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Whitehead's Sonic Ontology

and its Performance in Sound Poetry
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invites a shift 

from the meaning of words to
​the meaning of sounds and feelings,
without necessarily leaving the words behind;

creating space for opposition and hope,
resistance and love, protest and passion,  
honesty about pain, and an eros for beauty,

in a universe composed of events, not substances,
filled with multiple forms of becoming that are enfolded
within one another yet always unique, always different,

like a loud crack of thunder, or the thrashing of a wave,
or a conversation over dinner, or a sound poem.

Sonic Theology

From Syllabus for a Course in "Sound Studies" offered by Jonathan Sterne

​This course aims to acculturate students to the broad field of “Sound Studies” and acquaint them with current debates and issues in the area. The past few years have seen an explosion of scholarly work on sound by writers in the human sciences. Contemporary approaches, subjects and themes vary widely. Compared with a relative paucity of studies just ten years ago, there are now a range of histories and ethnographies of listening, studies of soundscapes built and natural, and a proliferation of books and articles on sound media, sound art and sound works. Scholars are rethinking longstanding pieties about the nature of sound and listening, the role of speech, hearing and music in modern life and modern thought, and the relations among the senses. Our goal will be to map and assess this work. As we proceed, we will consider how scholars ask questions of sound, and what important intellectual and political questions might be emerging at this moment. We will also consider contemporary sound studies against approaches to sound, speech, listening and auditory media from other historical moments. Class time will feature weekly lectures and discussions, and occasional creative or experimental in-class projects." 

Confessions of a Process Theologian
​wanting to learn from Sound Studies

Few scholars in religious studies or theology are knowledgeable of, or active participants in, the field of sound studies, one pioneer of which is the scholar Jonathan Sterne.

​​As someone trained in the philosophy of religion and theology, I am an example.  I have a love of music and all things sound-like; I am an oral and aural learner.  And yet I approached my own field of interest with logocentric (word-based, text-centered) assumptions.  I assumed, for example, that responsible theology needed to be about the meaning of words, not the meaning of sounds, and thus I neglected the role that that sounds and listening to sounds played in my own approach to life. 

This is all the more ironic insofar as the philosopher who most influenced me Alfred North Whitehead, offered what might easily be called a "sonic ontology" in his book Process and Reality, and likewise proposed that much if not most meaning in life comes, not through words written or spoken, but through feelings.  He did not write much about music, but I knew myself that music has a special capacity to communicate and evoke meaningful feelings: that is, feelings that inspire, evoke, and sustain human life.  Moreover, i recognized that many of my students (I teach undergraduates in a liberal arts college) gain their sense of what life is about through music, too. 

Thus I found myself wanting to link music with theology, and this website -- Open Horizons -- offers many samples of how I try to do that.  See the many essays in the Art and Music section. 

Still I know that the world of sounds includes, but is much more, than, the world of music, insofar as it includes environmental sounds, the sounds of the city, the sounds of the body, the sounds of injustice, and, yes, the sounds of silence. 
And, happily, I discovered that there is an entire field called Sound Studies, of which I was very much unaware. And I discovered that very wise philosophers -- Christopher Cox, for example -- have been writing books at the intersection of sound, art, and metaphysics for quite some time.

I am creating this page in hopes that it might introduce some theologians and religious studies scholars to Sound Studies, encouraging them to learn from, and offer their voices to, sound studies.  I have a special interest in those whom I know best, process theologians, learning from Sound Studies.  May this page serve, in some small way, as a springboard for much further study.

​- Jay McDaniel

Hannah Silva's Sound Poems
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"a one woman embodiment of
 a political system on meltdown"

                                               The Skinny
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Sonic Ontology: 
a Whiteheadian Approach
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A sonic ontology is not so much a "view" of the world as it is a feel for the world.  The world is felt as process, as becoming, as fluid, as composed of momentary events that are both within the self and more than the self. 

A sonic ontology takes the act of hearing and listening very seriously, but not in an imperialistic way.  The other senses and capacities have their powerful place.  You can feel the world sonically as you "see" things and "touch" things and "remember" things and "anticipate" things.  A sonic ontology offers a way of seeing and touching, remembering and anticipating, taking deep listening as a key to understanding how live can be lived and what the world is like.

In a sonic ontology the self itself is understood as a sonic event or, rather, a series of  sonic events, beginning with birth (or before) and extending to death (or after).  Each event is a moment of experience in which many influences from other events are gathered into the unity of a moment.  Each event is a subject of experience: a momentary self. 

Thus, from the perspective of a sonic ontology, we human beings are not a single self enduring from birth to death but rather a series of selves.  We have many lives.  At each moment the self is a gathering process.  The gathering is a process of feeling the presence, of listening, to the influences and being affected by them and then responding to them, moment by moment. "Listening" can happen through the ears, but also the eyes and hands and nose, and through memory, anticipation, and imagination.  Whitehead calls it prehending.

