https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0789-7696
Abstract
Sonic Spectral Summoning was a participatory ‘correspondence course’ that took place as part of Queer Extension, a series of remote, artist-led experiments in alternative education that ran during the spring 2021 COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. The project was structured as a kind of game that set a series of imaginative provocations all based on the idea that some arrangement of sound might give access to secret knowledge related to the persistence of the dead among the living (ghosts). Sonic Spectral Summoning is also the title of an audio work for voice and occasional electronic sound that the author made in response. This account traces some coordinates of the project, across fiction, domesticity, structures for collective practice and the unknown. The project, and this account, contributes to a field of inquiry about sonic epistemologies that is concerned not just with producing knowledge with and through sound, but with using sound to re-configure what constitutes knowledge. If ‘hear-telling’ designates a space for utterance, discourse, theatrical representation, sonic attention, infrastructures for communication and miscommunication, and other verbal transmissions, Sonic Spectral Summoning tries to linger in that space, shuffling through meaning and association, sense and its others.
The aim of the writer is not to become an exhibitor of found objects, but instead to not quite succeed in curating that which may or may not have been there in the first place. There is, obviously, a politics to that & it always produces, by definition, a story of ghosts, if not an actual ghost story.Footnote1
Prelude to a Summoning
Mon, 8 March 2021 at 9:12 AM
Hi, hello. Thanks so much, it’s so great you’re here. I’m really looking forward to this, I think it’s going to be really great. It’s just so nice to have this space, so thank you. Thank you for being here.
Ok, so we’ll just hold on for a minute or two and then we’ll get going. So, feel free to just chill out, and then we’ll get started. Ha! Ok, let’s just hang tight for a minute and then we’ll just kick things going, kick things off. Ok, I think we’ll go ahead and get going.
Get going.
Get it going.
Get started.
Start with this question first: do you really want to summon a spectre? What do you think might happen? What if it doesn’t? What if it does? And let’s be clear. We’re talking about the presence of the dead, of specific dead people.
Or this might be a good question: have you already summoned something? How would you know? Are you summoning something right now? I need to say, right at the start, I don’t hold any occult knowledge. I don’t hoooooooooold any occult knowledge. But I can’t guarantee that you won’t have an occult experience.
Here’s what I propose. We will investigate who and what accompanies you. We will investigate who you accompany. Not a practice of going inward but turning attention out. Not even turning attention out. Intensifying the trajectory of your attention as it is already in process.
Sit still and listen, if that seems like something that you’d like to do. Maybe set a timer, say five minutes. Try not to listen for anything specific. Try not to make too much of what you hear. Maybe listening makes you an amplifier so whatever’s out there is pumped up once you’ve understood it. Maybe listening helps focus your attention in a slightly different way so you become attuned to anomalies. I don’t know. Try it.
The premise of this exchange is that there may be some latent ghostliness in the sonic and I’m going to teach you how to access it. What if that works?
How about this? You could think of me as a ghost if you want to, if that’s interesting. I’d like that.
No pressure.
Story of Ghosts
This is not a ghost story. This is an account of something that may or may not have been a game, a performance, pulp poetics, a work of art, a radio play, a fever dream, a shared hallucination, an Arts Council-funded project, or a kind of reaching out. Sonic Spectral Summoning was a participatory ‘correspondence course’ that took place as part of Queer Extension, a series of remote, artist-led experiments in alternative education that ran during the spring 2021 COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. It is also the title of an audio work for voice and occasional electronic sound that I made in response. Finally (or until the next thing), it is this account tracing some coordinates of the project, across fiction, domesticity, structures for collective practice and the unknown. If ‘hear-telling’ designates a space for utterance, discourse, theatrical representation, sonic attention, infrastructures for communication and miscommunication, and other verbal transmissions, Sonic Spectral Summoning tries to linger in that space, shuffling through meaning and association, sense and its others. Not a ghost story but certainly a story of ghosts.
