Khalip, The Archeology of Sound

jacques khalip
“The Archaeology of Sound”: Derek Jarman’s Blue

and Queer Audiovisuality in the Time of aids
There is no absolute ear; the problem the sensory-sensual—of speech, of the

is to have an impossible one—making voice, of smell, of hearing. In short, of
audible forces that are not audible in the non-visual. And of the sexual [. . .].
themselves. —Lefebvre
—Deleuze
Until I die there will be sounds. And
The restoration of the body means, they will continue following my death.
first and foremost, the restoration of —Cage
I
want to begin with a passage from the essay “White Glasses,”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s elegy to the writer and activist Michael Lynch in
which the language of grief veers off to evoke queer fantasies of heightened
aural apprehension—sounds and voices in collision:
The most compelling thing about obituaries is how openly they

rupture the conventional relations of person and of address.
From a tombstone, from the tiny print in the New York Times,
from the panels on panels on panels of the Names Project quilt,
whose voice speaks impossibly to whom? From where is this
rhetorical power borrowed, and how and to whom is it to be
repaid? We miss you. Remember me. She hated to say goodbye.
Participating in these speech acts, we hardly know whether to
be interpellated as survivors, bereft; as witnesses or even judges;
or as the very dead. I look at my snapshots from the 1987 gay
and lesbian march on Washington—I see Michael across a dis-
tance, white glasses blazing, looking young and forlorn with no
mustache; it’s only weeks after Bill’s sudden death; in the panels
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74 “The Archaeology of Sound”
of the quilt, I see that anyone, living or dead, may occupy the
position of the speaker, the spoken to, the spoken about. When
the fabric squares speak, they say,
“Love you! Kelly.”
“Frederic Abrams. ‘Such Drama.’ ”
“Roy Cohn. Bully. Coward. Victim.”
“Michel Foucault. Where there is power, there is resistance . . .
a plurality of resistances . . . spread over time and space. . . . It
is doubtless the strategic codification of these resistances that
makes a revolution possible.”
“For our little brother, David Lee.”
“Sweet dreams.”
“Hug Me.”
Churned out of this mill of identities crossed by desires crossed
by identifications is, it seems—it certainly seemed in October
1987—a fractured and therefore militant body of queer rebellion.
( Tendencies 264–65)
In the midst of her reflections, Sedgwick moves from the visible markers
of life’s end—newspaper obituaries, tombstones, aids quilt panels—to the
difficult rhetoric of voice and address that haunts these various sites of
mourning. On the one hand, the faint pathos of such epitaphic words as
“We miss you,” “Remember me,” “She hated to say goodbye” evokes the
generic problem of the epitaph’s inscription and severance from human
voice; the quilt’s “fabric squares speak” in almost hallucinatory defiance of
their stitched memorials. On the other hand, however, the words gesture
beyond the grave of the textual and toward an auditory encounter with the
dead. Sedgwick’s felt duty to hear the dead refracts back upon her with the
realization that she is utterly (dis)possessed by the auditory power of her
language. Speech vexes the voiced act of commemoration and redirects
her within the sonorities of the departed.
The strange reconfigurations that Sedgwick registers in this
passage call to mind the limits of what Jacques Derrida has referred to
as the ethical dilemma of confronting “two infidelities, one impossible
choice” in the work of mourning: whether one should choose to remain
silent about the friend who has died and recall him or her purely through
the work of quotation, or utterly renounce identification altogether and
allow the friend’s muteness to reverberate (Work 45). In each case, the
(un)heard audiovisual memory of the friend returns to the mourner and

d i f f e r e n c e s 75
consigns the friend to death in the echo chambers of the ear and the heart.
Looking at the photograph of the 1987 gay and lesbian march on Washing-
ton, Sedgwick doesn’t so much see her friends as hear the unconversable
voices of memory—“I see that anyone, living or dead, may occupy the posi-
tion of the speaker, the spoken to, the spoken about.” The look of her friends
comes with the sound of their looking—in other words, the sound of their
gaze. Voice compounds voice in a phonic melee that records in the inner
ear like a “fractured and therefore militant body of queer rebellion.” The
“time” of the sound always returns a little bit broken, and for Sedgwick,
queer consciousness sounds like a revenant that simply cannot, try as it
might, bring to sight the pitch that it queers.
Within Sedgwick’s elegiac listening, a complex dissonance
strains to emerge: a queering of tone that evokes an aural substantializa-
tion of the past and relates sound to the (im)materialities of sexuality. It is
the remnants of a process Derek Jarman will call, in his masterwork Blue,
an “archaeology of sound,” a concept that develops out of a film that in its
entirety bears no images for seventy-six minutes except for the pulsing,
monochromatic International Klein Blue (ikb) color of the screen:
The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the
systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been under-
taken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase
materialized in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts
everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
(13–14)1
The burning heap of a “poetry of fire” evokes the archaeology’s failure to

fully present itself as a system of linguistic signification. Such an archae-
ology kindles, enlightens, and incinerates words as soon as they are lit.
In spite of this, however, the “poetry” continues to sound and resound:
as the film suggests, the achieved conflagration is always momentary,
always happening all at once. To a certain point, Jarman’s archaeology
recalls the Foucauldian sense of the term as a methodology that uncov-
ers how the past’s epistemic structure is shaped by rules and regulations
that variously affect its discursive production. 2 But even more, Jarman’s
reflections resemble Derrida’s description of the self-annihilating “death
drive” of the archive, which persistently destroys the form and content of
the knowledge it ostensibly tries to conserve: “This drive [. . .] is above
all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have been
archive-destroying, by silent vocation” (Archive 10). Jarman’s devastated

listening in Blue occurs just on the cusp of a newly emergent archaeology

of sound whose excavations break down rather than document the aural:
a queer archive that persists in its phonic destructivity. 3
Can the past be heard in the present? What or who speaks or
makes a sound? How do the lost voices of the dead contribute to the time
of the present? If Sedgwick’s scene of listening intimates the crucial (re)
turn of sound in queer thought, what follows is an attempt to explore the
implications of that turning in Jarman’s Blue, which I read as a significant
model of queer cultural practice that is expressed in and through the sonic.
At its core, Blue is a deeply autobiographical, self-conscious reflection on
queer life in the time of aids: as a visual document without any visuals
except the ikb screen, the film is Jarman’s personal commentary on the
everyday struggles brought on by the virus, but it is also a fantastic conjur-
ing of the fleeting queer histories and impressions that inform as well as
are informed by the screen’s resolute blindness. Personal memory is thus
necessarily a collective enterprise in Blue, and while it is understandable
that the film might be read in terms of an auteurist approach (one that
Jarman himself encouraged and often brought to bear, along with his
critics, on his entire literary and cinematic oeuvre), the film’s radicalism
complicates such auteurist discourses by developing a dissonant, audiovi-
sual aesthetic that refuses to fold back into any kind of unified perspective
or signature. To endorse such discourses would be to ignore the ways in
which Blue comes to us with resonances of contingency and obsolescence,
its blue blindness disturbing the interpellative frameworks that would seek
to paralyze into view the remains of some form of identifiable subject or
auteur. What the film’s testimony explores is the sonic materialities—the
layerings of various sounds, noises, and voices (some scored by Jarman’s
composer, Simon Fisher-Turner, as well as the British group Coil) that
evoke an impossibility or limit of listening, an inaudible and inarticulable
queer sonority that cannot be expunged from the filmic medium. In this
sense, Blue, like many of Jarman’s films, can be defined as part of the
genre of “the structural film” of the sixties and seventies, whose most
well-known exponents such as Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow “rejected
subjectivism, expressiveness, narrative, and direct social reference and
focused instead on the medium’s formal and material properties: framing,
editing, exposure and screening times, the effect of light on the emulsion,
and even the cone-shaped beam emanating from the projector” (Suarez
64). By concentrating specifically on the substance of audition in Blue,
Jarman makes a decisive ethical and aesthetic break in his cinema: he

shifts value away from the overdetermined cultural premiums associated

with the visual “spectacle” and onto the indeterminate event of aurality
that reconceptualizes queer belonging in terms of the erotics of the ear.
In order to trace the full impact of Jarman’s audiovisual project
and the kind of difference it registers in thinking about the representa-
tional logic that organizes theoretical articulations of queerness, I divide
this article into two extensive sections. I begin with the argument that the
relationship of sound to image in Blue is defined by an entropic or unvisual-
ized audition, one that in turn corresponds to a technical nonproductivity
inscribing certain constructions of the aural spectacle in philosophies and
theories of film sound. I then proceed to link Blue’s model of aural spec-
tacularization to Michel Foucault’s remarks on speakability/unspeakabil-
ity, voice, and listening in The History of Sexuality and The Hermeneutics
of the Subject. What lies unthought in these texts is something Foucault
can only imply: a groundwork for a mode of audition that poses a moving
counterweight to the ocularcentric and logocentric assumptions that often
underwrite queer theory.
How to properly hear what remains intractable to the ear in
fact belies the finer point that there is only impropriety in the discor-
dant materialities whose frequencies are heard throughout Blue, but just
barely. 4 Recall that when Sedgwick hears the fractured record of the dead
breaking into her photograph’s field of vision, it comes as an acousti-
cal cut that suddenly presses the aural past into a felt intimacy with the
present—a messianic blasting of the past out of what Walter Benjamin
(in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”) calls the historicist orthodoxy
of “homogeneous and empty time” (245–55). 5 Staying with Benjamin, we
should remember that aurality etymologically resembles (but is unlike)
his notion of the “aura,” defined as the irretrievably perceptual “unique
phenomenon of a distance.” Aurality thus beckons as something unbear-
ably instantaneous and paradoxically unhearable or, at the very least,
imperfectly heard because of a lag time within it, at once assembling time
past and time present with the now, breaching the self’s integrity and
temporal self-possession (216). To hear with the ear means to open up to
an unsublatable strain of history that cannot properly coincide with the
self’s knowledge of itself, that hurts as much as it welcomes.
By concentrating on the queer audiovisuality of Blue, I want to
claim that sound and the aesthetics of listening draw lines of attachment
that are different from (and yet interwoven with) the regimes of visuality
that seemingly have a critical purchase on the scopic viability of modern