The sonic world – the world that is felt -- is filled with possibilities: for violence and sadness but also for compassionate inter-containment and mutual joy.  We cannot and should not hide from the tragedies.  The sonic world is not always a happy world.
If we wish to be honest, we must do our best to listen to everything: that is, to take into account the whole of life.

But the sonic world also has a normative dimension.  It contains within it an Eros, a lure for truth, goodness, and beauty, for wisdom, compassion, and the fullness of life.  Whitehead speaks of the Eros as God and suggests that it has a receptive side as well as an active side.  The Eros is itself a Deep Listening that includes within its listening embrace all that happens in the universe.  It is the Deep Listening of which Pauline Oliveros speaks, filled with love.

We humans and all other becomings live and move and have our being within this Deep Listening, itself a Deep Becoming.   Our calling in life is to help create societies that make it alive on earth “as it is in heaven.”  It is to help build communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, egalitarian, multicultural, multireligious, humane to animals, and ecologically wise, with no one left behind. 

Sometimes we help create this world through art we create and enjoy.  We create poems, music, films, dances, that evoke the hope and, along the way, introduce and advance the “feel” of a sonic ontology.  One example would be sonic poems. These are poems that emphasize sound over visual imagery, and that are best understood as performed.  They elicit the feel of a sonic world and display its variety: the many voices that are part of the sonic world.  Thus they are, in their own way, sonic ontology in artistic form.

​- Jay McDaniel


​Sonic Epistemologies

Editorial: Towards New Sonic Epistemologies 
-Marcel Cobussen, Holger Schulze, Vincent Meelberg

an extended excerpt their editorial from The Journal of Sonic Studies 4
as made available through Creative Commons

"Although research on sound may be widespread, widely accepted, and even already commodified by now, scant attention has been paid so far to its epistemological values. Although Veit Erlmann warns against a countermonopoly of the ear in a (western) world that seems to be dominated by the visual, and rightfully remarks that the senses should be regarded as an integrated network in one’s relating to the world, this does not invalidate the often proclaimed idea – an idea which we support – that the ear leads to a different orientation on the world. Although human perception is always synesthetic, and visual experiences, like aural ones, can permeate the whole body – the skin ‘sees’, the eyes ‘feel’ – the distinctions in the ways the ear and the eye can affect us should not be neglected.

In recent philosophical accounts we discover approaches towards integrating sonic epistemologies into contemporary thinking that could prove as inspiring as they (might) prove irritating. Those approaches even quite consciously engage in what Jonathan Sterne calls an unbalanced audiovisual litany: they invert the sensory order into a kind of sonocentrism, but they do so in order to open up a thinking which takes the sonic as its starting point.

In The World is Sound: Nada Brahma jazz critic and Osho disciple Joachim-Ernst Berend sets the field of the gaze (as being exterior) in opposition to the range of hearing (as being depth). The eye explores surfaces; it analyzes, divides, rules, and is directed towards the mind. The ear, on the contrary, cannot discern anything that does not penetrate; it is receptive and intuitive, belongs to the spirit, and perceives the whole as one.

In his essay “Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik hören?” (Where are we when we listen to music?) the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk supports similar premises. He observes a spatial chasm between the subject that sees and the object that is seen, a chasm which is also ontological. An ocular subjectivity implies a not-involved witnessing, distance, and external relationships: the seeing subject is located at the edge of the world. Conversely, the ear has no opposite; it knows no frontal “sighting” of an object located at some distance. Listening means being-in-sound, being amidst the acoustic event, an inter-esse, a being among things. This contact is beyond the control and possibilities of the eye.

Sloterdijk’s observations echo those of the American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey who wrote already in 1927 that vision is a spectator, while hearing is participation.

A further impulse toward a sonic ontology and a philosophy in which the listening subject is central, has been presented by the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy in his book Listening. Sound, Nancy explains, has an internal resonance without which there would be nothing to listen to. This internal resonance also projects outwards; it spreads in space and becomes perceptible, e.g. by a self, a subject. And it is Nancy’s claim that this self is marked by reflection and self-reflection, in other words by resonances, “resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same and the other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense.” (Nancy 2007: 9) The alleged stable identity of a subject is thus deconstructed through a shift from a primarily visual to a primarily aural orientation: a self that vibrates and resonates is in a constant state of becoming, never steady, never definitive.

Perhaps the ideas presented above, on the whole not systematically thought through, can be regarded as the contemporary germs of a sonic epistemology and ontology. More recently, two scholars in particular have initiated attempts to elaborate further on what a primarily aural orientation towards the world might be like. Christoph Cox’s article “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism” in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2011 argues in favor of a new sonic ontology in which the current aesthetic theories concerned with representation and signification should be replaced by a sonic materialism, and a sonic realism should dispel an anthropocentric idealism and humanism. This materialism and realism must be understood in a non-conventional, Deleuzian way, that is to say, as forces, powers, and intensities. A materialist theory of sound emphasizes events, change, and the dynamic flux of becoming instead of turning its focus on objects and meaning.
 
