In this article, I consider how the revived interest in ontology within sonic theory connects to questions of race. Symptomatic of a broader ‘turn’ to ontology in critical thought, the (re)turn to ontology in sound studies is predicated on an ‘origin myth’ that disavows ‘old’ questions of culture, signi- fication, discourse and identity, and promotes ‘new’ questions of materiality, affectivity reality and being. This origin myth is re-articulated with the intro- duction of Christoph Cox’s materialist sonic philosophy, which hears the ‘richest’ sound art as giving voice to ‘the nature of the sonic’. Building on Nikki Sullivan’s notion of white optics, I suggest that Cox’s ontology is predi- cated upon a ‘modest’ white aurality – a racialized perceptual standpoint that is both situated and universalizing. Just as whiteness is not simply an individ- ual trait that is possessed, white aurality is not specific to or possessed by Cox; indeed, I suggest that in Cox’s work, white aurality is partly indebted to a particular engagement with John Cage: an engagement that amplifies an apparent distinction between the social and the ontological in Cage’s work, while muffling its political dimensions. The notion of white aurality is further exemplified through the comparison on two sound works: Lawrence English’s Airport Symphony (2007) which is heard to enact a move toward sonic generality; and Chino Amobi’s Airport Music for Black Folk (2016), which, apropos of Fred Moten’s notion of blackness as paraontological disruption, is heard as sounding the racialized violence of objecthood that often goes unheard by sonic philosophy’s white aurality.

/pdf/whiteness-and-the-ontological-turn-in-sound-studies-2dwp97l7om.pdf

Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies

This practice-based research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice. 

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres. Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall. 

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover. 

The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

The Feral, the Art Object and the Social

A brainchild of art critic Roger Marx, the redesign of French coinage at the end of the nineteenth century aimed to endow citizens with miniature artworks, opening the putatively transactional real...

Beautiful Money: Looking at La Semeuse in Fin-de-Siècle France

We do not know why this passage and corresponding symbols did not appear in the published book (Figure 1). Perhaps Twain or his editor deemed them redundant, as Twain slipped a similar witticism into his previous novel, The American Claimant (1892): “No weather will be found in this book. . . . Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather” (ix). Writing to his publisher in 1893, Twain promoted the newly completed Pudd’nhead Wilson in similar terms: “There ain’t any weather in, and there ain’t any scenery—the story is stripped for flight!” (Mark Twain’s Letters 355). Yet the proposed preface would have added a strange, new—and, as I will argue below, important—twist on Claimant’s earlier conceit. Twain instructed his printer to intersperse the symbols throughout and that it was “not necessary that they fit the weather of the

The Weather in Dawson’s Landing: Twain, Chesnutt, and the Climates of Racism

‘Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects’, posits Kathleen Stewart in her challenging experimental ethnography Ordinary affects (2007). Affects – public feelings that put intimate sentiments in broad circulation – are, for Stewart, the sinews of social life, an opaque circuit that simultaneously grounds experience in places and things and publicizes the personal. As such, affects are quintessentially archaeological in that they are both artefactual, embedded in what Bill Brown (2003) calls the ‘object matter’ of human relationships, and rooted in deep histories of material production and transformation. It is not surprising, then, that the intertwined problems of emotion and affect have re-emerged as potentially productive loci of research within archaeology itself. Indeed, as the discipline continues to extend its understanding of the social instrumentality of objects, landscapes and representations, it must, of necessity, come to terms with the affective efficacy of things, with the causes and consequences of our captivation.

Those obscure objects of desire

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguieres to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

/pdf/a-questionnaire-on-materialisms-1erqa6gco7.pdf

A Questionnaire on Materialisms

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A Questionnaire on Materialisms