Non-fundamental Tones, or, the Pharmakon of Silence

Abstract

The dialogic—a perpetual process of non-hierarchical interaction—is contrasted with both ethnomusicology’s and queerness’s monologic relationship to non-Western sites and people, a colonialist-masculinist stance founded on oppressive language and an implicit positing of the West’s knowledge production as singular, universal, and superior. Understanding communication as more than semiotic/linguistic, and the role of the sonic in relationality, it is argued that attention to the conceptual/material possibilities of echoes and reverberations—contrasting the monologic echo chamber with the expanse of ‘wild’ epistemic possibility—offers a way of conceiving of and working toward postdisciplinary, undisciplined explorations of sound, music, sex/uality, and the social. Silence is revealed as double-sided, a pharmokon—the poison of the silencing monologic, willingly withdrawn, becoming the remedy of self-silencing, a condition of pluriversality.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s explorations of language and/as speech are among the most widely known and productive emanating from the realm of twentieth-century literary studies. It is, however, somewhat of a misnomer to refer to Bakhtin as only or even primarily a literary theorist, as his work concerns not only language as that which is written (in the context of a work of ‘art’), but also that which is spoken, voiced, the means of communication with a co-present or imagined/intended interlocutor. Owing to his cognizance and highlighting of the relationship of language to sociocultural dynamics and structures, and the limitless manners and contexts in which such theoretical insights might be productively engaged, his remarkable analyses have arguably achieved a status of ‘unmarked’ (or ‘universally applicable’—one of few Russians to have been granted this dubious status in the Western academic humanities canon). Yet I imagine that most, if not all those familiar with Bakhtin’s work are aware that its genesis clearly cannot be separated from his lived experiences in the Soviet Union. Attempts at linguistic standardization—orthographic, semantic, inclusive of musical notation—were hallmarks of the Soviet mania for control,¹ a powerful constituent of the monologic context in which Bakhtin worked. Yet uniformity was not limited to the linguistic alone; Soviet Russia was also marked by a standardization of gender and sexuality that was no less restrictive,² and indeed ‘socialism in one gender’ was hardly the mark of the transcendence of a male/female binary, but rather the signalling of the imposition of male/masculine as the privileged and fetishized term—often in startlingly homoerotic manifestations.

Bakhtin’s work has little explicit engagement of gender, sex, or sexuality.³ Yet as I have shown, drawing on the work of scholars from numerous disciplines, writing from geocultural and temporal locations other than Bakhtin’s, gendered and sexed variables are consistently related to dynamics of erasure, power, and control—including a textual and linguistic control of discourse—in profound and problematic ways. The recent, relatively widespread comprehensibility, resonance, and adoption of the neologism ‘mansplaining’, far from signalling a trivialization of such dynamics, instead highlights the extent to which masculinity’s functioning through linguistic domination—what Dular analyses as a silencing equating to epistemic injustice (2021)—is enacted within and constituent of quotidian experience. Rather than an everyday occurrence one learns to live with as a petty nuisance, or ‘merely’ a type of ‘symbolic’ inequity, the masculine control of language, discourse, textual representation is one of the many circuits through which ‘epistemology creates ontological domains’ (Mignolo 2018a: 169), and which allows ontologies to be materialized as sites of (colonial, misogynistic, racist, homophobic) depredation. Reading Bakhtin’s analyses with the understanding of the fetishized masculinity underpinning the Soviet system—this engendering the gulag, man-made famine (the Holodomor [Голодомор]), and show trials with ultimate, preordained death sentences—reveals on a profoundly disturbing level the horrific outcomes of a monologic annihilation of the dialogic and heteroglossic. As with colonial encounters, at levels discursive, textual, and material: Silence(ing); and/then death.⁴

Ethnomusicology, via its textual artefacts and performances, invents (represents, describes) its colonies, speaking for the populations inhabiting them, explaining their thoughts, motivations, comprehensions, cosmologies (in a ‘scientific’ [= real man’s] language). That the more contemporary texts are frequently notable for their quotations from actual ‘natives’, that the word ‘informant’ has generally been replaced by terms such as ‘consultant’, does little to disguise the monologic characteristics of an enterprise devoted to the perpetual re-creation of the masculinity of its practitioners, and the obvious, stifling masculinity of the space, operating via the tools—the weapons—of this masculinity. And while queerness might be imagined as diametrically opposed to and tasked with the unmasking of just such practices and productions, it is clear—as evidenced by the somewhat effortless, comfortable, ‘interdisciplinary’ fit of ethno+queer—that the sites of overlap are not inconsequential, owing in part to the operation of both in relation to the same epistemic limitations and compulsions. An avoidance (due to a fear or suspicion) of the complexities of corporeal, sexual, sensual, material existence and experience that queerness shares with ethnomusicology might be explained as queer’s counteractions to and contestation of a history of reductive and pathologizing scientific apparatuses that erroneously and destructively posited biological explanations as paramount. Yet this one example of a distrust of ‘science’—a realm valorized, as I have noted, in relation to ethnomusicology’s bid for masculine validation—has not resulted in queerness’s unambiguous disavowal of the very apparatuses that govern an adherence to many of those things that science, in its Western, capitalist incarnation, deems valuable and essential. Queerness has willingly embraced, and is marked by, work most often disseminated as citation-based literature, based on a de facto canon of essential, foundational (Anglophone, Western) theory and theorists; the imperative for publication of one’s artefacts in or by (highly ranked) academic journals and presses (with ‘unbiased’ peer-review as the final arbiter of ‘quality’);⁵ the use of ‘objective’, ‘dispassionate’ language; the formulation of research agendas based on the guidelines of funding organizations, structured in a way to maximize ‘scalability’ (and with language that domesticates queer, rendering it less ‘confrontational’); among others. Numerous foundational aspects of the manner in which academic queerness operates (perhaps as distinct from what it ‘says’) appear indeed to be far from confrontational or subversive.

