Who vibrates?

This ar­ti­cle first ap­peared as Chris Swith­in­bank, ‘Who vi­brates?,’ CR: The New Cen­ten­nial Re­view, xviii/2 (Fall 2018), 141-164.

There are things you shake. You shake apple trees to ask for fruit. Climb­ing trees, to see how much they can hold. Pre­sents, bags of trea­sure, boxes of ce­real, jars of coins — you shake to know what is in­side, how much is left, how much is there to go still.

You shake the hands of peo­ple you don’t know, the shoul­ders of peo­ple you thought you knew, maybe also to find out what is in­side them. You lis­ten, care­fully, to the sound of the per­son being shaken, try to hear — what is in­side — how much is left — how much can they hold?

— Car­olyn Chen, Threads

Car­olyn Chen’s Threads, “for Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage in­ter­preter strung to wind chimes at a dis­tance and a story on tape,” is a per­for­mance piece last­ing around a quar­ter of an hour in which we hear the com­poser speak­ing to us on a recorded track, while the per­former on stage is in­structed to in­ter­pret Chen’s words for us in Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage (2014a; 2014b). Chimes made from paper, leaves, wood, and glass trem­ble over the au­di­ence in re­sponse to the move­ments of the ASL in­ter­preter on stage. At times, the nar­ra­tor’s voice trem­bles as it spins strands of folk­loric sim­plic­ity and pop-cul­tural fan­tasy into a dream haze of tip-of-the-tongue al­le­gory.

Chen’s recorded voice evokes the telling of folk tales or sto­ries for chil­dren in its bold but sim­ple lan­guage. In­deed, its open­ing ad­dress — “You told me a story once . . .” — evokes the ar­che­typal “Once upon a time . . .” sit­u­at­ing us in the past tense of the fairy­tale (2014a, 4). The nat­u­ral­is­tic set­ting of fairy­tale or myth res­onates in the text’s sea, fish, birds, or “my body . . . pulled, into the body, of a tree,” but is ex­panded upon by con­tem­po­rary comic-book coun­ter­parts with “su­per­pow­ers,” legs that can stretch “like chew­ing gum,” and the abil­ity to “travel at super speed” (2014a, 4–7). To a cer­tain ex­tent, Chen’s choice of lan­guage pro­vides ready­made syn­tax and pathos, which sup­port co­he­sion even as the story it­self swerves, frac­tures, and ul­ti­mately es­capes any uni­fied tele­o­log­i­cal read­ing. The bub­ble of safety pro­vided by the fan­tas­ti­cal, which ex­pands physics and cir­cum­scribes the im­pact of even ex­treme vi­o­lence, pro­vides a space for im­ages whose cu­mu­la­tive ef­fect is a med­i­ta­tion on com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the cor­po­re­al­ity of lan­guage.

In a pref­ace to the per­for­mance score, Chen notes:

Liv­ing abroad at the time of writ­ing, is­sues around com­mu­ni­ca­tion — who you are able to com­mu­ni­cate with, what you have the abil­ity to ex­press, what is able to be heard or un­der­stood — were par­tic­u­larly fore­grounded. . . . The writ­ing moves be­tween dif­fer­ent voices, some­times mat­ter-of-fact, some­times wrapped-in-a-dream. The feel­ing is of com­ing at Eng­lish from Chi­nese, or writ­ing sen­tences as music. (2014a, 2)

Threads lay­ers mo­ments of com­mu­nica­tive pas­sage across a sur­pris­ingly wide range of lin­guis­tic, nar­ra­tive, and ma­te­r­ial junc­tions. As Chen notes, the ques­tion of lin­guis­tic ex­pres­sion and com­pre­hen­sion was at the fore­front of her mind dur­ing the work’s con­cep­tion. On the recorded track, the nar­ra­tor de­scribes how “voices be­came water, dis­solved into points, and floated, flew out, and away.” The sto­ries the nar­ra­tor tells and those the nar­ra­tor tells us she is told, con­tin­u­ally re­turn to “is­sues around com­mu­ni­ca­tion,” but the way they do so sug­gests that the prob­lem is not nec­es­sar­ily one of lin­guis­tics or se­man­tics. Rather, in the uni­verse Chen brings to life, these is­sues be­come fleshy: the nar­ra­tor’s “tongue was a fish, it swam away,” while she ad­dresses an­other sto­ry­teller whose “mouth was full of water, water you couldn’t hold.” It seems tongues them­selves take on a life of their own, while voices are phys­i­cally pre­vented from leav­ing their bod­ies. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon finds sim­i­lar mouths — which are ei­ther re­cal­ci­trant or hy­per­ac­tive de­pend­ing on your per­spec­tive — in the po­etry of Myung Mi Kim, some of whose at­tempts to find po­etic ex­pres­sion for the ex­pe­ri­ence of learn­ing Eng­lish he de­scribes as re­quir­ing “an ex­er­cise of the mouth, a ver­i­ta­ble work­out of the tongue.” For Jeon, Kim’s po­etry cap­tures the phys­i­cal­ity of a for­eign lan­guage as it dis­solves se­man­tics and re­volves around re­peat­ing sonic frag­ments, link­ing words by shared sounds and mouth shapes (2004, 137). To para­phrase Chen, this “com­ing at Eng­lish from Ko­rean” re­veals that com­mu­nica­tive pas­sage is not a ques­tion of trans­la­tion be­tween equiv­a­len­cies, but rather of a pro­duc­tive act across mul­ti­ple or­ders. The loss usu­ally posited as in­her­ent to trans­la­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion, is shown in­stead to be an ex­cess of new mean­ing. When we “can no longer see . . . the lan­guage for the mouths,” we are dis­cov­er­ing some­thing new about both lan­guage and mouths (Jeon 2004, 147).

Chen’s Threads or­ches­trates a sim­i­lar ex­cess of new mean­ing not just in ad­dress­ing com­mu­nica­tive dif­fi­cul­ties in its text, but also in its premise of hav­ing its per­former in­ter­pret the spo­ken text as their pri­mary task. While the pro­tag­o­nists in Chen’s story find their at­tempts to com­mu­ni­cate chal­lenged by their own mouths and these dif­fi­cul­ties give rise to fan­tas­ti­cal sit­u­a­tions and so­lu­tions, the in­ter­preter en­gages in a live trans­la­tion of the text into Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage, in the process pro­duc­ing a new ver­sion of the pro­tag­o­nists’ strug­gles. Just as Myung Mi Kim’s ap­proach to Eng­lish casts new light on its sounds and phys­i­cal de­mands from a cul­tur­ally spe­cific ex­pe­ri­ence, this act of trans­la­tion is not a ques­tion of one-to-one — or even lossy — trans­mis­sion, but in­stead a pro­duc­tive pas­sage marked by cul­tural dif­fer­ence and re­la­tion. As Jes­sica Berson writes, the cul­ture of “DEAF-WORLD” — an at­tempted trans­la­tion of the ASL term for the Deaf com­mu­nity — might best be un­der­stood as “a lin­guis­tic mi­nor­ity group more in line with groups de­fined by eth­nic­ity, re­li­gion, or sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion,” and as such brings with it its own cul­tural forms and ex­pres­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties (2005, 44). The artist Chris­tine Sun Kim de­scribes being told by her cousin that she “be­haved as if I had lived my whole life in an­other coun­try with their cus­toms and rules,” but goes on to imag­ine a fu­ture in which her own re­la­tion­ship to sound is as valid as that of nor­ma­tive hear­ing cul­ture, and where her “own lan­guage [ASL] would be good enough” (2015, 34–35).

