There is no sonic fiction. There has always been sonic fiction. … Sonic fiction is everywhere. (Schulze 2020: 1, emphasis in the original)
To be an intercessor is to participate in this relational platform, not to mediate it. It is to recognize how the immediacy of an encounter with an image, with a movement of thought, or better yet, with the intervals of thought-images yet to come, affects what it means to perceive. (Manning 2017: 10, emphasis in the original)
Art writing is a lure – to me – it is a practice, not a justification. It is a mode of experimentation that teases me outside myself and draws me into thought in motion. (Klusmeyer 2023: n.p.)
Sonic fiction is a concept that has gained traction in the field of sound studies over the past decade. Scholars like Salomé Voegelin (2014, 2019), Holger Schulze (2020) and Macon Holt (2020), among others, have contributed to its development, seeking to expand and diversify its meanings and practices beyond its implicit roots in Afrofuturism and Kodwo Eshuan’s (1998) reading. However, given sonic fiction’s deep connection to human (and non-human sensory) experience, it seems futile to try to pinpoint its emergence. It may well go back to the very origins of storytelling, or even further, to the echo of the big bang (cf. Goodman 2010).
My interest in sound and fabulation can be traced through Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy, its alliance to the arts, and my research-creation project ‘Sonic Peripheries: Middling With/In the Event’ with its focus on sonic art practices. Following Deleuze and later A.N. Whitehead, I have sought to think sonically in and through art making, curating, and thesis writing.
What it means to think sound has been part of a (media-)philosophical discourse (Herzogenrath 2017) with different takes and emphases (Cox 2011, 2015; Schulze 2017, 2020). For my doctoral research, I considered the sonic as a vibrational force and an affective, affirmative, if paradoxical material-discursive occurrence – the it-happens-that of matter as it comes to matter – intuited as an intensive force and grasped as an aesthetic figure through sensation. This view allows for sonic thinking that posits a vibrational immanence at the core of all mattering: everything changes, everything is event, based on Deleuze’s naturalist ontology that conceives of nature as an autopoietic positive force. The first of ten propositions presented at the thesis defense embodies this premise, while the latter signal a shift toward sonic fictioning:
Writing speculative philosophically on artistic events is to retrieve or create anew sensations that intone a tune – a line of sonic thought – from the encounter with vibrational force – i.e., the thesis is a ‘tune’ in its own right.
Whitehead’s maxim ‘Have a care, here is something that matters’ encapsulates the ethico-aesthetics at play in the synthesis of sonic art practices, curation, philosophy, and audience participation. The remix of resources brings about a practical aesthetics where the new and unexpected lies in the re-arrangement of the givens.
If in doubt, deploy Oblique Strategies5: ‘Repetition is a form of change‘.
Drawing on Schulze, though eschewing an insistence on static ‘being’ (see his emphasis in the epilogue above), acknowledges that sonic fiction is felt everywhere, enveloping our sensory and conceptual landscapes with its ubiquitous presence. In turning to the PhD thesis and the schizopodcast project as tangible instances, my aim is not to map out a genealogy of fictioning in my work. The intention is to provide a conduit through which readers and listeners might encounter sonic fictioning as an ongoing, dynamic force that permeates myriad contexts. Engaging with this concept does not require one to place sonic fiction within pre-existing categories or historical narratives, but rather encourages an attunement to its resonances across multiple domains. Thus, the fictions inherent in various sonic experiences, whether in philosophy, art, or mundane everyday occurrences, is not merely an isolated theoretical construct, but an ongoing play of perceptual forces that continually reconfigure matter and meaning, suggesting that the material and discursive are intertwined and co-constituted (in listening) (Barad 2007).
While some critics may perceive an ontological primacy and interpret this account as potentially reductive, with the risk of marginalizing socio-political aspects6 (especially at a time that calls for concerted efforts to decolonize and re-evaluate embedded norms and narratives), I would like to preemptively counter this reading by emphasizing the ethico-aesthetic undercurrent of sonic fictioning, which is not merely an artistic or academic concept, but a living, resonant dispositif that is shaped and reshaped by the physical, cultural, and political realities it pervades. Sonic fictioning is not the antithesis of lived experience in late capitalism, but a speculative flight that could function as a ‘lure for feeling’ in the Whiteheadian sense.
Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, famously argued that the intrigue of a proposition is often more vital than its accuracy (Whitehead 1978). False propositions that misrepresent reality can still provoke thought by exposing their flaws or suggesting alternative realities. Such speculative ideas, which Whitehead calls ‘a lure for feeling’ (ibid.: 184), can lead us down novel paths, spark change, and encourage new ways of thinking and acting in this world. Although speculation may not lead us to greater truths, it serves a useful role by manifesting itself as a type of fiction (Shaviro 2019: 2–3). Its significance is primarily aesthetic rather than epistemological, yet it conveys that corporeal experience yields a distinct form of knowledge. (The latter is akin to William James’s radical empiricism (1912: 86–87), which emphasized the notion of experiential continuity, asserting that it does not require bridging any divide between experience and reasoning.)
The concept of ‘fictioning’ in this context is used as a verb to denote the practice of fabulation that connects to the real (the so-called ‘great outdoors’7) in and through sound. It thus ‘challenges the idea that fiction and reality are opposed to each other. Without claiming that they are the same thing, this concept approaches fiction as an agent that alters, instantiates, or produces worlds’ (Burrows 2021: 39).8 Sonic fictioning, then, precisely in the guise of this project, seeks to blur the line between material and meaning, the discrete and the continuous, sensation and thought. It does so by following the sonic’s lines of flight, the rhizomatic tendencies that this being-with the world affords. This approach involves the use of perceptual mannerism as a mode of invention for research-creation. It expresses sonic thinking through art writing and sonic experimentation, where writing is not necessarily about a thing but attuning to things in the middle – ‘sound is always already a middling of experience’ (see sections 2.2 and 3.2). The po-ethics of schizopodcast relies on this methodology.
In the epigraph of this section, I position art writing as the catalyst that kindled my speculative flight for this endeavor. The attempt was to investigate the trans-positioning of episodic narratives from scripted texts to spoken word, and how this transmutation engenders emotive-felt soundspaces. These soundspaces, I endeavour to suggest, transcend mere narrative representation, whether autotheoretical or fictional, evolving into a dynamic sonic milieu or auditory realm. In this realm, the confluence of voice, sound design, field recordings or soundscapes, and music is pivotal; here, the fragmentary episodes are set out to envelop the listeners’ attention, enticing their thinking-feeling to produce meaning through the articulation of sonic fictions in their imagination. Through repeated listening to the podcast’s remixed threads, this process might culminate in a nuanced, multi-modal tapestry of signification – acting as a lure for feeling in producing possible resonant worlds. This mode of ‘storytelling’ proposes a different perspective in a wide range of podcast production, but without the incentive of being a podcast, if understood in terms of presenting a series that comes in installments, for example. It challenges conventional structures, much like the concept of schizoanalysis. Accordingly, the title ‘schizopodcast’ alludes to the project’s operative moment as schizoanalysis, in the sense described by Guattari, and later developed in collaboration with Deleuze.
In Chaosmosis, Guattari explains that ‘rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modelizations which simplify the complex,’ schizoanalysis ‘will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity’ (Guattari 1995: 61).
The quote in Audio track 13 is Guattari’s answer to the question whether he considers schizoanalysis to be a method. His position is clear: a schizoanalytic approach is precisely not a method, but a metamodeling. The process-oriented inquiry employed in this project does not seek to reduce our awareness of the ongoing complexity of life, but to enhance it; it wants to create resonances between theory and practice, between the listener and the sonic narratology that unfolds and expands over time – never quite the same, a purposeful purposelessness – a kind of metamodeling itself. The reading of this ‘complexification’, if you will, takes place through leaps of association on the part of the listener, perhaps stimulating a thinking ‘otherwise’, inviting a sense of self that confirms a ‘glimmer of sensation’ – the it happens-that – a lure for feeling of the ‘untimely’ or the not-yet-thought.
The underlying question that arises is how one might (rather than ought to) live, and what role sonic fictions can play in affirming that question. Sonic fictioning as a spiritual exercise? Perhaps, to the extent that the creative act – of making, of listening – seeks to tease out not the known but known unknown (see Manning 2017 above; Klusmeyer 2019). Finally, the question of sonic fictioning, the question that schizopodcast sought to explore, was the philosophical and practical implications of this approach. In this exploration, I valued taking sonic thinking seriously, embracing a sonic-led approach that informed the practice of this research-creation in the interplay between collaborative dialogue, art writing, and sound making that provided an opportunity for critical reflection on how sound informs and transforms understanding and perception. And maybe, a hopeful maybe, sonic fictioning offers a contribution, a timely chance ‘to escape the systems of modelization in which we are entangled and which are in the process of completely polluting us, heart and mind’ (Guattari as qtd. in Manning 2016: 44, modified translation).