gay identity. What sounds of the social are we paying attention to when we
turn to sonorities for queering our relationship to what we have ostensibly
left behind? And what or whom are we meant to hear? These are questions
that Blue resonates with in the time of the pandemic; more to the point,
what is at stake here is the art of listening, as Jean-Luc Nancy notes, since
to listen (écouter) is decidedly not the same as to hear (entendre):
To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the look-

out for a relation to self [. . .] [L]istening is passing over to the
register of presence to self, it being understood that the “self” is
precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which
one can be “present,” but precisely the resonance of a return
[renvoi]. For this reason, listening [. . .] can and must appear to
us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this
access. (12)
Listening does not simply name a process of mystical exposure to alterity;

rather, Nancy proposes listening as a temporalized experience of subjectiv-
ity that can never properly differentiate itself from the other because the
subject is incapable of becoming self-present to itself: it is “in the presence
of” in the sense that it “does not let itself be objectified or projected out-
ward. That is why it is first of all presence in the sense of a present that is
not a being [. . .] but rather a coming and a passing, an extending and a pen-
etrating” (13). I shall have more to say about Nancy’s choice of words later
in the essay; for now, I want to emphasize his point that the subject cannot
recover her- or himself through listening because her or his resonance
to her- or himself constantly returns as an inaccurate sound, an endless,
temporalized return (renvoi). I should add that in foregrounding these
latter concepts, I don’t want to simply substitute one discourse for another
and privilege a phonocentrism that the film otherwise displaces. If we are
taught anything by the film, it is that we should listen closely to the ways
in which the sonic within ocularity exudes a nonspectacularized form of
queer experience, a listening that never collapses into self-identification.
Additionally, we might be led to rethink the kind of ethics that the film
cultivates, practices, and instantiates in its audition of sound and voice.
We may, in fact, discover what the unavowable and imperceptibly present
nonpresence of sound provokes us to say about sexuality when the logic
of the gaze is passed over altogether.

Whiting Out Memory
“How are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all? For the

most part we are invisible” (12). Listening to these words (in the absence of
seeing anyone who delivers them in Blue) we might begin by asking: How
can we properly attend to the voices summoned out of such invisibility? To
whom would they be speaking? What would we do if we knew? A common
starting point for Blue’s numerous critics has been the film’s renunciation
of the visual image and its related displacement of epistemological, onto-
logical, and ethical certainties. In the impotence of sight and its corollary
technologies of empathy, identification, and recognition, Blue’s technical
impoverishments—its unfilmable words, sounds, and images—gesture to
a radical poetics of blindness that stains the technoculture of cinematic
viewing. “Blue is Jarman’s adieu, it is the way (the path, the placeless place)
in which he says and sees adieu,” writes John Paul Ricco, “precisely where
saying and seeing, speech and vision fail him and us—where speech and
vision bid their adieu. Blue is rendered nearly homologous with adieu,
and sounds a prayer for what is, yet cannot be seen, spoken, filmed: death,
the Outside, aids” (44). 6 On the one hand, this reading of the film starkly
literalizes Jarman’s battle with cmv, a retinal infection brought on by
complications from aids; but on the other hand, and more powerfully, it
acknowledges Jarman’s final adieu as a bidding farewell to what the filmic
medium can and cannot yet welcome: a kind of representational limit posed
by “death, the Outside, aids,” which haunt the screen as neither diegetic
nor extradiegetic features, but as traces of an errancy within the thought
of the film itself. “Death, the Outside, aids” are thus not abstractions,
but marks of a negativity that defines Blue’s cinematic blindness, lushly
materialized in the screen itself that (as the etymology of “screen” implies)
serves as both surface and prophylactic barrier against the nothingness it
cannot bring into view. And even though Blue’s aesthetics of “becoming-
disappeared” (Ricco 65) is partly a reaction to the unsustainable phobic
violences of political and social ignorance (“The earth is dying and we
do not notice it” [Jarman 25]), its radical force derives from an insistence
on the incommensurability between filmic form and the limits of expres-
sive content—a problem that induces a complex ethico-aesthetic amnesia
that becomes the film’s mode of possibility: “A drift of empty snowflakes /
Whiting out memory” (24). What Simon Watney has called the “exemplary
and admonitory drama” of the “spectacle of aids” (78) nears its collapse

in Blue, which opens up a mode of perceiving that cannot give anything to

us because the film has utterly forgotten what it should represent.7
Blue thus explores the virus as an audiovisual thought from
outside—the tragically contingent predicament or rupture that cannot
be substantialized because it exceeds the organizing rationalism of the
social. Put differently: although we try to conceive aids as a catastrophe
both produced by and containable through reason and wholly dealt within
the language of the social, the “time” of aids remains what William Haver
has called a “radically unthinkable” and “necessarily impossible object”
(Body 1) because it testifies to a plurality of experiences that are incom-
patible with the category of the social. 8 This is not the same as saying that
aids defies reflection or is beyond language; rather, as a culturally and
politically overdetermined concept, aids marks (in Blue’s terms) a certain
blockage within the audiovisuality of thought, which in turn produces and
reproduces it as a symptom of cognition’s inability to tolerate its excessive-
ness. Blue avows aids as an illegible inscription and ascription, a “whit-
ing out [of] memory” or a self-destroying impulse within the aurality and
visuality of remembrance itself.
It is thus of pressing importance that we attend not simply to the
blue of Blue, but to the sounds of it, to its small unheard things, especially
since, as Paul Julian Smith reminds us in a review essay of the film, Blue’s
refusal to screen the hiv/aids body compellingly echoes one of act up!’s
powerful slogans from the 1990s: “Stop looking at us: start listening to
us” (18). And yet the urgency of this call has gone largely unheard in the
small body of criticism that has surrounded the film; indeed, it remains the
case that questions about the sonic phenomena of Blue have been largely
passed over or, at the very least, considered to be of peripheral importance.
Throughout Jarman’s cinematic oeuvre, however, music, sound, and voice
have been crucial: from the spoken Latin of Sebastiane; the pageants of
The Tempest or Jubilee; the music of Coil and Judi Dench’s reading of
Shakespeare’s sonnets in The Angelic Conversation; the dramatization of
Britten’s War Requiem; or Annie Lennox’s performance of a Cole Porter
song in Edward II, the filmic image for Jarman was always fundamentally
inseparable from reflections on its acoustic settings. In Blue specifically,
the queerness of the image derives largely from the film’s genesis in the
aural—something Jarman wrote about in the earliest planning stages of
his scripts: “Sunday / I want to share this emptiness with you / Not fill
the silence with false notes [. . .] / Silence is Golden / Silence falls on the
pandemonium of images / An infinity of silence / Without compunction”

(qtd. in Peake 400). Sharing takes place in the empty breath of the infinite
moment where silence awaits as the condition of listening to the image of
sound. As Jarman’s biographer, Tony Peake, has noted, Blue ambitiously
sought a total cinematic reorganization of the senses by amplifying aural
perception:
Jarman dreamed of recording the actor Matt Dillon’s heartbeat

for a soundtrack: “it would be a great first credit.” Sounds were
crucial to his thinking for the film. After gilding “a small pocket
book for Blueprint,” he walked along the beach and “thought
the film might follow the sound of footsteps, a journey with
the continuous murmur of lazy waves, sea breezes, thunder,
and stormy growlers. In the swell: dreams and recollections,
the gemstone city of Revelations, brazen trumpets, the Song of
Solomon—could all this be resolved with the Tai Te Ching: great
fullness seems empty?” In this version, the film was a dialogue
between Yves Klein and St. Rita of Cascia: “80 minutes of film in
i.k.b. ending with a breath of gold .” (435) 9
Jarman’s reverie evokes an “archaeology of sound” that fol-

lows, recollects, and pieces together disparate sonic fragments that pulse
in excess of the “pandemonium of the image” (Jarman 11). Jarman’s
acoustic bricolage harvests these displaced sounds and weaves them into
the new contextual grooves of the film, where they serve to evoke what
Timothy Morton has called an “ambient poetics” that interlaces past,
present, and future, thickening or rendering the film by “tear[ing] to
pieces the aesthetic screen that separates the perceiving subject from the
object” (35).10 In this aural ecology of “lazy waves, sea breezes, thunder,
and stormy growlers,” or the “swell” of a watery fantasy (one that conjures
the washing scenes in The Angelic Conversation), Blue announces itself
as a project that cuts, scratches, and tears open subjectivity to sonori-
ties that are at once inside/outside, background/foreground. The watery
echoes heard throughout the film (one of its significant leitmotifs) recall
Michel Serres’s thalassic imagery for his exposition of noise as both an
interference with and the condition of information transmission: “Noise
and nausea, noise and the nautical, noise and navy belong to the same
family [. . .]. Background noise may well be the ground of our being.” For
Serres, insofar as the sonic sea constructs a modality of transmission that
“moves through the means and the tools of observation, whether mate-
rial or logical, hardware or software [. . .] it is part of the in-itself, part of