The difference between a ghost story and a story of ghosts might have something to do with the way fiction can be released from but always haunted by narrative. My interest in fiction arises in part from its use as a mode to re-think site-specificity and the role of place in art-making. Robin Mackay’s 2015 When Site Lost the Plot, for instance, traces a shift among artists and thinkers critical of the subsumption of the site-specific into capitalist cultural regeneration projects and argues that experiments with ‘plot’ have emerged as these artists seek ways to evade this subsumption. My own work between 2014 and 2018 was focused in large part on a multi-part artistic research collaboration about eavesdropping, which took place in locations along the south and east coast of the UK. Since 2019 my collaborator Rebecca Collins and I have been developing a practice of ‘sonic detection’ in which narrative fiction is a primary strategy, including a co-written ‘sonic detective novel’ that retells a surreal version of our coastal turns.Footnote2
‘Sonic fiction’, in particular, has gained significance as a term, building from Kodwo Eshun’s landmark 1998 book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, which explodes and rebuilds Black music writing, in consultation with dance music and afrofuturist thought. Zoning in on an ‘alien discontinuum’ that operates through ‘intervals, gaps, breaks’, Eshun invests ‘Sonic fiction’ with a disruptive theoretical capacity which has had a major effect on sound studies, in part because it helps scholars and artists in the field trouble categories and assumptions.Footnote3 Holger Schulze, for example, champions sonic fiction as an expansive method for reorientating musicology, through ‘its non-argumentation, its narrative and audiovisual, its sonic elements and references’,Footnote4 while Eleni Ikoniadou, whose work on sound and the unknown I will return to later in this essay, argues for its capacity to ‘radicalize the speculative ghost in sound culture’.Footnote5 These formulations of sonic fiction have a complex relationship to narrative. Eshun writes that it ‘can be understood as the convergence of the organization of sound with a fictional system whose fragments gesture towards but fall short of the satisfactions of narrative’.Footnote6 Like Brecht’s ‘culinary’ theatre,Footnote7 here narrative complacency should be approached with suspicion, though Eshun edges its pleasures rather than rejecting them outright.
A narrative jump. From Autumn of 2020, I started listening to ghost stories when I took my daily walk. There was a park two streets away from my flat and I walked around it again and again, its minute detail becoming familiar and then over-familiar and then de-familiar. I liked the way the stories intensified this effect, layering the park with anxious entities evoked in the practiced tones of professional voice actors, lending form to the pervasive anxiety of the time. Robert Aickman, Edith Wharton, M.R James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, Charles Dickens’ ‘The Signal-Man’, Henry James’ ‘The Altar of the Dead’, canonical and alter-canonical, unsettling and staid, modern and anti-modern. The ghost story is exciting because it approaches alternate worlds, different possibilities for being and experiencing. As a genre, though, it is also often obsessed with cowering before an absolute, unknowable authority and, as Michael Newton writes in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, with ‘the intrusion of the “foreign” into the comfortably domestic’.Footnote8 This conservatism of the classic ghost story is echoed in its tendency towards white, middle class authorship. The ghost story needs to be deployed against itself.
Around the same time that I was haunting myself sonically on daily walks, I taught a postgraduate seminar on ‘the weird’ in art and literature, thinking about and against genre, reading some of the authors named above along with Samuel Delany, China Miéville, Victor LaValle’s appropriation of the violently racist HP Lovecraft story ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ in his novella The Ballad of Black Tom, Rita Indiana’s queer eco-weird novel Tentacle. We read Theodor Adorno’s ‘Theses Against Occultism’ to consider his critique of the politically stultifying effects of everyday occultist mystification (like astrology columns and psychic mediums). Adorno argues that when the stars are held responsible for our fates, the alienating and oppressive dimensions of modern life are given ‘an independent existence both natural and supernatural’ which precludes judicious reason and political change.Footnote9 At the same time, we looked at artistic strategies to deploy occult themes and practices as radically disruptive of dominant conventions, like the feminist poetics in Rebecca Tamás’ collection WITCH, and performance artist and scholar Eirini Kartsaki’s engagement with the weird as ‘staging an uncompromising celebration of the extraordinary complexity of human subjects’.Footnote10 All of this became background to Sonic Spectral Summoning and other creative work I made in the constrained circumstances of these years.
Though perhaps the activity that most informed my practice were the creative writing workshops I taught over various lockdown periods. In the midst of online teaching, I joked with a friend that it felt like consciousness being uploaded to a spaceship, a kind of deep physicality of disembodiment that was not without its rewards. In the workshops, each student read their writing out loud and we talked about it. Almost nobody turned their camera on, which was weird but by far not the weirdest thing about this time. Sometimes, often even, a compelling intellectual intimacy developed. We were listening, together. Later, when rules had relaxed, students came up to me in grocery stores and restaurants to talk about the workshops, these people whose faces I’d never seen but whose voices I recognised instantly. Oh, it’s you! I said. Their experiments across narrative and poetics, sometimes tentative, sometimes reckless, felt protected, sheltered, or held in some way by this mediated encounter. My own experiments teaching in a field relatively new to me (my training is in theatre and performance even as text has always been a significant part of my practice) also seemed otherworldly, less exposed and so more relaxed and attentive. We were a group of ghosts, opening up to each other.
