Parallax

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Introduction: Sounding / Thinking

James Lavender

To cite this article: James Lavender (2017) Introduction: Sounding / Thinking, Parallax, 23:3,
245-251, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2017.1339962

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Parallax, 2017, Vol. 23, No. 3, 245–251, Sounding/Thinking
https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339962

Introduction: Sounding / Thinking

James Lavender

In the introduction to his 2011 book Radio: Essays in Bad Reception, John
Mowitt remarks that the ‘object’ of a given discipline must be understood in
two senses: that to which the discipline refers, that ‘thing’ in the world that it
aims to study, on the one hand, and the ‘aim or purpose’ of the field in
question, that which the discipline ‘hopes to gain’ by turning to this object,
on the other.1 The disciplinary object thus resides in the ‘volatile zone of
indistinction’ where these two senses collide and resonate: this space between
the world and our knowledge of it, between what our studying is about and
what it is for, is where disciplinarity itself is at stake.2

We might ask then, on this basis: what is the object of sound studies? The
answer is, of course, contained within the question, at least as regards the
first sense: the object of sound studies is ‘sound itself’. But difficulties beset
us immediately: do we mean sound qua physical/material phenomenon, a
vibration passing through a given medium, conceived ontologically as an ele-
ment within a broader conception of nature or the real, as Steve Goodman
and Christoph Cox have argued?3 Or, do we rather hold that sound is only
conceivable in relation to the perception of such vibrations as sound, as
Jonathan Sterne and Seth Kim-Cohen have claimed, albeit for different rea-
sons, thereby making the auditory phenomenon, rather than ‘sound in
itself’, our object?4 And this question is only the beginning of our problems –
to take sound as object of and for perception, for instance, is to immediately
raise the question of the nature and capacity of sense perception, its scope
and its limits and its relationship to conceptual thought.

If we turn to the second sense, our problem is in some ways only exacerbated.
The immediate result is deceptively promising: though there is, as yet, no con-
sensus within sound studies with regard to what sound ‘is’, there is, within cer-
tain limits, a shared conception of what the function of a discipline called
sound studies would be. However, this shared conception in fact concerns an
incapacity that is placed at the heart of the discipline: insofar as this discipline
is taken to be a novel phenomenon (and certainly it has only attained a degree
of self-awareness and self-reference since the turn of the millennium), it rests
upon a shared sense that the study of sound is belated compared to, for
instance, studies of the visual arts or visual culture. What is more, this belated-
ness is often attributed to a fundamental mismatch between the nature of
sound qua object and the conditions of possibility for knowledge that are
rooted in the intellectual traditions of the West, and, according to some,

Ó 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group parallax

245
 coextensive with them. Thus, we find the exemplary remark by Aden Evens,
at the opening of his book Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience: ‘Music
resists theorization at every step. […] Western intellectual traditions show a
marked preference for vision as the figure of knowledge. We articulate more
effectively the fixed image than the dynamic sound.’5

In a certain sense, then, we have a clear object, in the sense of orientation or

goal, for sound studies: to make sound thinkable, at last. And yet, what is
seen here with such clarity presents us not with an obvious direction, but
rather with new, and even more extensive difficulties, redounding upon and
exacerbating the uncertainty we faced with the initial question.6 If our
object, in the second sense, is to make sound an object, in the first sense, of
and for thinking, we find that our uncertainty regarding what sound is to be
symptomatic of a broader incapacity that marks the practice of thinking as
such. If we take thought in its traditional sense – that is, the sense defined
by the tradition of Western thinking7 – then sound studies proclaims sound
itself unthinkable, and the ‘zone of indetermination’ between its two objects
becomes apparently self-annulling.

