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     REVIEW ESSAY
   
Sound Theory at Grand Theory’s End

Review of Sound Objects. Edited by James A. Steintrager and Rey
    Chow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 312 pp. ISBN 9781478001454
    (paperback).

        

    Julie Beth Napolin
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 161–169, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2022 Julie Beth Napolin. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss18311.



In an issue of Feminist Media Histories dedicated to genealogies,
    Roshanak Kheshti begins the entry on “sound studies” with an aside, one
    with enormous weight for the humanities and social sciences today: “The
    interdisciplinary ‘studies’ that formed on the margins of the traditional
    disciplines toward the latter part of the twentieth century—American/ethnic
    studies, cultural studies, film studies, gender/women’s studies,
    performance studies—experienced feminist sound studies interventions.”
    
        [1]
    
    The second part of this point, that feminist sound studies first emerged as
    an intervention in other studies, is preceptive enough, but the first part
    is tenacious in its critical importance: “studies” first appeared in
    marginal relation to the disciplinary, which is afforded master status. But
    if the “studies” are subordinate, struggling for recognition and autonomy,
    then what is at stake in the appellation “theories”?



    Much ink has been poured over the question “what is sound studies,” and in
    their recent collected volume Sound Objects, James Steintrager and
    Rey Chow sidestep this question to arrive somewhere in the middle of this
    already well-established transdisciplinary conversation. “The collective
    thrust of this volume is to make a multifaceted case for thinking the topic
    of sound objects theoretically,” Steintrager and Chow write in the
    introduction (1). If the general object of sound studies is sound, then
    what kind of object is sound, particularly when the distinction between
    subject and object is one of the most entrenched distinctions in theory
    across the disciplines?



    This volume is not the first in which Steintrager and Chow appear as a duo,
    the collection being the third installment of an “ongoing project and
    intellectual collaboration” (vii) that began in 2011 with a special double
    issue of differences.
    
        [2]
    
    The project, they say in the introduction, was motivated by the spirit of
    curiosity and without yet knowing that “sound studies was rapidly
    congealing into a field—if, thankfully, not quite a discipline” (vii). This
    spirit—curiosity around the not-yet congealed—guides the volume, both as a
    whole and in its individual contributions. The volume does not attempt to
    discipline sound studies in the way that an anthology or handbook might,
    nor does it strive for a shared lexicon, but it does reinforce a famous
    place of beginning (I hesitate to say “foundation”): French composer Pierre
    Schaeffer’s term objet sonore, “usually translated into English as
    ‘sound object,’” French film theorist Michel Chion writes in the book’s
    opening chapter. It is a term that is “both one of the most frequently
    mentioned … and one of the most misunderstood” of Schaeffer’s concepts,
    Chion continues (23).



    I won’t attempt to define it here; that is the purpose of the volume. I
    will only say that, as the editors also point out, the question of the
    sound object comes to the fore with sound recording technology—i.e., the
    possibilities afforded by isolating and repeating sounds without visual
    reference, which Schaeffer called the “acousmatic.” These possibilities
    pressurize the imputed relationship between sound and source. The problem
    of (mis)understanding Schaeffer’s concept is not one of translation but
    application, particularly because Schaeffer’s research was meant to guide
    new compositional practices, and these applications—as the volume’s
    contributors, ranging from comparative literature to communications and to
    musicology, demonstrate—far exceed what Schaeffer imagined or intended. The
    misunderstanding, but also reimagining, was compounded when Schaeffer’s
    thought moved out of mid-century France into Anglophone contexts, but also
    into scholarly and artistic contexts almost totally unrelated to the
    compositional one in which Schaeffer found himself as an artist and
    researcher. With this, it is safe to say that Sound Objects is
    both about Schaeffer’s thought and the transdisciplinary reverberations of
    his theory, and not about him at all.