Image 1. At some point over the next three days, you will hear a word or a phrase or a sound that is significant. You’ll know it when you hear it. Image by Diana Damian Martin.
Image 2. What is the sound of revenge? Sounds that cause harm and so could be useful to those seeking revenge: fingernails on chalkboard, dry skin handling cardboard, LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices) or ‘sound cannons’. Sounds that represent or recall the feeling of wanting revenge: teeth grinding, police sirens, villainous laughter. But let’s think in more spectral terms. What is a symmetrical sound, likely to affect a vengeful spirit? Or what is an asymmetrical sound, capable of driving a ghost wild? Image by Stav B.
Revenge
12 March 2021 at 12:38 AM
Ghosts want revenge. They have unfinished business and they’re happy for it to become your problem. It’s never fun to feel taken advantage of or like someone’s dumping unsolicited work on your plate. It’s understandable that you would find this frustrating (I have a lot going on, too). But it’s hard to know what to do about cosmic vengeance in the near term.
When confronted with the irrevocable or the unforgivable, a ghost will never say: what’s done is done. Ghosts abhor the incomplete – the vengeful ones at least. They frame their existence through the idea that harm means unbalance and that balance can be restored through an act of violent symmetry. For these ghosts, symmetry is an imperative that exceeds nature, exceeds death.
Can we do something with this? Consider sonic symmetry. Consider chiasmus, the rhetorical device where words or grammatical structures are repeated in reverse order. I love proximity but distance loves me. Today we are together, and we separate tomorrow. Symmetry with a difference. Are there other symmetries you’re fond of, or asymmetries you think might help? Can we form an incantation this way, to get under a ghost’s skin (so to speak)?
Haunted Houses
Sonic Spectral Summoning, as I mentioned earlier, took place in the context of a UK platform for queer artistic experimentation in the lockdown period of Spring 2021, titled Queer Extension. This platform in turn came out of a decade or so of collaborative performance work around domesticity, gender and sexuality by a group I co-founded called I’m With You. We approached houses haunted by restrictive expectations but also developed methods for welcoming spectral slippages and summoning new realities.
The couple who owned our shared house in Clapton (East London) had their main address miles away, in the county of Suffolk: no number, just ‘The Manor’. So, we called our house the Manor, too. It was three stories tall with five bedrooms, a kitchen/lounge on the ground floor and, for London, a big garden. At the back of the garden, there was a raised platform. Most of us were performance artists and inevitably we started using the garden platform as a stage. We decided we needed a name, and by way of a story involving Hilary Clinton and the Oxford University rowing team, we landed on I’m With You. From 2010 to 2017 I’m With You produced regular performance events. These performances were, at first, principally for and with a queer community of people living and working in East London. The idea of queer community – and more specifically, queer domesticity – remained a focus even as the work found its way into London institutions (the Barbican Centre, the Royal Academy of Art, the Hayward Gallery). We also sought to press up against the limits of domestic spaces: we organised a project in a bungalow on the edge of an eroding cliffside in Scarborough in Yorkshire; we staged performances in the flat above the queer nightclub Vogue Fabrics; we made work for the Bank of Ideas, a former HSBC building annexed as part of the Occupy London movement. A core team of people took on the organisational labour (unpaid): drag performer, producer and academic R. Justin Hunt; photographer Christa Holka; performance artist and novelist Season Butler; and me. Loose associations extended much more widely, though, and over an eight-year span over a hundred artists took part.
I’m With You understood our work as part of a longer lineage of performance artists working in and around the home. The artist Ernst Fischer, for example, writes about the radical possibilities of a queer ‘living-room theatre’, drawing on a pscyhoanalytic frame to argue for the ‘uncanny’ as an important political category to emerge from this space. Fischer theorises from his own work, particularly a long-term project starting in the 1980s called the Brixton heArt Room which saw Fischer putting his flat through a process of continuous transformation as the site for theatrical production. Where domestic spaces produce and are the product of the heavy familiarity of gender regulation and heteronormativity, Fischer argues that ‘the operations of the uncanny expand the apparently dialectical model of a living-room/theatre to include a third, amorphous, space of possibilities and of immanence, resulting in a trialectic spatiality that may be rendered as living-room/living-room theatre/theatre’.Footnote11 Domestic performance here takes on a kind of present ghostliness where certain freedoms are constructed when the familiar (re-)emerges as something else.