Yet appearances can be misleading. This issue of parallax is presented under

the title of ‘Sounding / Thinking’ insofar as it attempts to propose, not that the
difficulties faced by sound studies are either ephemeral, on the one hand, or
insurmountable, on the other, but rather that they are the motor of its contin-
ued vitality, and, ultimately, the source of its contemporary significance. Inso-
far as sound studies is a discipline whose object is theoretically indiscernible, it
effectively becomes an immanently meta-theoretical discipline – that is, a disci-
pline in which the status of theory itself is at stake. For sound to become think-
able, it is perhaps the case that thought must become something other than
what it has been; at a time when the question of what theory is and what it can
do has become of central importance, this ensures that sound studies not only
functions as a vital site for theoretical experimentation, a ‘test case’ to explore
the validity and fruitfulness of the latest developments, but, even more impor-
tantly, a point at which new innovations and orientations can be developed
under the constraint of the case itself. Ultimately, then, if sound studies has a
pressing contemporary import, it is to the degree that sound is not merely yet
another object for thought, taken in its limiting sense; rather, it is a demand
posed to thought by that which it has yet been unable to think.

The articles collected in this issue are offered, on this basis, as so many sketches
as to both the direction in which both sound studies, in particular, might move,
and the conditions under which it could do so, as well as, ultimately, demon-
strations of the contemporary significance of the attempt. In the remaining
part of this introduction, I will detail how the various articles gathered herein
pursue this aim, and how they intersect, in this way, with various contempora-
neous engagements with the question of theory as such, alluded to above.

The issue begins with three articles that explicitly connect sound studies’
concerns regarding the status of its object(s) to contemporaneous debates
Lavender
246
over the capacities of theory to think the real. This resurgence of materialist
and/or realist positions within cultural theory and philosophy has been pre-
sented as a counterpoint to, or sometimes rejection of, the approaches which
dominated the Anglophone institutionalization of theory over the preceding
decades, which are taken to be, in hindsight, focused upon language, signifi-
cation, and culture to a degree that was both explicitly anthropocentric and
implicitly idealist.8 Insofar as sound studies constitutes itself around an
uncertainty regarding the thinkability of its object, then, it is no surprise that
sound studies has found itself caught up in these debates. Yet, as asserted
previously, this does not simply place sound as an example upon which the
validity of these positions can be tested, but rather allows it to propose criti-
cal revisions and re-orientations of these broader debates.

In her article ‘A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption’, Eleni

Ikoniadou turns to an underexplored vein of theoretical engagement with
sound that exemplifies this latter claim. In her encounter with practices of
‘sonic fiction’ that are indissociably theoretical and musical, Ikoniadou draws
on a range of philosophical and sonic precursors in order to shift the terms
of the debate over the status of the sonic object at both the empirical and
transcendental level. At the same moment that sound ceases to be a case for
the application of theoretical judgments and begins to not only propose but
to actually produce its own conditions of thinkability, it, by extension, forces
us to reconfigure our sense of the ready distinction between what is and
what might be the case, between certainty and possibility, between fact and
fiction. This is a distinction already unsettled by many of the precursors of
the speculative turn, Nietzsche and Deleuze amongst them, but who are too
rarely read from this angle.