Could this same queerness, via occupying confrontations, and a furious highlighting of the unspeakable, transcend its current limitations, garnering greater self-reflexivity, with a resulting necessary and profound critique of its ‘exclusionary operations’? Can it destroy, slash and burn ‘ethno-’ (or ‘anthro-’) everything, generating fertile ground for future growth, itself emerging purified by the flames? Although anger and rage are often necessary motivations, bringing about profound changes, I am not sure that in this specific case—where the occupier itself requires occupation—that rage alone can promise enduring transformation. Surveying queer in the contemporary moment, it often appears that the ‘exclusions’ it has lamented and attempted to address are centred around the need for geographic/ethnic/national/racial ‘diversity’ (the parallels with ethnomusicology are apparent), and not the manners in which queer, as uninterrogated master signifier (exhibiting a ‘lack of reflection on the foundation of [its] own theorizing and on the role of the West/US America in shaping academic discourse’) (Kulpa, Mizielińska, and Stasińska 2012: 125) valorizes entire analytical registers which it unilaterally sets as foundational, dismissing (by ignoring, thus silencing) all others. Rather than a drive towards perpetual modification spurred by necessary, constant reminders of its own poststructuralist/postmodernist (= late capitalist, in Jameson’s 1991 analysis) genesis, and its status as a regionally, temporally, ideologically situated discourse, the ubiquitous, taken-for-granted cornerstones of much of its epistemology—the ‘fluidity’ of identity; the tyranny of norms; the commitment to subversion—are presented as metaphysical (and ethical) truths, and rarely as the situated, vested, interested, partial knowledges they represent. Is subversion, like negativity, the luxury of the Global North? Does wholesale fluidity erase, disenfranchise, mark as ‘backward’ those who consider their specific (sexual) subjectivity as constitutional of the self? Does the blanket vilification of ‘norms’ signal a failure to engage with epistemologies, discourses, and lived experiences (geographical, cultural, socioeconomic, corporeal, sexual, inter alia) that highlight customs and structures as necessary for physical, psychological, social wellbeing? Each base concept often appears as fundamentally transparent and universally intelligible, not only in queer theoretical texts, but perhaps most vividly in texts from myriad disciplines (like ethnomusicology—and musicology) where ‘X’ is (miraculously, alchemically) ‘queered’. And while there are indeed examples of scrutinization of these often-assumed universals,⁶ they often give the impression of existing as exceptions to the rules. It appears that after thirty-plus years, the ‘epistemological humility’ wished for by Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz (emphasis added; 2005: 15) has not obtained, and that the ‘subjectless/objectless critique’ vaunted by them (and again by Eng and Puar) (2020), while it has perhaps persuaded scholars to disassemble the barriers between domains once judged either ‘proper’ or ‘improper’ (in relation to discipline, geography, cultural practice, etc.), has not dislodged the one ‘subject’ most responsible for the monologue: the subject (the literal subject; the subject position) that is the source, the creator, the moderator, the convenor, the perpetuator of the always marked (cultural, theoretical) position of queer, the Western/Northern academic and their monologic, textual ‘splaining.

In hir⁷ call for an academic sphere free from colonial structures and practices, la paperson distinguishes a first, second, and third university: the first founded on accumulation via dispossession, ‘commissioned to actualize imperialist dreams of a settled world’ (2017: xiv–xv); the second, motivated by a ‘desire to humanize the world…a more genteel way to colonize a world that is so much more than human’, to ‘liberate’ through liberalism (xv); and the third, the ultimately decolonized, dismantled from within. The agent of this internal demolition is figured as manifesting in/as the ‘scyborg’:⁸ an Othered subject who, via the magnanimity of the first and/or second university (thus proving itself as ethical), becomes ‘the perfect masculine expression of education: an autonomous individual who will reproduce the logics of the university without being told’ (emphasis added: 56). However, released within the institutional machinery, the scyborg—with hir own agentic desires, and similar to the ‘queer desiring machines’ (55) suggested by Ferguson⁹ (which come into being via ‘associations of rubbings, frictions, and greasing of gears’ [emphasis added: 54])—becomes a reorganizer of that same machinery, ‘[subverting it]…against the master code of its makers…[rewiring it] to its own intentions’ (55). Looking past the references to an arguably sensual corporeality suggested by the author’s language, I imagine many ethnomusicologists or queer theorists would view this ‘decolonizing ghost in the colonizing machine’ (xxiv) as a reflection, an incarnation of their (idealized, desired, public) selves, committed as they are to ‘diversity’ and ‘representation’. Yet in the view of la paperson, such scholars, and others like them—‘the Marxist scholars, the ethnic studies formations, women’s studies, gender studies, American studies’—are deeply ensconced in the second university, in ‘the house of the hegemonic radical, the postcolonial ghetto neighbourhood within the university metropolis…mistaking its personalized pedagogy of self-actualization for decolonial transformation’ (emphasis added; 42).

It is impossible to ignore the fact that both ethnomusicological and queer scholarship are overwhelmingly marked by their adherence to the very methodologies, epistemologies, sensorial hierarchies, rhetorical strategies and fetishized artefacts that are the constructions of centuries of closed doors, dispossessions, and exploitations; the rules structuring the academic game as it is still played are those which have been reproduced over the course of centuries within locations that allowed for the existence of only one species of speaking subject, self-appointed/anointed as superior (the apotheosis of human-ness) by dint of the concomitance of his sex, gender, and ‘race’. Such rules, such practices are today still redolent of ‘the different aromas [of] five hundred years of Western epistemic racism’ (Mignolo 2018a: 161).¹⁰ This adherence is supported by what must certainly be an unacknowledged but profound/foundational belief in the West’s own self-construction as ‘the center of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge, and the source of “civilized” knowledge’ (Smith 1999: 63); it is a knowledge implicitly and explicitly presented as seminal, original, and generative (as opposed to derivative), each ‘new’ ‘discovery’ the first of its kind (denying and/or obscuring indigenous contributions or foundations), a knowledge that is universal yet owned, ‘as much [a commodity] of colonial exploitation as other natural resources’ (Smith: 59).¹¹ From this location, what masquerades as moves towards ‘equity’ more often appear to be motivated by an implicit desire to bring a constructed (backward) ‘them’ into ‘our’ (forward) intellectual/economic institutions, educating ‘them’ on the (‘unmarked’, ‘universal’) ‘proper’ rules of knowledge production (the methods, the canons, the very subjects), rather than moving towards an ‘us’ that can only obtain via the arduous, always ongoing work of dialogic, heteroglossic interaction and transformation. Although the Western academic subject has widened the visual scope to embrace new objects/subjects, the manner of speaking, writing, and representing—via the ‘proud but calcified language of the academy’ or ‘the commodity driven language of science’, both manifestations of oppressive language (Morrison 1993)—belies a loyalty to long-standing structures of inequity. The resulting stifling, monologic stream ‘does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge’.¹² And this limitation has had and continues to have profound consequences.¹³