Sun Kim’s work seeks to cap­ture her per­sonal re­la­tion­ship to sound both as phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non — move­ment, vi­bra­tion — and cul­tural form — the re­ac­tions, re­sponses, and ex­pec­ta­tions she ob­serves in the be­hav­ior of hear­ing in­di­vid­u­als. She char­ac­ter­izes part of this prac­tice as “a loose trans­la­tion of sound to an­other form” (Selby 2011) and this trans­la­tion be­tween sen­sory forms is found echoed in Chen’s pro­tag­o­nists who con­stantly find hear­ing and sight mis­matched: “You sig­naled, but I didn’t hear,” “I couldn’t see, what they were say­ing,” “I wanted to tell you, but you couldn’t hear” (Chen 2014a, 4–5, 7). While these in­ter-sen­sory junc­tures might at first seem like points of com­mu­nica­tive fail­ure, Chen hints at the pro­duc­tive qual­ity of these sites of sen­sory trans­la­tion when she de­scribes the feel­ing of strug­gling to com­mu­ni­cate across lan­guage bar­ri­ers as akin to “writ­ing sen­tences as music” (2014a, 2). Her in­ter­est in in­ter­me­dia work pro­vides a rich ter­rain for hy­brid ex­pres­sion of this kind, a form of ex­pres­sion al­ready pre­sent in her child­hood piano stud­ies, which she has de­scribed as “a kind of willed sen­sory hal­lu­ci­na­tion, try­ing to in­habit the bod­ies of peo­ple and things I was not — chan­nel­ing the en­er­gies of teach­ers, sumo wrestlers, bears — and pro­ject­ing this onto the in­stru­ment” (2016).

In­deed, Threads stages just such a pro­jec­tion of feel­ing across par­tic­i­pants and be­gins to re­veal the ma­te­ri­al­ity of these con­nec­tions. While the bond be­tween recorded voice and ASL in­ter­preter is im­plicit — its phys­i­cal­ity is one of sound waves and pho­tons — the threads bind­ing the in­ter­preter to the chimes are far more ob­vi­ously ma­te­r­ial and begin to raise ques­tions of who is trans­lat­ing who and where the ori­gin of the agency in Threads lies. For a hear­ing au­di­ence, we might spec­u­late that the ob­vi­ous flow is from Chen’s dig­i­tized voice, to the sign­ing in­ter­preter’s body, along the threads, and into the chimes above the au­di­ence. At each step in this causal chain we en­counter some­thing or some­one whose agency is in­creas­ingly del­e­gated to the pre­vi­ous actor, until we ar­rive at quiv­er­ing leaves, pulled around on the end of a string.

In a sound-nor­ma­tive so­ci­ety, the ex­pec­ta­tion is that the sound­ing voice pre­cedes and dic­tates the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the sign­ing body. How­ever, Chen’s com­po­si­tional de­ci­sions shape the per­for­mance in order to trou­ble that hi­er­ar­chy. In de­cid­ing to place her nar­ra­tive voice on tape, she de­nies it the op­por­tu­ni­ties for bod­ily ex­pres­sion that the sign­ing in­ter­preter on stage has. One is never pre­sented as the low-fi­delity re­pro­duc­tion of the other, nor do they com­pete for su­pe­ri­or­ity in a given reg­is­ter. Each is al­lowed to con­tribute its unique qual­i­ties, which form a hy­brid mul­ti­sen­sory reg­is­ter.

Vi­brat­ing mat­ter

If Chen’s Threads stages a net­work of sen­sory trans­la­tion and trans­mis­sion of ex­pres­sive vi­bra­tion — if, per­haps, the trans­mis­sion of ex­pres­sive vi­bra­tion might stand in as an ab­stracted de­scrip­tion of music it­self — the ques­tions arise: who or what is vi­brat­ing and what is nec­es­sary for a trans­la­tion to take place? If we take vi­bra­tion as the start­ing point for an analy­sis, im­ply­ing that in doing so we are able to bridge sen­sory reg­is­ters and modes of being, what fur­ther im­pli­ca­tions are there?

In re­cent “New Ma­te­ri­al­ist” thought, vi­bra­tion seems to lurk not that far below the sur­face as a force an­i­mat­ing the ma­te­r­ial world. In Eliz­a­beth Grosz’s un­der­stand­ing, “art un­leashes and in­ten­si­fies . . . the cre­ative and de­struc­tive im­pact of vi­bra­tory force on bod­ies, on col­lec­tives, on the earth it­self” (2008, 62). Her de­scrip­tion of art as a ques­tion of force and en­ergy, drawn from a Deleuz­ian chaos, cap­tures suc­cinctly the pri­mor­dial qual­i­ties at­trib­uted to vi­bra­tion, with music granted the power to ren­der sonorous “forces . . . that are them­selves non­sonorous” (57). Christoph Cox’s call for a “sonic ma­te­ri­al­ism” also takes up this lan­guage in propos­ing an analy­sis of the “com­plexes of forces ma­te­ri­ally in­flected by other forces and force-com­plexes” he ar­gues are pre­sent in sound art, also trac­ing this form of analy­sis back to Deleuze (2011, 157).

In the vital ma­te­ri­al­ism Jane Ben­nett lays out in Vi­brant Mat­ter, vi­bra­tion is an im­plicit pres­ence through­out. Ben­nett chooses “vi­brancy” as the pri­mary qual­ity of mat­ter “to in­duce in human bod­ies an aes­thetic-af­fec­tive open­ness to ma­te­r­ial vi­tal­ity” with the politico-philo­soph­i­cal aim of res­cu­ing the ma­te­r­ial world from being per­ceived as so many inert, pow­er­less ob­jects (2010, x). Through both the­ory and ex­am­ples, Ben­nett urges us to see mat­ter as lively and ca­pa­ble of ac­tion, re­vis­it­ing Spin­ozan cona­tus as the power in­vested in every “body,” human or not (2010, 2). In this con­text, vi­brancy seems very close to its et­y­mo­log­i­cal roots, with vi­brant mat­ter not sim­ply being full of life, but matière vi­brante, ag­i­tated and quiv­er­ing to demon­strate its agen­tive ca­pac­i­ties. As Ben­nett makes clear, her pro­ject is to work on “onto-the­o­log­i­cal bi­na­ries,” but at the same time has an “aes­thetic-af­fec­tive” com­po­nent that is of equal im­por­tance due to its po­ten­tial for re­shap­ing the po­lit­i­cal sphere (2010, 104–8). Sim­i­lar to these os­ten­si­bly egal­i­tar­ian goals, Cox be­lieves that con­ceiv­ing of sound as “anony­mous flux” will help us es­cape a num­ber of fa­mil­iar bi­na­ries: “cul­ture and na­ture, human and non­hu­man, mind and mat­ter, the sym­bolic and the real, the tex­tual and the phys­i­cal, the mean­ing­ful and the mean­ing­less” (2011, 157). In other words, turn­ing to sound’s ma­te­ri­al­ity and force will allow us to ac­cess a broader, less an­thro­pocen­tric per­spec­tive on artis­tic phe­nom­ena, just as Ben­nett’s at­tend­ing to the vi­bra­tory qual­ity of mat­ter will bring the non-an­thropic back into the po­lit­i­cal fold.