the for-itself” (13). Noise defines environmentally sensitive phenomena

that shape and disrupt the substance of information, both inside and
outside of the resonating subject. Jarman’s noisy archaeology similarly
works to interfere with the listener’s reception of and immersion in the
recorded, composed, and engineered ambience of Blue (mixed in Brian
Eno’s studios), to the point where the terrain of the self is dispersed amid
the noisy network: “There is noise in the subject, there is noise in the
object,” remarks Serres. “There is noise in the observed, there is noise
in the observer. In the transmitter and the receiver, in the entire space
of the channel” (61). Blue’s soundscape neutralizes the subject’s sense
of priority over its environment; sound sounds as the experience of the
listening subject’s “being-with-out” the world it inhabits.11
In sum, Jarman’s remarks help to clarify a decidedly aural form
of spectacle that suppresses the need for optical evidence, and it would be
fair to say that, above all else, Blue deterritorializes itself in perpetuum,
enacting a queerness of form that Sedgwick calls an “open mesh of pos-
sibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances” that multiply the
different ways in which the film might be experienced (8). Blue is thus nei-
ther a representation of a life nor a last testament; it describes an acoustic
being-in-the-world that nostalgically reminds us of how the “origins” of
sound cannot be returned to presence because no such origins exist—how
sound, while capable of imagining acoustic spaces where we are not, also
intimates the extent to which these “heterotopias” may or may not have
ever existed (see Foucault, “Of Other”). Michel Chion echoes this point in
his book Audio-Vision, where he states that “there is no place of the sounds,
no auditory scene already preexisting in the soundtrack—and therefore,
properly speaking, there is no soundtrack” (68). In theory, there is no such
identifiable thing as diegetic or extradiegetic sound because a film’s phonic
substance isn’t reducible to the regulative frame of the cinematic image.
To my mind, Chion intimates the nonrelational relationality of sound: it is
everywhere because it is nowhere as unvisualized, acousmatic spectacle.
In order to make this latter point more vivid, I want to pause and situate
Blue’s acoustic environment in terms of the particular technological prob-
lems also faced in philosophies of sound—more specifically, the problems
of sound’s representational “failures.”
In his book The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell questions whether
“the difference between auditory and visual transcription [is] a function of
the fact that we are fully accustomed to hearing things that are invisible,
not present to us, not present with us?” On the surface, Cavell’s desire to

complicate audiovisuality turns on defining different modalities of rela-

tions: “We would be in trouble if we weren’t so accustomed, because it is
the nature of hearing that what is heard comes from someplace, whereas
what you can see you can look at. It is why sounds are warnings, or calls;
it is why our access to another world is normally through voices from it”
(18). Glossing Cavell’s remarks, Cary Wolfe has succinctly noted that “the
lines of determination, if one wants to put it that way, run from the subject
to the object [. . .]. With sound, on the other hand, the lines run from the
object—‘where sound comes from’—to the subject, so that a corollary magic
would involve our insertion into the equation.” This equation describes
the specific conditions of our being-in-the-world in the context of sound;
however, the apparent comfort of hearing something invisible is a symp-
tom of a particular audiovisual predicament: sound evokes an absence
that is audible in space but heard as “invisible,” a sensory confusion that
stems, as Rick Altman and Christian Metz have each argued, from the
belief that when “[w]e claim that we are talking about sound [. . .] we are
actually thinking of the visual image of the sound’s source” (Metz 29).
Thus, when Cavell speaks of hearing “things that are invisible,” on the
surface he appears to normativize sound by inscribing it (according to Alt-
man) in a relationship with the image on screen that effectively renders
both redundant (sound repeats what the image “is,” and vice versa). A
“sound hermeneutic” is thus produced, corroding the semiotic differences
between image and sound so as to preserve the force of their illusory unity:
“the sound asks where? and the image responds here!” (Altman 74). The
immediate flaw, then, in Cavell’s argument lies in his conception of sound
as temporally ever present and renewable: “I don’t worry about hearing
a horn when the horn is not present, because what I hear is exactly the
same [. . .] whether the thing is present or not. What this rigmarole calls
attention to is that sounds can be perfectly copied, and that we have various
interests in copying them” (19). The supposed comfort we take in hearing
things comes from the belief that whatever we listen to is never utterly
gone because sound is uniquely reproducible and portable.
Exposing the insubstantiality of origin/copy, however, doesn’t
go far enough. Cavell’s idealization of sound’s capacity to bring listeners
into intimate contact with their acoustic environment is belied by what
James Lastra (among others) has described as a false conceptual reliance
on the distinction between origin/copy in sound theory. By defining sound
recordings as either pure copies of “original” sounds or as entirely new
distortions of them, critics end up justifying a binary that proves of little

use because it covers over the more pressing claim that “all practices of
audition are equally constructed [. . .]. The sonic differences to which
we attribute significance are always contextually determined, hence no
single context provides a reference point” (“Reading” 70).12 If sounds are
understood to be specific to particular contexts, one cannot say that there
is ever an authentic or essential core to any sound because our hearing
already insists on the repetition of that sound as a necessary cause of our
audition of it. Put another way, we should think of sound “as if, happening
later than the original, the repetition has worn away some, weathered a
little. Yet is it not through this ‘wearing away,’ this non-originality, that
we are able to imagine an original?”:
The historical happening of the sound event, its spatio-temporal

specificity, always appears to escape our apprehension. Whether
we’re in an auditorium, or listening to a relatively contextless,
closely-miked recording, or to one which stresses the particulari-
ties of the room, the event, in its fullness, seems to escape [. . .].
Perhaps it is in the non-presence of the repetition, of the wearing
away of the original surfaces, the decaying remains, that we rec-
ognize the possibility of the event itself. Out of the trace, then, is
born history [. . .] or the possibility of history. (“Reading” 83, 85)
The violence associated with this false philosophy of copying is grimly

alluded to in Blue’s attack on political slogans like “ ‘ Living with aids’ [. . .]
appropriated by the well” (9), that aurally manipulate, reproduce, and
render utterly substitutable all pwas, as in one instance in the film where
a voice over a megaphone in a hospital calls “Derek Jarman, Derek Jar-
man to [. . .]” while another complains, amid a flurry of whispers, “Here I
am again in the waiting room. Hell on Earth is a waiting room. Here you
know you are not in control of yourself, waiting for your name to be called:
‘712213.’ Here you have no name, confidentiality is nameless. Where is
666? Am I sitting opposite him/her? Maybe 666 is the demented woman
switching the channels on t.v.” (12). If, as Jarman implies, the flattening
regime of infinite substitutability that defines aids policy—that is to say,
the bureaucratic unwillingness and inability to recognize and hear the
singularity of each pwa—succeeds in diseasing/disfiguring the multitude
of faces it seeks to cure, it is also the case that the hell of the waiting room
in Blue is all the more intolerable because it sets up a primal scene where
the Althusserian hail of the megaphone attempts to secure and summon—
to sound out—the untethered name of someone named “Jarman,” not in his

anonymous singularity, his queerness, but in his carceral transparency as

citizen and subject. To begin thinking about the audible otherwise, then,
in the time of aids, would have us consider what the aural spectacle now
does and how “[w]e do not hear, we are heard” as acoustic symptoms in
the age of mechanical reproduction (Cavell 58).13
Jarman’s nuanced exploration of the friction between recorded
and technically engineered sonority marks both a difference and a same-
ness between sounds conceived as past and sounds conceived as powerfully
present—in other words, a temporal codependency between sounds “gone”
and sounds that are “here and now.”14 Thus the waves, breezes, techno-
music, gasps, sighs, whispers, grunts, clamors, sobs, and other tokens of
Blue’s archaeology of sound thicken a queer polyphony that constructs the
film’s acoustic substance. As Jarman’s musical collaborator Fisher-Turner
explains in an interview:
But the whole thing was very mysteriously put together because
first the words had to be recorded and then the words had to be
placed. And so we had 75 minutes of blank blue footage with time
code on it and Marcus [the engineer] and I spent a day placing
22 minutes worth of dialogue in order—randomly. We knew the
order, we just put them in order. We’d go, so the beginning goes
there. Ok, so let’s talk that through and so we’d go, blue, into the
blue, bla bla bla. Ok, silence, one, two . . . is that long enough?
No, longer. Ok, carry on. Ok, let’s make it 45 seconds and then
we’ll bring in a new poem. And we just did it like that and occa-
sionally we’d move a bit of dialogue and Derek came up the next
day and we played him the placements of the dialogue and we
then set about doing the music for the words, the prose and then
the silences between the words as well. So really we were scor-
ing words and we were scoring silence as well. (Kimpton-Nye)
These sounds are heard as absences; they are not located somewhere
within or “inside” the film, as if the latter were merely an aesthetic con-
tainer; rather, the sounds effectively fabricate Blue’s ontology and demar-
cate what we might call, after Slavoj Žižek, “the ontological horizon,
the frame of reality itself, the very texture that holds reality together”
(Metastases 115). Žižek remarks that the question of sound in film brings
up the “modern notion of the ‘open’ universe [. . .] the hypothesis that every
positive entity (noise, matter) occupies some (empty) space,” implying that
the removal of sound would still keep some kind of surrounding spatiality