Annie Goh and Marie Thompson, in their respective articles, take this critical
engagement with the ‘speculative turn’ and its limitations further by investi-
gating its conditions of theoretical possibility – that is, what must be rejected
and overlooked in order to conceive of such a ‘turning’ in the first place. For
Thompson, sound studies’ appeal to a re-turn to ontology, exemplified by
the work of Christoph Cox, retains the ‘racialized erasures and exclusions
from the realm of ontology’ that vitiate this broader trend, with regard both
to its diagnosis of the problem and its proposed solution. That is, in basing
its claim to novelty and innovation upon an opposition between the suppos-
edly out-dated attention to culture and language and the correspondingly
novel possibilities of a renewed ontology, such an articulation of theory’s
future manages to, at one and the same moment, situate concerns with race
within the ambit of theoretical problems that are now superseded, and fail to
attend to the rich seam of ontological investigation that has been formulated
within critical engagements with race. Thus, in absolving itself of ‘cultural’
issues, theory reaffirms the invisibility of whiteness by incorporating it within
a presumed neutrality. In so doing, it limits its own capacity to engage with
the richness of ontological thinking across a range of traditions – a limitation
which is audible in and through the exemplary cases with which it furnishes
and demonstrates its own pertinence.
parallax
247
 Annie Goh proffers a related but distinct engagement with the occlusions of
the speculative turn by emphasizing its problematic retention of a distinction
between nature and culture, whatever its professed aims. For Goh, the way
in which sound studies has registered the impact of the speculative turn by
attempting to thematize the ‘nature’ of sound – or to position sound within a
broader naturalism – not only retains an implicit subject-object division,
against its own intentions, but in so doing perpetuates the fiction of the non-
situated observer that has been the object of extensive critique within femi-
nist science studies. As with Thompson, then, Goh seeks to reconnect con-
temporary debates within sound studies to a rich and overlooked tradition of
thinking, not in order to argue that we need to turn back from broader
ontological pursuits to a narrower cultural realm, but that this opposition
itself limits the scope and possibility of such enquiries. Drawing on the work
of Donna Haraway in particular, as well as recent work in the field of
archeoacoustics, Goh proposes the project of ‘sounding situated knowledges’
as an alternate route for registering the challenge proposed by sound to
thought in a manner that not only evades the re-inscription of the subject-
object dualism, but does so by reaffirming feminist challenges to the ‘view
from nowhere’ that the speculative turn has failed to incorporate.

From these more specific engagements with contemporary theoretical prob-

lems, as manifested within sound studies’ meta-theoretical concerns, the issue
turns to broader problems regarding sound’s amenability to theoretical artic-
ulation, adding new lines of engagement to the aforementioned claim, widely
articulated within sound studies, that sound in some sense resists thinking.
Rachel Devorah’s article suggests that sound’s persistent occlusion as both
object of thought and model for conceptual activity can be understood more
fully by aligning it with a coextensive and, she argues, structurally analogous
exclusion of the feminine (as normatively defined and constructed). Thus,
providing further confirmation for Goh and Thompson’s arguments, Devo-
rah suggests that any theoretical attempt to recuperate sonority must, at the
same moment, challenge and unsettle prevalent gendered assumptions about
what it means to theorize, to conceptualize, and fundamentally, to think – as
well as, by analogy, what it is to listen.

Michael Eng, for his part, turns to the very motive of theoretical activity itself
in order to expand and to clarify the sense in which such activity has sought
to exclude sonority. Eng, in an exploration of the work of Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, exposes how the ‘denigration of vision’ in twentieth-century
French thinking, to use Martin Jay’s phrase, may not be easily converted into
the positive impetus to think sound anew, and think it differently. Rather, in
the case of Lacoue-Labarthe, the possibility is raised that theory can only
define itself as theory by a constitutive exclusion of music. In other words, the
subject of theory is defined precisely by the pursuit and the inaccessibility of
sound as its object. This possibility cannot be circumvented, and must be
confronted by any attempt to make sound into an object of and for theory,
‘at last’.

Lavender
248
The final three articles all focus on distinct cases upon which sound studies
has insistently focused, returning, in this sense, to the concerns of the open-
ing article, but from a series of distinct and illuminating angles. Mickey Val-
lee turns to the field of voice studies, in order to propose that, beyond the
binary framing in which the voice either represents the subject’s interiority
or its estrangment, it can instead be figured as the site of what Deleuze and
Guattari term an ‘incorporeal transformation’, a claim that has significant
implications not only for the political function of sonic acts more broadly,
but for the political status of sound studies itself.

