy. 82 This means that humanity deserves neither
ontological priority nor the privilege of distancing itself from other kinds of being.
OOO provoke[s] irreductionist thinkingin which ontotheological statements
about which thing is the most real (ecosystem, world, environment, or
conversely, individual) become impossible. Likewise, irony qua absolute
distance also becomes inoperative, as all events and entities equally constitute
the same kind of thingly being. 83 Mortons ecological metaphysics is a vital
extrapolation of OOO, and the echoes of radical ecology are clear. Does that
mean that ecological de-anthropocentrism indeed powers OOO from underneath,
as an ideology?
Id like to say that if it did, all the better. But my argument is precisely that
sound cannot be reduced to human experiences, actions, or constructions, ergo
the question of sounds thingness cannot be reduced to an ideological decision.
Arguably any attempt to decide the question on utilitarian, semantic, aesthetic,
ecological, or ethical bases would not respond to the question but foreclose it on
82
83
33
grounds that will probably turn out to be ideological in the light of critique.
Fortunately all humans, nonhumans, and relationships are things in Harmans
work. OOO isnt a matter of anthropocentrism or de-anthropocentrism but simply
of things on equal ontological footing. Hence to respond to the question of
sounds thingness with OOO isnt just to say that we ought to appreciate sounds
thingness, otherness, and durability because, for example, only such awareness
can alert us to sound cannons dissembling rhetoric. Such ethical reasoning is
possible, even wholeheartedly welcome, but its just one of many insights that
OOO facilitates. To respond to the question of sounds thingness with OOO
really is to say something about reality. At the very least, it reveals that sound
demonstrates just how strange reality is. From that observation, infinite
questions follow.