Can oppressive monologia be combatted; is its undoing to be found in a facet of its sonorous (rather than linguistic) ontology, as it meets a fecundating yet dissipating force? ‘Each utterance’, according to Bakhtin, ‘is filled with echoes (otgolosokov/отголосоков) and reverberations (otzvukov/отзвуков) of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication’ (1975a/1986: 91).¹⁴ And although Bakhtin does not engage the two Russian terms I have highlighted in a sustained manner, using them more as metaphors than sites of or catalysts for analysis, I want to suggest that staying with these terms, embracing them as both metaphoric and as reminders of the audibility and materiality of speech—it’s vibrating sonicity—may lead to a way to conceptualize (and actualize [?]) the future of queer, a future without ethnomusicology, without monologic suzerainty, without interdisciplinarity, because without discipline; a future imagined through affect, as echo. In many ways, queerness does operate as echo in the current marketplace of ideas—indeed a marketplace, where prominence and preeminence is guaranteed by the capital-backed circuits of the West, granting greater access to the institutions, corporations, and media that advertise and disseminate. But the echoing is that of an echo-chamber into which queer has pulled all Others, its blaring loudspeakers violently drowning out all other concepts, subjects, interlocutors; sound ricochets and eradicates, overwhelms as (colonialist) weapon.¹⁵That queer has remained the (only) master signifier (‘Unmarked. Unmarked!’) for decades—the only term constructed, advertised as capable of the theoretical capacity to subsume all other ‘local examples’—and that from no other source outside the West has another concept emerged that might displace this dominance has, as I have noted, everything to do with ‘worth’ based on monetary considerations, not epistemological/theoretical/experiential perspicacity. Or equity.

There are, however, ways out of the chamber, other echoing possibilities for queer—possibilities engendered by the metaphoric, conceptual, and experiential meeting of the affective, the auditory, and the wild which exhibit strikingly similar characteristics. Understanding this last term in the sense engaged and explored by Halberstam (‘the absence of order, the entropic force of a chaos that constantly spins away from biopolitical attempts to manage life and bodies and desires’) (2020: 7), and recalling both affect’s confounding of linguistic and subjective control, as well as queerness’s professed resistance to its trajectories being ‘decided on in advance’ or ‘depended upon in the future’ (2005: 3), the possibilities of a dialogic resonance, a mutually constitutive echoing, confound the assault of the monologic. With further reference to Halberstam’s wildness—a site for the exploration of sex’s/sexuality’s multiplicity—the contrasting of the closet with the ferox (implying the ferocious, the feral, the free, and relating, in his text, to falconry) is notable; here, we ‘swap out the image of an interior room representing a secret self for a wide-open space across which an unknowable self is dispersed’ (10). While conceiving of a dispersal into the open, in general terms, might appear to highlight both queerness’s and ethnomusicology’s colonial ambitions, a return to the auditory offers different possibilities: the openness of an exterior, expansive, unconstrained space, in which sound cannot be fully controlled, cannot but dissipate and animate, must meet with other motile, vibrating (human/non-human) forces, contrasts starkly with the echo chamber, the indoor, finite space that contains, restrains, and deadens vibrational potentials. Released into the wild of epistemological possibility, the disciplinary instruments of control (assuring a visual/textual monologic centrality) withdrawn, queerness might echo in any number of ways that cannot (must not) be counted upon in advance: This truly provincial, once-all-encompassing concept will be but one voice in what must become a pluriversal soundscape, no longer the lone, droning, deafening fundamental tone.¹⁶ Neimanis highlights the importance of our corporeal understanding and experience (an embodied concept) of ourselves as open, porous, liquid—bodies of water—that connect us to other porous, liquid materialities, human and non-human, flowing and becoming together (2017). In much the same way, feeling/thinking the self as a mutually constituting/constitutive component of a (literally) vibrating, sonorous/silent expanse that encompasses the immediate and the horizonal; abjuring claims to self-sufficiency, finitude, essence, and primacy; opening to the multimodal comprehending/experiencing of complex sonic relationships that reveal the limits and insufficiencies of a narrow (disembodied, ideal) understanding of language begetting disembodied, monologic, colonizing concepts disseminated via an artificial, stifling system of discipline/disciplines; allowing for the possibility that a textual obliteration of the materialities, sensualities, and aesthetics of sex, body, sound, music is not the apogee of ‘human’ intellectual possibility, but yet another effect of disciplining power/knowledge; all are vital contributions to movement towards the fecundity of multiplicity. If, as Sontag notes in her contemplations of silence, language might, in specific contexts, be ‘experienced not merely as something shared but as something corrupted, weighed down by historical accumulation’ (1967/1969: 15), the willingness to explore sonic interaction exceeding words or symbolic/semiotic systems may do much to cleanse such accumulated corruptions.¹⁷