In all of these pro­jects there seems to be an ap­peal to vi­bra­tion as nat­ural or fun­da­men­tal. Vi­bra­tion is drawn from an el­e­men­tary chaos for Grosz, is an an­i­mat­ing prop­erty for all mat­ter for Ben­nett, and pre­cedes “cul­tural his­tory” for Cox (Cox 2018, 234). Al­though ul­ti­mately all three the­o­rists are in­ter­ested in vi­bra­tion’s im­pact on so­cial ques­tions, all three also lo­cate the source of this vi­bra­tion as pre­ced­ing human per­cep­tion, some­thing Marie Thomp­son has termed an “ori­gin myth” (Thomp­son 2017, 266; James 2018). To begin to trou­ble the ques­tion of vi­bra­tion’s nat­u­ral­ness, we might take mru­dan­gam artist and com­poser Rajna Swami­nathan’s de­f­i­n­i­tion of sound art as “an of­fer­ing of res­o­nance or vi­bra­tion, in the con­text of a com­mu­nity that might find some­thing fa­mil­iar, of aes­thetic value, or so­cially co­he­sive, in the ges­tures and sonori­ties pre­sented.” Swami­nathan de­scribes how it has been hard for her to think in terms of “sound” with its im­pli­ca­tions of pre-so­cial vi­bra­tion, rec­og­niz­ing in­stead through prac­tices of in­ter­cul­tural per­for­mance and im­pro­vi­sa­tion that these vi­bra­tions are al­ways al­ready “in the con­text of a com­mu­nity” (Swami­nathan 2018). If we re­turn to the premise of our read­ing of Threads, namely that ASL in­ter­preter, recorded voice, and chimes in­ter­act across sen­sory reg­is­ters, con­sti­tut­ing a work par­tic­u­larly open to di­verse forms of ap­pre­hen­sion, we might also begin to sus­pect that the vi­bra­tion op­er­at­ing through the epony­mous threads is not a “pure in­ten­sity,” as Grosz might have it, but a so­cial phe­nom­e­non as much as a ma­te­r­ial one (Grosz 2008, 31).

Along­side a con­cep­tion of vi­bra­tion as a nat­ural phe­nom­e­non, vi­bra­tion also re­ceives an en­dorse­ment as the aes­thetic-af­fec­tive force of choice due its per­ceived friend­li­ness. Key to Ben­nett’s work is her in­sis­tence on mat­ter’s co-op­er­a­tive na­ture. Her de­pic­tion is of vi­brant mat­ter as an open and pro­duc­tive part­ner, filled with “cre­ative ac­tiv­ity,” which specif­i­cally re­sists com­pre­hen­sion “in terms of so­cial struc­tures,” be­cause its pow­ers ex­ceed a “con­di­tion­ing re­cal­ci­trance or ca­pac­ity to ob­struct.” While framed in terms of an ex­ten­sion of a fuller agency to the non­hu­man ma­te­r­ial world, it is also clear that the so­cial modal­i­ties of re­sis­tance, re­cal­ci­trance, or ob­struc­tion be­long to “stolid wholes” not the vi­brat­ing ac­tants of a hap­pier world (Ben­nett 2010, 35). Robin James has ob­served sim­i­larly rose-tinted con­cep­tions of vi­bra­tion in its ap­pli­ca­tion in “so­cial physics” and the the­o­ries of Hart­mut Rosa. She de­scribes Rosa as in­ter­ested in vi­bra­tion in that he “imag­ines res­o­nance as con­nect­ed­ness, the ca­pac­ity to af­fect and be af­fected by peo­ple and things that are dif­fer­ent from you.”

As James points out, this vaguely re­sem­bles sym­pa­thetic res­o­nance and posits a kind of uni­ver­sal acoustic so­cial­ity in which vi­bra­tion passed be­tween in­di­vid­u­als is ca­pa­ble of re­solv­ing and har­mo­niz­ing dif­fer­ence (James 2017b). James’s analy­sis of so­cial physics re­veals a sim­i­lar con­cep­tion of vi­bra­tion as sym­pa­thetic and co-op­er­a­tive via res­o­nance and ul­ti­mately har­mony: “a har­mo­nious so­ci­ety is one whose parts are arranged in ac­cor­dance with the prin­ci­ples of so­cial physics, namely, the ra­tios and prob­a­bil­i­ties that re­sult from ‘hav­ing a math­e­mat­i­cal, pre­dic­tive sci­ence of so­ci­ety’” and this sci­ence re­lies on a vi­bra­tory de­scrip­tion of the force by which so­cial in­ter­ac­tions move through large groups of in­di­vid­u­als. In both cases, vi­bra­tion and the po­ten­tial for har­mony are ab­stracted to an ap­par­ently nat­ural plane such that they ap­pear “seem­ingly ob­jec­tive” (James 2017a).

The fact that vi­bra­tion is por­trayed as pli­ant and co-op­er­a­tive — a nor­mal­iz­ing force that smooths over dif­fer­ence — raises the ques­tion of what being ac­corded vi­bra­tion means for the vi­brat­ing thing. Ben­nett di­rectly op­poses her “cre­ative” ac­tants with those who only have the “ca­pac­ity to ob­struct” (2010, 35) and in this con­text, vi­bra­tion’s in­vo­ca­tion for its per­ceived af­fec­tive po­lite­ness sug­gests the agency granted vi­brant mat­ter is tied to its per­ceived ca­pac­ity to con-struct. This co-op­er­a­tive urge is ul­ti­mately what al­lows vi­brant mat­ter to act most pow­er­fully “in or as a het­ero­ge­neous as­sem­blage” (2010, 23), but one won­ders what hap­pens to these vi­bra­tions if they en­counter an arm such as that found in Sara Ahmed’s ac­count of will­ful­ness. Ahmed takes up a hor­ri­fy­ing story from the Broth­ers Grimm of a “will­ful” girl whose per­ceived dis­obe­di­ence is pun­ished with death and whose arm con­tin­ues to come up out of her grave until it is beaten down by the girl’s mother with a rod. As Ahmed notes, “will­ful­ness is used as an ex­pla­na­tion of dis­obe­di­ence,” will­ful­ness is an ex­cess of will, while the dis­ci­plin­ing rod “is not deemed will­ful.” What is in­ter­est­ing about the story is how the arm posthu­mously re­ceives the girl’s will­ful­ness, which is “dis­placed . . . from a body to a body part” (2017, 67). Like vi­brant mat­ter, the arm is an­i­mated by an agen­tive force, op­er­at­ing in­de­pen­dently of the rest of its body, dri­ven by a will of its own. Un­like vi­brant mat­ter how­ever, the arm is seen as ob­sti­nate and re­cal­ci­trant. It will not co-op­er­ate and be­cause it is ex­pected to be obe­di­ent, it is judged to be will­ful. Ahmed’s ac­count pro­vides a cor­rec­tional to Ben­nett’s vi­bra­tion in that it makes ex­plicit that will­ful­ness — or co-op­er­a­tive­ness — is not an ob­jec­tive at­tribute of cer­tain peo­ple or things. Rather, the girl’s will­ful­ness is pred­i­cated on gen­dered ideas about her be­hav­ior, on what those ad­judg­ing her will­ful ex­pect her to be: “will­ful­ness is as­signed to girls be­cause girls are not sup­posed to have a will of their own” (Ahmed 2017, 68).

While warn­ing against the risks of an an­thro­po­mor­phic gaze, Ben­nett does not pro­vide an equiv­a­lent ac­count of how her aes­thetic-af­fec­tive pro­ject is im­pacted by what pre­cedes a human en­counter with vi­brant mat­ter (Ben­nett 2010, 99). In­deed, vi­brancy can be read along­side will­ful­ness in the sense that, de­spite its pre­sen­ta­tion as a pos­i­tive and em­pow­er­ing at­tribute, vi­brancy is granted specif­i­cally to mat­ter that is not ex­pected to have agency. Vi­brancy, it would seem then, is not an af­fect of agency but of an agency’s being judged to be ex­ces­sive. Here we might re­turn to Swami­nathan’s “vi­bra­tion in the con­text of a com­mu­nity,” a for­mu­la­tion that in­vokes “com­mu­nity” as that which pre­cedes, as that which de­ter­mines vi­bra­tion’s af­fect. This de­f­i­n­i­tion gen­er­al­izes, for sound art, what Ahmed’s analy­sis of will­ful­ness shows: that prop­er­ties at­trib­uted to a sub­ject’s ob­ject are in fact prop­er­ties of the ob­ject-for-the-sub­ject. In read­ing vi­bra­tion along­side will­ful­ness, the po­lit­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions of these New Ma­te­ri­al­ist ap­proaches begin to come into focus.