Finally, Charles Eppley and Iain Campbell both engage with a figure whose
work has been an inescapable reference point for defining the object of sound
studies – John Cage. For Eppley, the attention paid to Cage’s work within
sound studies can be deepened and extended by exploring more extensively
the musical genealogy of which he is a part, beyond the more limited readings
of his work that have been prevalent in an art historical context. Sound stud-
ies, in this sense, would serve an exemplary transdisciplinary function – allow-
ing the procedures and results of two different disciplines to resonate with
one another, and thereby open up new directions. In Campbell’s work, the
question of disciplinarity emerges through a Deleuzian emphasis on the
nature of philosophical practice – that is, what it is to do philosophy, as a con-
crete activity with an object of its own. If, following Deleuze, we claim that the
concept is the object of philosophy, then the question follows: What relation
does this object have to the object(s) of sound studies enumerated at the out-
set? In exploring Deleuze’s response to this question through an engagement
with Cage’s work, Campbell intervenes within what Brian Kane has described
as ‘the ontological turn’ within sound studies in order to pursue an alternate
possibility, providing a demonstration of what an alternative Deleuzian
approach to the sound/philosophy relation might be.9

To conclude, this issue offers a series of varied engagements with current

debates in sound studies, united by a sense that the significance of this disci-
pline lies precisely in the challenge it offers to existing accounts of what the-
ory is and does. It is a challenge that is found to occur not simply as a
practical result but as a condition of theorizing as such. If theory has still not
become adequate to thinking sonority, it is now more than ever clear that it
is not a question of turning our gaze upon yet another object of analysis, but
of raising the question of what relationship between thought and its object
would be adequate to sonority, or if, indeed, this relation itself may not be
part of the problem.

Notes institutions and practices. Further, in his

1
Mowitt, Radio, 1–2. It must be noted
here that, for Mowitt, the object, in the first
sense, is never a "mere" thing in the sense
of an inert physical presence, but also
implicates ’an unwieldy array of cultural
most recent book, Sounds: The Ambient
Humanities, Mowitt effectively provides his
own answers to the questions that I pose
on his behalf here – answers that bear pro-
ductive relation to some of the approaches
taken in this issue, not least Annie Goh’s