    Steintrager and Chow’s editorial beginning is a strategic one. Isolating
    Schaeffer’s concept as they do, they seem to suggest that to do sound
    theory today is in some way to come up against, even indirectly or without
    intending to, the sound object theorized by Schaeffer. And this place of
    the beginning of sound theory is slippery. It’s a point of contact—a
    relation, another term favored by many of the volume’s essays—and not a
    foundation. It is important to say here that much of the thrust of the
    volume comes out in its brilliant groupings where themes emerge slowly over
    the time of reading and as a series of echoes and relations. If the volume
    is careful never to state exactly what sound theory is, then the claim
    nevertheless manifests in its collective refusal to “arrest a paradox,”
    write contributors Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo (178). This refusal is
    one that many of the essays implicitly associate with the notion of sound
    as a peculiar kind of object. For example, Moreno and Steingo reserve a
    place in thought, in agreement with Chion, for “sound qua 
    contradiction” (179). This claim is echoed by Georgina Born, who finds in
    sound “nothing but mediations—indeed, of nonlinear, recursive mediations of
    mediations” (196), and also by Veit Erlmann when he suggests that “sound is
    not an object but an abject” (159).



    Returning to the misunderstood concept “sound object” introduces an
    ambiguity of aim that is never quite resolved in the volume, and with good
    reason. It would be incorrect to say that the book is dedicated to or is
    even a study of Schaeffer’s thought, but Steintrager and Chow nevertheless
    position him as what one of the book’s commentators, Dominic Pettman, calls
    a “pioneer” (and as Chion points out, he “invented” the book’s central
    term). Schaeffer appears in the book as a primary text excerpted in
    interview with Chion in the book’s opening section titled “Genealogies.”
Consider, in contrast, how excerpts from Schaeffer’s opus    Traité des objets musicaux (1966) are translated and reprinted in
    Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner’s seminal volume Audio Culture
    —first published in 2004 and expanded and updated in 2017—where Schaeffer
    appeared amongst a wide group of other writers working under a similarly
    hybrid identity of artist-writer-theorist.
    
        [3]
    
    Cox and Warner presented Schaeffer as one of many, some preceding and
    postdating him, and also as part of a longer story about modernism. One
    does not walk away from Audio Culture thinking that Schaeffer is
    the progenitor of sound studies, and not only because Cox and Warner
    assembled their volume well before sound studies was a term.
    
        [4]
    
    Instead, Schaeffer appears in Sound Objects in a hitherto
    difficult-to-access interview that took place much later in his career with
    Chion (who might be called one of his chief inheritors), and not in print
    but over the radio. The remarkable interview is here newly assessed and
    reframed by Chion, who now finds himself redefined on the other side of a
    long career as a formidable figure (forefather) in “sound theory.” In other
    words, the volume’s very organization seems to say that to study a
    beginning of sound theory, you have to study what Jacques Derrida would call
    its dissemination, making Schaeffer something of a trace. Theory, as
    intellectual history, is traditionally revered as a story between fathers
    and their sons; and if the paternal metaphor is irksomely present at the
    beginning of the volume, it quickly gets deconstructed in practice. The
    editors’ contrasting approach has something to do with the definition of
    sound theory as it mounts not directly but through its execution across the
    chapters.



    In the interview with Chion, translated by Steintrager (also one of Chion’s
    major translators in another intellectual history), Schaeffer reminds his
    audience of his first identity as a researcher in music theory, which was
    not yet the sound theory that, I suggest, Steintrager and Chow are arguing
    Schaeffer initiated not in himself but afterwards. What’s more, many of the
    chapters could be thought without him, making Schaeffer a strange kind of
    progenitor. The book ends with an essay by David Toop and thus where the
    book began, at the point of contact between sound theory and sound
    practice, Toop sharing this hybrid identity. At the same time, the name
    Schaeffer is nowhere to be found in Toop’s essay. In fact, he ends by
    declining to provide footnotes, wary of academizing his contribution, wary
    of the very status of sound theory. “I am loath to quote from academic
    works for fear this will be taken as supporting evidence for a proposition
    that is entirely personal and speculative,” Toop writes of his moving diary
    about drawing as sound (255). He instead hopes to reckon artistically
    (theoretically?) with what he calls, quoting Julia Kelly, “‘a temporal
    dynamic of the just-passed, of an ungraspable and unfixable lost moment’”
    (255).