Understanding the pluriversal as the outcome of the ‘process of knowledge production…[that] does not abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity, but which embraces it via a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic positions’ (Mbembe 2016: 37) allows for the imagining of a differently sounding queerness irrevocably changed by its new status as only one of many.¹⁸ Queerness must relinquish both its status and intentions (its role as central, omniscient administrator), must accept that the decolonial project—which it has been complicit in necessitating—cannot operate as a ‘master plan led by a privileged elite, avant-garde intellectuals, or ego-identity politics (Mignolo 2018b: 125). The peddlers of queerness must understand relations, bodies, epistemologies, always in states of becoming, and never reducible to either materiality or cognition; must exchange their product’s de facto current status as an ontological certainty marked by epistemological and economic arrogance (a transmutation via a quiescence with administration and discipline) for that which can only exist in non-hierarchical relation.¹⁹ Queer may reverberate rather than incorporate, animate, be re-animated through the various resonances; it may remain, faintly, as a sonic trace, a cautionary reminder of the monologic destruction in what can become a colonial past (that must not be repeated); or it may dissipate fully into silence, irrelevant, unable to maintain any vibrating, animating energy once the cheat of capital, wedded to language, is withdrawn.

Queerness is not willed into silence by its erstwhile monologic practitioners (wishing to lead the path to progress), but willingly accepts the silencing; not as a quasi-spiritual path to the practitioner’s own enlightenment, or as a means of drawing, paradoxically, more attention to itself as silence in an increasingly cacophonous world—placing itself, its agents, again, as the hub of all possible spokes—but from a commitment to the necessarily ethical foundations of intersubjective relation, self to others.²⁰ The purveyors of hegemonic, academic queerness must commit to this ‘deep selfsilencing’, moreover, as the ‘condition for listening to the voice of the inaudible’ a silence that is, in fact, a ‘sound not audible or intelligible to extractivist ears’, those ears accustomed not to ‘deep listening’ but ‘active listening’ as the means towards continued extraction (emphasis added; Sousa Santos 2018: 177). Understanding, additionally, that silence has often been a weapon of the subaltern—whose meanings are ‘traceable only in shared sequences and rhythms’ (via varied corporeal senses) (178), this dialogic, pluriversal intercourse reveals even more about the complexity of silence itself: Silence is revealed as a pharmakon, sometimes poison, sometimes remedy.²¹ Jones suggests that a ‘queer utopia’, rather than marked by a push towards perfection, is simply a space in which oppressed subjects can ‘breathe’ (2013: 3). We all might dream of a post-queer/post-ethnomusicological, pluriversal utopia, one in which silenced voices can vibrate on multiple frequencies; like music unleashed from the constraints of arid, textual representation, such voices can sound, reverberate in what continually strives to become a necessarily open expanse, one previously stuffed, congested, deadened with and by but one homogeneous, inert, stolid mass.

I am aware that by suggesting a nullification of queer, my arguments might (ironically) seem to align with those calling for an embrace of ‘queer negativity’. And I understand the critiques of such theories—often emanating from outside the West—that highlight the inherent ethnocentricities of a turn to ‘no future’ (Edelman 2004) as ‘[having] some raison d’etre only in cultures that have “future”, are “future-oriented”, and in the privileged position of being able to “waste” it’ (Mizielińska and Kulpa 2011: 18). However, I am not advocating a universal embrace of the ‘negative’ as global panacea, but a local remedy from and against its own provincial ideology that, via its silencing, opens a fertile space for a proliferation of new voices, ‘brought to life through cultural permeability, exchange, influence, or simple coexistence’ (Kulpa, Mizielińska, and Stasińska 2012: 116).²² Likewise, I am cognizant of the similarities between the previously noted ‘wild’ and the queer; Halberstam himself notes that while the terms are not synonymous, ‘wildness takes the anti-identitarian refusal embedded in queer theory and connects it to other sites of productive confusion, taxonomic, limits, and boundary collapse’ (2020: 30). As such, it is arguable that a utilization of ‘wild’ indicates that queerness has not been displaced, but remains central as yet another ‘unmarked’ container (queerness de-centred, but now located within a by-any-other-name queer space). But as with ‘negativity’, I am not arguing for ‘wild’ (or any other concept) to ascend to primary status, from the Anglosphere to ‘everywhere else’. Rather, I offer these concepts as possibilities, options, a way for a self-constructed ‘us’ to think about our/themselves, our/their positions, our/their history; they animate my Eurocentric critique of Eurocentricity, of Western disciplinarity, with the goal of ultimately decentring that dangerous ‘we’/‘us’ and, ultimately, any exploitive concept or construct of a ‘we’/‘us’ that owes its existence to that which is constructed as an always-inferior, perpetually catching-up ‘them’. Finally, it is essential to note that I do not envision dialogic, pluriversal intercourse as occurring and reverberating among subjects and groups marked by any sort of essential or irreducible identity (e.g., geographically defined: the West/the rest; the Global South; Eastern Europe; etc.) Rather, although geographic location has certainly been connected to questions of inequity (epistemological; material), and understanding the ideologies and mechanisms through which such inequities have been allowed to obtain is an important step in combatting their continued perpetuation, a true pluriversal space will only exist when variables such as ethnicity or nationality or any sort of geo-sociocultural location (to say nothing of sex, sexuality, class, age, corporeal abilities…) does not mark its bearer as hierarchically defined. Pluriversality will not allow for the distinction enunciator vs. enunciated, for the classification of a work of scholarship such as Ntarangwi’s (2010)—an ethnography of U.S.-based anthropology by a Kenyan scholar—as reversing the usual relationships. In a pluriversal space of meeting, marked by resonance, reverberation, echoing, subjects and subject positions are effectuated through interaction as much as through unique, situated location, histories, experiences, and knowledges.