Haunted houses are subject to material conditions, too, though. I’m With You was often an incubator for new work while also forming a kind of research inquiry in its own right. We were exploring how to build independent, collective spaces for living and creating for people whose relationships to gender and sexuality were marginalised. The results were inconclusive. The Suffolk landlords, drawn by the white heat of the London property market, eventually sold the house and the kind of domestic performance work we were supporting became unfeasible. The meaning and function of domestic performance shifts in a housing crisis where renters in wealthy urban centres find living space increasingly tight and unaffordable. The anxiety brought on by the need for frequent moving as rents rise or properties are sold makes the conditions for exploratory ambiguity in domestic spaces difficult to achieve.
The last event we held in the ‘Manor’ was a series of semi-occult rituals, many sonically inflected. The artist Benjamin Sebastian led a collective chant around a small fire on the kitchen floor (‘my heart is your home’, we all repeated), while R. Justin Hunt led the audience/participants in an opera for doors. Bodies placed in every threshold of 245 the building, we produced harmonious and discordant tones, blessing or cursing the space, or doing something more ambiguous altogether.
Image 3. Send me a recording (or document or score or image or invocation) of a long and mournful sigh. Image by Leigh who wrote: ‘this is the artefact of pressing into clay for the full, long out breath of the sigh’.
Melancholy
Tue, 16 March 2021 at 11:51 PM
We are not, I think, in the business of fixing or adjusting or reconciling or strategizing with or on behalf of ghosts. So, we turn from the vengeful spirits to the mournful ones. The ghosts that linger do so by and for themselves. There are challenges, nevertheless. Terminologies and disciplinary anxieties abound. What is the structure of the disembodied unconscious? A language? A baleful moan?
For our purposes, fine distinctions between mourning and melancholy are less (im)material than the practical fact that a ghost lost in painful self-contemplation may be difficult to reach. The attention of the disconsolate ghost is otherwise engaged. It is absorbed. So we start there. Squishy, squelchy absorbents. Break out your mops and sponges and get sopping. Spectral tears drip-dropping on the linoleum. Ectoplasmic snot pooling in the sink. Translucent soggy tissues piling up next to the sofa.
I don’t know about you but I’m unmoved by housework. Seek other approaches.
Sympathy. Being a good listener. Not just nodding along but really being there. Or sometimes actually just nodding along, if that’s all you’ve got, but reliably. We listen to and with the dead and sometimes the dead listen back.
Voices from Beyond
Five years after our last live event, I’m With You created Queer Extension as a new form for the collective work we are invested in. Conceived and developed by Justin Hunt, the format of the programme was in part a response to the COVID-19 lockdown – it was entirely remote, both synchronous and asynchronous, to use terms we became familiar with from this time. Zoom, WhatsApp, email, even the post. It was also, though, a chance to experiment with different ways of supporting alternative art practice, both for artists and participants. The remote spaces in some ways resembled the domestic space in which we started our collaboration, both characterised by tension between private and public, regulation and autonomy. The projects were also, of course, most often transmitted from bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms as the images and sounds of our homes became increasingly available. In the intervening period, though, we had become more sensitive to questions of labour and the economics of collaborative creative work.
Reflecting on Sonic Spectral Summoning, Queer Extension, and on collective work more broadly, I wanted to include other voices in this account. I spoke, then, to Justin about his ideas and how he developed the Queer Extension programme:
During the 2021 lockdown, I started thinking about correspondence courses and the history of the extension movement, which actually started over here in the UK.Footnote12 My grandmother was the head of an extension course in my hometown in Maine (USA). She brought all these amazing lecturers and speakers and courses to help women in the town to learn and experience things when they weren’t taking care of their kids. They would go to these extension meetings and get basically university level education courses. I was also inspired by [performace company] Goat Island’s summer schools, which were not separate from the work that they did, but also supported that work, both practically and conceptually.Footnote13 And at the time because of lockdown, because of COVID, we were all communicating through text and phone and Zoom and letters and emails. So, I wanted to use this framework to activate our brains in a way that was meaningful to us, and specifically a framework for queer exchange and queer feelings.