    In these and other moments, I wondered if the book was not finding
    obliquely in sound what is left of theory after deconstruction. In the
    introduction, Steintrager and Chow remind readers of theory’s resistance to
    the philosophical currents of existentialism and, more importantly for this
    volume, the visualism of phenomenology. The linguistic turn of
    structuralism and poststructuralism—in many cases redeemed by this volume
    for sound and, again, not directly, but through its practices—was a move
    from image to text. In any case, sound is, Steintrager and Chow write,
    “forever playing the role of the disruptor” of the visual (4). It is
    against this backdrop that Steintrager and Chow redefine Schaeffer as a
    (sound) theorist, one who was paying attention to the subject/object
    distinction differently. The mid-century research of Schaeffer coincides
    geographically and chronologically with the emergence of what John Mowitt
    summarizes as the tradition of “Grand Theory” instantiated by Marx and
    Freud (211). At the same time, Steintrager and Chow show, Schaeffer’s work
    represented an investment in phenomenology while also revealing “deep
    structuralist affinities” (8). While Schaeffer began “to categorize sound
    objects in morphological and typological terms” (9), he could not help but
coincide, if implicitly, with Foucault’s poststructuralist project in    The Order of Things (Le mots et les choses, 1966),
    appearing the same year at Schaeffer’s Treatise on Musical Objects
    . In other words, Schaeffer is a theorist, part of the milieu of Foucault
    and Derrida, but those entanglements were never explicitly addressed or
    thought by his project. In this way, with the essays taken together, the
    volume picks up on Foucault’s genealogical impulse to historicize what he
    called the “unthought” structures of prevailing schemata (9)—in this case
    the sound object and its guises.



    Readers should not approach this volume hoping for an intellectual history.
    Instead, they will be prompted forward through the chapters by themes that,
    loosened from context, “resonate.”
    
        [5]
    
    Reading across the chapters, we do learn about how the sound object was
    constitutive of the subject for Freud in the form of what Jean Laplanche,
    adapting Jacques Lacan, calls the “enigmatic signifier” (Mowitt’s essay);
    about the thingliness of music and the instrument as reified objects
    (Jonathan Sterne’s and Toop’s essays); of the unstable status of evidence
    of the object outside of its perception (Steingo and Moreno’s essay); how
    the subject/object binary introduces a tension between the human/nonhuman
    (Born’s essay); of sound objects as they lay bare the myth of the unified
    subject or collective (Michael Bull’s essay). In each of these cases, the
    authors either invoke the older debate initiated by Schaeffer or move
    beyond it. Mowitt seems to summarize a collective view of the volume when
    he writes, “sound is precisely not what is retained. It is,
    instead, what leaks out, or ‘whistles’ between the limits of the Imaginary
    and the Symbolic as they frame the transcendental parameters of the
    speaking subject, of the human” (225). Here the sound object appears to be
    something like the force of theorization itself.



    But what exactly is the relationship between sound theory and Grand Theory?
    The answer is not so clear, and readers have to attend to the ways that
    individual authors handle their material. In some moments, the answer seems
    to be that “sound” has always been a preoccupation of this tradition
    (Steintrager returns to Adorno, Mowitt to Freud, Erlmann to Julia Kristeva,
    for example). This preoccupation only became evident later or, more
    precisely, recognized as “sound.” Mowitt, Bull, and Chow retrieve a series
    of sounds from the pages of Grand Theory, a premise that, had it been
    collectively urged for by the authors, could amount to a retelling
    of theory as proto-sound studies—but that would be to miss the point. After
    reading the volume, I nonetheless wondered to what extent theory has always
    been sound studies, particularly if we are to believe Martin Jay’s thesis
    in Downcast Eyes (1993) that the history of theory is also the
    history of the denigration of vision.
    
        [6]
    



    Steintrager and Chow are aware that “sound theory” is itself a visual
locution, theoria being a Greek word for viewing.    For More Than One Voice (2005), by Italian philosopher Adriana
    Cavarero, a figure already established in ancient philosophy and feminist
    theory, was one of the first books to take as its object sound and to
    reassess the history of Western philosophy and theoretical descendants on
its basis. Cavarero links theoria in Plato’s lexicon to    scientia as “seeing clearing after having sought to perceive.”
    