Vi­bra­tion and race

In un­rav­el­ling lib­eral sub­ject­hood’s de­vel­op­ment hand-in-hand with Eu­ro­pean colo­nial­ism, Lisa Lowe cites British or­di­nances in oc­cu­pied Hong Kong that grant po­lice broad pow­ers when deal­ing with “per­sons . . . who can­not give a sat­is­fac­tory ac­count of them­selves.” Lowe writes that:

The sub­ject “who can­not give a sat­is­fac­tory ac­count” can­not be eth­i­cal be­cause he can­not place him­self in re­la­tion to a com­mu­nity from whose norms he is con­sti­tu­tively ex­cluded, and in whose norms he would need to gram­mat­i­cally con­sti­tute him­self. (Lowe 2015, 245)

Lowe pre­sents in great de­tail the ways in which Eu­ro­pean lib­er­al­ism takes care to place cer­tain peo­ple out­side of its de­f­i­n­i­tions of sub­ject­hood, mak­ing — amongst other things — their dis­en­fran­chise­ment, de­hu­man­iza­tion, and en­slave­ment pos­si­ble, with race as the crit­i­cal vec­tor for the en­act­ment of this ex­clu­sion. In this ex­am­ple, we en­counter quite con­cretely what is at stake in the at­tri­bu­tion of agency or will­ful­ness. Those “who can­not give a sat­is­fac­tory ac­count of them­selves” are deemed will­ful and, as a con­se­quence, can be de­tained by po­lice at will. As with Ahmed’s ex­am­ple of the will­ful girl, it is not that the colo­nial sub­ject does not have agency or that an ac­count of them­selves is not pos­si­ble, but that these are fore­closed by a leg­is­lat­ing com­mu­nity that ren­ders the ac­count il­leg­i­ble-for-the-com­mu­nity (Lowe 2015, 124).

While will­ful­ness and un­ac­count­abil­ity are fig­ured as neg­a­tive by their judges and vi­brancy is pre­sented as a pos­i­tive at­tribute (with its judges elided), Lowe pro­vides a telling ex­am­ple for un­der­stand­ing what is at stake in a re­la­tion to vi­brant mat­ter, or in the judge­ment of a thing as vi­brat­ing. In her ex­plo­ration of cute­ness, Sianne Ngai cat­a­logues ways in which a West­ern sub­ject — that of the Eu­ro­pean avant-garde — adopts “cute” things as handy helpers in phi­los­o­phy and po­etry, cit­ing “Stein’s cup and cheese, Williams’s plums, and Ash­bery’s cocoa tins . . . Wittgen­stein’s cook­ing pot, Hei­deg­ger’s jug and shoes” (Ngai 2005, 841). In her analy­sis, Ngai sug­gests that al­though the af­fect of cute­ness is gen­er­ally pos­i­tively con­no­tated, there is in fact a vi­o­lence in the at­tri­bu­tion of cute­ness, be­cause it “names an aes­thetic en­counter with an ex­ag­ger­ated dif­fer­ence in power” (2005, 828). If this is the case, then we might argue that the at­tri­bu­tion of vi­brancy may also arise not from an equal­iz­ing ges­ture but from a pre­ced­ing in­equal­ity. In­deed, pre­empt­ing Ben­nett, Ngai writes of “how eas­ily the act of en­dow­ing a dumb ob­ject with ex­pres­sive ca­pa­bil­i­ties can be­come a dom­i­nat­ing rather than benev­o­lent ges­ture” (2005, 832).

In other words, by elect­ing to de­ploy the af­fec­tive shim­mer of vi­brancy as mat­ter’s route to ex­pres­sion and agency, we may in fact be more in­ter­ested in draw­ing mat­ter into our own ex­ist­ing sys­tems of knowl­edge, af­fect, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

There is of course a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence be­tween Lowe and Ngai’s ex­am­ples: while Ngai pre­sents a power dif­fer­ence be­tween an ob­ject nom­i­nated as cute and its sub­ject, Lowe ad­dresses the power dif­fer­ence be­tween a human ex­cluded from so­cial­ity by the leg­isla­tive im­pacts of a Eu­ro­pean lib­eral sub­ject. The ma­te­r­ial cir­cum­stances and reper­cus­sions of these two dom­i­na­tions are not equiv­a­lent even if they bear a for­mal re­sem­blance. Nev­er­the­less, these for­mal re­sem­blances come into sharper focus when one con­sid­ers Ngai’s fur­ther work on af­fect and race. Sim­i­larly to how she un­der­stands cute­ness as a prod­uct of a power im­bal­ance be­tween the ap­pre­hended and the ap­pre­hen­der, Ngai elab­o­rates a con­cept of “an­i­mat­ed­ness” that

fore­grounds the de­gree to which emo­tional qual­i­ties seem es­pe­cially prone to slid­ing into cor­po­real qual­i­ties where the African-Amer­i­can sub­ject is con­cerned, re­in­forc­ing the no­tion of race as a truth lo­cated, quite nat­u­rally, in the al­ways ob­vi­ous, highly vis­i­ble body. (Ngai 2007, 95)

Ngai’s an­i­mat­ed­ness can be jux­ta­posed with Ahmed’s will­ful­ness in the sense that while will­ful­ness names the sub­ject who has too much will, an­i­mat­ed­ness is at­trib­uted to those for whom will is fore­closed. Un­like the sov­er­eign sub­ject whose body is seen as act­ing under the sub­ject’s con­trol, the an­i­mated body is seen as being un­willed and un­con­trolled. The an­i­mated sub­ject can­not give an ac­count of it­self be­cause, like the col­o­nized Chi­nese “va­grant” in Lowe’s ex­am­ple, it is “con­sti­tu­tively ex­cluded” from the com­mu­nity that con­sti­tutes it as an­i­mated. Be­cause it is as­sumed to be in­ca­pable of will, its ac­tions are at­trib­uted to an­i­ma­tion. Ngai reads a scene from Har­riet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which Tom’s preach­ing is ren­dered not as his speech or self-ex­pres­sion but rather as “a kind of ven­tril­o­quism: lan­guage from an out­side source that ‘drop[s] from his lips’ with­out con­scious vo­li­tion” (Ngai 2007, 97). The af­fec­tive force be­hind an­i­ma­tion is so strong that even speech can be per­ceived as dri­ven by au­toma­tism or pup­petry, trans­form­ing from a sign of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, ra­tio­nal­ity, and agency, to a sign of a body out of con­trol, a body only ca­pa­ble of speech through an act of ven­tril­o­quism. In this there is a strong res­o­nance be­tween Stowe’s Tom and the re­cep­tion of per­for­mances by the en­slaved mu­si­cian Thomas “Blind Tom” Wig­gins, who Willa Cather de­scribed as “a human phono­graph, a sort of an­i­mated mem­ory, with sound pro­duc­ing pow­ers” (Brooks 2014, 398). Cather’s de­scrip­tion rests on the same as­sump­tion as Stowe’s that the ex­pres­sion of these en­slaved men — one his­tor­i­cal, one fic­tional — could only be ex­plained by me­chan­i­cal repli­ca­tion: Blind Tom is a ma­chine for the pas­sive re­pro­duc­tion of music but is not granted any cre­ative ca­pac­ity; Uncle Tom has ab­sorbed scrip­ture to such an ex­tent that it can an­i­mate him with­out his in­ter­ven­tion.