An awareness of the productiveness of reverberation, the makings of echoes may draw us not only to sound in general, but to music, rich with vibrations that incite and excite a desiring exploration. The theoretical, symbolic, and experiential understanding of phenomena such as overtones or sympathetic resonance, essential components of music’s sonicity, expand to broader (geographical; temporal; philosophical; material) concepts—from the Music of the Spheres²³ to Confucian ganying—and then back to the most microscopic; for example, the mirror neuron. Music’s very ontology, moreover, gives the lie to the various dualisms that have served as building blocks for any number of exploitative, epistemologically backed structures and actions; with music, it is an utter distortion to posit grouped pairs of supposedly discrete, opposing, foundational terms such as corporeal vs. ideal/cognitive; material vs. intangible/ephemeral; emotional/affective vs. rational; functional vs. aesthetic; or countless others. The sounding musical—distinct from the disciplined musical, in which dualisms such as masculine/feminine indeed still obtain—serves as an extraordinary tool in dethroning the default to the (god trick; surveilling; rational-scientific) visual in Western theory, resulting in alternative, productive possibilities for conceiving of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (e.g., a polyphonic self, in which the multifarious components that contribute to the making of that self, echo, ping, vibrate, transmute with one another).²⁴ Even the concept of a uniform, universal temporality—so central to the colonialist enterprise, and rearing its hideous head in both ethnomusicology and queerness, as I have shown—cannot be sustained in relation to the experience and the theoretical affordances offered by music. Rao’s exploration of the postcolonial South, marked by attention to the ‘heterotemporality of the global queer political present’, with time itself approached as ‘temporal states [past, present, and future] that inflect and infect one another, rather than following in chronological succession’ (2020: 21), has a resonance with Capitain’s previously noted call for ‘heterophonic reading’ (2022) and is, moreover, an example of the ways in which the sexual-ideological echoes the sonic-affective.²⁵ Indeed, they arguably cannot be thought apart from one another, cannot in fact be thought of as parts; they are, rather, mutually resonating nodes that affect and are affected, their (temporally evanescent) ontologies brought about in the moments of mutual fertilization and frisson, the ontologies and relationships both productive of new ontologies and relationships (temporally, spatially) that cannot be known, controlled, decided upon in advance. Instead of two exploitive and disciplined structures coming together ‘interdisciplinarily’, perpetuating exploitations, the ever-changing study of the ever-changing, mutually inflecting—theoretically, practically; to expand intellectual horizons, to foster the ability of all people to thrive on numerous levels—is the space in which epistemological hubris can have no place, where methodological dogmatism and ethnocentric hierarchicalization can find no purpose or sustenance, can only wither away.

The fostering space in which the multidimensional interaction of sexual/sensual/sensate subjectivity with sound/music—engaging registers experiential, discursive, sensuous, aesthetic, ideological, erotic, social, (inter)subjective, as well as those not yet divined, conceived, or sensed—might counteract the types of erasures and co-optation seen as, in part, the unavoidable outcome of our current university system in which knowledge as commodity is parcelled and segregated, the better to be managed and administered. Such a potential space is not, of course, a wholly new conception—Moran notes that ‘the critique of the academic disciplines as limited and confining is as long-standing as the disciplines themselves’ (2002: 14)—but one with a legacy of starts and stops. Menand (2001), for example, in line with Ferguson’s (2012) exploration of interdisciplinarity, finds the roots of antidisciplinary sentiment and action in the United States as inextricably linked to the changing demographics of the postwar (and post-Cold War) University—combating the exclusions and actions of traditional disciplinary structure, and opening up both ‘studies’ (women’s, Latin, Black, LGBT+, e.g.) and centres devoted to various previously obliterated groups. He also highlights, however, the extent to which such interventions eventually became ensconced within and wedded to extant disciplinary locations, adding that ‘merely adding new areas of study’ (such as ethnoqueer?) ‘doesn’t threaten the integrity of a discipline’ (2001: 54).

What is needed, according to Menand, is a postdisiplinary²⁶ stance, one that is animated by an ‘imaginative and dynamic eclecticism’ that stands in direct opposition to, for example, the conferral of discipline-bound doctoral degrees as ‘a fetish of academic culture’ (59). The postdisciplinary ‘allows ideas and connections to be followed to their logical conclusions, not to some contrived preordained end point determined by artificial disciplinary structures’ or ‘disciplinary policing’ (Coles, Hall, and Duval 2009: 87). Additionally, Ings highlights how postdisciplinarity is essentially radical, drawing on the etymological sense of this word—radical—‘proceeding from a root’ (2020). This root, he explains, is a ‘need to know’, a need that brings the seeker into contact with that which is unfamiliar, and which functions as ‘a form of institutional disobedience not only because it refuses to acknowledge foundational structures of division and demarcation but, more importantly, because it rethinks how we might “know” things’ (52). Recalling, to my mind, Tomkins’s work on affect theory, with interest-excitement posited as a central (yet most theoretically neglected) primary positive affect pair—as that which moves the subject-organism to interact with the world, to explore, ‘to “interest” the human being in what is necessary and in what is possible for him [sic] to be interested in’ (1962/2008: 188)—Ings’s highlighting of the radical needing to know (a desire, as I see it, not predicated on lack) suggests an affective valance to the postdisciplinary.²⁷ This affective motivation might or must, I believe, additionally allow for illogical points that refute ‘endings’ at all, repudiating a hollow, narrow scientism more completely than does any sort of ‘interdisciplinarity’ that capitulates to the extant epistemological and methodological boundaries of enterprises that have, at their heart, a perpetuation of inequity. To be moved to know, and to interrogate the very ontology of knowing—spurred on by the reverberations among the sonic, the sexual, the social, the intersubjective—is to embrace a relationship to inquiry that proceeds from a courage, an audacity to venture into territories that offer the exhilarating potentials of the unidentified, the strange, the unimaginable. The courage, the audacity to repudiate a system of masculinity that is, despite its self-construction, not courageous at all, but terrified of the Other-than-itself.