parallax
249

engagement with the figure of echo. In
emphasizing the ‘sound/sense snarl’, and
asserting that ‘[s]ounds, whether in the
world or on the page, are Text’, Mowitt
suggests that he, like a number of contribu-
tors herein, find the current emphasis on
an oppositional binary between textualism
and realism/materialism an unpalatable and
limiting forced choice. Mowitt, Sounds, 1.
2
Mowitt, Radio, 2.
3
See Goodman, Sonic Warfare, and Cox,
“Beyond Representation and Signification.”
Brian Kane aligns both Goodman and Cox
with the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies,
broadly reliant on a particular reading of
Deleuze in order to postulate a non-anthro-
pomorphic and non-essentialist conception
of nature as a material flux; see Kane,
“Sound Studies Without Auditory Culture.”
Iain Campbell, in the concluding article in
this issue, offers an alternate approach to
Deleuze’s work and its possible use in
thinking sonority, while Annie Goh and
Marie Thompson both directly challenge
Cox’s conception of a sonic naturalism that
is counterposed to narrowly socio-cultural
concerns.
4
Sterne’s approach, formulated most suc-
cinctly in the introduction to his influential
study The Audible Past, appeals to a func-
tional equivalence between sonority and
audition: the field of sound is delimited by
the possibility of audition, which separates
it from the broader field of vibratory phe-
nomena, many of which are not audible
and, therefore, non-sonic. What is more,
Sterne stresses that audition itself is a his-
torical phenomenon shaped by socio-cul-
tural and technical conditions (he invokes
Marx and Engels’ appeal for a ‘history of
the five senses’ on this point). Kim-Cohen,
for his part, offers a more straightforwardly
anti-realist argument regarding the impos-
sibility of speaking about that which
exceeds representation in his In the Blink of
an Ear, and for this reason is taken as
exemplary of the idealist premises of cul-
tural theory by Cox. The phrase ‘sound-in-
itself’, upon which this debate has turned,
is taken by Kim-Cohen from the work of
Douglas Kahn (see in particular Noise,
Water, Meat), who develops it to character-
ize certain tendencies in the work of John
Cage. Cage in fact uses the term himself in
an interview with Daniel Charles. Cage, For
the Birds, 78.
Lavender
250
5
Evens, Sound Ideas, ix. It is important to
note that there are two distinct but inevita-
bly related positions involved in this broad
claim regarding the primary role of vision
in the intellectual history of the West.
Firstly, it is the preference for vision as the
clearest or most direct source of sense-per-
ception, over and above the other senses.
Secondly, it is the use of visual tropes and
figures to define and determine thinking as
such. The former position is often explicitly
avowed, while the latter usually remains
implicit, insofar as it is often contrary to the
intended argument. The classic example
here is Plato. Though he refers to vision as
the ‘keenest’ sense in the Phaedrus, for
instance, Ideas are nevertheless presented
as exclusive objects of intellection to the
degree that they cannot be perceived by
the senses, and as such we must turn away
from the visible world in order to appre-
hend them (Plato, Phaedrus, 31). Yet Plato’s
language often deploys visual formulations
with regard to this apprehension – not least
the use of theoria, which has its root in
visual contemplation – which implicitly
import a visual model into an account of
thinking that is supposed to transcend sen-
sation. As Eric Havelock puts it, ‘one can
say that repeatedly, in striving for a lan-
guage which shall describe [a] new level of
mental activity which we style abstract,
[Plato] tends to relapse into metaphors of
vision’ (Havelock, Preface to Plato, 270). The
famous allegory of the cave draws the full
consequence of this ambiguity: sense-per-
ception and intellection are counterposed
as two distinct forms of vision. For a fuller
discussion in relation to ancient and medie-
val philosophy, with an interesting excursus
on the role of the cave metaphor in partic-
ular, see Blumenberg, “Light as a Meta-
phor for Truth.”
6
Language itself, of course, attests to both
the veracity of the diagnosis of ocular-
centrism, and the difficulty of extirpating
it. For an amusing demonstration of this
point, see the opening paragraph of Jay,
Downcast Eyes.
7
As the quotation from Evens above indi-
cates, that there is such a tradition, and
that this tradition privileges vision, is a
foundational premise within sound studies.
Its fundamental, most polemical formula-
tion can be found in Jacques Attali: ‘For
twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge
has tried to look upon the world. It has
failed to understand that the world is not
for the beholding. It is for hearing’ (Attali,
Noise, 3). I will neither challenge nor justify
such a claim here, given that my overall
aim is to explore sound studies’ self-under-
standing on this point, and so therefore
simply wish to register its prevalence.
8
The clearest articulation of this position
can be found in Bryant et al, “Towards a
Speculative Philosophy.” Cox also provides
a clear expression of this claim with specific
reference to sound studies in “Beyond Rep-
resentation and Signification.”
9
For my own tentative exploration of this
question in relation to Cage and Deleuze,
as well as the problems raised in this intro-
duction more generally, see Lavender,
“Objects, Orientations and Interferences:
On Deleuze and Sound Studies.”

Bibliography
Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
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Minnesota Press, 2005.
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Turn.” Sound Studies 1, 1 (2015): 2–21.
Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London and
New York: Continuum, 2009.
Lavender, James. “Objects, Orientations and Interferences: On Deleuze and Sound
Studies.” parallax 21, 4 (2015): 408–428.
Mowitt, John. Radio: Essays in Bad Reception. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2011.
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NC: Duke University Press.

James Lavender received his PhD from the School of Fine Art, History of
Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on
the relationship between sound and philosophy, with a particular emphasis
on the work of Gilles Deleuze and John Cage. He was previously co-editor of
parallax. Email: huuity@gmail.com

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