We got funding from Arts Council England, which was exciting because I knew I wanted to support people robustly – like give them a month or two of money so they could create what they wanted to create and give them the framework that I had enabled. Like a lot of people, I had been pushed really fast to become an online lecturer and my university (Syracuse University in London) gave us a lot of tools and training, so I wanted to make that available. Plus, I had a professional Zoom account and so I thought, let’s do it. Let’s get the stuff done. As we started building the programme, I realized that actually we should do a pay-what-you-can model and use it as a test case to understand what this model could afford in itself. It became important to me to think about, what is the economy of this transaction, this space? ‘What you need to know about queerness right now’ probably won’t make too much money, and I wanted it not to be connected to an institution. The project was in many ways tethered to friendship, and it was ‘adult further education’ but without a rubric or assessment. There was no product in that way. But I also didn’t want anyone, including myself, to be doing all this work for free.
Some of the projects or ‘modules’ used the implied formality of the educational frame; others subverted or ignored it.Footnote14 Many named or addressed queer cultural practices as sites of knowledge; some were more oblique. Few left the teacher/student dynamic unquestioned. In queer big brother in ur bedroom but dance, artist and choreographer illyr took participants through an investigation of the experience of dancing alone in a bedroom, a kind of primal scene for many queer kids. Liz Rosenfeld invited participants to ‘microdose’ with them. A term usually used to describe the consumption of small amounts of recreational drugs, for Rosenfeld microdosing became a framework for conversation about bodies, desire and subtle shifts in how we encounter the world. Brian Lobel’s Queer Corralling and Comforting was specifically aimed at ‘those who have experience leading and coordinating rites and ceremonies for queer people’.Footnote15 He created a space for people who are already engaged in conducting weddings, funerals and other practices of collective meaning-making to reflect and consider.
In our conversation, I asked Justin to talk about ‘extension’ and what is queer about it. He said:
I think that to me, queer was doing the work of trying to trouble a structure and not to name a structure. So, this isn’t a Queer Extension, it’s queering ‘Extension’ really. So, you’re not in an institution or a structure of learning that has a set or mandated rubric other than arriving and engaging in the way that you feel is appropriate, then going as far as you want with response to those structures. The extension movement was about creating a place for people to learn things that they never would have heard of. It was mostly junior faculty who would be really excited about sharing a paper or an idea that their undergraduates didn’t care about, the academy didn’t care about, so they would bring it out and they’d have another audience. That audience would be people who had never engaged with philosophy, sociology, mathematics, and they would hear about these things. In Maine, when my grandmother ran an extension, she would bring in experts in her husband’s field and her friend’s husbands’ fields. The wives couldn’t learn about the world that they were working in otherwise because they had no access to them, so it was extending the space of their engagement.
For me extension was also about physicality. Like if we think of the physical states, what feels safe in the extension of a joint and where does it get creaky? Where do you want to push through or not push through? It’s about understanding the range of the motion of engagement – that was a metaphor that we were playing with. Queering was not necessarily naming an ontological state or space of queerness. Instead, each module pushed against something about the way we engage with learning and performance. Because each one was about performing in the everyday, especially in the lockdown everyday, which was modulated so heavily by rules and distance. For performers and performance artists, one of the things that we really develop in terms of skill, which is maybe overlooked a lot of time, is the sorts of techniques you need to create emotional and psychic conditions within a space that allow something else to happen. You make it safe for an audience member to feel like they can participate. You make it feel like it’s okay as a student to participate. It actually creates a very specific apparatus for performance. Do I feel safe enough to act or be a social actor in this way? I try to really carefully give people the space to know that they could take any route. It isn’t about mastering. It’s about exploration: holding the space for engagement in that moment.
The lockdown period exposed the infrastructures behind structures of social encounter, and Queer Extension became an opportunity to use performance training in a radically reconfigured performance context to reflect on these infrastructures. Ultimately, then, I wanted my contribution to take up the question of a space for many voices uttered in chorus with my preoccupation with fiction and domesticity, and the haunted quality of all of these.
Image 4. An irrepressible sound, please. Something that had to come out. Image by Timothy Smith, who wrote: ‘the agony & the ecstacy: the irrepressible sound of foxes fucking at 3am’.
Ecstatic
Tue, 16 March 2021 at 11:51 PM
A sigh becomes a groan becomes a wild carrying-on, shaking the rafters and rattling the windowpanes. Let’s talk about psychic energy and the sheer force of feeling as feeling. For some, this will seem like the most self-evident set of observations ever to emerge in an occult correspondence course. For others, a guided tour of the Ecstatic can only be endured from within a full-body cringe. These are all promising orientations.