intact. However, Blue’s ambience emphasizes Žižek’s point that the “pri-
mordial noise” of the universe is “constitutive of space itself ” and that the
sound of this noise is equivalent to a silence that marks the nonidentity of
that noise (115). Blue thus beckons us to hear its “dreams and recollections,
the gemstone city of Revelations, brazen trumpets, the Song of Solomon”
as elements of a sonic “ontological horizon” that remains silent or unheard
because it evokes the limit of the filmic form.
A question begs to be asked at this point: What kind of acoustical
history, knowledge, or affect would such an archaeology of sound provide?
Even more, how might the “radically unthinkable” thought of aids in Blue
be heard? In his book Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Akira Mizuta Lippit
suggests that we consider the term a/visuality as inscribing, on the one
hand, “a visuality of the invisible, a mode of avisuality [. . .] herald[ing] a
form of unimaginable devastation,” and on the other, bearing a relation
to audiovisuality—the impossible listening to an unlistenable sound, or
sound heard in terms of its utter unlistenability (92).15 To think about
the irrecuperability of sound is to invoke it in terms of a loss that one
can never know existed—a loss within sonority itself that beckons to be
heard as loss. The ear’s mournful labor can never perfectly register what
it is listening to because its labor destroys the recovery of anything like
a coherent subject position, composed of the unity of sound and image. It
anticipates an absence already intrinsic to the sonic image, which itself is
always mixed with the remains of an otherness that has seemingly been
rendered inaudible yet still persistingly “resounds” within the sonic image
as its audiovisual residue. The a/visual work of Blue is also, by implica-
tion, a work of mourning, a point poignantly felt in those moments in the
film where the names of Jarman’s dead friends and lovers are turned into
the Serresian “noise” of an intransmissible archaeology: casualties of the
film’s audiovisual technics that mourn the nonreproducibility of those
aural memories Blue simultaneously engineers and erodes.
I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale—

Another year is passing
In the roaring waters
I hear the voices of dead friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My heart’s memory turns to you.
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul . . . . (5)

As Nigel Terry intones these names, almost questioning them, his voice
becomes inseparable from its drift into the blank ambience of the film’s
acoustic tides. As sounds now rather than appellations, the names of Jar-
man’s friends cannot tell us who or what we are speaking of or with; they
neither situate nor connect with one another. They merely are, like the
snowflakes that fall, singular patterns on their own that as a group remain
patternless. The repetition of names as sounds undoes the individuating
effect of naming and lumps Jarman’s friends into an aural swarm: “David.
Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul . . . .” This “echo of many voices” (10) distorts
any semblance within earshot of a normative intersubjectivity since it
prevents any expectation of their return to reciprocity. The necrological
sounds of friends long gone or gone much too soon intimate the anonymous
remains of phonic substances that exceed the social and are undone of
every possible predicate and face, having become in the “time” of aids
the “radically unthinkable” predicaments that Blue summons but also
sonically—and mournfully—disavows.
If the acoustical reminiscences of dead friends that punctuate
the film serve in part to relinquish them to the ecology of Blue, the sounds
of their names bear traces of an inhumanity within vocalized speech
that never can be properly claimed, never can be spoken, never can be
sounded—what Lippit, in another context, calls “a sonic blindness [. . .] [a]
convergence of sound and nonsound images that initiates (or secretes) a
secret phonography” (“Derrida” 87). The sounds of the names in Blue, like
the sounds of waves, the thunder, the Song of Solomon, or the conversation
between Yves Klein and St. Rita of Cascia mark the unfurling of semantic
meaning from sound, the very possibility of sound not referring to anyone
at all. If Blue does provide a quasi-narrative of sorts (one that is somewhat
“reproduced” in the Overlook Press’s printed text of the film with specific
syntax, punctuation, paragraphing, and line spacing), the film’s words,
spoken throughout by various actors on the soundtrack who remain dif-
ficult to distinguish, should also be heard in terms of their unreadability.16
To be sure, to watch and listen to Blue is to participate in an exegetical
process that Jarman himself, living his own unimaginable destruction
through the pandemic, linked to a practice of a/visuality: “Thou Shall Not
Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to
fill the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released
from image” (15). As Deborah Esch has remarked, Jarman’s iconoclastic
“caveat to the commandment invokes the ongoing ‘task’ of writing, and
with it the inevitable, invisible images in the language enlisted ‘to fill the

empty page’: the images we hear rather than see in Blue” (“Blue” 525).17
In this sense, the task of writing (echoed in Jarman’s several published
journals, notes, memoirs) is synonymous with an attentiveness to the a/
visuality of a language whose figural capacity is broken down, where the
images in words aren’t mere figures produced by the language to signify or
refer, but tokens of a negativity in language that is heard as the blind spot
or “sonic blindness” within the audiovisual image itself. The interpretative
problem of a/visuality thus lies in its apparent breaking down of the chain
of significations that are produced at the expense of an ocularcentrism
that dampens the sounds that embed the logos in the first place.
Even if it is tempting to think of Blue as in some way imagining
the transcendence of one sense over another, we should note that what
is at issue in Jarman’s archaeology of sound is less the hegemony of the
eye over the ear, or vice versa, than a distrust of the plenitude and self-
sufficiency of any one of the senses. The spectacular “pandemonium” of
the image arises from the falsely redemptive promises of visualization.
To turn to sound, however, as a rival source of “direct” experience would
be foolhardy; it would effectively reinscribe sound with the same power
as the visual image that, according to Chion, has subjugated sound within
a certain history of filmmaking that conceives it as nothing more than
“added value” or “the expressive and informative value with which a
sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the
immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information
or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained
in the image itself” (5). Faith in the image’s ontological fullness effects a
total subordination of audiovisuality, a condition Guy Debord presciently
critiqued when he implied that the commodified optical “spectacle” of
modernity was an attempt at controlling sociality by way of pulverizing
the world through sensory deprivation:
Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer

directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized media-
tions, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of
sight to the special place once occupied by touch [. . .]. This is
not to say, however, that the spectacle itself is perceptible to the
naked eye—even if that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle
is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to
any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue.

Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the

spectacle reestablishes its rule. (17)18
Before we have set eyes or ears upon the spectacle, it already exists in
advance of our encounter with it as the reifying gaze of what we should
choose to be. The spectacle is the corrupted audiovisual record of a
past that appears incontrovertibly finished, immunized, and singularly
unheard because its message allows no auditory participation, no audi-
tion. You cannot hear the spectacle; it is, in the words of Blue, “a prison of
the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your
qualities, your psychological world” (15). The spectacle of aids tyrannizes
by consolidating aurality and visuality in commodified queer bodies that,
as objects in the age of capital, are produced as symptomatic representa-
tions of society’s homophobic zeal for spectacularization. The ocular gaze
of the spectacle precisely denies the appeal of act up!’s call: “Stop looking
at us: start listening to us.” In this way, the aestheticization of the image
simultaneously mutes all our capacities to hear otherwise.
The image that Jarman militates against is the one manufac-
tured by the spectacle to relieve us of one of our most serious and ethical
obligations: to listen to the world as lost. Indeed, Blue’s virtual and inde-
terminate audience ponders the International Klein Blue less as an optical
opacity that commands a kind of subordinating identification with itself,
and more as a sonic smear over the media of visualization, an affectively
corrosive encounter with what Fred Moten has called the aurality of the
Lacanian gaze, which defines its maleficence over and against sound but
never quite excludes the ethical “blessing” that sound returns and cuts
over the gaze’s visual tyranny (183). Jarman intimates something of the
force of this disturbing phonic disidentification in the following “scene”:19
There is a photo in the newspaper this morning of refugees leav-

ing Bosnia. They look out of time. Peasant women with scarves
and black dresses stepped from the pages of an older Europe.
One of them has lost her three children. Lightning flickers
through the hospital window—at the door an elderly woman
stands waiting for the rain to clear. I ask her if I can give her a
lift, I’ve hailed a taxi. “Can you take me to Holborn tube?” On the
way she breaks down in tears. She has come from Edinburgh.
Her son is in the ward—he has meningitis and has lost the use
of his legs—I’m helpless as the tears flow. I can’t see her. Just the
sound of her sobbing. (10–11)