A ‘post-’, of course, may be questionable insofar as it suggests a unidirectional, evolutionary/melioristic movement. But there appears to be agreement that the various modifying prefixes do not, in fact, translate with uniformity of meaning across wide geographic, cultural, or academic terrains; what is a ‘post-’ in one context may be termed an ‘anti-’ in another. I obviously find the term ‘interdisciplinary’ particularly problematic and odious; it reeks of administrators, controlled by a belief that the value of knowledge is equal to its ability to create financial profit, and clinging frantically to disciplinary structure out of a self-preserving avarice and utter fear of the unknown. But what is most important, in my estimation, is indeed a commitment to explorations—whether post-, anti-, non-, trans-, or other—that have salubrious social, ethical, and epistemological aims and consequences, that resist a stultifying and limiting disciplining, that remain elastic and open (to sounding/vibrational potentials) in their needing to know.²⁸ And understanding the various elisions that continue to shape the academic landscapes I have been discussing, I believe it is vitally important at this moment in time to foster work that embraces (as method; as process-object of exploration) what might be broadly understood as the creative-expressive, that which is marked in significant ways by affective, sensual-somatic, and aesthetic variables and/as a refusal of the dictates of a bland scientism that is anything but ‘objective’.²⁹

I have attempted throughout the chapters of this book, as well as in much of my past writing, to highlight the significance of the affective and the corporeal in relation to the countless registers of lived experience, as well as the dangers of occluding such variables in scholarly work; an unquestioning obeisance to what is supposedly an unimpeachable method of ‘fact-based’ inquiry appears to have rendered some unwilling to consider the posits of countless scholars, artists, and practitioners who have found inextricable links among the corporeal and the ideal, the ‘emotional’ and the ‘rational’, and the indispensable nature of affect in driving towards a ‘need to know’, academic or otherwise. Now, however, I would like now to foreground the importance of aesthetics, wedded to both of the aforementioned registers, and often summoning attention to the ethical. Taken in its broadest sense as referring to the study of the subject’s multivalent sensory perception of and relation to environment (and not, as is sometimes inferred, as marking a field of inquiry positing universal, ideal, and/or metaphysical theories, these in relation to ‘the arts’ and/or an antiquated, simplistic conception of ‘beauty’),³⁰ a focus on aesthetic registers offers numerous possibilities for approaching the complexity of experience that, like sound/music/sexuality, can never be reduced to either/or propositions.

In addition to those authors whose work I have previously noted (Panagia 2009; Rancière 2000/2004; Lefebvre 1992/2004; Florensky 1914/2004) (see Chap. 6),³¹ there are numerous others whose findings demonstrate the rich possibilities of attention to aesthetics and corporeal aesthesis. Highlighting both sense and sociality, I first draw attention to Sousa Santos’s observation that the entire sensorium is implicated in relationships between the extractivist and the subaltern subject—the former may not hear the latter, or perhaps the latter ‘[communicates] by other senses, which in turn may provide significant reinterpretations’ (2018: 177)—as a necessary reminder of the embodied nature of all sociocultural, ideological, political relationships.³² And the aesthetic has an important role to play in exploring just such corporeal-social-relational dynamics. Relationality is a central concern in the phenomenological theories of Dufrenne (1953/1973), which highlight the extent to which affective, aesthetic experience can be understood as breaking down supposed self/other divisions.³³ Likewise, as Beltrán’s (2014) and Chuh’s (2019) work illustrate, in line with both of the foregoing scholars, aesthetics may be enlisted in understanding sociocultural dynamics that reveal a complexity refusing binary simplification. Beltrán, with attention to the relationship between ‘racial presence’ and ‘racial justice’—one marked by paradox—argues that an engagement with aesthetics affords theorists the possibility of ‘[attending] to the distinction between values and feelings’ in order to become aware of ‘the dissonance between our sensory pleasures and our ethical values’ (140), thus highlighting the importance of making informed and intuitive judgments in situations marked by indeterminacy. And Chuh, defining the aesthetic as ‘the relationships among the senses and the processes and structures of value by which certain sensibilities become common sense and others are disavowed’ [xii]’, draws attention to its ‘double-voiced’ quality, exploring how it may either support and subtend the status quo or, alternatively, those that dissent from a disempowering, normalizing ‘sensus communis’. As her work makes clear, attention to aesthetics contributes to our understanding not of discrete ‘aesthetic objects’ qua artefacts, but of the possiblities for ‘unconcealing’ subjugated voices and knowledges that can interrupt the monologue of the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that has ‘come to have the effect of truth through the powerful machine of modernity’ (5). Arguing for an ‘illiberal humanities’ as a necessary counter to the current ‘liberal humanities’ constellations that ‘racialize and hierarchize people’ (24), Chuh’s aesthetic analyses of illiberal knowledges contribute to the work of ‘mis-taking’ the university ‘as a means of unsettling the very grounds upon which it stands’ (121).

The influence of Wynter on Chuh’s analyses is expressly noted (by her) and abundantly clear; Chuh’s ‘illiberal humanities’, for example, is alternately termed a ‘humanities after Man’, referencing Wynter’s anti-humanist, anti-exclusionary, decolonial arguments in her 2003 article (subtitled, in part, ‘Towards the Human, After Man’). And although Chuh does not explicitly engage Wynter’s discussion of ‘deciphering practice’ (1992) in the text cited here, it is just such a practice that can illuminate what may be accomplished by prying off the various diversionary veneers covering such prominent examples of the ‘liberal’ as ethnomusicology and queerness. Reading these disciplinarily defined humanities texts themselves, the tens of hundreds of thousands taken individually and collectively, with attention to aesthetic registers—how they are constructed to work upon interrelated ethical and affective registers, on values and feelings, this often effectuated according to what is highlighted and what is eradicated—the illocutionary force must be understood as having explicit (professed, conscious) and implicit (unacknowledged/unacknowledgeable, subconscious; beyond the plans or wishes of any one writing/reading subject) aims. While the former conforms to the dictates of these ‘liberal humanities’ (contributing new understandings of culture-process-object X; giving representational space to same, thus supporting ‘diversity’), it is the latter, the doing rather than the meaning, that allows for the perpetual replication of the alienating, exploitive epistemic system, immune to scrutiny, the highly polished veneers reflecting the idealized self back at the reader.