In both cases, vi­bra­tion is granted the power to take ahold of these men such that their music and speech shake them like rag dolls.

For a more re­cent ex­am­ple of how an­i­mat­ed­ness de­nies a sub­ject’s ca­pac­ity for agency, we might turn to a 1999 Ken­tucky Supreme Court rul­ing, in which it was de­cided that a wit­ness could “iden­tify a voice as being that of a par­tic­u­lar race or na­tion­al­ity” from its sound alone (Ei­d­sheim 2015, 22). As Nina Sun Ei­d­sheim notes, this judge­ment rests on “an as­sump­tion that the speaker in ques­tion did not com­pletely con­trol his body, and there­fore could not help but sound in a way that iden­ti­fied him” (Ei­d­sheim 2015, 23). In this case, the pos­si­bil­i­ties for vi­bra­tion in the vocal cords of the speaker are be­lieved to be con­strained by a pre­ced­ing racial imag­i­nary. His voice must nec­es­sar­ily be­tray his racial­ized body, be­cause his race is be­lieved to be an ob­jec­tive and nat­ural part of his cor­po­real being and there­fore a defin­ing con­straint on his voice. In ef­fect, vi­bra­tion is at­trib­uted not to the sub­ject’s will but to a sep­a­rate an­i­mat­ing force, in this case some kind of force un­avoid­ably pre­sent in the racial­ized body. In ren­der­ing voices as will-less, race is nat­u­ral­ized via vi­bra­tion and the sub­ject falls prey to an­i­mat­ed­ness.

Ei­d­sheim finds the same as­sump­tions at play in ap­proaches to clas­si­cal vocal ped­a­gogy dur­ing her own stud­ies as a singer, writ­ing that “all but two teach­ers told me that they can al­ways tell the eth­nic­ity of the singer by his or her vocal tim­bre” (Ei­d­sheim 2015, 4). This racial logic is ex­tended to a va­ri­ety of bod­ies, but sig­nif­i­cantly is with­held from “singers who ap­pear to be Eu­ro­pean Amer­i­can,” which is to say that in es­tab­lish­ing this logic, the op­er­a­tive force is a white­ness that grants full sub­ject­hood and thus pro­tects the in­di­vid­ual from being judged to have a re­cal­ci­trant, un­con­trol­lable body (2015, 25). Fol­low­ing Ei­d­sheim’s analy­sis of the Ken­tucky Supreme Court rul­ing, it is clear that these teach­ers hold the be­lief that there are ir­re­ducible, racially de­ter­mined char­ac­ter­is­tics in the voices of stu­dents who ap­pear Asian- or African-Amer­i­can, for ex­am­ple, that are not pre­sent in the voices of Eu­ro­pean-Amer­i­can stu­dents, whose “inner essence” does not pose such cor­po­real re­sis­tance (Ei­d­sheim 2015, 6). When Ngai de­scribes Stowe’s de­pic­tion of Tom as liken­ing him “to an in­stru­ment, porous and pli­able, for the vo­cal­iza­tion of oth­ers,” she also de­scribes the cir­cu­lar logic that gen­er­ates an­i­mat­ed­ness: a white gaze vo­cal­izes it­self through Tom’s body by see­ing it as an­i­mated, and in the process claims his body to be an in­stru­ment an­i­mated by oth­ers (Ngai 2007, 97). Ei­d­sheim de­scribes the same cir­cu­lar process, writ­ing that “what­ever we be­lieve is pro­jected onto the sound” (2015, 11). Through this pro­jec­tion, what we be­lieve be­comes con­sid­ered a nat­ural at­tribute of the sound, and the white gaze turns trans­par­ent, an ob­jec­tive lens or per­fect res­o­nant sys­tem through which the world is faith­fully and truth­fully trans­mit­ted.

A gen­er­a­tive but un­ac­knowl­edged white­ness such as that ob­served by both Ngai and Ei­d­sheim is what John Gille­spie has cri­tiqued as “a resur­fac­ing of epis­temic vi­o­lence” through a de­nial of “the epis­temic agency of the thing” with re­gard to the the­ory of vi­brant mat­ter. He ar­gues that Ben­nett’s ap­proach is ul­ti­mately scup­pered by the eli­sion of her white gaze, link­ing her ap­proach to the “thing” with the white gaze’s force­ful his­tory in the leg­is­la­tion of black bod­ies as ob­jects or things. Specif­i­cally, draw­ing on Frantz Fanon and Fred Moten, Gille­spie sug­gests that a fail­ure to en­gage with his­to­ries of racial­iza­tion and rad­i­cal black thought on ob­ject­hood doom an analy­sis of the thing to re­pro­duce his­tor­i­cal vi­o­lence. Re­vers­ing Ben­nett’s call for “not Flower Power, or Black Power, or Girl Power, but Thing-Power,” Gille­spie coun­ters that “to see the fact of black­ness is to see that Black Power, is al­ways al­ready Thing Power” (Ben­nett 2010, 6; Gille­spie 2017).

In his own cri­tique of New Ma­te­ri­al­ist thought, André Car­ring­ton also ques­tions the rein­scrip­tion of En­light­en­ment hu­man­ism onto ob­jects, char­ac­ter­iz­ing this epis­temic pro­jec­tion as re­ly­ing “for its sta­bil­ity on non­hu­man ob­jects fash­ioned out of human flesh.” Car­ring­ton de­scribes his re­luc­tance to en­gage with the fruits of posthu­man­ism by ac­knowl­edg­ing — un­like the the­o­rists he is push­ing back against — that he could only en­gage with ideas such as an ob­ject’s hav­ing agency from an “ex­plic­itly Black and human” per­spec­tive. Echo­ing Moten like Gille­spie, Car­ring­ton knows “that ob­jects can and do re­sist, but the rea­son I know this — my epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ground — is that my an­ces­tors were ob­jects” (2017, 281). These per­spec­tives chal­lenge New Ma­te­ri­al­ist thinkers to tackle the racial and his­tor­i­cal la­cu­nae in their the­o­ries, ar­gu­ing that a fail­ure to do so risks re­pro­duc­ing many of the er­rors New Ma­te­ri­al­ism claims to ad­dress.

For Lowe, Ngai, and Ei­d­sheim it is clear that his­tor­i­cal and so­cial sub­jects — Eu­ro­pean lib­eral hu­man­ist, white and male — pro­duce af­fec­tive re­la­tion­ships to in­di­vid­u­als who are ex­cluded or un­der­stood as dif­fer­ent, which nat­u­ral­ize those dif­fer­ences, ren­der­ing them as ob­jec­tive givens. Ahmed’s the­o­riza­tion demon­strates the af­fect of will­ful­ness to be the prod­uct of a sim­i­lar gen­er­at­ing sub­ject: while the gen­der of the girl in Grimm’s story is gen­er­a­tive of a judge­ment of will­ful­ness, Ahmed writes that “the will­ful child is also the story of the sub­al­tern,” the will­ful­ness of the col­o­nized sub­ject who can­not speak to give an ac­count of them­selves (2017, 80). The im­pli­ca­tions are broad and carry vary­ing weights, from fur­nish­ing “the eco­nomic, as well as po­lit­i­cal and hu­man­i­tar­ian, ra­tio­nales for British im­pe­r­ial gov­er­nance in Asia” (Lowe 2015, 104) to shap­ing cur­rent clas­si­cal vocal prac­tice. To be clear, the ways in which things may be read as symp­to­matic of this line of thought are many and the im­pact is any­thing but sin­gu­lar or mono­lithic. These ex­am­ples pro­vide us both with a more generic un­der­stand­ing of the stake of power for the re­la­tional sub­ject as well as specif­i­cally sit­u­ated analy­ses that im­pact upon how we ap­proach vi­bra­tion and its af­fec­tive rel­a­tives, in­clud­ing res­o­nance, vi­brancy, and an­i­ma­tion.