The description of the unseen photo in the film doesn’t compensate for
its actual invisibility, nor (for that matter) does it do so for Jarman’s own
blindness. What is missing here is precisely what cannot help but remain
missed or, put otherwise, is missing as remains: the sound the photograph
cannot bring to the ear, the sound of the woman’s sobbing, a sobbing that
searches for a proper listener to allow for its audition. In other words, the
woman’s unheard sobs require a poetics of tears in order to be understood,
but they only deepen the gulf between her and the film’s narrative voice,
as if the impossibility of her crying is a condition of the nonspectacular-
ized colloquy that Jarman here unfolds. In both instances, there is the hint
of a belief that “[t]he thereness of sound becomes the hereness of sound
in the ear of the receiver,” as Bruce R. Smith puts it (8). But again, such a
spatiotemporalization of aurality fails to account for the fact that sound in
Blue is nowhere in that it is technologically mediated and deracinated from
space. At the beginning of the film, a speaker describes sitting in a café
being served by “young refugees from Bosnia” as the “war rages across
the newspapers and through the ruined streets of Sarajevo” (3). Sounds
of the café mix into the sounds of a wartime that is somewhere else but
is experienced in a cinematic present that is pure contemporaneity, event
slamming against event like a trauma that brings past, present, and future
into unsettling proximity. “Listening takes place at the same time as the
sonorous event,” writes Nancy, “an arrangement that is clearly distinct
from that of vision [. . .] [V]isual presence is already there, available before
I see it, whereas sonorous presence arrives—it entails an attack” that
infiltrates the body as an unprecedented presence that is “omnipresent,
and its presence is never a simple being-there or how things stand, but is
always at once an advance, penetration, insistence, obsession, or posses-
sion” (14, 15). Listening has no preconditions because it occurs within a
“sonorous presence” that isn’t simply a naive presentism, but a complex
temporality that is all temporalities at once—and not:
Sound essentially comes and expands, or is deferred and trans-

ferred. Its present is thus not the instant of philosophico-scientific
time either, the point of no dimension [. . .]. [S]onorous time
takes place immediately according to a completely different
dimension, which is not that of simply succession (corollary of
the negative instant). It is a present in waves on a swell, not in a
point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out,
that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that

becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches or contracts,

and so on. (13)
Recalling Jarman’s reflections on the “swell: dreams and recollections”

or “the continuous murmur of lazy waves, sea breezes, thunder, and
stormy growlers,” Nancy links sound to a nonserial experience of space
and time that, unlike the visual, opens, closes, coils, penetrates, stretches,
and imbues “us”; whatever “we” are, however, is wholly elaborated in the
dynamic choreography of sonic time. For Nancy, listening occurs “at the
same time” with the sonorous event in the sense that one’s audition is radi-
cally discontinuous with any sense of volition and intentionalized point of
contact with the acoustic—although whether one chooses to hear a sound
or not is beside the point because sound expresses a stretched out, ambi-
ently environmental subjectification, a resonance that is pitched through
the field of the auditor. Listening, in other words, is not simultaneity but
contemporaneity, the latter term referring to an immanent, spatial beside-
ness or between-ness with sound, whereas the former evokes a sense of
temporal difference that is specific to visuality and deprives us of a felt
immersion in the evanescent or “mobile” (16). 20 What we are dealing with,
Nancy maintains, is presence as the criss-crossing sum of transitive and
intransitive actions that never substantialize the “I” as one of their agents
or effects: agency conceived in terms of laterality as opposed to teleology.
Queered Pitch
If we are sonic symptoms, I want to now consider the different

pressures that Jarman’s acoustic project brings to bear on the substance
of the phonic in queer theory’s textualizing and historicizing moves. How
does one hear something like queer thought concretized in the allusiveness
of figurative language? How and what does queer sound like, after all? I
suggest that the aural frequently returns in queer theory, albeit mutely,
in and around questions of sound and voice. For example, in “Critically
Queer,” Judith Butler argues that queer derives its conceptual force from
the fact that it signals an injurious address or hail that is heard by a sub-
ject for whom the word marks the temporary coincidence of body and
name, of inscription with substance, “establish[ing] certain bodies at the
limits of available ontologies, available schemes of intelligibility” that in
turn partially subordinate the subject to the “binding,” citational power
of the law (224, 225). The fact that queer can be resignified, that it can be

reclaimed from its wounding, abusive history and become a conceptual

rallying cry for new perversities, means that the word’s reception is made
possible by its iterability, its repetition of a difference that is premised on
an absence intrinsic to its inscription. If we follow Derrida’s claim that
a requirement of writing is that it “must be repeatable—iterable in the
absolute absence of the addressee or the empirically determinable set of
addressees” to the point where it is infinitely repeatable beyond its origi-
nary context, then queer is in part scripted by a notion of absence that
already structures cinematic sound itself—that queers sound altogether
(“Signature” 315). Queerness is perpetually forestalled from generating
permanence of place, and its sound in Blue is heard/read as an absence or
nothingness that innovates materialities that remain nonrepresentational,
nonidentifiable, a “queer militancy” Sedgwick hears but cannot see and
that Butler’s subject also involuntarily hears and upon whose audibility
it depends. Queer is thus not merely a linguistic utterance or label that
the subject encounters as a call that comes outside of itself; rather, queer
marks the very materialization of subjectivity through a sonic absention
that is intrinsic to queerness—what Carla Freccero refers to as a “kind of
Derridean différance [. . .] the inscription of a negativity that nevertheless
may be said to have force, to act or be active in a positive sense” (18). For
Butler, the hail is an address, a figure of speech that cannot be properly
identified or located because as figure, it cites a word whose power is not
merely semantic but phonic: it emerges as a relation of the subject to an
otherness it discovers “within” itself as a darkness—a darkness visible
and heard that is at once prior to and instantaneous with the sound of
queer subjectivity tout court. 21 If queer summons, then it does so by an act
of indirect movement that problematizes what is, or what we hear to be,
the historical freight carried in the sound of the hail itself.
If the act of hailing inaugurates something queer, it does so
by bestowing an audiovisual figuration: voice, that is, which is in turn
scripted by its injurious appellation. What becomes most urgent here is not
simply listening to the vocal difference of the other, but rather attending
to the trajectory of that voice itself, which, as Butler implies, occurs at the
limits of materiality. “Queer voice” is an error, an inscription of the image
of the body to a sonic stain. What does allow for audition, however, is the
sonic sameness of queer that makes the word into what Haver calls “an
unmotivated existential comportment toward, an existential attention to,
what is, as such, unsurpassable. [. . .] Queer’s honor is a comportment, an
attention, that is something quite other than interpretation; it is a seeing

irreducible to looking, a hearing irreducible to listening; it is the perversity

of the singularity at stake” (“Really” 11). Haver’s description of “queer’s
honor” formulates an erotics of being in terms of an audiovisual materi-
ality that is irreducible to the body of the senses; it is opposed to any such
body being posited as a condition of seeing/hearing. 22 I would like to take
Haver’s remarks as a cue to begin thinking about how investments in voice
and speaking might in fact be linked to fantasies of visualized representa-
tion, and in so doing, occlude ways of listening to those subjectivities that
might be approached as silenced and invisible, that is to say, subjectivities
characterized by an a/visuality that exudes an ontology of sound that is
as sonically queer as it is textually marginalized.
To begin with, let’s track a particular kind of voice that at one
point in history dares to speak its name: “There is no question that [with]
the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and
literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies
of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and ‘psychic hermaphrodism,’ ”
the biopolitical management of sexual perversity achieved a more pro-
nounced two-way effect: homosexuality became more legible as well as
made “possible the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality
began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘natu-
rality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same
categories by which it was medically disqualified” (Foucault, History 101).
In this classic moment from the first volume of The History of Sexuality,
Foucault identifies the notorious release of a voice out of the juridical,
literary, medical, and psychiatric discourses of the nineteenth century.
We recall that Foucault defines the “world of discourse” as “a multiplicity
of discursive elements that can come into play [and it] is this distribution
that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those concealed, the
enunciations required and those forbidden [. . .] with the variants and
different effects—according to who is speaking, his position of power, the
institutional context in which he happens to be situated” (100). Foucault
takes as his examples the cases of sodomy and homosexuality: while both
are discursively produced concepts, homosexuality emerges as something
that in particular can bear witness to and refract back upon itself from the
hegemonic forces that seek to silence or trammel its sound. What inter-
ests me are Foucault’s musings on the substance of that refraction—how
it occurs and what it produces—since they raise key questions about the
ability to speak. While Foucault claims, albeit controversially, that earlier
textual “discretion” toward the category of sodomy rendered it at once the

object of cruel punishment and a matter carefully tolerated by virtue of its

inutterable nature, he emphasizes that homosexuality acquired a certain
textual voice from the power that conditioned it, capable of speaking “in
its own behalf” in order to address and form a kind of public culture.
Foucault’s statements are of course linked to his study of the
confession in the first volume of The History, which he defines as the form
or genre used for extracting statements on sexual subjectivity (“the agency
of domination does not reside in the one who speaks [. . .] but in the one
who listens and says nothing” [62]). Thus the taxonomic value of homo-
sexuality lies not only in its discursive productivity, but in its aurality: after
all, homosexuality’s capacity for addressing others and itself depends not
on its newly cultivated identity, but rather its sense of itself as a relation
(Nancy’s “resonance of a return” or a “coming and a passing, an extend-
ing and a penetrating”) bestowed by those forces that precisely want to
hear it. Power “neither sees nor speaks,” Deleuze perceptively notes in his
own “audiovisual” study of Foucault. “It is a mole that only knows its way
round its network of tunnels [. . .]. But precisely because it does not itself
speak and see, it makes us see and speak” (Foucault 82). 23 Confessional
homosexuality thus emerges for Foucault as at once a kind of visual spec-
tacularization of a certain self, but even more, it signals an audition or an
address to an animating other that then recursively addresses itself back
with the effect of enabling its subjection to the vocality it thinks is its own
but is nothing but the sign of its juridical objectification and commodifi-
cation. As Moten has stated in a brilliant reading of Marx’s reflections on
the commodity in connection with racial subjectivity and sound, “[T]he
truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility
of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic
value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not
from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value—that
it is not intrinsic—that Marx assigns it” (13). What is at issue here is not
whether the commodified identity can or should speak, but the movement
from spectacle to marginalized/unvisualizable audition: How and what
are the implications of hearing, of extracting linguistic signification from
something called “voice,” something that cannot properly coincide with a
particular body that is meant to house it?
As an effect of Foucault’s theoretical analyses, we can already
begin to hear a concerted mobilization of forces around the politics of
vocality, or what Kobena Mercer has succinctly defined as the “question