And it is the armature of masculinity that supports the doing, the coding of this one version of academic discourse (an economic discourse, after all) as superior, represented as the knowledge of (but not understood as the very creator of) Man. Here, the bases for the elisions and exclusions, all gendered, all mapped upon a masculine:feminine :: superior:inferior binary, become clear: body inferior to mind; affect/emotion inferior to rationality; auditory inferior to visual/textual. The individual manifestations—the palpable anti-eroticism; the homophobic invisibilization; the racism masked by ‘diverse representations’; the continuing primary reliance upon written texts, in inviolable formats, despite a cultural-technological landscape that facilitates the ability to communicate with sound and motion, colour and timbre, differences in velocity and tempo; the Eurocentric denigration of orality as inferior to the (visual/material) artefacts of textuality;³⁴ the maintenance of raced/racist/gendered/misogynist/homophobic geoculturally based roles of speaking subject/represented object; and numerous others—expose what dares represent itself as a universally valid, preeminent system of knowledge production as, in fact, a system of exploitation, bolstered by a ‘policing language of mastery [that] cannot, [does] not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas’ (Morrison 1993). The limiting structure of the (meta)episteme prohibits any admission or reciprocity that might change process or product, both of which are essential to its (covert) replication—a replication that is all but insured so long as ‘meaning’ is sought, in line with current academic demands, in the ‘what ‘rather than the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of production.

Akin in some aspects to Bakhtin’s conception of truth not as an essence, but as a perpetual process of dialogic interaction,³⁵ Chuh argues that ‘an illiberal university must remain a question, a marker of a striving for the realization of a radically different world’ (121). And my sonically motivated thought experiments are marked by just such indeterminateness, as questioning rather than answering. If they appear as wistful/wishful thinking, formless, impractical fantasies lacking clearly defined goals, plans, instructions—this is obviously the point. Only unfettered imagination, a willingness to meet and conceive of phenomena in novel, even impertinent ways, a commitment to the process (rather than the artefacts) of mutually constituted knowledges (the outcome of a ‘distributed creativity’)³⁶ can foil the neoliberal-colonial disciplinary machine, the dismantling of which is dependent not upon ‘alternatives’, but ‘an alternative thinking of alternatives’ (2020: 118). What passes as the pinnacle of research emanates now from a soul-sucking apparatus that operates exclusively with an eye to profitability, implementability, patentability, assessability, scalability; that values only standardization and replication; that speaks the administrative language devoid of risk, inspiration, and movement, a language of stasis and entrenchment.³⁷ One wonders how, in fact, in such an overarching structure—especially considering the exploitation and precariousness of the labour within it³⁸—the study of music or sexuality (or anything else) could resist disciplining, ultimately becoming mere one-dimensional, grotesque caricatures of the experiential and conceptual complexity they now wrongly profess to elucidate (as with, e.g., the stultifying transmutation of the multimodal richness of musical experience into a ‘figure of sound’) (Eidsheim 2015).³⁹ It is the fallow space in which financial and institutional benevolence is bestowed upon those who have learned that the most valuable knowledge is not any sort of ‘content’ ‘within’ a ‘discipline’ (or, better still, ‘interdisciplinary content’), but a crass, rote-like learning of and adherence to the language and machinations of the system, in order to utilize it for personal gain (oblivious to the fact that, rather than having mastered the system, they are mastered by it, transformed from seekers and makers to babbitts).⁴⁰ By setting up a cacophony of ‘disciplinary’ voices—each driven by a panicked desire to obtain a piece of the ever-shrinking pie, competing (as opposed to cooperating) with all others—the university, in fact, silences the possibility of true resonance. If Foucault (1975/1995) is correct, if a ubiquitous power/knowledge is at the root of such disciplining dynamics, it is imperative to remember that neither half of the dyad is universal, metaphysical; the dyad is marked by specific types of power engendered by/engendering specific types of knowledge, emanating from, and creating specific sociocultural spaces. It is a type of knowledge marked as much by the mechanisms of its dissemination, by its gendered/raced/classed lineage, as the contents and posits with which it manifests in any one era. And this specificity must be undone by refusing both mechanisms and posits, by vibrating on new frequencies, refusing ancillary, facilitating relations to the droning (disciplining) fundamental tones.

The modern, Western university’s ultimate goal of financial enrichment for a few (institutions, and privileged elite within those institutions, whose largesse ‘trickles down’ just enough to assure the allegiance of the many) is ultimately accomplished via a reliance upon the structures and perpetual instantiations of masculinity,⁴¹ these inextricably linked to, and symbiotically working with and through those of the racist, the colonialist, the misogynist, the homophobic. Mignolo notes the necessity of epistemic, emotional, and aesthetic decolonizing ‘delinking’ from such structures (used to structure knowledge) in order to create ‘institutional organizations that are at the service of life and do not—as in the current state of affairs—put people at the service of institutions’ (2018b: 126). In addition to Chuh, both la paperson (2017) and Escobar (2020) imagine possibilities of universities that do not yet exist, with the last—specifically referencing pluriversality—contrasting the productivity of the possible with the restrictions of the pragmatically attainable.⁴² Yet Moosavi draws attention to the many voices suggesting that, owing to their complicity in ethnocentrism, elitism, and exclusion, ‘universities should be abandoned altogether, even if nobody is willing to take the first step in doing this’ (2020: 342). And perhaps gesturing towards a violence necessary to do the demolition work that can engender an inversion of the current hierarchy institution/[over]/people, Bacchetta—aware of the academic’s ‘[participating] in bolstering the institution and thus enabling (even if unwillingly) its dominant ideological work’ (Bacchetta, Jivraj, and Bakshi 2020: 578)—envisions a ‘critical mass’ of ‘radically critical subjects’ brought inside the university, in order to ‘implode [it] and recreate it differently’ (580).⁴³