The­o­ries that would take vi­bra­tion as a uni­ver­sal, un­der­ly­ing force ca­pa­ble of re­solv­ing both po­lit­i­cal and on­to­log­i­cal ques­tions, need to deal with how they con­tinue in the vein of un­si­t­u­ated, un­crit­i­cally Eu­ro­cen­tric thought that uni­ver­sal­izes its sub­jects and fails to take ac­count of its own pro­duc­tive gaze. In re­sponse to Cox’s sonic ma­te­ri­al­ism, Marie Thomp­son for­mu­lates a corol­lary to the white gaze she dubs “white au­ral­ity,” which suc­cinctly sum­ma­rizes the eli­sion at the heart of Cox’s and oth­ers’ New Ma­te­ri­al­ist thought. Thomp­son de­scribes how white­ness is able to per­form its van­ish­ing act through the de­ploy­ment of “a racial­ized per­cep­tual schema that is at once sit­u­ated and ‘mod­est’ in­so­far as its own, ac­tive pres­ence is ob­scured” (2017, 278). The “ac­tive pres­ence” of white­ness — white­ness’s gen­er­a­tive and pro­duc­tive im­pact on per­cep­tion — is “ob­scured” by as­sum­ing what it gen­er­ates to be ob­jec­tively true. Cox’s con­tention “that cul­tural his­tory sup­ple­ments a nat­ural his­tory that vastly pre­ceded it” and there­fore that a nat­ural his­tory — the ob­jec­tive real of ma­te­r­ial vi­bra­tion — is valid ground for his sonic ma­te­ri­al­ism to ex­plore, re­peats pre­cisely the move that Thomp­son and oth­ers above have iden­ti­fied (Cox 2018, 234). This is not to argue that vi­bra­tion does not exist or that all and any per­cep­tion of the ma­te­r­ial world is only an il­lu­sory sim­u­lacrum; rather, that any ac­count of vi­bra­tion must ac­knowl­edge the re­la­tions that pro­duce it. Cox dis­misses Thomp­son’s cri­tique as “clas­sic rel­a­tivist,” but as Robin James re­sponds, this sup­poses a plane of equiv­a­len­cies, where white­ness is “one op­tion among fun­gi­ble, in­ter­change­able op­tions,” rather than an ap­proach that ac­knowl­edges in­equal­i­ties and im­bal­ances in re­la­tions (Cox 2018, 238; James 2018). White au­ral­ity is not an equal but dif­fer­ent coun­ter­part to other au­ral­i­ties, be­cause it alone is granted the priv­i­lege of gen­er­at­ing its own in­vis­i­bil­ity in order to lis­ten in to a vastly pre­ced­ing nat­ural his­tory.

The prob­lem with Cox’s sonic ma­te­ri­al­ism then is not its en­gage­ment with the ma­te­r­ial world per se, but its in­abil­ity to deal with race and power im­bal­ances by in­sist­ing on a uni­ver­sal­iz­ing epis­te­mo­log­i­cal frame. If we are to de­ploy the­o­ries of the ma­te­r­ial world, these need to ac­count for the his­tor­i­cal and sit­u­ated epis­te­molo­gies they re­late to. As James writes, “it is en­tirely pos­si­ble to form ab­strac­tions that do not ab­stract those on­go­ing re­la­tions of dom­i­na­tion and sub­or­di­na­tion away” (James 2018). Sim­i­larly, while ex­plor­ing her con­cerns and sus­pi­cions of New Ma­te­ri­al­ism, Kyla Wazana Tomp­kins writes of how, even if lack­ing at this point, “New Ma­te­ri­al­ist think­ing must nec­es­sar­ily en­gage rad­i­cal in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nar­ity,” which “in turn brings us back to the provo­ca­tions of left, fem­i­nist, queer, and crit­i­cal race the­ory” (2016). While Cox pro­poses a sonic on­tol­ogy, Tomp­kins sug­gests that in fact ma­te­ri­al­ist ap­proaches should take on a rein­vig­o­rated en­gage­ment with their pre­ced­ing but un­ac­knowl­edged kin, whose di­verg­ing epis­te­molo­gies give the lie to the sci­en­tis­tic ten­den­cies of New Ma­te­ri­al­ist strands such as ob­ject-ori­ented on­tol­ogy. For ex­am­ple, like Gille­spie and Car­ring­ton, Tomp­kins iden­ti­fies cross-pol­li­na­tion with work “that seeks to re­ori­ent west­ern epis­te­molo­gies from the point of view of those who have never been human” — such as that of Hort­ense Spillers, Sylvia Wyn­ter, and Alexan­der We­he­liye — as an ap­proach that may save New Ma­te­ri­al­ism from its ten­dency to claim a nat­ural neu­tral­ity. She also ar­gues that the seeds for an anti-rep­re­sen­ta­tional analy­sis “of the mi­cro-work­ings of biopol­i­tics in the con­tem­po­rary me­di­a­tized po­lit­i­cal era” can be found in ma­te­ri­al­ist ap­proaches — an ap­proach ar­guably rep­re­sented by Ei­d­sheim’s “mi­crop­ol­i­tics of tim­bre,” which iden­ti­fies how racial­ized per­cep­tual regimes op­er­ate through con­stant judge­ments about the ma­te­ri­al­ity of the voice (Tomp­kins 2016; Ei­d­sheim 2015, 14). In Tomp­kins’s view, these in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary ef­forts can ad­dress ex­clu­sions such as those iden­ti­fied by Thomp­son in “white au­ral­ity” by re­viv­i­fy­ing ma­te­ri­al­ist analy­ses with ap­proaches that ex­plic­itly tackle so­cial dif­fer­ences rather than elid­ing and nat­u­ral­iz­ing them.

“An am­bu­lance made of fire­works”

To re­turn to Car­olyn Chen’s Threads, we might reeval­u­ate its nar­ra­tor as de­scrib­ing the vi­bra­tion as­cribed by a pro­duc­tive sub­ject when she speaks of how “you lis­ten, care­fully, to the sound of the per­son being shaken, try to hear — what is in­side — how much is left — how much can they hold?” In Threads, shak­ing is a knowl­edge-pro­duc­ing prac­tice in which vi­bra­tion is the medium for the trans­mis­sion of in­for­ma­tion about an ob­ject — “bags of trea­sure, boxes of ce­real, jars of coins” — but this shak­ing makes ex­plicit the in­ter­ven­tion of the sub­ject in the gen­er­at­ing of af­fec­tive vi­bra­tion (Chen 2014a, 4). The “sound of the per­son” is as much their being shaken as “what is in­side” — an “inner essence” or nat­ural vi­bra­tion. Un­like the ven­tril­o­quiz­ing vi­bra­tory af­fect of an­i­mat­ed­ness, the shake clearly im­pli­cates the shaker. By am­pli­fy­ing the shake in the stag­ing of Threads through a se­ries of sus­pended chimes, Chen ren­ders ma­te­r­ial this re­la­tional prac­tice, treat­ing the vi­bra­tion that her music of­fers not as a pre­ced­ing flux that she taps into, but as a messy prod­uct of the so­cial bod­ies in­volved. For the on­stage per­former, ASL guides their move­ments as their ges­tures “shake” the chimes as well as con­vey­ing lin­guis­tic mean­ing. Chen’s stag­ing draws at­ten­tion to the mul­ti­ple mean­ings and ap­pre­hen­sions of vi­bra­tion by dif­fer­ent in­di­vid­u­als, em­pha­siz­ing in her text a con­stant cross­ing of see­ing and hear­ing, akin to the vi­sual–so­cial per­cep­tion of sound de­scribed by Chris­tine Sun Kim (Selby 2011). In­stead of being pre­sented as a sin­gu­lar vi­bra­tory truth, Threads demon­strates the so­cial com­plex­ity of vi­bra­tion.