of enunciation—who is speaking, who is spoken to, what codes do they

share to communicate?”
It is enunciation that circumscribes the marginalized positions

of subjects historically misrepresented or underrepresented in
dominant systems of representation. To be marginalized is to
have no place from which to speak, since the subject positioned
in the margins is silenced and invisible. The contestation of
marginality in black, gay, and feminist politics thus inevitably
brings the issue of authorship back into play, not as the centered
origin that determines or guarantees the aesthetic or political
value of a text, but as a question about agency in the cultural
struggle to “find a voice” and “give voice” to subordinate experi-
ences, identities, and subjectivities. (190)
The cultural work involved in finding or giving voice operates within a

framework that compels the “I” to sound like a speaking, textual subject—
that is to say that it resemble and inscribe itself, with all its deconstructive
ambivalences, as something that emits “from someplace.” For Mercer, the
contestatory subjectivities that propel black, gay, and feminist politics are
also haunted by a very real fear of a loss of voice as a loss of speech and
representation, the fear that the occlusion of voice is a sign of a margin-
alization of representable subjectivities that “have no place from which to
speak, since the subject positioned in the margins is silenced and invis-
ible” (190). Such fear, moreover, finds its correlate in our technoculture’s
willingness to produce, reproduce, and distort voice into something that is
entirely coterminous with presence and identity. 24 And yet we might recall
Sterne’s advisory that “the claim that sound reproduction has ‘alienated’
the voice from the human body implies that the voice and the body existed
in some prior holistic, unalienated, and self-present relation” (20–21).
Without minimizing the real value that surrounds these ques-
tions of identity, I want to examine how a politics of voice in fact depends
upon a rhetoric of visual spectacularization that displaces some of the more
radical queerings that sound and listening effect. Indeed, in Foucault’s
later writings and interviews, these very questions would near a stunning
pitch, and in his lectures at the Collège de France, he revised his earlier
critique of the confession and outlined a philosophical ascesis or “technol-
ogy of the self” that he describes as “the subjectivation of true discourse. It
ensures that I myself can hold this true discourse, it ensures that I myself
become the subject of enunciation of true discourse” (Hermeneutics 333).

Drawing on ancient philosophical sources, Foucault writes that a compo-

nent of subjectivation is listening, which he defines as an ascetic practice
that allows for the logos to be taken into the body and “embedded” in the
subject. Foucault notes that for Plutarch, hearing is at once the most passive
(pathetikos) and the most rational (logikos) in that hearing is an exposure,
a form of relation to self. “The soul that listens must keep watch on itself.
In paying proper attention to what it hears it pays attention to what it hears
as signification, as pragma. It also pays attention to itself so that, through
this listening and memory, the true thing gradually becomes the discourse
that it clutches to itself” (Hermeneutics 351). To listen to the sound of “the
subjectivation of true discourse” marks a shift in Foucault’s thinking away
from the subordinating power of the inscriptive hailing voice and toward
the structural sound of that vocal address itself, which multiply resonates
as the sign of voice’s sameness to sound: of sound and voice’s continuity
precisely as audiovisual symptoms that reproduce a subject whose queer-
ness is mechanically reproduced or copied but that cannot be (originally)
found. Like the clamoring, perverse choir in Blue that mockingly sings
of “sexual identities”—“I am a mannish / Muff diving / Size queen / With
bad attitude / An arse licking / Psychofag / [. . .] Laddish nymphomaniac
politics / Spunky sexist desires / Of incestuous inversions and / Incorrect
terminology / I am a Not Gay” (21–22)—homosexuality for Foucault can-
not properly embody any subject position because, like the I and the you
that minimally structure its form of address, it is a fantasy spun out of the
gaze’s aurality.
A fractured negativity thus lies within address itself, sound
burying sound in hauntological echoes that call to mind the welter of
Sedgwick’s “mill of identities.”25 One should not be listening to the grain
of the voice, as Barthes might suggest, but to the sound of one’s dispos-
session from oneself. The radical audiovisual capacity of (homo)sexuality
to speak on its own behalf lies not simply in its development of voice but
rather in the way in which it gestures to a certain nonmeaning in its speech
that cannot be translated but cannot not be translated into a sonority that
impossibly emerges out of the interstices of vocalized thought. 26
Turning back to Jarman, we should remember that it is out of
just such an interstitial queer moment that Blue begins:
You say to the boy open your eyes

When he opens his eyes and sees the light
You make him cry out. Saying

O Blue come forth

O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in. (3)
Listening to the sonic, carillon-like tolling, one of the film’s guiding voices
(the actor Nigel Terry) is ushered in; and yet who compels whom to say
this to the boy, and why? And who is (are) the speaker(s)? Between the
address of the first line and the apostrophic pitch of the fourth, a blurring
of positions occurs: Can we discern if the voice recommends, witnesses,
or performs these lines? And who is the “you” or “the boy”? In one sense,
the “you” might very well signal an inaugural moment, a call into being
that speaks to and potentially brings us as Jarman’s audience into relation
with the International Klein Blue. Indeed, the “you” is evoked in the very
instant that it/we are counseled to “say to the boy open your eyes.” That
is, in making this “you” speak to another, it acquires a sonic materiality
that cedes to the boy’s aural gaze, embedded in the rich dominant-tonic
alternations that punctuate this moment. Jarman’s soundmix voice com-
prises nothing more than a technical humanization of sound, manipulated
by the complexities of the film’s acoustic reproductions. The voice doesn’t
accusatively interpellate “us,” the boy, or itself; rather, it resounds at the
beginning only to mark its own deferral. In this way, the opening of Blue
gestures toward a mode of nonantagonistic recognition that depends upon
the voice’s utter lack of difference, its continuity with a certain queerness
of the sonic that is awaited and received rather than injuriously consum-
mated. In Blue, the act of speaking for someone means attending to the
nonvocality of their sound—the “taking place” of their sound within our
own, without fetishizing voice as a sign of sound’s humanistic modulation
into “authenticity.”27
In Jarman’s Blue, “the sound that arises from the lacuna, the
non-language that one speaks when one is alone” (Agamben 36) creates
an anonymous acoustic space that maintains its sounds and voices as
irrecuperable—or rather, it bears witness to a sonic ambience that cannot
be transmuted back into spectacularization and intelligibility. The non-
positivist emergence of “homosexuality” is enabled by the queerness of its
voice, or rather, by the negativity of its sonority around which homosexu-
ality is conjured as voice: the nothingness of a testimony that knows no
voice except its sound, at once material and immaterial. Put another way:
voice and sound occur or open up as a result of a blurring on the level of

interstitiality; sound is a dispossessing omnipresence that violates just as

well as it envelops:
Sound has no hidden face; it is all in front, in back, and outside

inside, inside-out in relation to the most general logic of presence
as appearing, as phenomenality or as manifestation, and thus
as the visible face of a presence subsisting in self. Something of
the theoretical and intentional scheme turned to optics vacil-
lates around it. To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at
the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well
as around me, and from me as well as toward me it opens me
inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double,
quadruple, or sextuple opening that a “self” can take place. To
be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be
open from without and from within, hence from one to the other
and from one in the other. Listening thus forms the perceptible
or sensitive (aisthetic) condition as such: the sharing of an
inside/outside, division and participation, de-connection and
contagion. (Nancy 13–14)
The anality of Nancy’s remarks on sound in this passage—“I am penetrated,

for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward
me it opens me inside me as well as outside”—evokes the temporality of
listening as fucking, an erotic passivity that expresses in the time of the
fuck the sonorous pleasures that emerge in and out of the points of contact
on the “self” where they are produced and made to resonate. 28 Additionally,
Nancy’s description is uniquely spatial: if we recall Freud’s definition of the
perversions as “extend[ing], in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of
the body that are designed for sexual union” (149), Nancy describes sound
as the anonymous stranger, the presence or presencing (not being) that
has no face, that is a/visual, and disrupts the self by humiliating it into
subjectivation through a kind of sexual aggression that pushes it into a
nonrelational spatiality. The queer abjection of sound lies in its foreboding
ubiquity or deterritorializing anality, stripped of anything that smacks of
the personal: “[I]t is all in front, in back, and outside inside, inside-out in
relation to the most general logic of presence as appearing” because it is
a “time out of joint” within which the anonymous fuck of sound resonates
according to a phenomenology that is nonappearing, nonmanifesting,
nonbeholding. It is there precisely because—as a challenge to a politics
of recognition—it is decidedly not before us. “Whereas visible or tactile