        [7]
    
    One might well ask what is possible for sound theory given theory’s origins
    in the discursive and linguistic turn? If theory is seeing clearly after
    having sought to perceive, a collection and division of objects into
    categories and classifications, then a theory based on sound would be based on the limits of theory itself, that is, hearing differently and
    ambiguously. At the very least, the question would have to remain open.
    Steintrager and Chow’s volume does not address the question of why sound
    studies now: the introduction abruptly transitions from the claim “theory
    itself must also proceed otherwise, with sound” (6), with a new section
    titled “Sound Objects: The Problematic,” that is, its summary of Schaeffer.
    But they do so without addressing the intellectual history in between. I
    asked myself, how did theory come to exhaust itself and find sound?



    This brings me to the volume’s importance in that it is the first to
    address (again, obliquely) the relationship between the linguistic turn and
    the sonic turn, and the tenuous relationship between sound studies’ debt to
    Grand Theory, particularly its white male inheritors, and the “other”
    studies. Though Fred Moten’s name nowhere appears in Sound Objects
    , it is worth recalling, for a consideration of the meaning and existence
    of sound theory, that his book—largely classified in African American
    studies, yet a major contribution to what is now sound studies—came out in
    the same year as Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003) (another
    now-canonical book in the field, though for very different reasons).
    
        [8]
    
    In a section titled “Resistance of the Object,” Moten begins his
    magisterial In the Break with a deconstruction of Saussure’s
    suppression of sound, the scream of Aunt Hester, as a suppression of
    Blackness. Marx is not able to think through—or listen to, these two being
    intertwined in sound theory—“the commodity who speaks,” an inability that
    Saussure inherits.
    
        [9]
    
    For Moten, at the point of Grand Theory’s exhaustion, a Black sound becomes
    audible and legible, the entanglements between race and theory being
    difficult to overestimate.



    Thus, I want to suggest that even though the majority of the contributors
    to Sound Objects are white men, the organization and framing of
    the book resists the patrilineal metaphor that shapes the tradition of
    Grand Theory because (and one senses Chow’s role here) something of it is
actually postcolonial in its force. The volume touches on the postcolonial    tout court in the middle section, titled “Acousmatic
    Complications,” where Chow and Pooja Rangan (also teacher and former
    student) appear side-by-side, making this section something like the heart
    of the book. For Chow, the acousmatic is compelling precisely to the extent
    that it supersedes the desire for the object (above all, the inner voice)
    to be “native” to its source. It turns out that when theory is thinking the
    subject and object relation, it is thinking acousmatically, Chow
    convincingly argues, making the sound object the transdisciplinary
    phenomenon par excellence. In Rangan’s brilliant essay, which offers a
    close reading of two films (Julia Dash’s Illusions, 1982, and
    Mounira Al Solh’s Paris Without a Sea, 2007), she is careful to
    make a claim, in conclusion, on behalf of a series of terms coined by the
    essay. Again, obliquely through a series of rhetorical moves, Rangan wants
    to lay claim to or make legible an alternative intellectual history of
    sound theory, one where Chow is to be found along with two contemporary
    female figures within African American studies and sound studies, Nina Sun
    Eidsheim and Jennifer Lynn Stoever. This grouping does not share the
    paternal metaphor of lineage traditionally attributed to the genealogy that
    also orients Rangan’s essay (in this case, Schaeffer, Chion, and Dolar).



    When Rangan ends her close reading of two films by women of color
    directors, involving lip sync and colonized, racialized bodies both
    on-screen and acousmatically off-screen, she insists more than once that
    what she is proffering, by way of case study, is a series of “concepts,”
    such as “ventriloqual listening” and “the skin of the voice.” I am not sure
    it is correct to say these terms are concepts. The phrases enumerated seem
    to be something else, and this something else is important for the meaning
    of sound theory. For example, Rangan credits Eidsheim for conceptualizing
    “acousmatic blackness.” But race is not a feature of Schaeffer’s thought
    (I’ve argued elsewhere that it is implied, though not directly stated, by
    Chion’s thinking of darkness).
    