If amassing to implode requires a catalyst, perhaps polemics such as this text are useful—not in order to incite anger for anger’s sake, but as a textual intervention (working against a system founded in numerous ways upon textuality) that aligns with the affective motivations moving beyond discipline, ‘threaten[ing] the regularizing bound of rhetoric’, thus ‘put[ting] into question the notion of boundaries or limits’ (Flannery 2001: 117). Certainly, my envisioning of the role of the affective may appear quite different from than that of Muñoz, whose ‘call for an “affective reanimation” of queer theory—a blending of critique with hope, passion, aesthetic pleasure, and utopian longing’ (Felski 2015: 30)—is deemed necessary to displace a ‘disabling political pessimism’ (Muñoz 2009: 9). Felski engages with Muñoz’s texts, among others, in order to explore alternative relationships of researcher/analyst to their ‘object of study’ beyond that of critique—a methodology, a stance that has come to be, for the past several decades, the assumed ‘gold standard’ of analysis, granting purchase on a text’s hidden meanings and, concurrently, its subversive/resistant potentials. Operating as a sort of ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur’s [1965] term),⁴⁴ however, critique, according to Felski—owing to its wholesale, almost requisite embrace as the method par excellence (‘not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing’) (118), a method/stance moreover marking the expositor with the imprimatur of both perspicacity and objectivity (to say nothing of ethical superiority and/or gendered attributes)—has had negative consequences. Resulting in the ‘confusing [of] a part of thought with the whole of thought’, the de facto, often unreflective, habitual, and automatic recourse to critique ‘[scants] a range of intellectual and expressive possibilities’ (5). (The resonance with Morrison’s [1993] assessment of oppressive language that limits knowledge is notable.) Felski notes Sedgwick’s (1997) influential essay on paranoid and reparative reading as expressing this dynamic as well, whereby the mandate of suspicion has become ‘increasingly prescriptive as well as excruciatingly predictable…pushing thought down predetermined paths and closing our minds to the play of detail, nuance, quirkiness, contradiction, happenstance’ (Felski: 34).⁴⁵

Felski’s highlighting of both Muñoz and Sedgwick (noting specifically the latter’s conception of reparative reading as allowing for a relationship to the work of art based upon a desire ‘for solace and replenishment rather than viewing it as something to be interrogated and indicted’) (Felski 2015: 151) alerts us to the various ways that texts may be productively approached without falling back upon what might be seen as the ‘negativity’ of (suspicious) critique. Deposing the stranglehold of critique may enable us to perceive dimly glowing roads, barely visible through the fog of habit or indoctrination, and we may be curious enough to follow them, to approach research in radically reimagined, post/anti-disciplinary manners, in myriad post-university settings (where even the categories of ‘art’ or ‘science’ are understood as nowhere near as discrete as imagined). Yet I do not want to think of my polemic as a critique motivated by suspicion, at least not in the ways Felski and Sedgwick (or Ricoeur) appear to understand this. My critique is, rather, a type of peri-archaeological reading that takes the absolutely undeniable signifying absences in both ethnomusicology and queerness as starting points, not in an attempt to ‘uncover what cannot be seen’, but to highlight the disorienting, dizzying refractions/reflections that manifest as an infuriating invisibilization of a stunningly visible invisibility, perpetuating and perpetuated with utter impunity. An affectively resonant and motivated refusal to ignore this present absence is an essential component of the processes that may ultimately expose the limits of knowing and knowledge within and through the underlying epistemic boundaries that must be perpetually actively/consciously as well as performatively/subconsciously (owing to differing threats and rewards) invisibilized themselves. Moreover, while scholars/researchers may indeed find a certain seduction in suggestions that ‘we’ might approach ‘our’ ‘texts’ with affection rather than antagonism (suspicion, anger, rage as ‘negative’), it is a mistake to construct such relations as bipartite in nature (analyst/text); rather, our anger at these disciplines and their various texts (and their privileged creators) should stem from a care and concern for, from relationships with those silenced and/or exploited by their violations: most significantly, the ‘research subjects’ who—contra the posits of Lévi-Strauss—exist as material, feeling people, not data, those other interlocutors often ignored, obliterated, or misrepresented. At what price does ‘our’ ‘solace’ or ‘replenishment’ come?

All assessments of emotions’ ‘values’ are, of course, situated and contextual; and anger cannot be universally constructed as the opposite of hope or optimism. Indeed, insisting upon anger’s ‘crucial’ nature in battling disenfranchisement of and violence against women of colour (including highlighting the ways that race inflects relationships and power differential among women), Lorde cautions, ‘when we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known’ (1981/1984: 131)—an assessment underscoring the value of embracing a so-called ‘negativity’ intimately linked to an affective horizon of unknowable possibilities. Affect’s indissoluble link to movement also implicates its utility in combating a disabling acquiescence to status quo. With reference to the title of the collected volume in which his essay appears—The Fire Now—Yancy equates the imperative ‘wait’ with cowardice, but the titular ‘now’ (a command to act with immediacy) with ‘a transnational, multicultural, multi-gendered, multi-disciplinary clarion call’, ‘a demand, a scream, that operates according to diametrically opposed temporal logics…[speaking] to a temporality of refusal to go on as usual’ (2018: 272). Further dismantling what is certainly one hierarchically privileged group’s attempt to value/devalue specific motivations, emotions, and actions (those that benefit ‘us’/those that threaten ‘us’, respectively), Yancy—following the editors’ assessment of the title’s Fire as something ‘cleansing, that comes from speaking up and out against the violence that surrounds us’ (Kamunge, Joseph-Salisbury, and Johnson 2018: 3)—refuses to equate burning with hate, with negativity, with destruction. Much to the contrary, it is ‘a deep stirring in the soul’, a burning that is ‘socially, politically, psychologically, spiritually, and existentially cathartic’ (Yancy: 273). To burn the inequitable, so that another burning can illuminate and perpetuate a temporality of possibility, can crackle, and vibrate the air as a reminder of the power of the sonic. To silence that which silences.