Spurred on by Tomp­kins’s cri­tique of New Ma­te­ri­al­ism, Michelle N. Huang asks us to con­sider the po­ten­tial of ma­te­ri­al­ist ap­proaches “to rec­on­cile the di­vide be­tween the rep­re­sen­ta­tional and de­con­struc­tion­ist modes of fem­i­nist, crit­i­cal race, queer, dis­abil­ity, and an­i­mal the­ory,” seek­ing to find ways in which ma­te­ri­al­ist read­ings might in fact pro­vide new in­roads to talk­ing about race. For ex­am­ple, Huang sug­gests that ma­te­ri­al­ist read­ings may counter the as­ser­tion that a text is or isn’t “about” race by in­stead de­tect­ing race’s pres­ence as it is folded into ob­jects or aes­thetic po­si­tions. In her view, such adop­tions of New Ma­te­ri­al­ist method­olo­gies “are pro­duc­tive not be­cause they move us ‘be­yond’ race . . . but be­cause they make vis­i­ble how race is al­ways em­bed­ded within the pro­duc­tion of the cul­tural forms used to fab­ri­cate the human.” Huang reads poet John Yau’s “Con­fes­sions of a Re­cy­cled Shop­ping Bag” for just this kind of pres­ence, sug­gest­ing that the poem’s repet­i­tive focus on color in the bag’s “self”-de­scrip­tion — “I used to be a pur­ple poly­eth­yl­ene pony,” for ex­am­ple — is re­flec­tive of a broader so­cial ob­ses­sion with skin color — “I used to be a pleas­ant red col­league” — but that the mul­ti­ple col­ors the bag “used to be” in­di­cate that “the banal mech­a­nism of racial iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is less an es­sen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic than one re­peat­edly trans­formed through var­i­ous dif­fer­ent means of pro­duc­tion.” Huang pre­sents a con­vinc­ing at­tempt at read­ing an ob­ject’s aes­thetic pre­sen­ta­tion for sit­u­ated and so­cially vec­tored qual­i­ties with­out the ob­ject it­self hav­ing to rep­re­sent or be “about” those qual­i­ties. In doing so, she does not argue that there is “a mas­ter mol­e­cule for race” in­her­ent to the ob­jects being read, but that these ob­jects’ qual­i­ties are co-pro­duced in the con­text of a com­mu­nity (Huang 2017).

Car­olyn Chen’s per­for­mance essay, This is a scream, pro­vides us with an op­por­tu­nity to try to take up Huang’s chal­lenge and read ma­te­ri­al­ity for traces of racial­ized per­cep­tion (Chen 2017). A 20-minute work writ­ten to be per­formed by Chen her­self, This is a scream has been com­pared by the com­poser to a pod­cast or TED Talk in which she dis­cusses how dif­fi­cult it is for her to scream while play­ing audio ex­am­ples that blur the lines be­tween sci­en­tific spec­i­men, re­portage, and acous­matic com­po­si­tion (Daniel 2017). As she un­rav­els what a scream is, Chen tries to get closer and closer to its fleshy vi­bra­tion, say­ing that she would like “to hold it in my hand and turn it this way and that, to prod it and spread it apart to see what’s in­side, be­cause it sounds to me like there are all these glis­ten­ing lit­tle parts hid­ing in there” (Chen 2017). Like a hy­brid radio pro­ducer–sci­en­tist, Chen tries slow­ing down Justin Ver­non and Nicki Minaj’s screams on “Mon­ster,” from Kanye West’s 2010 album My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twisted Fan­tasy, to be able to probe deeper into the de­tail of these gut­tural roars. The slowed-down screams de­scend lower and lower in pitch, dig­i­tal sam­ples sep­a­rat­ing into a rum­bling bass vi­bra­tion, but Chen ex­presses re­gret that she is “also los­ing the scream by slow­ing it down.” Turn­ing to lan­guage to try to cap­ture what at­tracts her to Ver­non and Minaj’s screams, Chen draws on a kalei­do­scopic range of highly tac­tile im­agery:

If the sound of the scream were a pic­ture, it might be an am­bu­lance made of fire­works. The color would be red and shiny and grainy and feath­ered be­cause there’s some­thing a lit­tle fancy about it. If it were a fish, maybe it’d be a giant shark, swarmed by all the lit­tle flash­ing fishes, the en­tourage, and the den­tistry, swirling, sparkling around him like fairy god­mother skirts. (Chen 2017)

Sim­i­larly to the lan­guage of Threads, this fan­tas­ti­cal de­scrip­tion of the scream at­tempts a kind of sen­sory trans­la­tion, gath­er­ing a gallery of vivid ob­jects to stand in for the scream’s af­fec­tive power. Chen’s vi­sion of the scream is per­vaded by dan­ger via a giant shark with deadly teeth and an am­bu­lance made of ex­plo­sives — the glis­san­dos of sirens and whistling rock­ets res­onat­ing with one an­other — but the grain of Ver­non and Minaj’s voices are heard as also pos­sess­ing a glit­tery and glam­orous as­pect, an “en­tourage” con­jur­ing celebrity, per­haps the spark­ing of cam­era flashes glint­ing off the shark’s teeth. Later Chen com­pares the scream to a “molten chan­de­lier.” This sen­sory trans­la­tion is an at­tempt to get closer to a thing — the scream — that Chen can’t seem to em­body her­self. Chen turns to a lit­er­al­ist analy­sis of “blood cur­dling” — an ad­jec­tive often and al­most ex­clu­sively used for screams — for a fur­ther ma­te­r­ial sense of what the scream does. Cur­dling milk thick­ens and clumps, so she asks, “what would be the sound of cot­tage cheese squish­ing its way through ar­ter­ies?” This con­tin­u­ous map­ping of af­fec­tive qual­i­ties from the scream to other ob­jects grad­u­ally ac­cu­mu­lates to be a spec­u­la­tive ma­te­r­ial the­saurus for peo­ple who can’t scream, but might have vis­ited a pub­lic aquar­ium, eaten cot­tage cheese, or have ar­ter­ies. Like the sen­sory trans­la­tion at work in Threads, this the­saurus at­tempts to ren­der the af­fect of the scream for a range of ap­pre­hend­ing bod­ies, ex­pos­ing the wealth of dif­fer­ent mean­ings within what at first ap­pears to be a uni­tary vi­bra­tion.