presence occurs in a motionless ‘at the same time,’ ” continues Nancy,

“sonorous presence is an essentially mobile ‘at the same time’ ” (16).
Sound is not “in” the past, present, or future, nor is it “before,” “during,”
or “after.”29 It is an eroticism of and for temporality. “One might say: there
is the simultaneity of the visible, and the contemporaneity of the audible”
(16) because every phonic moment in time occurs in “an essentially mobile
‘at the same time’ ”—that is to say, sound penetrates the art of listening
insofar as the latter is an exercise of attending to the impossibility of per-
fect audition. Listening is forever disarmed by the unexpected force of its
own saturation in a world devastated by sound and nonsound. For Nancy,
sound does not instance spectacle or spectacularization, but is rather a
taking-place, an event, a queer cruising that enables a stunning group
fuck, “for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as
toward me it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such
a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a ‘self’ can take place.” The
multiplicity of pleasures achieves a truly carnal ethics of hospitality, turn-
ing the “self” into an acoustic anus or hole. Although sound appears to be
seemingly inside and outside, both perpetrator and perpetrated, Nancy’s
point is that the acoustic emerges out of the multi-openings or interstices
of embodied thought and thus sunders, warps, and dizzyingly increases
the sensualities experienced between the seams of subjectivity. 30
What Blue breathlessly seeks to remind us is that sound cruises
us. For instance, take a moment in the film where the central speaker
nostalgically recollects the sexual freedom of earlier decades—“Impatient
youths of the sun / Burning with many colours / [. . .] Fucking with fusion
and fashion / Dance in the beams of emerald lasers” (18). The “erotohis-
toriography” (Freeman) of these memories is laced into a pulsing dance
track that cites the past as a recurring, irrepressible club mix, a queer
orgy on the dance floor that persists in spite of the halting sounds of clocks
that figure for Jarman’s i.v. drip, “tick[ing] out the seconds, the source of
a stream along which the minutes flow, to join the river of hours, the sea
of years and the timeless ocean” (18). The technosounds of fucking are the
movements of an ecstatically obscene eros, summoning a present that is a
“coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating” of the auricular, a
sonic ejaculation that never can stop, never can be brought to term, never
can end as a “point on a line”: “Mating on suburban duvets / Cum splat-
tered nuclear breeders / What a time that was” (18). Blue projects us into
an unanticipated queer futurity that locates itself between past sounds that
are already sourceless and placeless and their audition in a present that

cites and recites the past as its futural projection. Blue throws itself into
a future acoustic resonance that listens to the past within the present, a
sonic blindness or unhearable frequency whose full aural portent always
remains in advance of listening, of écoute. 31
If Jarman’s Blue has taught us anything, it is that we have yet
to properly listen to the virus and the communities it effects and that our
hearing, even at the best of times, might very well prove to be a sign of
a tonal deafness. It isn’t even a matter of properly hearing for the sake
of knowing what might save us—as if reason can rid us of aids and con-
vince us of a final, future deliverance from it by exterminating all those
abandoned by the illness. Such impossibilities in the time of aids come
with powerful ethical pressures: as Alexander García Düttmann has
trenchantly remarked in his indispensable book At Odds with aids , the
political expediency of speaking for and on behalf of the virus is often
accompanied by identifications that must be resisted (“being-not-one”),
identifications that produce aids , gay, homosexual as terms that give the
lie to testimony’s capacity to cure through speech:
Giving testimony comes about because there can be no more

communication of what is testified to than there can be any
simultaneity with Being-not-one. Giving testimony does not
communicate anything: it has no communicable content [. . .].
Perhaps in the time of aids a way of giving testimony, a marking
of Being-not-one, comes about that communicates nothing and
erases itself because such a paradoxical marking must always
also be understood as the attempt to exhibit Being-not-one as
such. Only when this exhibition is thought can one perhaps
speak of a duty and a responsibility to give testimony. (76)
Such testimony bears the sounds of a refusal to hear, to identify the aurality
of the virus as if it had a kindly human voice or face, but it does so while
also never ignoring the kinds of queer relationalities that the sonic com-
pels. What Blue does ask of us is this: what forms of attention might we
offer to the virus, and in what sense is our attentiveness deeply bound with
unraveling the ways in which aids summons us to listen, to hear, to attend
to it? All of which is to say: what might be the sounds of aids, after all?

For their generous (and generative) readings of this essay, I would like to thank Nancy Arm-
strong, Tim Bewes, David L. Clark, Julie Chun Kim, Alix Mazuet, Timothy Morton, and two
anonymous readers for differences. Some of the arguments were first presented as a talk
at Brown University’s lgbtq Center, and I also thank those at the center for kindly inviting
me, and my audience that day for their engagement.
jacques kh a lip is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities and Assistant
Professor of English and of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His areas of
specialization include Romanticism, aesthetics, poetry, and queer theory. He is the author
of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford University Press, 2009) and
coeditor of Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Standford University Press,
forthcoming). His current book manuscript, “Dwelling in Disaster,” considers Romantic
and post-Romantic explorations of extinction and wasted life.
Notes 1 For purposes of textual accuracy than those of determining the

and transcription, I cite from the meaning of being, thinking, and
film’s “screenplay” throughout knowing has no choice but to
this article. The filmic experience sound apocalyptic” (34). Addition-
of Blue, however, is the principal ally, see Derrida’s The Ear of the
locus in the pages that follow. Other.
2 See Foucault’s Archaeology of 5 For a reading of Benjamin in rela-

Knowledge. tion to the sonic capacities of the
past and the formulation of Afri-
3 On the subject of queer sexuality can American subjectivities, see
and the archive, see Cvetkovich; Alexander Weheliye’s excellent
and Esch, “Blue” and “The Only.” book, Phonographies.
4 In his discussion of the question 6 For other pertinent readings of

of tone in Derrida, Peter Fenves the film and/or Jarman’s visual
helpfully notes that auditioning aesthetics, see Bersani and
the other as “an object of hearing Dutoit, Caravaggio; Esch, “Blue”;
to which the subject can address Lawrence; Schwenger; Paul
inquiries” is a sorely mistaken Julian Smith; Vogler; and Wollen.
pursuit: “To hear with, and along
with, the ear of the other is not 7 See also Casarino.
to listen to the other. It is not to
engage in ‘dialogue,’ and it is thus 8 For another seminal work on the
not to work out a more inclusive discursive construction of a ids,
dialectics; it is, above all, not to see Treichler.
understand the other as a sender
9 Citing Peake, Esch enumerates
of messages or as an object of
the various titles for Jarman’s
address” (33). Fenves remarks,
film: “Bliss, Blueprint, A Blue-
“Derrida has linked the attempt
print for Bliss, International Blue,
to bring philosophy to a close with
Forget-Me-Not, Speedwell Eyes,
an attempt to stop up the ears
Bruises, Blue protects white from
in order to hear oneself speak.
innocence, O, Into the Blue, My
The closure of philosophy—the
Blue Heaven, and Blue is Poison”
exhaustion of its ability to open
(“Blue” 509; Peake 398, 435, 510).
new ways of determining being,
Jarman hoped his homage
thinking, and knowing—is the
to Klein might take the form of an
subject matter of Derrida’s early
imageless screen in ikb , comple-
analyses [. . .]. Opening philo-
mented only by a “sophisticated
sophical activity to efforts other

Dolby stereo soundtrack which 12 Also see Lastra, Sound

would tell the Yves Klein story in Technology.
sound and jazzy be-bop.” Then,
because he realised such blue 13 With reference to Walter Ben-
blankness would make the film jamin, Jonathan Sterne has
almost impossible to fund, he cogently remarked that the arti-
planned that it should take the ficiality of the cinematic repro-
form of a masque set in a blue duction of “nature” “highlights
room. A series of poems and dia- the possibility of reality having
logues concerning the evolution of an immediate self-presence in
Klein’s art toward the immaterial the first place: authenticity and
would be spoken, sung or chanted presence become issues only
liturgically by the dramatis when there is something to which
personae. These comprised Klein we can compare them [. . .]. As a
himself, St. Rita, the Knights of St. studio art, sound reproduction
Sebastian, and ikb , a blue, mercu- developed shortly before and then
rial messenger of the gods. (Peake alongside film. The possibility of
399) sound reproduction reorients the
practices of sound production;
Jarman organized a number of insofar as it is a possibility at all,
live concerts that anticipated reproduction precedes original-
the release of what was then ity” (220–21).
alternately called “International
Blue” or “Bliss.” One such elabo- 14 “To be an astronaut of the void,
rately staged concert projected leave the comfortable house that
an ikb screen while Jarman and imprisons you with reassurance.
Tilda Swinton, dressed in blue, Remember, / To be going and to
recited poetry and lines from have are not eternal—fight the
the film as a pageant played out fear that engenders the begin-
in front of the audience. There ning, the middle and the end”
were also, “eight musicians who, (Jarman 15–16).
under Simon Turner’s leadership,
improvised some purposefully 15 Lippit theorizes this “aesthetics of
monotonous music, thus provid- devastation” as the precipitate of
ing a meditative ambience in the historical catastrophe of the
which the minds of the listeners dropping of the atomic bomb on
could drift into the blue in pursuit Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,
of Jarman’s evanescent poetry” an event that did not simply anni-
(473–74). hilate the visual order of post-war
Japanese culture but rather intro-
10 “Ambient poetics” is Timothy duced an opacity within seeing, a
Morton’s term in his Ecology perceptibility akin to a darkness
without Nature: Rethinking Envi- visible. The catastrophe of a ids
ronmental Aesthetics. in Blue, I want to suggest, might
11 The extraordinary acoustic trib- evoke a similar sensual reorga-
ute to Jarman by the British artist nization. Lippit’s work is in some
Scanner (Robin Rimbaud), The ways continuous with the argu-
Garden Is Full of Metal, extends ment of Bersani and Dutoit’s Arts
this ambient aesthetic by record- of Impoverishment, which cri-
ing and manipulating taped inter- tiques a kind of narrative cinema
views with Jarman, the bustle of governed by the “radical proposi-
Charing Cross Road, and various tion that the world can be seen.
noises in and around Jarman’s If the world is there, it is in order
final home in Dungeness (among to allow us to see it. To identify
other phenomena). with the camera is to transcend