Spectral vibes in the key of the Ecstatic call to mind, among other things, medieval saints scourging the flesh to satisfy the spirit. Holy Ghost indeed. So, let’s open the floodgates. All you enraptured, metaphysical, all-or-nothing, god-fucking queer mystics, I want to hear it. I want to hear all about it.
Ecstasy is a feeling; the Ecstatic is a category. Structures for intense experience are also sometimes barriers to it. All worked up with nowhere to go. If someone telling you to feel something is the best way to ensure you don’t feel anything at all, I want to hear about that too. There are ghosts in the cosmic, swirling encounter with the numinous and transcendent. And there are ghosts in the damp carpet fibres.
The Great Unknown
The final element underpinning both Sonic Spectral Summoning and Queer Extension was an interest in alternative approaches to knowledge and the unknown. This element tied together the other interests I’ve outlined and gave shape to the project. The structure I developed was a kind of game that set a series of imaginative provocations all based on the idea that some arrangement of sound might give access to secret knowledge related to the persistence of the dead among the living (ghosts). The project unfolded over three weeks, by email (generally sent around midnight/the witching hour), for about 40 participants. I was interested in email itself as a creaky medium, a bit mouldy, recalling inefficient institutions. I also tried to balance levity with a sober and clear-eyed approach to the disorientation produced at the meeting point between finitude and the eternal.
Every few days, participants received an email themed around an emotional category associated with supernatural entities: revenge, melancholy, the ecstatic. I reflected on these categories, trying to discern sonic associations they might suggest. For instance, revenge suggests symmetry: tit for tat, an eye for an eye, balanced scales of justice. I asked participants to send their own sonic symmetries (which wouldn’t necessarily take the form of sounds – sometimes images, or words). I then circulated those responses as part of the next ‘lesson’. I also created my own responses, in writing. For revenge, again, I experimented with the idea of poetic metre as stifling symmetry: a trochaic tetrameter, a trudging rhythm matched by a kind of pious ABCB rhyme scheme. I then used these texts to create a new sound work that extends the project beyond the initial 40 participants.
The premise of Sonic Spectral Summoning bears some resemblance to Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 occult novel The Human Chord. In the book, the (possibly deranged) genius of a clergyman-turned-experimental-scientist, Philip Skale, is applied to the production of a certain chord which can only be achieved through the mystical utterance of four perfectly tuned human voices. This chord, in turn, will allow the voices to begin to speak the name of God and so, as Skale repeats, become ‘as gods’ themselves.Footnote16 The protagonist, a young man named Robert Spinrobin ultimately defies his mentor and breaks off the chord along with his love, a young woman named Miriam. In literary scholar Sylvia Mieszkowski’s reading of The Human Chord, sound is a hinge between two knowledge paradigms: the rapidly dominating and depersonalising discourse of modern science, and the occult, which promises access to secret knowledge and so confirms the individual in a feeling of significance. ‘The Human Chord … ’ Mieszkowski writes, ‘needs to be read as an attempt at enhancing the protagonist’s self and, thus, turning him into a functioning subject’.Footnote17 By the end of the novel, the occult promise of ultimate truth and unfragmented selfhood is rivalled by the bourgeois domestic promise of social position and reproduction. The latter is the path chosen by the protagonist, though the ultimate effect of the novel is more ambiguous. The reader is left with an impression of the overwhelming power of sonic experience pitted against rationalist attempts to measure, contain or master it.
