Conclusion
Considering the operations that render the audible possible demands re-assessing the relational nature of sound beyond the fixed poles of the subject and the world as conventionally conceived in Western thought. I have addressed sound as a transductive circumstance in which different processes of imaging unfold. A radical plurality of the audible necessarily follows, accounting for the different ways in which such imaging processes articulate a form of participation in an environment.
I developed this approach drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon, who unfastens the image not only from the exclusive domain of the visual and the static but also from the idea that it is an illusory construct, exclusively residing in the realm of the mind. Despite Simondon’s regular allusions to the mental image throughout Imagination and Invention, the image cannot be construed as an independent reality produced by the mind. As Andrea Bardin remarks, “an exclusively phenomenological reading of the course centered on the activity of the symbolic production of the organism-subject simply does not work” (Bardin 2015: 148). The image in Simondon exists across domains. It is a process rather than a self-sufficient entity; it is a genetic activity (Rossi 2018).
The image is an operation in the unfolding of the real, defined by its capacity to stabilize a sensorial engagement and not exclusively by its capacity to represent. It concerns procedures, patterns of continuity, and synchronizations that do not preexist but rather involve the technical, material, and collective circuits that make it possible. The crisis of the image provides the necessary context in which to reconceive the variable nature of imaging processes and embrace the realm of the sonic. To place sound at the core of this revised notion of the image emphasizes sound’s role as an axis of knowledge production and as a fundamental site of engagement in the world. By addressing how sound images – their singular protocols, infrastructures, and operations – enable different audibilities to be constituted, my account acknowledges the productive nature of every audible instance. Rather than an ingenuous ascription to the materiality of projected objects and the capacity of a subject to attend to them, attending to these imaging processes becomes a tool to address the relational circuits in which the audible is produced. My account echoes anthropologist Tim Ingold’s words that “we cannot rest content with the facile identification of the environment – or at least its non-human component – with ‘nature’” (Ingold 1996: 41) in a way that nature is conceived of as a pre-existent and detached reality humans act upon. Simondon’s theorization of the cycle of the image allows for a consideration of the sensorial – and therefore the realm of the audible – as intrinsic to the temporal process of co-individuation in which agent and environment are perpetually co-constituted.