all the other identifications the the visible subject, or the impos-
camera has led us to make” (159). sibility of an overall view as soon
In addition, see their book Forms as the sonorous subject has lasted
of Being. a certain amount of time” (74).
Nancy’s larger point, however, is
16 The speakers are John Quentin, that sound is multistimulating,
Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, John multidirected, and disembody-
Lynch, and Jarman himself. ing: it unfastens the subject from
any single point of contact and
17 For a discussion of writing’s multiplies one’s sensitivity to
haunting of cinema, see Gibson. penetration.
18 Debord’s own first film, Hurle- 21 As Butler states, “The ‘I’ cannot
ments en faveur de Sade (Howl- give a final or adequate account
ings in Favor of Sade), was a of itself because it cannot return
ninety-minute blank screen and to the scene of address by which it
voice-over. For a brief consid- is inaugurated and it cannot nar-
eration of Debord in relation to rate all of the rhetorical dimen-
Jarman, see Wollen 128. sions of the structure of address
in which the account itself takes
19 I am much indebted to Moten’s
place” (Giving 67).
book throughout this article. See
also Žižek’s Enjoy Your Symptom!, 22 I should add that Haver’s use of
where he describes the effect of hearing is homologous to Nancy’s
the “traumatic voice” in film as a term listening, which, as I men-
“strange body which smears the tion near the beginning of this
innocent surface of the picture, article, separates itself from
a ghost-like apparition which entendre, “to understand.”
can never be pinned to a definite
visual object” (1). 23 In the chapter “Strata or His-
torical Formations” in Foucault,
20 In response to Nancy, Alix Mazuet Deleuze states:
has said to me, “I agree with the Foucault continued to be
idea of an attack, but not with fascinated by what he saw as
that of a sonorous event, which much as by what he heard or
would place it at the same time read, and the archaeology he con-
as listening. You may listen to a ceived of is an audiovisual archive
sonorous event, and you may not. (beginning with the history of
If you do, it’s here, for you. If you science). Foucault delighted in
don’t, it’s not. Same thing for a articulating statements and in
visual phenomenon: it’s here if distinguishing between them, only
the subject looks at it; it’s not if because he also had a passion for
the subject doesn’t. ‘Visual pres- seeing: what defines him above all
ence’ is not ‘already there, avail- is the voice, but also the eyes. The
able before I see it,’ any more eyes and the voice. Foucault never
than audio presence is” (personal stopped being a voyant at the
communication, 24 Aug. 2008). I same time as he marked philoso-
would agree with Mazuet’s cri- phy with a new style of statement,
tique here, especially since Nancy though the two followed different
frequently insists on an imme- paths, or a double rhythm. (50)
diacy for the acoustic that he does For an application of Fou-
not grant the visual. In a footnote, cault’s argument on the confes-
he describes “the impossibility of sion to musicological studies, see
a recoil or a coming closer of the Peraino.
sonorous subject, as opposed to

24 See Lindon Barrett’s differentia- is understood as closing the gap

tion of the “signing voice” from between signifier and signified”
the “singing voice” in African (43). For Silverman, the “sonic
American literature and culture, vraisemblable is sexually dif-
where the former is defined as ferentiated” (43) and effectively
the “presence of signification” and relegates the female voice to
speech, whereas the latter “dis- the outskirts of the screen. For
plays the meaninglessness, the another discussion of the gender-
apparently ‘unmeaning’ sound, ing of filmic voice, see Doane.
that enables the voice and the
idealized sign to occur” (84). 28 Compare with Douglas Kahn’s
observation that “a sound of
25 In Queer/Early/Modern, Frec- adequate intensity can be felt on
cero implicitly defines “queer and within the body as a whole,
spectrality” as a historical feel- thereby dislocating the frontal
ing that haunts us as a phonic and conceptual associations
disturbance, one that obscures of vision with an all-around
the ways in which certain queer corporeality and spatiality” (27).
bodies from the past come back
to us to be heard. Reflecting on 29 In another register, see Edel-
the case of Brandon Teena, the man’s notion of “(be)hindsight”
transgendered teen who was in the chapter “Seeing Things” in
brutally raped and murdered in Homeographesis.
Nebraska in 1993, Freccero asks
30 My thanks to Alix Mazuet for
“what we would see and hear
formulating the concept of the
were we to remain open to Bran-
interstice in the context of theo-
don Teena’s ghostly returns” (75).
rizations of sound and for sharing
Freccero cites the event of Mat-
her own forthcoming work on
thew Sheperd’s father speaking
sound and interstitiality.
to his son’s killers as an example
of a melancholy ventriloquism or 31 One might compare (as has often
haunting, a speaking on behalf of been done) Jarman’s work with
the dead that unsettles the spaces Isaac Julien’s. As José Esteban
of the living and nonliving. Muñoz has argued (drawing on
See the entire chapter, “Queer Sergei Eisenstein’s theorizations)
Spectrality.” in the context of Julien’s tour
de force Looking for Langston,
26 For a dense ethical argument
Julien’s reliance on cinematic
about voice’s “uniqueness,” see
montage achieves a “juxtaposing
Cavarero. Additionally, see Dolar.
of ‘attractions’ that are not just
27 In The Acoustic Mirror, Silverman ‘shots’ but fabrics not tradition-
describes film criticism’s long ally enfolded within the tapestry
history of fetishizing voice as the of montage cinema—materials
sign of “cinema’s veracity” while such as poems, experimental
at the same time consolidating fiction, still photographs, vin-
its “key role [. . .] in the larger tage newsreels, and blues songs.
project of disavowing cinema’s Montage cinema creates a certain
lack”: “More is at issue here than rhythm in its stark juxtaposi-
the recovery of the object. When tions of images that, on a level of
the voice is identified in this way traditional novelistic narrative
with presence, it is given the logic, clash and set each other
imaginary power to place not off” (60). Muñoz argues that the
only sounds but meaning in the visual “strategy of emotional
here and now. In other words, it combination that produces what

[Eisenstein] has called ‘emo- of a transhistorical queer, black

tional dynamization’ ” negotiates culture that locates itself in the
between the “ ‘ two poles’ of a ‘his- interstitial echoes of past, pres-
torical self’ of official, archival ent, and future (61). The call-
images [. . .] the other is the con- and-response model of historical
temporaneous self that produces thought also sheds light on the
images that represent an ‘under complexities that surround what
siege’ reality” finds reflection in “queer” was, is, and will be for
a “traditional African-American Blue since the film forcefully
oral trope known as ‘call-and- denies any “wholeness effect”
response,’ [whose] ‘antiphonal and moves between recalling and
back-and-forth pattern’ ” estab- dissolving queer memory.
lishes the historicizing dynamics
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Khalip, The Archeology of Sound

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jacques khalip

“The Archaeology of Sound”: Derek Jarman’s Blue

There is no absolute ear; the problem the sensory-sensual—of speech, of the

The most compelling thing about obituaries is how openly they

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The burning heap of a “poetry of fire” evokes the archaeology’s failure to

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listening in Blue occurs just on the cusp of a newly emergent archaeology

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shifts value away from the overdetermined cultural premiums associated

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To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the look-

Listening does not simply name a process of mystical exposure to alterity;

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Whiting Out Memory

“How are we perceived, if we are to be perceived at all? For the

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in Blue, which opens up a mode of perceiving that cannot give anything to

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Jarman dreamed of recording the actor Matt Dillon’s heartbeat

Jarman’s reverie evokes an “archaeology of sound” that fol-

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the for-itself” (13). Noise defines environmentally sensitive phenomena

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complicate audiovisuality turns on defining different modalities of rela-

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The historical happening of the sound event, its spatio-temporal

The violence associated with this false philosophy of copying is grimly

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anonymous singularity, his queerness, but in his carceral transparency as

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I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale—

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Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer

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Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the

There is a photo in the newspaper this morning of refugees leav-

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Sound essentially comes and expands, or is deferred and trans-

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becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches or contracts,

Recalling Jarman’s reflections on the “swell: dreams and recollections”

If we are sonic symptoms, I want to now consider the different

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reclaimed from its wounding, abusive history and become a conceptual

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irreducible to looking, a hearing irreducible to listening; it is the perversity

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object of cruel punishment and a matter carefully tolerated by virtue of its

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of enunciation—who is speaking, who is spoken to, what codes do they

It is enunciation that circumscribes the marginalized positions

The cultural work involved in finding or giving voice operates within a

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Drawing on ancient philosophical sources, Foucault writes that a compo-

You say to the boy open your eyes

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O Blue come forth

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interstitiality; sound is a dispossessing omnipresence that violates just as

Sound has no hidden face; it is all in front, in back, and outside

The anality of Nancy’s remarks on sound in this passage—“I am penetrated,