The Human Chord – with its complex obsession with sound, knowledge, and bodies – stages multiple concerns that animate contemporary sound scholarship. Across the field of sound studies, epistemology is a pressing research focus, often inflected by claims for sound against the primacy of the visual in the positivist scientific paradigm, which also leads thinkers to trouble neat distinctions between perceptual fields.Footnote18 The anthropologist Steven Feld coined the term ‘acoustemology’ to describe a method of research that aims to generate knowledge about the acoustic textures of a specifics places and times,Footnote19 while Veit Erlmann argues that modern European philosophical traditions were shaped by acoustic thinking in ways that complicate inheritances like mind-body dualism.Footnote20 Nina Eidsheim highlights racialised dynamics in a common conflation of voice and identity, arguing that an ‘assumption about the possibility of knowing sound in the first place extends to a second assumption: that it is possible to know a person’.Footnote21 She carefully adumbrates how sonic epistemologies can reduce and essentialise speaking subjects. Deborah Kapchan, in her introduction to Theorising Sound Writing, argues for a kind of ‘sound knowledge’ that is not just knowledge about sound but an ongoing, embodied process of production and reception. Sound knowledge, according to Kapchan, is ‘a non-discursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening’.Footnote22 Sound knowledge might find form in language but will not be reduced to meaning. Kapchan goes on to define ‘sound writing’ as ‘a performance in word-sound of such knowledge. Not just an intersemiotic translation. Sound writing is a gong resonating through bodies, sentient and non’.Footnote23
Sonic epistemologies, then, are often concerned not just with producing knowledge with and through sound but with using sound to re-configure what constitutes knowledge. Extending this, there is also a line of thinking that understands sound to have a particular purchase on the unknown and phenomena beyond human perception or conceptual capacities. My collaborator Rebecca Collins, for example, works with theoretical physicists on a project called Parameters for Understanding Uncertainty,Footnote24 using sound as a way to develop artistic approaches to topics on the leading edge of scientific thought: from dark matter to the first few seconds of the universe. Eleni Ikoniadou, who I referenced earlier in this essay, argues that ‘the sonic features a largely untouched but fascinating relationship, for example, to counterfactual and counterfictional thinking, to the zones of transmission between life and death, to subaquatic, Cthulu-esque, non-human forms of life, and to unsound, vibrational milieus inaccessible to the senses’.Footnote25 For Ikoniadou, the task is not to generate knowledge about or with the sonic but to use the sonic – and particular ideas of sonic fiction – to access that which ‘resists scientific inquiry, precise measurement and deviates from our habitual laws’.Footnote26 She is interested in how sound can give us an unsettling indication of ‘a realm that we can never know and which, far from mirroring our thoughts and practices, mocks the human belief that the world only exists as its mirror. A world without people. One that was always indifferent to us and is, one day, altogether rid of us’.Footnote27 If this risks a nihilistic politics, Ikoniadou argues that sonic fiction is a domain for the marginalised, ‘a minor and micro art/science/method, best suited to a minority (black, female, other) people or a people yet to come’.Footnote28
In Sonic Spectral Summoning, celebration of the unknown as unknown and special access to secret knowledge give way, somehow, to the nitty-gritty, teeth-grinding perplexity of kind of having a sense of something. I was interested in acts of collective interpretation, a sonic (spectral) epistemology where knowledge is made, together and for each other. Everything can mean something else: the basis for conspiracy thinking and/or a radical re-envisioning of the relations between things. We set out to prove that the world can turn on a different axis, that the way things are isn’t the way things have to be. As we don’t quite succeed at reproducing our results, under conditions where clarity is a hard-fought territory, we clear our throats, fill our lungs and open our mouths to speak.
Sonic Spectral Summoning: Verbal Transmissions
Written and recorded by Johanna Linsley, with sound design by Jan Mertens. Permanent link to audio work here: https://soundcloud.com/jhlinsley/sonic-spectral-summoning.
Prelude to a Summoning
Profane insomniacs! Degrading islands! Poets you know are falling apart!
The time has come: there’s a ghost in the telephone. The time has come to propagate ivy and vibrate knowingly. The time is a pulley. A bucket of chalk conveniently placed. These conditions have one thing in common: a hairline fracture.
What does the ghost chorus sing? We have unfinished business. We are lingering awkwardly. We want to feel it good. Are you on side?
A tentative unwinding as a first step then we grind, vomit, twitch and shiver. Sleep late and peak early. We said we would do it and I guess we have to now. If you hate authority, one strategy is to tell everyone else what to do and shut your eyes. I still haven’t nailed down the distinction between ‘I don’t want to’ and ‘I would prefer not to’. Sequence is everything and this relationship is in order. Are you alone now? Are you tempted to reach out? Don’t. Take dictation in character instead.
Like this: I am standing just to one side of myself trusting that an automatic impulse will leave room for the occasional insight but not so much room that I’m forced to teach. Poets you know are falling apart and students you’ve never seen will miss you tomorrow. How can I say it’s ok for me right now and also please come get me? I’m crossing the river in traffic. Please come get me.