        [10]
    
    To go further, the term, as Eidsheim uses it, is a citation and related to
    the academic writing of and Eidsheim’s conversations with sound artist
    Mendi Obadike.
    
        [11]
    
    Not having published this writing, Obadike instead
    elaborates—theorizes?—acousmatic blackness in her work as a sound artist in
    the duo Mendi + Keith Obadike.
    
        [12]
    
    This matrix raises questions of theory and practice in sound, of the
    slipperiness of citation, inclusion, and exclusion, once the patrilineal
    model of theory and discourse has left the scene. Just in the way it
    becomes entirely appropriate for other essays in Steintrager and Chow’s
    volume to theorize the sound object without ever citing Schaeffer, sound
    theory here surfaces as a break from theory’s abiding and paternal logic of
inheritance. In a stunning move, Rangan shows us how the    ideological inheritance of the theory of the sound object—whose
    beginning, Schaeffer posits, is the master listening sessions to Pythagoras
    behind a screen, notably a myth that Schaeffer’s inheritors go on to repeat
    
        [13]
    
    —is the continued idealization of a source in its absence.



    To be sure, there is a struggle going on in sound studies, as in any study,
    for conceptual status, a struggle to reach beyond the study and to take on
    the portability of the conceptual object. What the book leaves me with as a
    reader, as someone invested in theory’s remains, is the sense that, in
    sound, we approach the limits of what Grand Theory is supposed to be in its
    transmissibility. In the end, Schaeffer—the forefather and master—gets
    loosened from the object of his thought for the “sound object” to live a
    much more interesting and varied life.



    

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
Roshanak Kheshti, “Sound Studies,”            Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 2 (2018): 179. Thank you
            to Amy Cimini, who shared this essay with me and helped me grasp
            its importance.
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
            Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager, eds., “The Sense of Sound,”
special issue,            differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22,
            no. 2/3 (2011).
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            Audio Culture Revised Edition: Readings in Modern Music
            , ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017;
fist. publ. New York: Continuum, 2004). See also Pierre Schaeffer,            Treatise on Musical Objects: Essays Across Disciplines,
            trans. Christine North and John Dack (Oakland: University
of California Press, 2017); orig. ed.            Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines (Paris:
            Seuil, 1966).
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
            In 1995, I was a teaching assistant in the class that launched the
            book, and the class was titled “Contemporary Music and Musical
            Discourse,” signaling its distance in time from what we now call
            sound studies. Discourse, particularly in its Foucauldian valence,
            is a term that Steintrager and Chow claim as a central component of
            (sound) theory in the opening pages of their volume. Theory is a
            discourse whose sedimented enunciations must be historically and
            institutionally analyzed (1).
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
            Here I mean to invoke the comparative mode of study described in my
            
                The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form
            
            (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
            See Martin Jay,
            
                Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
                French Thought
            
            (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
            Adriana Cavarero,
            
                For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal
                Expression
            
            , trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
            2005), 36.
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
            See Fred Moten,
            
                In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
            
            (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and Jonathan
Sterne,            The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
            (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
            Moten, In the Break, 1–24.
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
            See Napolin, The Fact of Resonance, 20.
        

    

    
        
            
                [11]
            
            See Nina Sun Eidsheim,
            
                The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African
                American Music
            
            (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). See Mendi Obadike, “Low
            Fidelity: Stereotyped Blackness in the Field of Sound” (PhD diss.,
            Duke University, 2005). This dissertation is cited in relationship
to “acousmatic blackness” in Brian Kane,            Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New
            York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228–29n26.
        

    

    
        
            
                [12]
            
            For samples of projects, see the artists’ website “Mendi + Keith
            Obadike,” blacksoundart.com.
        

    

    
        
            
                [13]
            
            See Kane, Sound Unseen, for a convincing study of
            how Schaeffer mythologizes Pythagoras.
        

    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    




                

                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