Salomé Voegelin’s sonic fiction and philosophical fairytale ‘Ethics of Listening’ appeared in 2012 in the second issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies. Like Cox, Voegelin is searching for a sonic materialism and a sonic reality that diverges from the prevailing ideas about concepts like materiality and reality: instead of fixed identities and meanings, stability, nouns, and stasis, the sonic exposes us to action and movement, to fleeting understandings, verbs, and contingent possibilities. The ear’s focus is on process, on objects and events existing in time. A sonic materialism is a temporal materialism, grounded in a contingent encounter of listening – contingent, as Voegelin connects this sonic materialism or sonic reality to the invention and appreciation of possibilities (what things could be instead of what they are)."

The Problem of Ocularcentrism
More on Sonic Ontology in Whiteheadian Perspective
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Sound Studies theorists propose that Western modernity has given us an ocularcentric or vision-bound sense of reality.  Ocularcentrism takes clinical and detached visual perception as a primary or exclusive source for understanding ourselves at the expense of recognizing other sensory and psychological activities-- hearing, touching, tasting, feeling, remembering, anticipating, and acting with purpose – which are, or can be, valuable sources of knowledge and self-understanding.  

Ocularcentrism is problematic for at least three reasons.  First, it gives us a skewed and overly manipulative view of the world and ourselves.  Just as items of detached vision are discrete and separate, with clearly defined boundaries that separate them; so an ocularcentric approach takes reality itself as composed of discrete and separate substances which have their insulated and compartmentalized essences.   Thus it neglects the connections between things.  And just as the self who “sees” the world from this detached perspective is an observer but not a participant, so ocularcentrism implicitly highlights the detached observer as a normative ideal – an observer who manipulates the world for personal or collective gain without being affected by it.

Second, ocularcentrism demeans vision itself, by focusing on only one form of visual experience: detached visual persception.  In fact there are many forms of visual perception, many of them deeply emotional and responsive to revelations from the worlds of sight.  Visual artists take us fare beyond detached visual perception in their presentation of color and texture and line as means of evoking participation.

Third, ocularcentrism wrongly isolates vision (detached or otherwise) from the other senses, neglecting the synesthetic and bodily nature of all perception.  When we 'see" with our eyes we are also bringing with us, the sensibilities of listening and touching, and when we listen we are bringing with us the sensibilities of seeing.

In order to transcend the limitations of an ocularcentric or vision-based view of reality, sound studies theorists invite us to exploring sonic ontologies.  A sonic ontology takes sounds and listening to sounds as a source for understanding the fundamental nature of the universe: its very being or existence.  And it proposes that part of what makes us truly human is our capacity for listening: that is, for receiving sounds from various sources in sensitive and sympathetic ways. 
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So what might a sonic ontologically sound like?  Already I have offered a "feel" for it in the first part of this page.  In concluding this section, I offer another approach, building upon analogies between listening and Whitehead's sonic ontology.

1. Just as sounds and listening to sounds are occurrences or happenings, so in a sonic ontology the fundamental units of reality – the really real things – are understood as occurrences or happenings, taking time and making time to occur.  Whitehead speaks of these units as “actual occasions.”  They are dynamic rather than static: actual occurrences or actual happenings. 

2. Just as sounds do not exist as “sounds” without our listening to them in the subjective immediacy of a moment, so in Whitehead’s sonic ontology the actual occasions of the universe are akin to moments of listening to sounds or feeling their presences.  As Whitehead puts it, the fundamental units of reality are actual occasions of experience.  For Whitehead there is something like listening all the way down into the depths of matter and all the way up into the heights of heaven.  The quantum events in the depths of matter are listening to their environments in some way, and the galactic whole of the universe (Whitehead calls it the Harmony of Harmonies) is likewise listening to its environment.

3.  Just as, in the act of listening, the environment outside the body is nevertheless within the activity of listening, such that the listening includes the environment, so in a sonic ontology the world beyond the body is also within our experience of it.   
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4. Just as, in listening to sounds in the environment we typically do to with attention and intention, so Whitehead proposes that the occasions of experience carry within their own occurrence “subjective aims” for momentary satisfaction, and that the satisfaction they seek consist of harmony and intensity.

​- Jay McDaniel

Performing Sound Poetry 

Sound poetry is one way of performing a sonic ontology, shifting 
from the meaning of words to the meaning of sounds without leaving words behind
​
Sonic Bardos: Listening to Maarja Nuut and Ruum's Music with Spiritually Sensitive Ears
​Electronically Queer Heterotopias:​ The art of Tara Transitory and ​Justyna Stasiowska
​The Sonic Side of Race: Race, Sound, and Process Theology
A Woman of Constant Transformation: Alice Coltrane
​Pop Songs as Postmodern Angels
​Pauline Oliveros and Process Theology
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Also of interest:

Open Horizons