Old and New Materialisms
While New Materialism has inspired and informed recent interest in the material, what I hope I have signaled above is the potential value of returning to old materialisms to develop and extend the discourse around sonic materiality. Specifically, what this old materialism brings to the table is a very direct engagement with aesthetics – hardly surprising here since Structural/Materialist film is a form of art practice. Within a New Materialist framework, notions of authorship – and perhaps even the voices of artists – might seem antithetical to a project that seeks to level the ontological field and to stress the agency and vitality of the nonhuman. But it is precisely this problematization of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman that reinvigorates and radicalizes older debates around what is at stake in both aesthetics and creative practice.
Key to this is the disarmingly simple question posed by art historian Petra Lange-Berndt: “What does it mean to give agency to the material: to follow the material and to act with the material?” (Lange-Berndt 2015, 13, emphasis in orignal). To consider this very briefly in sonic terms, and to understand how this question reinvigorates debates in sound aesthetics and creative practice with sound, we might consider two seemingly contrasting pieces of sonic art: Annea Lockwood’s A Sound Map of the Danube (2008) and John Oswald’s Plunderphonics 69/96 (2001). Reflecting on the field recordings of the river that constitute the central part of A Sound Map of the Danube, Lockwood comments: “Towards the end of the final field trip, while listening to small waves slap into a rounded overhang the river had carved in a mud bank in Rasova, Romania [...], I realised that the river has agency; it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it sculpts its banks” (Lockwood 2008). Significantly, the project foregrounds this sense of nonhuman agency by preserving the river’s sonic flow through inaudible sound editing and recordings of extended duration. In this way, Lockwood draws on aesthetic strategies to shift the focus from her agency as a composer and sound artist to the sounds of the river. Here, then, we have a form of creative practice with sound that seems very much in tune with some of the ideas proposed by New Materialism.
We might then contrast this with Oswald’s work, in which the shaping of sonic material evidences highly interventionist and manipulative forms of artistic control, achieved primarily through montage editing. Audible montage, as practiced by Oswald in his plunderphonics work, undoubtedly foregrounds the presence of the artist and in this way appears antithetical to the modest, receptive, listening-oriented, curatorial creative practice heard in Lockwood’s A Sound Map of the Danube. In montage, it seems, we have an example of the monstrous anthropocentrism that lies at the heart of much of Western art practice. And yet, this is problematized by Oswald’s comment that “i [sic] have the feeling that the compositions are trying to say something, not i. This is an illusion of course, and i am willful and manipulative and yearning on many levels, but the process is nonetheless more about the piece establishing its acoustic individuality than it is about my extramusical concerns” (Oswald 2001: 43). What Oswald proposes, then, is a rescaling of self – also signalled in his use of a lower case “i” as a personal pronoun – through which some attempt is made to share agency with the material, and perhaps, in the words of Coole and Frost, “to give materiality its due” (2010: 7).
Discussions around the political dimensions of aesthetics have a long history, often centering, in the last century, around the differences between realist aesthetics and formal experimentation. However, a contemporary discussion of sonic materiality informed by New Materialist approaches to sound radically changes the terms of this debate, whereby discussion of the ethical and political aspects of aesthetics might now turn around ideas of responsibility and relationality, informed by an awareness and sensitivity to the fundamental interconnectedness of actants. In this way, exploring the materiality of sound opens up new avenues for understanding its role and significance across a range of contexts, from environmental soundscapes to artistic practices. To this end a continued engagement with both new and old materialisms can deepen our grasp of sonic materiality and its implications for sound studies, philosophy, art history, film and media studies, creative practice in sound, and beyond. The articles in this issue take up this challenge, offering responses to these ideas and inviting the reader to join in this ongoing exploration. We hope these contributions serve as a starting point for further dialogues, encouraging a broader investigation into the evolving intersections of sound, materiality, and culture.