Revenge
Melancholy
Ecstatic
Felt so much we exceed feeling, so physical we escape the body. Indifference to temperature. Cold baths and scalding showers. Callouses all over, callouses on callouses on blisters on sores on scars on abrasions on tender fresh new little surfaces. Events without admin. Elaborate, synchronised movements and gestures produced without arrangement. Pleasure without anticipation. Action without assistants. Spontaneous and simultaneous design without instruction or support. Structure without infrastructure. Engineering without architecture or vice versa. Expenditure without savings. Discharge without charge. Meeting without meetings. Arrival without any reminders. Approval without preparation. Convergence without scheduling. (Someone is doing the scheduling). Display without coordination. Coordination without authority. Authority without acquiescence. Performance without notation. Performance without process. All run-through all the time. No backstage or only backstage. Nobody answer the phone. Total submersion at intervals likely to muddy the waters and choke the waterways. An empty glass.
We are not annoying or pedantic people so when we say the glass is empty we don’t mean the sticky film at the bottom. The glass is empty because if we tried to sip from the glass we would be disappointed. We couldn’t even stick our tongues all the way out and lick the sticky film; the glass is too tall. Though if we later filled the glass with water and swirled it around we might taste the sweet residue. It might make us sick.
No more lists. No more lists of things. Everything all at once or not at all.
Everything all at once
or
not
at
all.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Johanna Linsley
Johanna Linsley is an artist and researcher working across performance, text, and sound. She has published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Cultural Geographies. Her first album, Stolen Voices 001, was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music in 2021, and her book Sonic Detection is forthcoming from punctum press. Johanna is a lecturer at the University of Dundee.
Notes
1. M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2023), 52.
2. For more on the project, titled Stolen Voices, see www.yourstolenvoice.com (accessed July 19, 2023).
3. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 3.
4. Holger Schulze, ‘Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A Heuristic for Sound Studies’ Journal of Sonic Studies 4, no. 4 (2018) www.researchcatalogue.net/view/290688/290689 (accessed July 19, 2023).
5. Eleni Ikoniadou, ‘A Sonic Theory Unsuitable for Human Consumption’, Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 252–265 (255).
6. Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drexciya as Spectre’ in Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, eds. Martin Clark and Alex Farquharson (London: Tate, 2103), 138–146 (138). Quoted in Ikoniadou, ‘Sonic Theory’, 255.
7. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, eds. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 35.
8. Michael Newton, ‘Introduction’ in The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories (London: Penguin, 2010), xxvi.
9. Theodor Adorno, ‘Theses Against Occultism’ in Stars Down to Earth (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 173.
10. Eirini Kartsaki, ‘Rehearsals of the Weird: Julia Bardsley Almost the Same (Feral Rehearsals for Violent Acts of Culture)’, Contemporary Theatre Review 30, no. 1 (2020): 67–90 (68).
11. Ernst Fischer, ‘Writing Home: Post-modern melancholia and the Uncanny Space of the Living-Room Theatre’ in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2001), 115–131 (126).
12. In The Beginnings of University English, Alexandra Lawrie notes that ‘The University Extension Movement first emerged as an organised and functional educational scheme in England during the 1870s, with the aim of providing tertiary teaching for those unable to go to university’.
13. For an account from Goat Island about the role of education in their creative work, see http://www.goatislandperformance.org/education.htm (accessed July 19, 2023).
14. For full details about Queer Extension, see www.queerextension.org (accessed July 19, 2023).
15. Queer Extension, ‘Queer Corralling and Comforting: Celebrations and Ceremonies’, https://www.queerextension.org/queer-corralling-and-comforting (accessed July 19, 2023).
16. Algernon Blackwood, The Human Chord (New Delhi: Phrabat Prakashan, 2015). This is a refrain that first appears on page 39.
17. Sylvia Mieszkowski, Resonant Alterities: Sound, Desire and Anxiety in Non-Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 156.
18. Jonathan Sterne, for instance, critiques an ‘audiovisual litany’ within sound scholarship that opposes sight and hearing and naturalises cultural understandings of these perceptual faculties. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 15.
19. Stephen Feld, ‘Waterfalls of Song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’ in Senses of Place, eds. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91–135.
20. Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010).
21. Nina Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 3.
22. Deborah Kapchan, ‘The Splash of Icarus: Theorizing Sound Writing’ in Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 1–22 (1).
23. Ibid.
24. Rebecca Collins, ‘Parameters for Understanding Uncertainty: Creative Practice and Sonic Detection as Strategies for Scientific Outreach (P4UU)’ funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Grant ID 1897 (2023) https://projects.ift.uam-csic.es/p4uu/ (accessed July 19, 2023).
25. Ikoniadou, ‘Sonic Theory’, 252.
26. Ibid., 262.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 258.