Key to Chen’s at­trac­tion to the scream is her own in­abil­ity to scream. There is a gen­tly comic but also mov­ing un­der­tone to Chen’s ef­forts: she en­lists friends to scream for her, she asks for in­struc­tions, she re­hearses scream­ing as one might singing, search­ing for the break in her voice. Nev­er­the­less, a friend hears her and laughs, “that’s not a scream” (Chen 2017). It ap­pears that — like the voices an­a­lyzed by Nina Sun Ei­d­sheim — her body is found to re­sist her ef­forts and her screams never fully scream (Ei­d­sheim 2015, 23). Chen has de­scribed the piece as being “about the lim­i­ta­tions of my body as op­posed to this uni­ver­sal­ized body” and in this de­scrip­tion we start to see how she ac­knowl­edges race to be op­er­at­ing be­neath the sur­face of the glit­ter­ing scream (Daniel 2017). In at­tempt­ing to un­der­stand why she can­not scream, why she is com­ing up against this limit in her body, Chen re­counts how she “grew up in sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey, where I was one of two Asian kids in class and nei­ther of us made much sound, talk­ing or oth­er­wise. I think we tried as much as pos­si­ble to dis­ap­pear.” The scream on the other hand “lights up the world around it,” call­ing at­ten­tion to it­self and the screamer in a way that she feels she has tried to avoid (Chen 2017). Chen iden­ti­fies race as a fac­tor in her own phys­i­cal dif­fi­culty to pro­duce sound. The very real, ma­te­r­ial re­sis­tance brought on by racial­ized ex­pec­ta­tions and so­cial­iza­tion re­calls Huang’s re­al­iza­tion that “de­spite know­ing that race is a mu­ta­ble fic­tion that is so­cially and ma­te­ri­ally dis­trib­uted through net­works of power, I could never say, even for a mo­ment, that I do not ‘be­lieve in race’” (Huang 2017). Huang stresses that this is not to say that race can be lo­cated as orig­i­nat­ing from and nat­u­rally pre­sent in bod­ies per­ceived to be raced, rather that she is acutely aware of how force­ful race is re­gard­less of its fic­tion­al­ity. Chen’s re­stricted voice also res­onates with Ngai’s read­ing of John Yau’s “Genghis Chan: Pri­vate Eye,” in which the speaker an­nounces, “A foul lump started mak­ing promises in my voice” (Ngai 2007, 92). Ngai con­tends that the process through which this “lump” as­serts it­self in Genghis Chan’s throat “might be read as an al­le­gory of how the Asian-Amer­i­can be­comes forced into the po­si­tion of model mi­nor­ity,” that the lump, whose sen­sory pres­ence is phys­i­cal or ma­te­r­ial, in fact is an em­bod­ied ex­pe­ri­ence of an en­forced so­cial role that sup­presses the sub­ject’s ca­pac­ity for ex­pres­sion (2007, 93). Chen de­scribes a de­sire to ex­pe­ri­ence the scream for its power to re­lease feel­ings caught in the body, but finds her­self de­nied this re­lease by her in­abil­ity to scream. Try­ing “as much as pos­si­ble to dis­ap­pear” leaves one hold­ing feel­ings and un­able to let them go by draw­ing at­ten­tion to them. Like the in­ves­ti­ga­tory shak­ing de­scribed in Threads, vi­bra­tion ap­pears to ask, “How much can they hold?” (Chen 2014a, 4). The scream is a mech­a­nism for al­low­ing what is being held to es­cape, but this es­cape can be blocked by a lump in the throat.

Ngai con­trasts Chan’s an­i­ma­tion by the lump, which gen­er­ates a stereo­typ­i­cally “silent, in­ex­pres­sive, . . . emo­tion­ally in­scrutable” Asian sub­ject, with other forms of an­i­mat­ed­ness, which pro­duce “ex­ag­ger­at­edly emo­tional, hy­per­ex­pres­sive, . . . ‘over­scrutable’” sub­jects, such as that of Uncle Tom dis­cussed above (2007, 93). This ex­ag­ger­at­edly emo­tional fig­ure sur­faces in This is a scream when we con­sider how Chen draws on Kanye West’s “Mon­ster.” The track is a show­case for verses from West, Jay-Z, and Nicki Minaj, in which each lays claim to being a mon­ster “in ways that re­in­force fan­tasies of tri­umph and in­vin­ci­bil­ity” (Win­ters 2017, 292). Of par­tic­u­lar note is Minaj’s con­tri­bu­tion in which she vir­tu­osi­cally veers be­tween alter egos, tack­ling the tit­u­lar mon­stros­ity with what Joseph Win­ters de­scribes as “a split sub­ject who wears dif­fer­ent masks and takes on dif­fer­ent sex­ual and gen­der iden­ti­ties to nav­i­gate and trou­ble a male-dom­i­nated space and vi­sual ter­rain” (2017, 296). The voice at­trib­uted to Minaj’s alter ego Roman Za­lan­ski in­creas­ingly ends lines with a snarling de­liv­ery as the verse pro­gresses, cul­mi­nat­ing in the clos­ing scream — “I’m a moth­er­fuck­ing mon­ster” — that Chen picks up for fur­ther ex­am­i­na­tion (West 2010). As Win­ters high­lights, Minaj’s use of alter egos al­lows her to trou­ble her gen­dered voice, con­trast­ing the de­liv­ery style of Za­lan­ski with the higher pitched and rel­a­tively softer vocal style of the alter ego Bar­bie, while con­stantly as­sert­ing her artis­tic and fi­nan­cial worth. Chen tries to zoom into Minaj’s scream through dig­i­tal pro­cess­ing but is con­fronted with the fact that:

As she slows down, I start to lose her voice, her gen­der, her lan­guage. She be­comes in­dis­tin­guish­able from Bon Iver. By 85% [slower] she might not even be a per­son any­more or even an an­i­mal. She could be a glac­ier. What kind of feel­ings is that? (Chen 2017)

Chen is dis­ap­pointed to find that Minaj’s skill­ful de­ploy­ment of sonic masks is lost to ab­stract vi­bra­tion as the speed of the record­ing slows and her voice be­comes a low-fre­quency quak­ing. In this mo­ment, we are shown that the scream is not sim­ply a glit­ter­ing cas­cade of vi­bra­tion to be picked apart, but that this sound most force­fully res­onates in its ex­pres­sion of the per­sonal, as a re­lease or shar­ing of pain or en­ergy in the con­text of a com­mu­nity. The slow scream may in some sense con­sist of the same ma­te­r­ial as the orig­i­nal but it dis­solves the orig­i­nal’s af­fec­tive force by loos­en­ing its con­tact with its so­cial sig­ni­fiers — it gen­er­ates an ab­strac­tion that “ab­stracts away from on­go­ing re­la­tions of dom­i­na­tion and sub­or­di­na­tion” (James 2018). As Minaj is slowed down, she ap­pears first as an an­i­mal and then a glac­ier. If the mon­strous­ness claimed by Minaj, Jay-Z, and West is pre­sented as ev­i­dence of their ex­cep­tional skill and power, the tech­nique of slow­ing com­pletes the con­nec­tion be­tween the mon­ster and the “per­ni­cious legacy of as­so­ci­at­ing Black­ness with the ‘not quite human,’ with that prover­bial space be­tween the human and the an­i­mal” (Win­ters 2017, 292). The slow scream is ren­dered an­i­mal or ge­o­log­i­cal but in im­por­tant ways it is sim­ply no longer a scream, be­cause a scream is the vi­bra­tion of some­one scream­ing, be­cause the vi­brat­ing sub­ject is not a neu­tral res­o­nant body.

An­swer­ing the ques­tion of who vi­brates re­quires us to take into ac­count the­o­ries such as those of white au­ral­ity or tim­bral mi­crop­ol­i­tics. These de­scribe how vi­bra­tion is not a nat­ural or cos­mic force de­tectable in the trem­bling of ob­jects, but an af­fec­tive cat­e­gory that rests on sub­jects’ power re­la­tions within so­cio-cul­tural con­texts. The­o­rists of vi­bra­tion can learn from fem­i­nist analy­ses of will­ful­ness and read­ings of colo­nial archives that re­veal sub­ject­hood’s sit­u­ated his­to­ries. Un­der­stand­ing sound art or music as vi­bra­tion “in the con­text of a com­mu­nity” af­firms the ma­te­r­ial im­pact of vi­bra­tion, while ac­knowl­edg­ing its con­tin­u­ous pro­duc­tive re­la­tion to gen­er­a­tive sub­jects who are not equiv­a­lent or in­ter­change­able. Mir­ror­ing Chen’s in­abil­ity to scream, our in­abil­ity to hear the scream, re­lies on our in­abil­ity to see the screamer as human.

Ref­er­ences